Quixote Cult, The

The late 1960s was a heady time to come to adulthood, even in deep South Texas. When the narrator of The Quixote Cult—known simply as De la O—begins college, he discovers a world of political activists, Vietnam veterans, small-time drug dealers, and academic opportunists unlike anything he and his friend Lucio ever experienced in the barrio. And the more he sees of the fighting between La Raza revolutionaries, union members, political bosses, and paramilitary protesters, the more De la O wonders if the preaching of Chicano brotherhood isn't simply the flowering of another crackpot cult. But as he encounters day-care radicals, tilts at institutional windmills, and learns about St. Che and other icons, De la O also meets such living wonders as the Jewish Aztec Princess and The Brown Barbie. The Quixote Cult confirms Genaro González's reputation as a rambunctious, quirky writer whose characters, as The Nation wrote, "combust into their own living, full-colored reality"—even as they take on such important hippie-era questions as "You guys do bathe, don't you?"