mexico – ode to shelf-care

Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor

31XkWuncUYL *Originally published in Latino Book Review at latinobookreview.com*

Fernanda Melchor’s debut English-translated novel is a haunting masterpiece reminding us that there are no winners when it comes to intolerance. In a rural Mexican village marked by misogyny, addiction, machismo, and homophobia, the Witch is a lifeline for the local women and the target of violence by men who are threatened by her audacity to live outside of their sphere of power. As the second-generation resident witch, she knows she is safest only on the fringes of society. When she is violently murdered and tossed in the irrigation canal, the twisted events leading up to her death and the ugly aftermath reveal how deeply her existence was intertwined in the dysfunctional community relationships.

Through the unfiltered, rambling consciousness of her troubled characters, Melchor reveals the depths of human greed and the desperate actions it drives us to commit. In this place dominated by poverty and violence, the only redemption is the persisting memory of the Witch of La Matosa, a tormented woman who recognized a shared pain among her comrades and had the inexplicable compassion to heal others despite her own suffering. The Witch is both everywhere and nowhere in our society. She is the queer outcast who never got to tell her own story. She is the living fantasy and greatest fear for those oppressed by the patriarchy. She is like so many victims of femicide in Mexico for whom there is no justice.

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July 5, 2020July 6, 2020 by Sam Olvera Categories: Fiction, UncategorizedTags: book review, books, femicide, fernanda melchor, Fiction, homophobia, hurricane season, latina authors, latinx literature, mexican authors, mexico, novels, veracruz, witches, WOC, WOC authors Leave a comment

Native Country of the Heart by Cherríe Moraga

**Originally published on Latino Book Review

9780374219666 From the beloved queer Chicana feminist writer Cherríe Moraga, Native Country of the Heart is a memoir told in parallel with the memoir of her Mexican mother, Elvira. Elvira is the foundational stone on which Moraga builds her own Chicana feminism and family, a woman whose beauty, rage, and fuerza incansable were unmatched in the eyes of Cherríe. Cherríe Moraga’s life story is one of reclamation and resistance: reclaiming her indigenous Californian and Mexican roots in a Gringo world, while resisting the shame and guilt forged by the patriarchy and religion of her family’s culture.

With Spanish words and phrases infusing her prose with a poetic precision that only the two languages combined can achieve, Moraga takes us from the 1930’s in Tijuana, Mexico to the 1960’s in San Gabriel, California, and beyond. Alzheimer’s disease eventually takes the wheel of Elvira’s life, both incapacitating her at a functional level while simultaneously revealing her most repressed desires and authentic self. Cherríe, becoming a mother to her deteriorating parents, grapples with the feat of relinquishing control and surrendering her mother through the haze of dementia to the spirits of her ancestors.

From her childhood experience of being isolated and fearful that her identity might be the thing that tears her family part, to her mixed-blood experience of feeling always on the edge of two cultures, to the prolonged, painful loss of the matriarchs of her family, Moraga’s storytelling embodies both an immense grief and a powerful life-force.

How to explain the complexity of this? What it means to be—not just me but us. To know yourself as a member of a pueblo on the edge of a kind of extinction, and at the same time a lesbian lover and mother, where you truly do live your life in constant navigation through whatever part of your identity is being snuffed out that morning—in the classroom, at the community meeting, the gasoline station, the take-out counter—Mexican, mixed-blood, queer, female, almost-Indian. And a poverty masked by circumstance. For all my feminism, this is why I left a white women’s movement in the late 1970’s. So I wouldn’t have to explain anymore, translate anymore.

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June 23, 2019June 25, 2019 by Sam Olvera Categories: BiographyTags: autobiography, book review, books, california, cherrie moraga, Chicana, feminist, history, indigenous, intersectional feminism, latina, latinx, literature, memoir, mexican, mexico, native country of the heart, nonfiction, this bridge called my back Leave a comment

Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions by Valeria Luiselli

Luiselli_TellMeHow_9781566894951_1024x1024 An essay in 40 questions, beginning with “Why did you come to the US? Where are your parents?”

In Tell Me How it Ends, Valeria Luiselli shares her experience as an interpreter for refugee children from Central America arriving in the United States. As she fills out the intake questionnaire with each child, she attempts the impossible task of reducing the traumas of their life into a few blank lines.

The maddeningly concise questions minimize the underlying tragedy—the fact that thousands of children with the right to political asylum, the right to a dignified life free of violence and persecution, are quickly filtered through the US legal system. Often, they are deported as “illegals” before receiving legal support or due process to obtain refugee status.

Luiselli’s work is a testament to her commitment to making these stories known and heard. Many of the questions she asks the children are unanswerable, beyond comprehension, or too sad to muster a coherent response, but the call to action for the rest of us is much clearer:

“And perhaps the only way to grant any justice—were that even possible—is by hearing and recording those stories over and over again so that they come back, always, to haunt and shame us. Because being aware of what is happening in our era and choosing to do nothing about it has become unacceptable. Because we cannot allow ourselves to go on normalizing horror and violence. Because we can all be held accountable if something happens under our noses and we don’t dare even look.”

This book gives readers the opportunity to bear witness to the suffering of others, understand why families and children will continue to flee oppressive conditions, and hopefully inspire readers to take action against dehumanizing policies.

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“And once you’re here, you’re ready to give everything, or almost everything, to stay and play a part in the greater theater of belonging.”

April 29, 2019May 13, 2019 by Sam Olvera Categories: Non-fiction, Non-fiction essaysTags: book, bookreview, centralamerica, children, diverseauthors, essay, femaleauthors, immigration, latinx, latinxauthors, literature, mexico, nonfiction, policy, politics, refugee, review, stories, storytelling, valerialuiselli 1 Comment

Eating NAFTA by Alyshia Gálvez

9780520291812 Originally published on Latinobookreview.com

As Mexican food is being globally ‘elevated’ and reinterpreted/appropriated by the foodie elite, Mexico has seen a simultaneous rise in obesity and diabetes as access to traditional food is drastically hindered as a result of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Eating NAFTA is an investigation of the rise of industrial food systems in Mexico and the ways that governments have decentered the state’s responsibility to protect public health, while deflecting the blame and responsibility for health problems onto individuals, especially women and marginalized populations.

Gálvez switches between personal interviews and macro-level policies as she discusses everything from migration, the role of nostalgia in food consumption patterns, the burden of labor for women, and why the public health crisis in Mexico is not just an unintended consequence of NAFTA.

Since NAFTA was signed in 1994, diabetes has become the leading cause of death in Mexico, with a prevalence of almost 16% of the population. 42% of its food is imported, and poverty (55.1%) and inequality have increased. Gálvez calls out diabetes and diet-related illness as an example of structural violence enabled by continued state-led manipulation.

“Colonialism’s extraction of raw materials and resources provided the fodder for the machines of industrialization. In the post- or neocolonial world, parasitic relationships between former colonial powers and territories continue to organize global trade and economic relationships. Only because of the relationship of economic and political dependence between center and periphery could the center become wealthy enough to dominate the global economy.”

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April 1, 2019May 13, 2019 by Sam Olvera Categories: Non-fictionTags: agriculture, book, bookreview, ethnography, food, foodsovereignty, foodsystems, latinx, mexico, NAFTA, nonfiction, structuralviolence Leave a comment

Among Strange Victims by Daniel Saldaña Paris

among strange victims

Rodrigo is a cynical, twenty-something writer contentedly shuffling through life when an unexpected development takes him from his commonplace job at a museum in Mexico City into a rural college town. Indifferent to things like emotional connections and career ambitions, Rodrigo finds meaning only in the most ordinary details of his everyday life, like the chicken in the vacant lot next to his apartment, which “begins to have pathological importance in relation to [his] daily routine.” As the title implies, this novel contains a strange cast of characters: Rodrigo, passive and hyper self-aware; the misogynist academics he finds in his company; and the various female characters who are unimpressive and defined only by what they provide to these self-important men. I don’t think any of the characters are meant to be admirable/likable. Amidst Paris’s rhetorical musings, time travel, and tequila-fueled antics, the story is an unflattering glance into the human ego.

“I don’t seek the permission of the Fates to find a soul mate with whom to deploy my melancholy; I can be alone, really alone, but I do ask the god of neural functions to let me retain this faint line of voice that crosses my cranium, allowing me to laugh at the world around me.”

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September 10, 2017March 18, 2019 by Sam Olvera Categories: FictionTags: books, chicken, latino, mexico, POC, tequila, timetravel Leave a comment

The Circuit by Francisco Jiménez

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One of my favorite reads of this year, The Circuit is a short novel that introduces readers to the life of a child migrant worker from Mexico. Jiménez writes from the perspective of his childhood self, free from judgment or analysis. The language is simple and clear. For Panchito, living in a tent with his family of five is just the norm, but losing his marble collection is the ultimate tragedy. It’s a beautifully written story of growing up in a transient world where family comes first and life fits into a cardboard box. I read this book in one sitting (because it’s both short and hard to put down). The original Spanish version is Cajas de Cartón.

September 10, 2017March 1, 2019 by Sam Olvera Categories: FictionTags: autobiographical, bookreview, books, immigrant, latino, mexico, POC Leave a comment