Coal Camp Days
The coalfields of northern New Mexico are the setting for the remembrances of six-year-old Matias Montaño, a fictionalized version of the author's life in the last years of World War II. García writes about ordinary coal-mining people as they struggle to make a living and raise families, and about their heroism, joy for living, and their belief in the value of education, hard work, and the American Dream.
For Matias, his brothers, friends, and the adults in their lives, the poor living conditions did not interfere with their adventures and activities, which included collecting scrap iron, picking chokecherries, tracking deer, hunting rattlesnakes, and riding hand cars down the railroad tracks. This book presents a fresh and richly textured view of life in a mining town from the Hispanic viewpoint but includes folklore and stories told by the town's many other ethnic groups, among them Italian, Slavic, and Greek immigrants and African Americans, all working together in support of the war effort and in search of better lives.
Dr. Ricardo García has spent thirty-six years as an educator beginning in Tierra Amarilla and Wagon Mound, New Mexico as a high school English teacher. Since 1973, he has taught or served as an administrator in various colleges and universities. Currently, he is a Professor of Education in Teachers College at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is a storyteller for the Nebraska Humanities Coucil and author of a monthly feature story in the Raton Range on coal camp life. His poetry has been published in New Mexico Magazine, and his book, On the Way to San Francisco Bay, (Anchorage, Salmon Run Press, 2001) won the National Poetry Award for the year 2000. His other professional education books are: Teaching in a Pluralistic Society (Harpercollins, 1991); Teaching for Diversity (Phi Delta Kappa, 1998). He has conducted seminars or told stories in 35 different states from Alaska to Puerto Rico.
