Arturo Islas; Stanford University Professor and Novelist

Arturo Islas, 52, Stanford University professor of English who wrote two novels about the Chicano experience in the American Southwest. His first novel, “The Rain God,” was published in 1984 and won the best fiction prize from the Border Regional Library Conference. “Migrant Souls” in 1990 was the second novel in his planned trilogy, and he was working on the third at the time of his death. A native of El Paso, Islas earned three degrees from Stanford and then joined the faculty in 1971. In Palo Alto on Friday of the complications of acquired immune deficiency syndrome.