Miguel Méndez

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Miguel Méndez M.
Born	June 15, 1930 (1930-06-15) (age 78) Bisbee, Arizona
Pen name	Miguel Méndez
Occupation	novelist, professor (retired)
Nationality	USA
Writing period	1969-
Genres	short story, novel, poetry, autobiography
Literary movement	Aztlán, Chicano
Notable work(s)	Peregrinos de Aztlán (Pilgrims in Aztlán)
Notable award(s)	Premio Nacional de Literatura Mexicana Jose Fuentes Mares
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Miguel Méndez (born June 15, 1930) is the pen name for Miguel Méndez M., a Mexican American-Yaqui author best known for his novel Peregrinos de Aztlán (Pilgrims in Aztlán).

1 Biography
2 Published works
3 Awards
4 References
5 Further Reading
6 See also
7 External links

[edit] Biography

Méndez was born in the border town of Bisbee, Arizona on 15 June 1930 into a bilingual family. He grew up in El Claro, Mexico, and left school after the sixth grade to work as a hired hand on area farms. In 1946, he moved to Tucson, Arizona and became a bricklayer. At the same time, he wrote as much as he could, and completed a novel by the age of eighteen, although he did not publish anything until the 1960s.

After 1970, Méndez became a teacher, including jobs at Pima Community College and the University of Arizona, Tucson, from which he retired as a Full Professor and from which he was awarded a Doctor of Humane Letters degree in 1984. A Festschrift in his honor was published in 1995, Miguel Mendez in Aztlan: Two Decades of Literary Production.

Méndez has been described as “one of the principal voices of socially committed Chicano fiction” by the editors of Chicano Literature: A Reference Guide and as "one of [Chicano literature's] finest and most sensitive writers" in The Dictionary of Literary Biography’s Chicano Writers First Series. His papers are now archived at the California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives at UC Santa Barbara.

[edit] Published works

"Tata Casehua" and "Taller de Imagenes" (short stories), published in El Espejo/The Mirror (1969)
Los criaderos humanos: épica de los desamparados y Sahuaros (poems; 1975)
Cuento para niños precoces (1980)
The Dream of Santa Maria de las Piedras (1989)
Pilgrims in Aztlán (1992)
Entre Letras y Ladrillos (1996), trans. as From Labor to Letters : A Novel Autobiography (1997)

[edit] Awards

Premio Nacional de Literatura Mexicana José Fuentes Mares (1991)

[edit] References

California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives (accessed March 2008)
Answers.com Bio (accessed March 2008)
BestPrices.com Bio (accessed March 2008)

[edit] Further Reading

Alarcón, Justo S. "Lo esperpéntico en Peregrinos de Aztlán y Criaderos humanos, de Miguel Méndez," Relaciones Literarias entre España e Iberoamérica (1988), pp. 785-795. available online at Biblioteca Virtual Miguel D. Cervantes (accessed March 2008)
---. "Estructuras narrativas en Tata Casehua de Miguel Méndez," Confluencia Vol. 1, n.º 2 (1986) 48-54, available online at Biblioteca Virtual Miguel D. Cervantes (accessed March 2008)
---."La aventura del héroe como estructura mítica en Tata Casehua de Miguel Méndez," Explicación de textos literarios Vol. XV, n.º 2 (1987) 77-91. available online at Biblioteca Virtual Miguel D. Cervantes (accessed March 2008)
Alurista. "Myth, Identity and Struggle in Three Chicano Novels: Aztlán ... Anaya, Méndez and Acosta." Aztlán: Essays on the Chicano Homeland. Ed. Rudolfo A. Anaya, and Francisco A. Lomeli. Albuquerque: Academia/El Norte; 1989. pp. 219-229
Bruce-Novoa, Juan D. "Righting the Oral Tradition." Denver Quarterly 16.3 (1981): 78-86.
Cárdenas, Guadalupe. "El arquetipo de la madre terrible en Peregrinos de Aztlán de Miguel Méndez M." México, Alta Pimeria Pro Arte y Cultura, 1990. available online at Biblioteca Virtual Miguel D. Cervantes (accessed March 2008)
Ekstrom, Margaret V. "Wanderers from an Aztec Land: Chicano Naming Devices Used by Miguel Méndez." Literary Onomastics Studies 12 (1985): 85-92.
Somoza, Oscar U. "The Mexican Element in the Fiction of Miguel Méndez." Denver Quarterly 17.1 (1982): 68-77.
Villalobos, José Pablo. "Border Real, Border Metaphor: Altering Boundaries in Miguel Méndez and Alejandro Morales." Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 4 (2000): 131-40.