BOOK REVIEW : Fault Lines Upset a Compelling Collection : THE OTHER SIDE: Fault Lines, Guerrilla Saints and the True Heart of Rock ‘n’ Roll <i> by Ruben Martinez</i> , Verso, $24.95, 168 pages

Ruben Martinez, 29, has a Mexican father, a Salvadoran mother, an unusually interesting point of view and a ton of talent. He was raised in Los Angeles. His Mexican grandparents lived in Silverlake; his maternal grandparents still live in San Salvador.

What goes wrong at times in this compelling book is summed up by the subtitle. While “The Other Side” is a perfect title, the subtitle is terrible. Earthquakes, saints, rock music? Clearly, his publishers are trying too hard to turn the poor kid into the Latino Joan Didion. Martinez does himself the same sort of disservice at times--piling on too much, rather than leading the reader through a sustained line of thought or series of observations.

For example, early on Martinez sets up his paradox: “I have lived both in the North and the South over my 29 years, trying to be South in the South, North in the North, South in the North and North in the South.” Then, unfortunately, Martinez adds, “Now, I stand at the center--watching history whirl around me as my own history fissures: my love shatters, North and South, and a rage arises from within as the ideal of existential unity crumbles.” He’s pushing to be profound. And nobody can use the word fissure as a verb and get away with it while I’m on the job. Martinez’s insights, and at times his emotions, run ahead of his language, and the reader can be left in the dust.

“The Other Side,” Martinez’s first book, contains 20-some essays, a series of diary entries, and several poems on the misunderstandings between people in the United States, Mexicans and Central Americans. In writing about an earthquake in San Salvador, a city already in the middle of a war, he distills things perfectly: “At exactly 11:49, they all heard what they thought was the familiar sound of a bomb exploding in the distance.” He celebrates Father Luis Olivares, former pastor of La Placita, near Olvera Street, who allowed hundreds of refugees to sleep in the church at night. Martinez does not celebrate the new pastor, who says “This was not a sanctuary for refugees. This was a sanctuary for criminals.”

In “Going Up in L. A.,” a piece based on many days and nights of difficult reporting, he hangs out with the graffiti artists of Pico-Union, East L.A. and Westlake. These include Prime, a talented 17-year-old who survives being blasted by a shotgun but may lose the use of his right arm. Underneath most of Martinez’s essays lies the question of how you can find your real identity--artist? criminal? radical? middle-class intellectual? dirty Mexican? ignorant gringo?--when people on both sides of the border are all too eager to assign you a false identity.

A venerable Mexican professor Martinez admires, Ruben Vizcaino, observes that North Americans get a certain sick satisfaction defining themselves in contrast to the people of Tijuana. “The gringos fancy themselves Supermen, leaders of the Free World, technological gods,” Vizcaino says. “They see the Third World poverty--the skinny dogs, the people begging, the indigenas kneeling before them--and they prove to themselves that they are great.”

Martinez provides no neat summary of his observations from both sides and no list of heroes. He leaves the reader with the feeling that a perfectly reasonable response to willful misunderstandings on both sides is to be cynical. Cynical and scared. Not yet 30, Martinez is prescient. “One can spy on multilingual store signs in New York or Los Angeles, eat food from all over the world, listen to the rhythms of every culture . . . ,” he writes in 1990, “But the fires of nationalism still rage, and in the cities of the United States, blacks and Koreans and Latinos and Anglos live in anything but a multicultural paradise.”

Near the end of “The Other Side” is a poem from 1989 that ends this way:

All kinds of battles are yet to come (race and class rage bullets and blood); choose your weapons . . . just know that everyone is everywhere now so careful how you shoot.