Mario Suarez will tell you: Garza's Barber Shop is more than razors, scissors, and hair. It is where men, disgruntled at the vice of the rest of the world, come to get things off their chests. The lawbreakers come in to rub elbows with the sheriff's deputies. And when zoot-suiters come in for a trim, Garza puts on a bit of zoot talk and "hep-cats with the zootiest of them."

A key figure in the foundation of Chicano literature, Mario Suarez (1923-1998) was among the first writers to focus not only on Chicano characters but also on the multicultural space in which they live,...