Fronterizo: a novel by Roberto Álvarez (Forthcoming)
Fronterizo tells the story of Manuel Mondragon who was born in the U.S. barrio of La Mesita on the Tijuana-San Diego, U.S.- Mexico Border. La Mesita is a close knit community of immigrant families from Mexico where fruit orchards provided jobs and a life of strong friendships and relations. However, Manuel is deported during the Great Depression to Mexico with his siblings and mother. Manuel yearns for the community and friends left behind in the U.S. They leave behind not only the community but the dream instilled in his father’s migration north. The family is deported to his father’s home town, Cabo San Lucas on the Cape of Baja California. Manuel adapts to the life of the cape and Mexico, but his fervent goal is to return to the United States. He eventually works his way north and to the Frontera—the Mexico-U.S. Border. In this journey he engages the world of fruits and vegetables—the life of the “verdulero.” Traveling through the interior Mexican states of Sinaloa, Guerrero, Jalisco, and other fruit producing regions, Manuel discovers a Mexico he never imagined. The deep ties to both Mexico and his place of birth solidify a binational belonging and identity. On the border in Tijuana, Manuel is engaged by the life of border commerce, and eventually returns to San Diego and enters the world of bi-national export. Manuel’s journey presents a Mexico and border framed by the bustling markets of ethnic fruits and vegetables. In the life style of fruteros, trust, competition and suspicion live side by side in the daily encounters of the fruit trade. This is a story of loss, the loss of home but also of self -emergence in the discovery of place, belonging and identity. It is a story couched in an unknown Mexico, and a life pulled by the contradictions of home, the border, and self.
Roberto Álvarez is a social-cultural anthropologist whose career and life have been guided by a commitment to social justice, and the empowerment of underserved communities. This stems from both his personal history growing up along the U.S.-Mexico Border and from his experience in a broad range of social-change contexts. In the U.S. Peace Corps (Panama and Puerto Rico) as a Volunteer and Trainer, he discovered the value of anthropology in understanding the effects of social change, inadvertent power, and inequality. Roberto returned home, to San Diego, and intermittently worked in the produce industry (in which he was raised), pursued an M.A. at San Diego State University. He completed the PhD in Social Anthropology at Stanford in 1979, focusing on migration and social change and joined the Institute of Urban and Minority Education (IUME) and the Program In Applied Anthropology at Teacher’s College, Columbia University. Here, Roberto taught as part of the Applied Program and served in IUME Centers for Race Desegregation, Title IX, and National Origins working in New York City Schools and urban neighborhoods. Subsequently, he worked at the Cross Cultural Research Center at Sacramento State University, as Director of Research and Evaluation, and Associate Director of the College for Migrants Program. At the CCRC he conducted leadership, and ethnographic training, with teachers, community, and indigenous leaders in the Federated States of Micronesia, the Republic of Belau, the Northern Marianas (Guam and Saipan), as well as in Chicano/Mexicano and Indigenous communities in the U.S.
In 1985, he re-entered the produce world and worked in the U.S.-Mexico Fruit Industry. This five-year ethnographic experience provided him with a novel understanding of the U.S.- Mexico Border, U.S. Government Policy, transnational process, and ethnic entrepreneurial strategies. A number of his academic publications focus on ethnic markets, entrepreneurs, global agriculture, and the role played by the “transnational state,” in local, regional, and global processes. He has also published extensively on the U.S. Mexico Border.
In 1990-2001, he returned to academia at Arizona State University (ASU), where he founded the Program in Applied Anthropology, to engage both graduate students and local community in effective educational and policy efforts. He was Chair of Socio-cultural Anthropology, Director of Graduate Studies, and director of ethnography and evaluation for various university programs that included the Project for the Improvement of Minority Education, The Office of Youth Preparation and the President’s Building Great Communities Program. Most recently at UCSD (2001-2012) he directed the Logan Heights Ethnography Project in the Chicano/Mexican community where he was raised. Roberto has maintained a commitment to education at all levels, aimed at economically disadvantaged and “minority” student success. Throughout his career he has been dedicated to advancing non-traditional students and faculty in university settings.
Roberto has been an active member of the Society for Applied Anthropology and was also a founding member and subsequently President of the Association of Latina and Latino Anthropologists (ALLA). He is currently Professor Emeritus of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego.