At 11 years old, Rivera was in a car accident in Bay City, Michigan. Rivera was born in Crystal City, Texas, to Spanish-speaking, migrant farmworkers, Florencio and Josefa Rivera. From 1979 until his death in 1984, he was the chancellor of the University of California, Riverside, the first Mexican-American to hold such a position at the University of California. Rivera taught in high schools throughout the Southwest USA, and later at Sam Houston State University and the University of Texas at El Paso. This book won the first Premio Quinto Sol award. y no se lo tragó la tierra, translated into English variously as This Migrant Earth and as. However, he achieved social mobility through education - earning a degree at Southwest Texas State University (now known as Texas State University), and later a Doctor of Philosophy degree (PhD) at the University of Oklahoma-and came to believe strongly in the virtues of education for Mexican-Americans.Īs an author, Rivera is best remembered for his 1971 Faulknerian stream-of-consciousness novella. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990.Rivera was born in Texas to migrant farm workers, and worked in the fields as a young boy.
Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference. Dolph Briscoe Center for American History. “SA writer getting attention.” San Antonio Express, March 15, 1976. The Harvest: Short Stories by Tomá s Rivera. …y no se lo tragó la tierra/…And the Earth Did Not Devour Him.
“Tomás Rivera Award.” Hillviews, Winter 2006: 12–15. International Studies in Honor of Tomás Rivera. “Tomas Rivera: Remembrances of an Educator and a Poet.” Texas Humanist, November–December 1984: 37–39. “College Chancellor, Tomas Rivera, dies.” The El Paso Times, May 18. Beginning in the fall 2015 semester, Texas State will require all incoming freshman to read Rivera’s novel And the Earth Did Not Devour Him.īruce-Novoa, Juan. The university’s college of education offers a prestigious annual book award in Mexican American children’s literature to commemorate their esteemed alumnus. from Southwest Texas State University in San Marcos, now Texas State University. The center continues Rivera’s mission of student retention at public universities serving the Mexican American community. The University of Texas at San Antonio has memorialized Rivera’s time as a professor there with the Rivera Center for Student Success. The university has catalogued the collection online. In addition to serving the informational and research needs of the campus, the library houses Rivera’s papers. In 1985, the University of California at Riverside named its main library in Rivera’s honor.
His achievements are commemorated at many sites in Texas, including in his hometown of Crystal City, where an elementary school was named in his honor. After serving on University of Texas campuses in San Antonio and El Paso, he became the first Mexican American chancellor in the University of California system. The novel received the first Premio Quinto Sol, an annual literary award given to the best work of fiction by a Chicano author.Īs an educator, Rivera saw that he could advance the interests of first-generation college students more effectively as an administrator than as a professor. when the migrant worker was living without any kind of protection.” Rivera later explained, “I wanted to document, somehow, the strength of those people that I had known. Rivera’s 1971 novel …y no se lo tragó la tierra-or, in English translation, And the Earth Did Not Devour Him-portrays the terrible conditions faced by Mexican American farm workers. Rivera traveled and worked with his family throughout his education. His parents were farm laborers who followed the annual harvests from Texas to the Midwest. Tomás Rivera’s career as a writer and educator was shaped by the struggles of his family.
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