El Indio Jesus

Politically savvy, sociologically on the mark, witty and tragic by turns, this multiethnic novel chronicles a week in the life of a Chicano/Indian/Coyote Robin Hood. ""El Indio Jes s,"" as the man is called, cruises his unnamed border town in his caro troquita, a VW Beetle he turns into a pick-up truck, hiring himself out to do repair work and organizing his fellow drifters, mostly undocumented immigrants. As he crisscrosses the district, he meets up with a succession of people whose stories make up the bulk of the novel. El Chuy Jim nez, a builder with an amazing creative streak, is seduced from El Indio's fly-by-night construction business, the Right On Time Company, by a beautiful blonde who symbolizes the corrupting attractions of the Caucasian, or gabacho, world. Another of El Indio's friends, Miguel Olson, is burned to death in a car outside a bar, leading El Indio to muse on the life of the ""Chicano Swede,"" as Olson was known. The longest episode involves El Indio's daring plan to ferry a young muralist and his grandmother into the U.S., with the help of an Anglo priest. The book is rife with expos s of the bureaucratic catch-22s that beset the poor, as when a rent receipt is required to get food stamps. But the slumlords are renting property already sold to the urban renewal program and are unable to provide legal rent receipts. El Indio Jes s is a maverick genius who can circumvent almost every aspect of such byzantine systems. Unfortunately, he seems unable to keep from being arrested for lacking the proper automobile papers. Though Ballejos and Witt speechify in places, they otherwise offer up a stinging, eloquent critique of a hypocritical world determined to beat down those who fail to buy into the system. (Sept.)