'The Barbarian Nurseries' author to hold talk in SLO

“In Southern California, a lot of people … look at someone like me and think that we are a member of the domestic class (or) that we don’t have any aspirations to be anything other than a member of the lower laboring classes,” he continued. “My goal in life now is to serve as an example to other people who continue to face that kind of (prejudice).”

Tobar tackles the thorny issues of race, class and immigration in his award-winning novel “The Barbarian Nurseries,” the focus of this year’s Book of the Year program sponsored by Cuesta College and San Luis Obispo County Library.

He’ll speak about the book Tuesday at Cuesta’s Cultural and Performing Arts Center in San Luis Obispo.

The son of Guatemalan immigrants, Tobar was born and raised in Los Angeles at a time when the Southern California city held plenty of promise for new arrivals.

“That’s the L.A. I grew up with, an L.A. where anything was possible,” Tobar said, adding that he’s since seen the metropolis transform into a place that’s “more intolerant … more crowded and less hopeful.”

Tobar, who holds degrees from UC Santa Cruz and UC Irvine, spent much of his journalism career at the Los Angeles Times, serving as the newspaper’s national Latino affairs correspondent and its bureau chief in Mexico City and Buenos Aires, Argentina. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the 1992 Rodney King riots.

In 2014, Tobar left the Los Angeles Times to become an assistant professor in the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication.

Reached by phone at his office in Eugene, Ore., Tobar said he’s always fought to defy the low expectations of others.

The author, who’s also written for The New Yorker, LA Weekly and The New York Times, recollected an incident that occurred when he worked as an intern at the Los Angeles Times’ San Fernando Valley office.

“An editor stepped in, read the story and said, ‘Hector, this is really good. Did someone help you with this?’ ” Tobar recalled. “He didn’t believe that this 25-year-old trainee could produce a story of the depth and intelligence he had before him.”

The main character of “The Barbarian Nurseries,” a stoic Mexican immigrant nicknamed “Madame Weirdness” by her employers, similarly struggles to make people notice something other than her brown skin and boxy uniform.

“She is an intellectual trapped in the body of a servant,” Tobar said of Araceli Ramirez, calling the character his alter-ego.

Once a student in Mexico City, Araceli now works as a live-in maid in an upscale Orange County enclave for software developer Scott Torres and his wife, corporate executive-turned-supermom Maureen Thompson. When the couple fires their nanny and gardener for financial reasons, Araceli finds herself looking after their three children as well.

Then a domestic squabble over an ill-advised and expensive landscaping project throws the household into further turmoil. Maureen flees to a spa with her infant daughter. Scott goes AWOL as well.

With food and options running low, Araceli leaves Laguna Rancho Estates for central Los Angeles with the two Torres-Thompson boys in tow. But their search for Scott’s estranged Mexican father soon spirals into a massive misadventure.

Tobar started writing “The Barbarian Nurseries” — the title refers both to gardening and child-rearing, two jobs commonly filled by Latin American immigrants — as a graduate student in 1995. The first version was roundly rejected by publishers.

“It was a novel about a family written by someone who did not at the moment have a family,” said Tobar, who revisited the story a decade later. (He now has a wife and three children.)

By then, he had written two other books: the novel “The Tattooed Soldier” and the non-fiction travelogue “Translation Nation: Defining a New American Identity in the Spanish-Speaking United States.”

“Writing a novel requires a certain amount of emotional intelligence,” he said. “I personally didn’t have that emotional intelligence or insight when I was 30 years old. I had to be in my 40s to have that.”

Tobar added that the book industry also saw a shift during that time.

“Publishing is much more open to the idea of a Latino writer taking on political themes than they were a decade earlier,” he said. “There’s been a change in the culture. … The readership is much more sophisticated.”

In short, it’s a world where a book billed as “a response to the growth of the anti-immigrant movement in California” can find a responsive audience.

Published in 2011, “The Barbarian Nurseries” won the California Book Award for Fiction and landed on Best Book of the Year lists for the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times Book Review, the San Francisco Chronicle and The Boston Globe.

“There’s a certain power to the truth (that) really resonates with readers,” said Tobar, who returned to the realm of nonfiction for his most recent book, which investigates the 2010 Chilean mining disaster. “Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free” was published in 2014.

“To me, there’s a real symbiotic relationship between journalism and fiction,” from Ernest Hemingway to Gabriel García Márquez, Tobar said, adding that both approaches are “an act of bearing witness. You bear witness to the life and times of your community.”

This story was originally published March 11, 2016 at 6:26 PM with the headline "'The Barbarian Nurseries' author to hold talk in SLO."