Romeo Rolando Hinojosa-Smith (January 21, 1929 – April 19, 2022) was an American novelist, essayist, poet and the Ellen Clayton Garwood professor in the English Department at the University of Texas at Austin.
[2][3] His father, Manuel Guzman Hinojosa, was a Hispanic American sheriff and a veteran of the Mexican Revolution; his mother, Carrie Effie Smith, was an Anglo-American housewife and teacher.
[9] Hinojosa would regularly read Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time in his early seventies, in addition to Marcel Proust, Alexander Pushkin, Heinrich Böll, and Miguel Ángel Asturias.
Hinojosa states that one of his first audiences was Tomás Rivera, another prominent Chicano author who had already published his well known work, ...y no se lo tragó la tierra (1971).
[5] Hinojosa-Smith has also been inspired by William Faulkner, who is prominently known for his novels and short stories that take place in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County.
Rolando Hinojosa's Klail City Death Trap Series mirrors this with his own fictional county that takes place in the American-Texas border instead of Faulker's Mississippi area.
[4][11] He devoted most of his career as a writer to his Klail City Death Trip Series, which comprises 15 volumes, from Estampas del Valle y otras obras (1973) to We Happy Few (2006).
For example, the Mexican-American author has stated that although the Mexican Revolution ended in 1920, there were still skirmishes from both sides of the forces until 1934 with the election of President Lázaro Cárdenas del Río.
[5] Inspired by these conflicts as well as the stories his father would tell him, The Mexican Revolution was a prominent topic in his early of books of KCDTS, notably Estampas del Valle (1973) and Klail City y sus alrededores (1976).
In Estampas del Valle (1973), specifically under the chapter "Otra Vez La Muerte", Hinojosa writes about a man's experience in the war in the style of journal entries that the character wrote in while stationed in Papantla, Veracruz in the spring of 1920.
Under the chapter "The Eighth Army at Chongchon", Rafe (the character writing the poems about the war), makes a reference to the General Walton H. Walker's comment on the underestimation of Chinese fighters in the Korean War, who proclaims that the many Chinese groups that live in Korea are akin to Mexicans living in Texas, implying that the general views Mexican-Americans as Mexican and thus not as actual Americans.
Observations from this book is that after the chapter "Bruno Cano: Lock, Stock, and BBL", the section switches from focusing on Jehu Malacara to Rafe Buenrostro.
In Klail City y sus alrededores, Jehu Malacara travels with a Protestant preacher, Iman, spreading their word and selling the bible around the community.