La joven (The Young One or White Trash in the United States, Island of Shame in the United Kingdom) is a film, directed by Luis Buñuel and currently available on the Buñuel DVD collection released in 2007, after being out of distribution for many years. Produced in Mexico in 1960 and shot in English, La Joven is one of Buñuel’s more serious films, dealing with racism and rape. Based on a story by Peter Matthiessen called Travelin’ Man, it tells the story of Traver, a black jazz musician who is on the run after a white woman accuses him of rape.

Like a number of Matthiessen’s early stories, “Travelin Man” is both an elegant piece of writing and a brutal parable of the South’s race relations as they stood in the 1950s. When “Travelin Man” was published in Harper’s in 1957, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was only weeks old. The city of Montgomery, Alabama, had just integrated its buses as an outcome of the year-long boycott sparked by Rosa Parks’s civil disobedience. Within the year, paratroopers and national guardsmen would be dispatched to Little Rock, Arkansas, to buffer the enrollment of nine African-Americans against threats of mob violence at Central High School.

Get Travelin’ Man here at www.all-story.com