THE SUNDAY PROFILE : Building on Words : HEAD Family history provides UC Irvine professor Alejandro Morales the material with which to lay the foundation for novels that put forth the contributions of Mexican Americans.

Heading back to Orange County after a reading and discussion of his novels at a private school in Sherman Oaks, Alejandro Morales takes a detour to his oldstamping grounds: the former Simons barrio in Montebello.

A professor of U.S. Latino and Latin American literature at UC Irvine, Morales is one of America’s leading Mexican American novelists, a writer known primarily for investigating what his friend and fellow writer Gary Soto calls “ground-level living.”

But teacher and writer only partly define Morales, 50. As the publisher of a small press whose authors reflect California’s cultural diversity, as the owner of a bookstore that specializes in Latino and international ethnic literature, and as a nurturer of young Latino writers, Morales has been a vital force in Orange County’s burgeoning literary scene for the past two decades.

Home is a ranch-style house in the solidly middle-class residential flatlands of Tustin, where he and his wife, Rhoda, an elementary school teacher, raised their two children--Gregory, 25, a Yale graduate now studying medicine at UCLA, and Alessandra, 23, a film studies graduate of Columbia University.

But Morales’ heart, like the essence of his writing, remains firmly rooted in the barrio.

“Hola, mama, como estas?,” he says, walking up the driveway and greeting his mother with a hug.

“Como estas, mi hijo?” the small, white-haired woman in a purple sweat suit says to the youngest of her five children.

At 89, Jennie Morales still lives in the modest, two-bedroom stucco house that she and late husband Delfino built on Espanol Avenue just outside Montebello in 1947, a time when Mexicans were prevented from buying property within the city limits.

The house is on a small rise of land that once overlooked the Simons Brick Co., a sprawling factory built shortly after the turn of the century. Once considered the world’s largest brickyard, Simons at its peak in the 1920s produced nearly a million bricks a day.

The factory and adjoining Simons company town where Morales was born in 1944 vanished decades ago, but he has kept several Simons-stamped bricks as reminders of the place where hundreds of Mexican immigrant laborers like his father, grandfather and uncles lived and worked.

The bricks provide an apt metaphor for Morales’ own life, one devoted to labor of a far different sort.

“I guess I’ve always considered my dad and the Mexican population, really, as builders,” says Morales. “My dad made the material--the bricks--that were used to construct many of the buildings in Los Angeles. I look at words in the same way: Words are also the material that you build from.

“Like my father, I’m working with raw material, that which is language, using it in such a way to write novels that will in one way or the other affect people.”

Morales and his mother sit in the shade of the front porch of a small adobe room built off the garage behind the house. Morales moved into the room in high school, about the same time he began to write.

He inherited the room from his paternal grandfather, who died in bed of a hemorrhage.

“The first couple of weeks,” Morales recalls, “I was terrified because I thought the ghost of my grandfather would come.”

“They never come,” his mother says matter-of-factly.

Morales, however, keeps the ghosts alive through his writing.

In “The Brick People,” his best-known novel, he tapped his own family’s history to create a fictionalized account of the Mexican immigrants who worked at Simons and struggled to find acceptance in their adopted land. The 1988 novel was his first in English.

Lately, Morales has been writing a collection of short stories in Spanish based on his mother’s reminiscences about her life and the people she knew--stories he gently prods from her during his weekly visits.

“Es puro chisme,” his mother says.

Morales laughs, adding: “She just called the short stories I’m writing a lot of gossip.”

*

Writing, Morales had said on the drive to his mother’s, “is very important in my life.”

“It’s a way to keep in contact with the community, to keep memory alive. I think it’s really important. It’s important not only to the Mexican American community--the adults as well as the younger people--but it’s also a way, for me anyway, to put forth the positive contributions of the Mexican American community to the development of California and the United States.”

Morales has written five novels during the past 20 years, the first two in Spanish and published by one of the top publishing houses in Mexico City: “Caras viejas y vino nuevo” and “La verdad sin voz” (“Old Faces and New Wine” and “Death of an Anglo” in the English versions).

Those were followed in 1983 by “Reto en el paraiso” (“Challenge in Paradise”), a bilingual historical novel that chronicles the history of the Irvine Ranch (renamed Lifford) and features a contemporary Latino architect who is forced to confront his present and past.

“He’s one of the leading and most productive Chicano, or Latino, novelists in the United States,” says Nicolas Kanellos, publisher of Arte Publico Press, the largest and oldest publisher of Latino literature in this country.

Arte Publico Press, which is affiliated with the University of Houston, published “The Brick People” and “The Rag Doll Plagues,” Morales’ 1992 novel that follows a Latino doctor battling infectious disease in the past, the present and the future. The Texas Review called it “a unique blend of fact, magic and utopian fantasy.”

“Part of his particular niche is he writes, for the most part, historical novels that are meticulously documented and re-create important moments in time that have helped to forge present Latino identity,” says Kanellos.

In writing novels that have dealt with the Spanish colonial period in Mexico, the Latino influence in the building of 20th-Century Los Angeles and the Chicano civil rights period of the early 1970s, Kanellos says, Morales is “providing historical background and depth for a community through literature.”

Kanellos uses the term “total commitment” when describing Morales.

He recalled that the first time he met Morales, at a writing conference more than 15 years ago, “he was carrying a typewriter. Then I went to his room, and he was typing away. Total commitment--wherever he goes, he’s writing, writing, writing.”

*

Spanish was Morales’ first language at home as he grew up.

“My dad didn’t speak English very well,” he says. “But my mother, because she was the one who would go out and deal with the outside world more than my dad did, learned English very, very well.”

Seated in his living room one recent afternoon after class at UCI, Morales recalls that both of his parents emphasized the importance of getting an education.

“My dad said, ‘I don’t want you to work as hard as I have worked. If you study you will succeed, you will do better.’ ”

Morales attended the all-Mexican elementary school in Simons through the third grade. But in 1953, when the brick factory and company town were razed, he was transferred to an integrated elementary school in Montebello.

Although Morales would be the only member of the family to graduate from college, his older brother, Richard, now a supermarket manager, served as an early role model by attending East Los Angeles College and Cal State Los Angeles.

A turning point in Morales’ life came in junior high school. A personality clash with a math teacher led to his being placed in the only other math class available: an advanced math course.

“There you had all the brains of the school, and I was not expected to do very well,” recalls Morales.

His counselor told him, “Just pass it.” But, Morales says, “I sat in that class and I excelled.” And there was a side benefit: The students in the class, who became his friends, “were all college-oriented kids.”

In high school, after an English teacher “turned me on to literature,” Morales began “dabbling” with poetry, short stories and prose poems, writing about things that were happening to him and his friends--vignettes that later evolved into his coming-of-age first novel.

*

After earning a BA in Spanish at Cal State L.A., Morales taught Spanish for a year at Claremont High School. By then, he was married, having met Rhoda at a Montebello elementary school where she taught, and he served as an after-school playground director while attending Cal State L.A.

When he was accepted to graduate school at Rutgers University in New Jersey in 1969, they had just learned that Rhoda was pregnant. But they sold everything, packed up their VW and drove cross-country.

“My family thought I was absolutely crazy,” he recalls.

Morales earned his master’s degree and doctorate in Spanish, writing one of the first dissertations on Mexican American literature. After a year on a fellowship at the Center of Literary Studies at the University of Mexico in Mexico City, where he sold his first novel, he was offered the job at UC Irvine in 1974.

At the university, where professors are required to regularly publish books, articles and research papers, Morales continued to write his novels. He recently completed “a novel of intrigue,” the first in a trilogy he is writing about a woman who is a U.S.-born Mexican national who becomes an economist.

The book is now in the hands of a literary agent, his first. After being published by university presses for the past 15 years, Morales is eager to begin reaching a broader audience with his writing.

When he’s not teaching and writing there are those other sides to Morales that keep him busy.

In 1987, he and Tustin High School assistant principal Robert Boies co-founded Pacific Writers Press, a small independent press created to support “quality writers” who might not otherwise have a chance to be published by a major publisher.

The press’s first book was Lake Forest writer David Nava Monreal’s “The New Neighbor and Other Stories,” a collection of short stories that examine the California lifestyle from the Latino point of view.

Seven more books have followed, including “Calendar of Souls,” a collection of poems by Victor Valle of San Luis Obispo, and “A Hundred Feelings,” a collection of short stories by Ethel Quon of San Diego.

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If Pacific Writers Press’ goal is to serve as a launching pad for new writers, its biggest success story to date has been Jo-Ann Mapson, whose first book--a collection of short stories titled “Fault Line”--was published in 1989.

Mapson has gone on to write two critically acclaimed novels published by HarperCollins, “Hank & Chloe” and “Blue Rodeo.”

Mapson praises Pacific Writers Press as “a great forum for people whose work is new and doesn’t fit into any great commercial kind of genre--people whose books would otherwise be overlooked for more profitable ventures.”

In Mapson’s case, publication of her short story collection led to “a great L.A. Times review. I’m sure that it made me look serious to my agent, and it certainly gave me a whole lot of faith to keep writing.”

Mapson first met Morales when he decided to publish her short stories; they have since become good friends.

“I think that Alex takes a look at each manuscript and kind of puts a stake in: He realizes there’s merit in that person’s work and by putting his publishing company behind the writer he puts a stake in that person’s career,” says Mapson. “I have a lot of respect for what he does because I know it doesn’t bring great financial gain.”

Morales, who now runs the press alone with his wife’s help, originally hoped to publish three or four books a year, but he’s averaging one a year. A typical first printing is 1,500 copies.

Distribution, Morales says, “is the hard part. We’re a small press. We don’t have the money to launch a book like the big presses do, so we depend on small press distributors and we depend also on the writers” to set up signings at bookstores: “They take 25 to 50 copies, and that’s the way we move the books.”

“I’d really like to see our press develop even more,” says Morales, “but it needs more attention, and I can’t give it all that attention because my full-time job is the university.”

*

Morales’ bookstore, which he opened in 1991, also warrants his part-time attention.

Rhoda, who teaches second grade at Remington Elementary School in Santa Ana, handles the accounting for the store--”She’s the one who screams and yells at me and says, ‘Hey, we don’t have enough for the rent,’ ” Morales jokes.

Rhoda also helps out behind the cash register on weekends. Not Morales: “I make too many mistakes, so I can’t be trusted,” he says. But he stops by the store a few hours a week. When someone picks up a book he’s familiar with, he’ll walk over and discuss it or introduce the customer to similar titles. “I enjoy talking about books,” he says.

A board member of PEN West, the West Coast branch of the international writers organization, Morales served on a steering committee that in 1991 established the Orange County chapter of PEN. The first chapter meetings were held in his living room.

He also is the newly appointed director of the 21st annual Chicano Latino Literary Contest, a prestigious national competition sponsored by UCI’s department of Spanish and Portuguese.

Always the teacher, he speaks frequently at schools, urging students to continue their education and offering his advice to fledgling writers. He’s particularly interested in nurturing the next generation of Latino writers.

“I think what we have to do--those people who have been fortunate enough to get published--is gather writers together to encourage them to work,” he says.

*

In March, “just to give them insight into the literary world,” Morales and Berkeley writer Gary Soto will host an invitation-only gathering for 20 Southern California Latino writers in Morales’ home. He’s lining up a literary agent, a successful author, a representative from a major publishing house and a CD-ROM representative.

In April, Morales will join Soto and several other Latino authors to speak to East L.A. College students involved with the Puente Project, which helps prepare students to enter the University of California.

“They’re all young people, and the idea is to encourage them to go on to (the university) but also encourage them to write,” says Morales.

Says Soto of his friend: “I’d describe Alejandro as a person who is committed to literature. There’s a major commitment in all his duties. I think most professors in any field really don’t tend to reach out that far. It is hard to build a writing life and still immerse yourself in community activities. Alex has a major commitment to the community.”

Soto says he admires Morales’ ability to wear so many different hats.

“It’s really hard to do one thing right. If you were a publisher, that’s all you would do. If you were a bookseller, that’s all you would do. But to do everything and try to do it in one lifetime is really kind of spectacular.”

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Alejandro Morales

Age: 50

Background: born in Montebello; lives in Tustin.

Family: married to Rhoda Morales; 25-year-old son, Gregory; 23-year-old daughter, Alessandra.

Passions: tennis, writing, working in his bookstore, gardening.

On the state of Latino literature in the United States: “I think it’s flourishing, really booming. Many writers are being published by major houses as well as small, independent publishers, and the tradition is growing.”

On his practice of talking to high school students: “I like to keep in contact with the younger generation because I find many times they’re ignorant of history.”

On his advice to fledgling writers: “What I tell them is they should take advantage of the people around them. Especially the older folks--their mom and dad, aunts and uncles, especially grandparents. Many times you’ll find stories. That’s where I would start: Just jot down a story that a grandparent will tell you. . . . It gives you a sense of identity, a sense of belonging to a place. It gives you a sense of your place in history.”