...y no se lo tragó la tierra is a 1971 Tomás Rivera novel, most recently translated to English as ...And the Earth Did Not Devour Him.
[1] The novel presents stories that center around a community of South Texan Mexican American migrant farm workers during the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Rivera sent manuscripts everywhere and he said he received "thousands" of rejections before winning the Quinto Sol award and publishing his novel the subsequent year.
Rivera, Tomás (1987) ...y no se lo tragó la tierra/ ...And the Earth Did Not Devour Him (English and Spanish edition).
Rivera, Tomás (1992) ...y no se lo tragó la tierra/ ...And the Earth Did Not Devour Him (English and Spanish edition).
[8] Additionally, in "The Little Burnt Victims", two small children of migrant workers are burned to death in an accidental fire when they are left alone in their house.
The stories thus expose dire conditions for Mexican American migrant workers and may be seen as a work that calls for structural changes to occur.
Limón makes the point that in order for the boy in the novel to embrace rationality, he must put down and deem backwards his Mexican American culture's folk Catholicism.
In their extensive introduction, Ramos and Buenrostro argue that Rivera's outstanding fictionalization of memory resists the tendency to aestheticize and heroize the figure of the farm worker; which was a common practice of social realism during the decades of 1930 and 1940.
Additionally, the Latin American edition of Tierra includes numerous unpublished materials that show the relationship between Rivera and the editors of the foundational publishing house Quinto Sol.