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 Entertainment | Books | April 2007 
'Antonio's Gun and Delfino's Dream'
 Dagoberto Gilb - SFGate.com
| Delfino Juárez, third from the left, as a construction worker with members of the younger Xocotla generation that followed him to Mexico City. (Sam Quinones)
Antonio's Gun and Delfino's Dream
True Tales of Mexican Migration
by Sam Quinones
University of New Mexico Press; 318 PAGES |
I am obsessed with the Conquest. I think of it as one of the thousand-year flood events that has shaped the Western world, the one right after the Christians moved out of Jerusalem and ascended to power throughout Europe. I say this certainly aware of many other huge moments in Western history - the Guttenberg Bible and the printing press, the Industrial Revolution, the current technological revolution. Only the coming of global warming can match the alterations in our social and cultural worlds that Christianity and the Conquest wrought. Like those of Christian scholars and zealots, my glasses color my vision, though instead of rose-colored, they're a mix of white, black and brown.
Most people in the United States view its history in binary black-and-white, the Civil War its emblematic marker of that. And so goes the politics here. But that is only because of they have limited education concerning the history of this continent and don't know the immigration pattern from which the country was made. I can't understand why it is so easily put aside: All of California and the Southwest, north up to Kansas and east to Georgia, and all below that, was mapped and claimed by Spaniards. This was done in less than 50 years after Columbus settled the island of Hispaniola, now Santo Domingo and Haiti. He declared the brown indigenous peoples there as under the rule of Spain (ultimately the island was peopled with slave workers, a commerce that in later years would expand to make New Orleans the wealthy entry port it became in the United States). After him came Pizarro to Peru and Cortés to Mexico. It was this immense human epic of the white European, the brown Indian and the black African slaves that set the stage for the American continental experience, both north and south.
Cortés came from a royalist, aggressive, militaristic culture to conquer a royalist, aggressive, militaristic Mexican nation. Before and after the Conquest, the ordinary people of Mexico had to live by governmental whim and the demands of dangerous rulers. And so they remained, uneducated, poor and raised to be patiently dependent. Even after its revolution, Mexico had changed only from a monarchy to a privileged political oligarchy known as the PRI, the Institutional Revolutionary Party. Every city, every pueblo, survived only through the munificence of its newest emperor in Mexico City.
Until those who live there take huge risks and leave. "Poor Mexico. So far from God, so close to the United States." Though not what President Porfirio Diaz meant when he spoke these words, this might be described as the energizing cry heard by so many immigrants who risk everything to go to the United States to find economic independence and freedom. It is where, many generations later, these defeated descendants of the Conquest have come to partake of what many to the north of them take for granted - a chance for themselves and their families.
"Antonio's Gun and Delfino's Dreams" gives us stories of the exodus of poor Mexican people from the 1990s to the present. If Sam Quinones' first book, "True Tales From Another Mexico," was a marvel of unique journalism, his new book's material - witnessing history and cultural transformation - singles him out as the most original American writer on the border and Mexico out there.
What we read about is the small, extraordinary lives of people who are usually invisible in the United States. Delfino Juárez, for example, is from a mountain village of Xocotla, north of Veracruz, where the villagers took one day a week to cut and shovel a road down the mountain until - 31 years later - it was done. Delfino's father had become a full-time drunk by the time Delfino was 8, and Delfino begins hauling flour and picking corn to help his mother with money. At 12, he tells her he can't live there anymore. He takes the road down to Mexico City.
He becomes an underage, underpaid construction worker who sends money home but who, on his Sundays off, learns to break-dance in Alameda Park. He shaves his hair into an Americanized Mohawk, shocking the elders of Xocotla whenever he comes back, thrilling those younger than him about the world below, driving them onward. At 22, married, he's had enough of Mexico City. With a group, he crosses the Sonora Desert into the United States, only a few hours stronger than the slow-moving "señora" with them, who collapses and dies of thirst. He ends up living in Huntington Park and working throughout Southern California as a tile setter until he cuts his hand at a job in Oxnard and can't work. With substantial savings, he travels back, through Mexico City, to Xocotla.
Quinones' stories are of immigrants whose bodies are small businesses in a constant battle of expenses and earnings, who are trying to expand opportunities for family and neighbors back home, learning on the job, who are sending American dollars back to communities that depend on them - and no longer the government - while building dream homes they end up not wanting to live in. They are newly liberated bodies whose small businesses grow like that of Andres Bermúdez, who'd worked the fields near Sacramento for so long, his success as the Tomato King in the States sent him back to his hometown in Zacatecas to run for mayor, even though he didn't and wouldn't live there anymore - exactly why the people voted him in.
They are hardworking immigrants in South Gate (Los Angeles County), being played by the cucuy, the boogeyman a greedy, corrupt Mexico City-like politician, who rebound, learning grassroots American-style local politics and booting the man out.
We learn about the rise and fall of the velvet-painting industry in El Paso and Juárez, and in Chicago and its suburbs, we see the boom in burrito stands and taquerias by residents of Atolinga, Zacatecas. We follow the bittersweet story of Mercedes Quiñónez, the leading soprano of L'Opera de Tijuana.
"Antonio's Gun and Delfino's Dream" is journalism that doesn't replay or expand on the cliched or stereotyped stories of the exotic border, of mystical or threatening mejicanos.
Genuinely original work, what great fiction and nonfiction aspire to be, these are stories that stop time and remind us how great reading is.
Dagoberto Gilb lives in Austin, Texas, and is the author of four books, including "Hecho en Tejas: An Anthology of Texas Mexican Literature." His novel, "The Flowers," will be published by Grove Press. |
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