Coal camps and land grants

I googled around using the only part of the title I retained from those two books that caught my eye in the library yesterday--coal camp--and I found them. They look mighty interesting and certainly support the assertion that books by and about the working class do now and then make their way to publication; the challenge is finding out about them and getting your hands on them.

The books are COAL CAMP DAYS and COAL CAMP JUSTICE. Both novels are set in the mines of northern New Mexico in the 1940s. The author is Ricardo L. García, who, according to his listing at New Mexico University Press, "has spent 36 years as an educator beginning in Tierra Amarilla and Wagon Mound, New Mexico, as a high school English teacher."

This piques my interest even further. Tierra Amarilla was the site of a major struggle over land grant rights in the Chican@ movement of the 1960s. On our one truly splendid vacation, in 1992 in New Mexico, Teresa and I went there to see the courthouse where the Chican@ militants took their stand. During the drive she told me what happened there in 1967, and how it electrified young Chican@ radicals like her. I took a picture of her at the courthouse but who knows where it is. I do have this one of Teresa this past spring in Mexico City at a monument to the resistance to Cortes and the Spanish invaders.

Ricardo L. García's books are now on my to-read list.