What is Living Up The Street by Gary Soto about?
Living up the Street is a book written by Gary Soto. It was published in 1985. The book is a collection of short stories, recollections of growing up Chicano in Fresno, California. It won a Before Columbus Foundation’s American Book Award in 1985. In these “narrative recollections” poet Gary Soto reflects on his Mexican American childhood in the ethnically mixed laboring-class neighborhoods of Fresno, California. His was a life lived at the margins–economic margins and cultural margins. In these recollections of family relationships, youthful mischief-making, farm and factory jobs, adolescent rebellion, and the transition to professional writing Soto subtly and humorously draws our attention to the discontinuities between the lived lives of Chicanos and Anglos. “The Beauty Contest” describes how young Gary entered his younger half-brother in a playground beauty contest. “Strong build, a chipped tooth, half Mexican and half white–he might win, I thought.” Gary knows that only a lighte
