User:Texaspublishing

Author: Jesus "Chuy" Ramirez San Juan, Texas

Biography

Chuy Ramirez is an attorney who practices law in McAllen, Texas and is a partner in the firm Ramirez & Guerrero, LLP. He was also a partner for twenty five years in the McAllen firm, Montalvo & Ramirez. Leo Montalvo served as mayor of the City of McAllen for twenty five years and was the first Mexican American elected to that post.

Ramirez’ practice focuses on commercial transactions and public finance. As a bond attorney, he has represented most governmental units in South Texas in connection with their issuance of tax-exempt bonds. He is currently corporate legal counsel for Lone Star National Bank, a Texas national bank with branches throughout South Texas and more recently in San Antonio. He grew up in the Rio Grande Valley and is no stranger to the strawberry fields, to which he traveled over the years with his family and thousands of families from South Texas. Ramirez attended Pan American University at Edinburg, Texas and is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin School of Law. At the law school, he served as Articles Editor for the International Law Journal and published a note entitled, “Altering the Policy of Neglect of Undocumented Immigration from South of the Border, Vol. 18, 1983. Strawberry Fields is his first fictional work.

In law school, Ramirez was an active participant in the Chicano Law Students Association and edited Rio Rojo, a student publication. He also served on the Legal Research Board.

Before law school, Ramirez served in various positions including City Manager for the City of San Juan in South Texas and as an administrator for Texas Rural Legal Aid. He also helped recruit area managers for the Dept. of Commerce (the U.S. Census Bureau) for the 1980 census.

As a high school student at Pharr San Juan Alamo High School in South Texas, Ramirez was an activist, edited a movement newspaper and helped organize the Mexican American Youth Organization which pushed for an end to segregate schools and bilingual education. He was also an active supporter of Cesar Chavez and his farm-workers movement during the California lettuce strike, and later Antonio Orendain’s Texas union, and edited the movement newspaper, El Portavoz. As a college student during the early 1970s, Ramirez was a political organizer and assisted with numerous campaigns, most notably the campaigns of Los Tres, the first three elected Mexican Americans to city office in San Juan, Texas, his home town. Ramirez was nineteen years old at the time. In 1972, he also helped organize the Raza Unida Party, a local third party in South Texas, for which former Texas state representative Alex Moreno served as the first standard bearer. Later, Ramirez served as treasurer for the Mexican American Democrats and an officer of the Texas Democratic Party. He has never sought public office and has not been directly involved in politics since 1980 except for his assistance or contributions.

Ramirez lives in San Juan, Texas with his wife of thirty eight years, Aida, who is a retired public school teacher. He has a son, a property manager, and a daughter, who works and resides in Austin. He is the proud grandfather of four: Chuy Ramirez III, Carla Ramirez, Victoria Ramirez and Isaiah Matthew Ramirez.

PUBLICATIONS:

Fiction:

Strawberry Fields

Articles:

Altering the Policy of Neglect of Undocumented Immigration from South of the Border, Vol. 18, 1983

Links

www.Iberoaztlan.com
www.twitter.com/texaspublishing

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www.strawberryfieldsramirez.blogspot.com

www.texaspublishing.blogspot.com

E-mail: texaspublishing@iberoaztlan.com

http://www.raymondvillechroniclenews.com/search/luceneapi_node/chuy%20ramirez

http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/view/9932

http://books.google.com/books?id=67IyYpMAF2gC&pg=PA268&lpg=PA268&dq=jesus+chuy+ramirez+democratic+party&source=bl&ots=M3cpFCNjbY&sig=lHTZ5eSjPBvPFWArgGa60q7EU-4&hl=en&ei=GoogS-L2I422sgOh083bBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CAgQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=jesus%20chuy%20ramirez%20democratic%20party&f=false

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Book Review

Book Review Strawberry Fields The unity of the stories in Strawberry Fields is in both the physical journey of one generation of Mexicans from Northern Mexico to South Texas and their gradual integration into American culture. The stories depict the history of a people. With the advent of the railroad and agricultural land developers in the Rio Grande Valley at the turn of the century, the need for cheap labor and the Revolution of 1910 in Mexico hasten that migration.

But it is the lives of the baby-boomer generation, Joaquín’s generation, and that generation’s inevitable divided loyalties that arise from familial and cultural demands to help earn a living and yet to move on in a majority culture which demands and purports to reward individualism that are the center of Strawberry Fields. The tensions that arise in that dynamic transition, the tensions in adolescence, the tensions between father and son, husband and wife, the myths that ethnic groups perpetuate, all fuel these vignettes.

So much in the stories is about the internal experience of the character. The stories both reveal and conceal a negative self-image held by the principal characters, Benáncio and Joaquín, father and son (Joaquín calls it the “affliction”) which fuels Joaquín’s own journey to the Strawberry Fields. Benáncio cannot forget his own history. Should Joaquín forget his? Joaquín’s self-reflexive journey back to the Strawberry Fields parallels a similar journey that his own generation has taken to get to where they are today. In so doing, Joaquín revisits a time, often painful, now often forgotten, which many of that generation will be reminded of. Will the journey repair him? Can he cast off the haunting images of his dreams? Chuy Ramirez immerses us in Benáncio’s and Joaquín’s world.

We are invited to decipher Joaquín’s encoded dreams and to make psychoanalytic inquiries. Yet, the stories are satirical, comical, and often heart-wrenching, as they chronicle in entertaining fashion Joaquín’s early years during the journey of rediscovery he has embarked upon. The stories can be enjoyed independently, but the more ambitious reader may find approaching the stories as chapters in a novel more rewarding.

—Good Reading Pancho Velasquez