Earthy Mexico Through the Eyes of a Child : WILD STEPS OF HEAVEN by Victor Villasenor; Delacorte Press $19.95, 296 pages

In the best-selling “Rain of Gold,” Victor Villasenor told the story of his mother’s family. Now, in the second volume of a projected trilogy, Villasenor tells, or mythologizes, the “wild and huge” story of his father’s family--a story “filled . . . with rage and violence and yet this incredible faith in God.”

Set before and during the Mexican Revolution of 1910, “the story of my father’s familia was the story of all Mexico,” Villasenor asserts, “and the story of Mexico was the story of the last 500 years of European dominance all over our globe.”

His paternal grandparents embodied the nation’s cultural split, Villasenor says. He sums them up: “My grandmother--a small, wise, beautiful Indian woman--coming from the heart-center of the Earth; and my grandfather--a tall, handsome European of Spanish royal blood--coming with all the arrogance of his world-conquering culture.”

They had 19 children, of whom Villasenor’s father, Juan Salvador, was the last. He was about 8 years old when the revolution broke out. The exploits of his father, Juan Jesus, his mother, Margarita, and his brother Jose, a legendary fighter against the troops of dictator Porfirio Diaz, are heightened by being seen through this young boy’s eyes.

And heightening, make no mistake, is Villasenor’s aim. “The Wild Steps of Heaven” is full of massacres and miracles; it’s earthy, mystical, bloody and unashamedly emotional.

“This is an era of hard-boiled-dom,” Saul Bellow wrote in “Dangling Man” in 1944, and it still is today. Understatement, a rejection of sentimentality at all costs, remains the dominant mode in American--at least Anglo--literature, though it has long since become as much a convention as Victorian melodrama was a century ago.

Reaction was bound to set in eventually. South American magical realism is one form this contrary impulse has taken. Villasenor’s approach--”con gusto y amor”--is another.

In fact, my first thought on reading “Wild Steps of Heaven” is to apologize to Montserrat Fontes, whose “Dreams of the Centaur” (W.W. Norton)--a novel based on her family history, set in roughly the same time period and region--I criticized in January for its operatic plot and characters. Compared to Villasenor, Fontes is a model of restraint.

What I didn’t realize is that this is a genre, or literary movement, that has its own rules.

Villasenor clearly enjoys breaking the old, hard-boiled strictures, which he seems to identify with the rational, manipulative, European side of his heritage. That is the side of his grandfather, Juan Jesus, who is dashing but headstrong and unable to express his love, and the villainous Col. Montemayor, who wages a personal war against the family.

The author’s sympathies lie, instead, with Jose, the dark, indio son whom Juan Jesus banishes from his home at age 12, and with Margarita, who preaches a religion of unconditional love--even for the colonel--and even-handed acceptance of the good and evil in life. She draws spiritual power not just from Christianity but from Native American roots, such as fire dancing.

Villasenor is no author for half measures. The hypnotic storytelling in “Wild Steps of Heaven,” the tear-jerking epiphanies and the philosophy he pounds into our heads, like a sledgehammer driving a railroad spike, can’t be separated. Love it or wince at it, we have to take it whole.

In the end, their village destroyed, the surviving members of the family reluctantly leave their native soil and dodge battling armies en route to the United States, where the third volume, no doubt, will resume the tale.