Synopsis
An evocative memoir of growing up in San Antonio, Texas, along the Mexican border interweaves family reminiscences with the history of Texas and Mexico to chronicle the story of one Mexican family and its rich blend of Mayan, Aztecan, Spanish, and American heritage. 20,000 first printing. Tour.
Reviews
"Mexico was always an empire of forgetting," writes Santos in his elegantly crafted chronicle of one of the thousands of Mexican families who fled to El Norte during the Mexican Revolution. An award-winning documentary television producer for CBS and the first Mexican-American Rhodes Scholar (1979), Santos struggles with the destiny of "every Mexican" to either embrace or lose entirely the "hidden light left behind in the past with los Abuelos" (one's grandparents). In a story told in part by ghosts, Santos takes the reader through the Inframundo, the timeless underworld of the ancient peoples of Mexico, to find out how he came to be the scion of a now-childless family. His tale is inhabited by eclectic charactersAa clairvoyant albino aunt; a great-grandfather stolen by the Kickapu Indians; an aunt who learned English from the young Lyndon Baines Johnson in exchange for cabbages and potatoes. Then there was Santos's grandfather, Juan Jos?, whose unresolved death by drowning in 1939 haunts the book. Combining traditional memoir, ancient Mexican history and beliefs, personal sacramental journeys and ghostly interviews, Santos gallops across the desert mountains of Coahuila through a flood of migrating Monarch butterflies, recalls long-ago predawn breakfast rituals in a Mexican village and flies with the Aztec "guardians of time"Athe Volador dancers at the 1968 HemisFair in San Antonio. His book is one of the most insightful investigations into Mexican-American border culture available. Agent, Janis Valelly, Flaming Star Literary Enterprises; 10-city author tour. (Sept.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
A moving, intellectually powerful memoir of Mexican-American life. Born in San Antonio in 1957, Santos, a journalist and television documentary producer, grew up in an extended family whose elder members remembered a Texas that had not yet become anglicized. Through their eyes, Santos revisits that time, looking deeply into the Mexican past as a way of informing the present. We may be latter-day Mexicanos, he writes, transplanted into another millennium in el Norte, but we are still connected to the old story, arent we? Answering his own question, he continues, that connection is rapidly dying with the loss of the old generation, and with what he considers to be a cultural habit of selective forgetting, for there is pain enough in the present to go around. Resisting that habit, Santos writes evocatively of his childhood in la Tierra de Viejitas, the land of the little old ladies in whose custody family memories resided. He reconstructs the old San Antonio of daylong movie matinees and weekend barbecues, of visits by relatives from both sides of the border, of the quotidian life of men and women who considered themselves exiles but who refused to feel oppressed or downtrodden; that San Antonio, he writes, is now gone, with places like the Hard Rock Cafe and Planet Hollywood having taken their place. Santos probes the silences of childhood, the things those viejitas left unspoken, the terrible (and sometimes humorous) family secrets. His quest for roots eventually takes him deep within Mexico, where he explores the Indian and Spanish roots that shape modern Mexican-American identity. Santoss fine memoir is sure to find a wide readership, especially in courses in ethnic and Mexican-American/Chicano studies. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
More meditation than chronological memoir, this lyrical account of a Mexican American writer's search for himself is rooted in his family's uprootedness, their move in this century from northern Mexico to southern Texas, then from the barrio to the suburbs, and then outward to New York City and across the world. Whether he is talking about the Alamo history he was taught in his San Antonio school (no lessons about the Indians, no mention of the Spanish and the Mexicans who had first built the city), or about his experience as a Rhodes scholar in Oxford, or about his search for the conqueror Cortes ("the grandfather no Mexican wants to admit to"), Santos is always circling back obsessively to his own extended family lore, "an unstoppable carousel of stories," those shared and remembered in garages, kitchens, and backyards, and also those secrets determinedly forgotten. Many Americans will find themselves in the narrative of upheaval and migration; they will recognize the difference between labored nostalgia and heartfelt loss. Hazel Rochman
As remembering is to Jews, forgetting is to Mexicans. In a remarkable, bittersweet, and often tragic memoir, Santos, a journalist, television writer and producer, and the first Mexican American Rhodes scholar, attempts to reverse this cultural generalization by reflecting on the early years he spent in San Antonio and Mexico, traveling the paths his family followed between two cultures. Always at the center of tales told by his aunts and uncles is the suicide of his paternal grandfather in 1939. In seeking to unravel the tragedy, Santos carries us through years of cultural mixing in the city that was "an umbilical tether to a past that otherwise seemed to be disintegrating, memory by memory." Much of his story is of poverty, yet rich portrayals of Mex-Tex life also provide a perspective too often forgotten by sociologists, historians, and writers who dwell on acculturation. This is an important book, both as memoir and because it helps us grasp the history of a people who are an integral part of the national identity. Highly recommended for academic and larger public libraries.
-ABoyd Childress, Auburn Univ. Lib., AL
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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