WVU Press publishes bilingual Spanish/English narrative in paperback

Morgantown, WV, July 24, 2006:  Part memoir, part history, part novel, Pinnick Kinnick Hill: An American Story by Gavin W. González is a cross-genre, bittersweet celebration of one small Spanish community in the ethnic salmagundi of twentieth-century America. A West Virginia University Press favorite first published in hardcover in 2003, Pinnick Kinnick Hill is now available in a bilingual paperback with side-by-side English-Spanish facing pages.

The author, Gavin W. “Bill” González, Sr., was born in 1909 in Anmoore, W. Va. near Clarksburg, to immigrants from Asturias, Spain. The Gonzálezes and their immigrant neighbors built a lively community around a hilltop where they picnicked. Not until 1995, seven years after González died, did his daughter Mary Fran discover her father’s manuscript Pinnick Kinnick Hill in an old suitcase.

With humor and frankness, Pinnick Kinnick Hill explores themes familiar in Appalachian history and American immigration. “It is a story of bigotry, intolerance, and violence, as well as a story of community resistance, cross-ethnic cooperation, and resilience,” said Suronda González, director of the Languages across the Curriculum Program at Binghamton University.

Pinnick Kinnick Hill could have been written as a labor memoir, a bitter indictment of American capitalism, a rant against the exploitation of immigrant workers, said Mark Brazaitis, professor of creative writing at WVU, who edited the manuscript. “It could also have been written as an immigrant Paradise Lost, about families uprooting themselves to come to what they envisioned as a kind of Eden but which proved a thornier place whose dark reaches included the Ku Klux Klan, merciless capitalists, and the dreaded Black Hand mob, but González took a different approach, celebrating the kind of human spirit that has become, in popular myth, identified so closely with Americans,” Brazaitis said.

“The book is about the hills of West Virginia and about the dreams of Asturian emigrants,” said Daniel F. Ferreras, professor of Spanish at WVU, who translated the manuscript. The literal English translation of González’s Spanish title, “Las colinas sueñan en español,” means “The hills dream in Spanish,” Ferreras explains. “The hills do dream in Spanish and tell us that we should never forget again, for knowing the past helps us understand the present and allows all of us to work together toward a better future, free of segregation and exploitation,” he said.

‘Pinnick Kinnick Hill is a good read for anyone interested in West Virginia, Appalachian, and American history or in immigrant first-person narratives, said Patrick Conner, director of the WVU Pres. “It’s also a great teaching tool for English speakers learning Spanish and Spanish speakers learning English,” Conner added.

"It's firmly rooted in the ongoing dialogue of the Spanish-Latino-American immigrant experience," says Suronda Gonzalez, "and a quitessential piece of West Virginia's and America's social, ethnic, and labor history."

For more information about the new paperback edition of Pinnick Kinnick Hill, visit the WVU Press at www.wvupress.com , or 1-866-WVUPRESS.

W-V-U