Thomas Sanchez

  • Born: February 26, 1944
  • Birthplace: Oakland, California

Author Profile

Growing up in a low-income family, Thomas Sanchez was sent to a Catholic boarding school in Northern California after his mother became ill. There, he developed his interest in Indigenous American subjects, which informs some of his fiction. An outspoken advocate for human rights, Sanchez was a member of the Congress for Racial Equality, the United Farm Workers, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during the 1960s. Sanchez participated in the Sacramento Valley grape strikes and the Vietnam antiwar movement. As a radio correspondent in 1973, he reported on the Indigenous American Movement’s takeover of the Wounded Knee Reservation in South Dakota. This protest prompted a Senate investigation into the conditions of Indigenous American life.

In 1969, Sanchez left the United States to visit Spain, where he wrote his first novel. Rabbit Boss (1973) chronicles four generations of the Washoe nation. The nation’s leader, the Rabbit Boss, encounters the Donner Party, a group of White settlers who became snowbound in the mountains and resorted to cannibalism. A Washoe legend that Whites are cannibals originates from this 1846 encounter. The cannibalism overturns the civilized White man-savage dichotomy. Rabbit Boss was named one of the 100 Greatest Western Novels by the San Francisco Chronicle in 1999. Cultures clash again in Sanchez’s next novel, Zoot Suit Murders (1978), a mystery set in a Los Angeles barrio of the 1940s. The story concerns the murder of two Federal Bureau of Investigation agents in a rioting neighborhood where sailors regularly terrorize the local zoot-suiters.

A Guggenheim Fellowship and the proceeds from the sale of his house allowed Sanchez to move to Key West, Florida, where he wrote Mile Zero (1989). Rabbit Boss describes the beginning of an American campaign against Indigenous people that culminated in the destructive logic of the Vietnam War. Mile Zero is Sanchez’s attempt to connect with the post-Vietnam generation. For Sanchez, the tide of refugees fleeing Haiti and the increasing cocaine traffic through Florida stemmed from the same folly that fueled the United States’ involvement in Vietnam. The novel’s brilliant evocation of Key West and its political vision elicited favorable comparisons with the work of John Steinbeck and Robert Stone.

To foster inspiration and authenticity for his next novel, Sanchez once again departed the United States and went to live in and visit such cities as Paris, Provence, and Mallorca. An epistolary novel, Day of the Bees (2000), tells the story of a lost love affair between a Spanish artist and his French muse during World War II and the years following. Changing gears, his subsequent work of fiction, King Bongo (2003), adopted the setting of Havana, Cuba, in the 1950s. After about a decade, he followed this book with the ecological thriller American Tropic in 2013, returning to the world of Key West to explore contemporary ecological issues through a murder mystery. In addition to his writing, Sanchez has also worked on screenplays with notable producers. He also wrote and directed a film called Keep Calm and Carry On (2019).

Sanchez writes novels infused with the richness of America’s cultural heritage, so his work is difficult to categorize. His fiction has received laudatory reviews and other critical accolades, but it has yet to attract the scholarly attention it deserves. Nevertheless, Sanchez is an important contemporary critic of the United States’ destructive desire for “progress” at the expense of others.

Bibliography

"American Tropic." Kirkus Reviews, 2012, www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/thomas-sanchez/american-tropic. Accessed 10 Oct. 2024.

"The Best in the West / Top 100 Fiction." SFGate, 21 Nov. 1999, www.sfgate.com/books/article/the-best-in-the-west-top-100-fiction-2895432.php. Accessed 10 Oct. 2024.

Bonetti, Kay. "An Interview with Thomas Sanchez." Missouri Review, vol. 14, no. 2, 1991, pp. 76–95. missourireview.com/article/an-interview-with-thomas-sanchez. Accessed 19 Apr. 2023.

"King Bongo." Kirkus Reviews, 2003, www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/thomas-sanchez/king-bongo. Accessed 10 Oct. 2024.

Kinsella, Bridget. "Thomas Sanchez: Telling History’s Stories." Publishers Weekly, vol. 250, no. 21, May 2003, pp. 40–41. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=502904788&site=ehost-live. Accessed 10 Oct. 2024.

Marovitz, Sanford E. "The Entropic World of the Washo: Fatality and Self-Deception in Rabbit Boss." Western American Literature, vol. 19, no. 3, 1984, pp. 219–30, doi.org/10.1353/wal.1984.0150. Accessed 19 Apr. 2023.

Mudge, Alden. "Tom Sanchez." Book Page, June 2000, www.bookpage.com/interviews/8058-tom-sanchez-fiction. Accessed 10 Oct. 2024.

Sanchez, Thomas. "The Visionary Imagination." MELUS, vol. 3, no. 2, 1976, pp. 2–5. doi.org/10.1093/melus/3.2.2. Accessed 19 Apr. 2023.

"Thomas Sanchez Biography." Thomas Sanchez, www.thomas-sanchez.com/en/biography/bio‗index.html. Accessed 10 Oct. 2024.