Somehow I missed this when it was first published.... Not quite exactly Mexican literature but this seems like a reasonable place to post this (even if Urrea now lives where I do--in Chicago!)
Read Your Way Through the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands
By Luis Alberto Urrea
June 14, 2023
I was born in Tijuana and spent much of my boyhood in a neighborhood — “colonia,” in TJ-speak — called Independencia. There was an ersatz European-style castle at one end of our street, a tamed bear living at the bottom of the hill, a madman next door who regularly got drunk and shot his pistola at the moon, and a yard with bananas and a tall old pomegranate tree. Sounds tropical. Sounds like Gabriel García Márquez. Doesn’t sound on the surface like the deadly desert, like the frightening shadow land of crooked policías and narco hit men.
The borderlands are the most interesting book in the world, being rewritten every day. Currently, I can attest that much of that contested region, from coast to coast, is alive with tourists seeking good food and cheap medical care, a developing street scene of boutiques and gourmet eateries, baristas and art galleries, vivid music and literary movements, ballet companies and symphonic concerts and, in my hometown, the best street tacos on earth.
The Mexican cultural journalist Jaime Cháidez Bonilla recently wrote this on Twitter (I’ve translated from his Spanish): “I like it when evening falls over Tijuana, a poetic act. A city so defamed, a city so generous.” I dare say most people don’t think of any border city, on either side of the wall, as generous. I have been fortunate enough to write about Tijuana and the border for many years, and of course I have read a library’s worth of other authors wrestling with the region. My favorite border pop song is by Nortec Collective (more on them below), and it’s called “Tijuana Makes Me Happy.” Yeah — the border makes me happy. A tip: Expect the unexpected.
I need to pause here in recognition that immigration is the relentless theme of this area and this era. But I do not believe that immigration stories are a subset of the literature of the borderlands: Though there is some cross-pollination, I believe immigration literature is a genre of its own, deserving of its own spotlight. I do not include it here.
What books and authors should I take with me?
One grand feature of border culture is the lure of a bargain. For decades, the clarion call of cheap muffler (“mofle”) shops drew tourists south; now, it’s cheap dentures and Viagra. So let us offer a one-stop classic, the anthology “Puro Border: Dispatches, Snapshots and Graffiti From La Frontera.” Edited by Tijuana’s greatest literary son, Luis Humberto Crosthwaite, along with El Paso’s late, great Bobby Byrd and his son John William Byrd, this wild anthology covers the good, the bad and the ugly. Many of the greatest border thinkers and writers are contained within its covers: Charles Bowden, Leslie Marmon Silko, Sam Quinones, Juan Villoro and Doug Peacock (model for the infamous hero of Edward Abbey’s novel “The Monkey Wrench Gang”), among others. Funky, funny, literary, angry — it will show you things you may have wondered about and things you might not have imagined.
What writers or books will help me feel the spirit of this place?
Even if you do not read poetry, the borderlands require it. In a place both lush and austere, alien and homey, full of symphonies of languages and accents, smells and sounds, silence and raucous music, nothing can touch the experience of being there like poetry. It is not a coincidence that most of the writers on my list are also poets. They will transport you.
Ofelia Zepeda, a 1999 MacArthur fellow, is a Tohono O’odham poet of such elegant and exact rhetoric, such integrity of culture and vision, that you miss her quiet genius at your own risk. She gave the songs of the Tohono O’odham back to the land. Come to the chapels of her books “Ocean Power: Poems From the Desert” and “Where Clouds Are Formed.”
I highly recommend a book that gives me endless delight as a reader and endless inspiration as a writer: Harry Polkinhorn and Mark Weiss’s seminal anthology “Across the Line/Al Otro Lado.” It covers the broad and surprising corpus of Baja California’s poetry, from Indigenous chants to postmodern epics, and it includes works that reflect the flavored cross-genre/cross-cultural/cross-border adventures the writers foresee in the distance of this decade.
Arizona’s first poet laureate, Alberto Ríos, born in Nogales, Ariz., is a true writer of the borderlands. Though all of his poetry books are excellent, “A Small Story About the Sky” remains my favorite. However, of particular interest for this list is “Capirotada: A Nogales Memoir.”
No one is better positioned to affect this literature than Natalie Diaz, the director of the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands at Arizona State University. A winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry and a self-described “language activist,” Diaz is brilliant and powerful, and you need to read both “When My Brother Was an Aztec” and “Postcolonial Love Poem.”
Finally, the wizard, the curandero, the presidente: Juan Felipe Herrera. A former U.S. poet laureate and son of migrant farmworkers. My homeboy from Barrio Logan in San Diego. His selected poems in “Half of the World in Light” are a magical mystery tour, not only along the border but through the universe. Herrera is a kind of psychedelic drug and he will make you see visions. His voice is the distillation of all of our journeys.
What novels will transport me?
Borderlands authors are many. One of the best and most authentic is Denise Chávez. Her milieu is the often overlooked southern New Mexico and West Texas world of frontera families, and the tall tales that flourish there. She is the queen of the generation that surged in the 1980s and beyond — a strong feminist voice free of cant and bursting with delight. Her novel “Loving Pedro Infante” will begin your Chávez collection, and you won’t want to stop. Another groundbreaker is the poet and novelist Ana Castillo and her border classic “So Far From God.” Both of these writers tell the stories of women on the American side of the line in vivid color, in many tones and in both languages.
I also highly recommend anything by Benjamin Alire Sáenz. His “Aristotle and Dante” young adult novels are immensely popular, but I regard his poetry with helpless envy. Start with his story collection “Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club,” which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and his poetry collection “Elegies in Blue.”
What audiobook would make for good company while I walk around?
The oldest, most venerable literary tradition along the borderline is oral. I didn’t start out reading books: I sat at the feet of old women telling ghost stories and fanciful family histories (and recounting dyspeptic gossip about other relatives). They were my first lit professors.
In my opinion, rather than audiobooks, you should listen to the music of the border, because it will be easier to absorb and you can dance to it. Every song is a novel or a book of poems, because the borderlands don’t talk: They sing. Music transcends and leaps over border walls like wild doves. Two of the best musical portraitists of this world are Lila Downs and Nortec Collective. Downs’s “The Border” is an elegant and lively album that paints indelible portraits with depth and wit. And her album “Shake Away” is a wild ride through the sounds and tales that we will never see on a tour bus or a beach holiday. (Suggested track: “Minimum Wage.”) For dance lovers and electronica fans, the Nortec Collective duo has created a hybrid of techno music that absorbs and transforms traditional instrumentation and themes into a rollicking dance music of joy and, yes, generosity. There are few bands that spawn a huge cultural and literary movement, but Nortec has opened gates for creativity in literature, theater, dance and visual art throughout the region and across the world that are constantly bearing fruit.
I must also recommend Los Lobos from Los Angeles, Calexico from Tucson, Ariz., and two wildly rollicking bands from Monterrey, Mexico: El Gran Silencio and Jumbo.
Anything I should add to my bookshelf?
For literate thrills and occasional chills, turn to Rubén Degollado (“The Family Izquierdo” and “Throw”). A splendid collection by Oscar Cásares, “Brownsville,” gives the inside scoop on a place in Texas that you may not think of without an author’s guidance. And Sergio Troncoso is such a beloved writer of the borderlands, there is a public library branch named for him in El Paso. His “A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant’s Son” is simply brilliant.
Luis Alberto Urrea is a member of the Latino Literature Hall of Fame and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 2005 for “The Devil’s Highway.” His newest book, “Good Night, Irene,” was inspired by his mother’s Red Cross service.
