Award-winning Latino author Rolando Hinojosa-Smith dies at 93

Internationally acclaimed author, poet and essayist Romeo Rolando Hinojosa-Smith, who used his life in the Texas Rio Grande Valley to write a series of award-winning novels, has died, his family said. He was 93.

Hinojosa, who died Tuesday, was best known for his “Klail City Death Trip” series about life and the people in fictional Belken County and Klail City.

The National Book Critics Circle honored Hinojosa-Smith in 2013 with its Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award.

“He was a writer’s writer,” said a colleague, John Morán González, a professor of American and English literature at the University of Texas at Austin.

Some have compared the bilingual series to William Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying” and its fictional Yoknapatawpha County and to Gabriel García Márquez’s fictional Macondo in “One Hundred Years of Solitude.”

“Like William Faulkner, Rolando has immortalized his ‘little postage stamp of native soil’ the borderlands of the Rio Grande Valley,” Elizabeth Culliford, a professor and chair of the English department at UT Austin, said in 2013 when Hinojosa’s award was announced.

The first book of the series, "Estampas del Valle," won the 1973 Premio Quinto Sol award for best work by a Chicano author.

“Klail City y Sus Alrededores” earned Hinojosa the Premios Casa de las Américas prize, a prestigious honor for Latin American literature.

“Writing in two languages, experimenting with different genres of fiction, and having a sarcastic, cutting Texas Mexican wit make Hinojosa one of the most influential American writers in the late 20th century and early 21st century,” Jaime Armin Mejía, an associate professor of English and Chicano literature at Texas State University, wrote in a chapter on Hinojosa-Smith for Encyclopedia Britannica.

Hinojosa-Smith said in a 2014 interview with Humanities Texas, the state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities, that he chose to create a town so as not to be tied down in his writing.

“Klail City is very important to me because it allows me the freedom to write about a town in the Valley, any event, any historical moment as well, and the different ethnicities there,” he said.

“I’ve always insisted on being true to the place, having a sense of the place, to convince the reader that whatever they’re reading, this man who is writing knows what he’s talking about. It’s easy for me to write about home,” he said in the interview.

A native of Mercedes, Texas, Hinojosa spent many years as a professor at UT Austin, in the English, Spanish and Portuguese departments. He was the last of his four siblings.

He served in the U.S. Army during the Korean War and used his experiences in his writing, including “Korean Love Songs."

Clarissa Hinojosa, Hinojosa-Smith’s daughter, said her father “was proud to come from the Valley and our family. It mattered a lot.”

It was important to him to teach the world about that part of Texas, she said.

She said he had recently stopped writing after he retired from UT Austin because of dementia and because he had already “said a lot of what he needed to say.”

She said in a Facebook post that he taught for more than 60 years at all levels of education, 35 of them at UT Austin.

He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois in 1969 and received the Alumni Achievement Award from the Illinois Alumni Association in 1998. The university's Latino/Latina Studies Department renamed its guest lecture series for him in 2006.

"He was a prolific and award-winning author whose books had readers all over the world," Clarissa Hinojosa wrote on social media. "His writing made him a popular guest lecturer at universities across the Americas, in Europe, the Middle East and Southeast Asia."

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