Alejandro Morales, a native of California, is currently a professor of Spanish at the University of California, Irvine. His novels include Caras viejas y vino nuevo (1975), La verdad sin voz (1979), and Reto en el paraíso (1983). He has recently finished his fourth novel, The Brick People.
Alejandro Morales's second novel, Death of an Anglo, originally issued in Spanish by the Mexican publisher Joaquín Mortiz as La verdad sin voz, is a fictionalized account of an idealistic young doctor's attempts to improve the lives of the Chicano residents of Mathis, Texas, in the earty 1970s. Loosely basing his story on actual events, Morales has created a compelling tale of heroism, human failings, and the connection between documented sources and their artistic reconfigurations. The hero, Logan, is a rebellious physician who seeks to cure his patients rather than grow rich from them. The storyteller is an ostracized Chicano academic and aspiring writer named Eutemio. Despite the weaknesses and lapses that impair the doctor's ability to fulfill his ideals, his commitment to this beliefs becomes Eutemio's literary inspiration. The latter had always considered himself a coward, but his contact whit Logan enables him to take a similarly defiant stand. Heroism is communicable.
Judith Ginsberg, the translator, is University Director of Research at Fordham University in New York. She holds a PH. D. in Spanish literature from the Graduate Center of CUNY.
