Immediate release in San Antonio at TWIG Book Shop

First Texas Publishers
Immediate Release

April 8th, 2010


Texas fiction writer, Chuy Ramirez, will be featured at the Twig Bookshop, 200 E. Grayson Suite 124 in San Antonio on Friday, May 7th from 5pm to 7pm.The public is invited. Ramirez, who is from South Texas, has a home in north San Antonio and is General Counsel to Lone Star National Bank, which is opening several branch banks in San Antonio. His book of short stories, Strawberry Fields, published in February, is a collection of stories and vignettes of three generations of a South Texas family beginning at the turn of the century and ending around the year 2000. The stories include the coming of the railroad and irrigation systems to the Valley and the people who labored to slash and burn thousands of South Texas acres to convert prickly desert to productive farm land.
As a boy in the early 1960s, Ramirez had chopped cotton just south of Lamesa around a community called Sparenberg. Forty years later, in “Strawberry Fields, A Book of Short Stories”, a character much like Ramirez recalls Lamesa:
“In the 1950s, on Saturdays, the family would drive in for groceries from the cotton fields around Sparenberg and Klondike—not quite towns on the Texas mesa, but rather zip codes denoting farm-to-market road intersections. Welcoming them as the road curved north into the town square of Lamesa, Texas,was the Negro shanty town. A segregated clay-red flatland devoid of flora or fauna (save for the sturdy tumbleweeds, which grew in abundance), was reserved for the small huts with the tar and asphalt siding. The only integrated venue in town was the long line at the rear of Murphy’s slaughterhouse, where the Mexicans and the Negros would line up at dawn on Saturdays with their galvanized washtubs to receive the calf bowels that Murphy disposed of.”
For more information about Strawberry Fields, visit the Web site at www.iberoaztlan.com .