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SUNBURST by Mauricio Magdaleno

SUNBURST

By

Pub Date: Jan. 1st, 1944
Publisher: Viking

This might almost provide a soundtrack for some of Rivera's paintings. A grim story of Mexican Indians betrayed by a greed and a lust for power on the part of a man who had risen from their ranks. It is a tale of the Mexican Dust Bowl, a land cursed by lime which chokes all growth, by poverty and pauperism, by the spark of life fanned by the excitement of the intercommunity feuds which eventually drive away the priest who is almost their only friend. They have idealized the ""golden one"", Saturnino Herrera, who had become famous; he returns to them, full of false premises, he ps an overseer in the hacienda to draw on their very life blood for his own ends -- they become peons, slaves of the hacienda. At the close, betrayed, they kill the overseer; they doubt the faith of the once friendly storekeeper put in his place -- and they look with suspicion on the school teacher who strives to hold out to them some glimmer of hope for the future.