The Rain God - The Author

The Author

Arturo Islas was born on 25 May 1938 in El Paso, Texas, a bilingual city in the desert along the Mexican-American border. His parents were Arturo and Jovita Islas, who had three sons altogether. Mario Islas became a priest in Liberia, and Luis Islas an attorney working in El Paso. Islas graduated from high school in 1956 and enrolled at Stanford University in Palo Alto, from which he earned three degrees, a B.A. in 1960, a Masters degree in 1963 and a Ph.D. in English. In 1971 he became a professor of English there. He was a very popular teacher, winning the Dinkelspiel Award for his contribution to undergraduate education at Stanford. He is said to have taught richness of friendship. When he began teaching at Stanford, his offered a class called “Chicano Themes,” the first such class to be taught in Stanford's English Department.

Islas lived with Jay Spears until they broke up 1970. Islas learned in 1985 that Spears was in hospital with AIDS, from which he died in 1986. Islas himself died of AIDS on 15 February 1991 at his campus home. Islas is probably best known as the author of The Rain God (1984) and its sequel Migrant Souls (1991). He had planned the books to be part of a trilogy and was working on the final book, La Mollie and the King of Tears, published posthumously, when he died.

Big Mamou and her daughter, Emily, two characters in La Mollie and the King of Tears, are based on San Francisco Blues Musician, Margaret Moore and her daughter Kirsten Moore, long time, close friends of the author. Arturo Islas was Godfather to Kirsten Moore. The story of Kahoutek was originally related to Arturo by Margaret Moore who first heard it from "Mike", a bass player and band mate in Johnny Nitro's blues band, The Door Slammers. Arturo was enchanted with the Kahoutek story and decided to use it as the framework for La Mollie & the King of Tears. Johnny Nitro, also a friend of Arturo's, still plays in SF Bay Area clubs, most notably The Saloon in North Beach.

The Rain God was awarded the best fiction prize from the Border Regional Library Conference in 1985 and was selected by the Bay Area Reviewers Association as one of the three best novels of 1984. His second book, Migrant Souls, was the first novel by a Chicano author to be published by a New York publishing house.

Rain God contains many analogies between Islas and the character of Miguel Chico. Like Chico, Islas suffered from polio when he was eight and had to undergo long sessions of physical therapy. The illness left him with a permanent limp. In 1969, he underwent a major surgery and got a colostomy. Also like Chico, Islas lived in San Francisco; he also used his hometown as the template for the town where the Angel family lives in his book. And Islas and his cousins were taught reading by his grandmother, like Mama Chona teaches her grandchildren in the novel.