Rolando Hinojosa-Smith was an award-winning Chicano novelist whose works included the 15-book “Klail City Death Trip” series.
- Died: April 19, 2022 (Who else died on April 19?)
- Details of death: Died in Cedar Park, Texas of complications of dementia at the age of 93.
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Author and professor
After serving in the U.S. Army in the late 1940s, Hinojosa-Smith studied English literature. He taught at universities including the University of Texas at Austin, where he was the Ellen Clayton Garwood professor of creative writing in a career that spanned 35 years. As he taught, Hinojosa-Smith wrote in both Spanish and English, publishing his first novel in 1973: “Estampas del Valle y otras obras.” Published in English as “The Valley,” it was the first in his “Klail City Death Trip” series. The series followed the people of Klail City, a fictional town in the Rio Grande Valley on the Texas-Mexico border. Hinojosa-Smith’s 1976 novel, “Klail City y Sus Alrededores,” won the Casa de las Américas Prize when it was later published in English as “Klail City.” Hinojosa-Smith spent decades writing about the people of Klail City, as well as writing other work including police procedurals.
Hinojosa-Smith on the Rio Grande Valley
“What the Valley shares—all the way up to, say, El Paso, which is nine hundred miles upriver from Brownsville—is that we are tied to the border. We are tied psychologically, certainly historically—we share a lot of that. We are tied culturally and in many ways linguistically. Now the Mexican American population is in the majority, so that the political face has also changed. The intercourse between the northern and southern bank is where it always has been, very closely tied to the economy, which we also share.” —from a 2014 interview for Humanities Texas
Tributes to Rolando Hinojosa-Smith
Full obituary: The New York Times
