Last Night In Brooklyn by Xochitl Gonzalez

I read a review that this is a modern telling of The Great Gatsby story, moved from Long Island to Brooklyn, the place in New York to be now. I myself didn't catch that, and while it definitely holds water, that was not my take away from it. That says more about me than it does Gonzalez, because I didn't love Gatsby and I didn't love this either. Here goes. Brooklyn, 2007. Alicia (the new Nick) is 26 years old and feels like she’s stuck. She’s doing what is expected of her rather than what she wants to do. She’s saving for a wedding she’s not sure if she wants. But one night she attends a party in the Fort Greene neighborhood, and her life changes dramatically. She finds herself in the orbit of her magnetic neighbor, an up and coming designer who calls herself La Garza (the Great Jay Gasby). Alicia watches her neighbor from across the street, marveling at the epic parties she throws. When Alicia is invited into La Garza’s world, she finally realizes what she wants and what she’s been missing. La Garza has almost mythical reverence surrounding her. Alicia finds herself torn in many directions as the whole spun out of gold fairy tales cames spinning down. The setting of the book is as much a part as a character. Brooklyn in 2007 is on the verge of gentrification. The Barclays Center is about to be built, pushing out some of the neighborhood’s oldest residents. The country is already feeling the effects of a possible recession, even as the optimism of the Obama campaign is rising, especially for black and brown people. The big difference for the reader is that while The Great Gatsby was published in 1925, at the peak of the high times and long before the Crash of '29, this version comes to us almost 20 years after the events depicted, we know where that ends.

When I Sing, Mountains Dance by Irene Solà

This is an award winning Catalan author and an award winning book, which is a series of short, sometimes very short, interlinked storied with one family at the center of them, but also including the perspective of nature and things within nature as characters of sorts in the book. In saying this, I am struck that there may be a lot about the author's meaning and message that did not come through to me. The underlying or unifying theme is grief, and that does come through clearly. The book is set among the villages, forests and rivers of the Pyrenees, the book builds a layered history of the area while focusing primarily on one family. Domènec leaves his wife, Sió, and two children, Mia and Hilari. The Spanish Civil War is a part of the destruction in the novel as well, but it does not seem to be central. The stories depict the natural world as a complex system of relationships that shapes human lives. Within that system, everything is important, the mushroom as much as the man. When we step back and allow the bigger picture to take shape, we adopt a more expansive view. At least I think that is the advise.

Elena Knows by Claudia Piñeiro

This is a short, poweful, and compelling novel that chronicles several hours in the life of Elena, a frail old lady, on a quest through Buenos Aires. We meet her at home at the start of her day as she composes herself in readiness for a trip she’s planning to make. It merely involves a short walk, a train ride and a taxi trip, but as we’re to learn, Elena has a condition, severe Parkinson's disease, which makes even the simplest of actions a major endeavour. She is searching for the reason that her daughter, Rita, is dead. She was found hanging in a bell tower in a church, but Elena is sure that she did not do this to herself, and not in this place, so she is in search of answers. Elena knows that she hasn’t been told the whole truth, and her journey has as its goal a visit to someone she believes can help her reveal what really happened. The whole day builds towards this encounter, and we get ever closer to the moment when Elena will have her world turned upside down. The novella has many thoughts and questions about women's role in society, in the church, about autonomy and independence, and on family relations, illness, and death. It packs quite a punch into it's pages.

I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter by Erika Sanchez

This is a Young Adult book that is recommended as a way to better understand the immigrant experience.  I think that Black Lives Matter, and it is the moment to focus on racial injustice in this country, to dismantle the structural racism and to move forward with defunding the police and addressing these profound wrongs.
I do not want to forget about the immigrants, who just this week ICE made a statement that they are in no way responsible for the sexual abuse of children they have in detention.  The situation is inhumane, unacceptable, and morally wrong.  So I do not want ot completely interupt my education in this area.
Julia is a teenager in a traditional Mexican immigrant family.  Her parents came via coyote over the border, and now live in Chicago.  She lives in an a Central American ethnic neighborhood, but unlike her older sister Olga, who elected to skip college and go to work, Julia wants to go to college and to be a writer.  Her parents do not get her at all, and Olga is killed in a pedestrian accident that leaves Julia adrift and at odds with her family.  The story is a coming of age one that we can all relate to, and well worth reading.

Between Going and Coming by Octavio Paz

Cinco de Mayo is not a real holiday, but that should not stop us from remembering great Mexican poets.

Between Going and Coming

Between going and staying
the day wavers,
in love with its own transparency.
The circular afternoon is now a bay
where the world in stillness rocks.

All is visible and all elusive,
all is near and can’t be touched.

Paper, book, pencil, glass,
rest in the shade of their names.

Time throbbing in my temples repeats
the same unchanging syllable of blood.

The light turns the indifferent wall
into a ghostly theater of reflections.

I find myself in the middle of an eye,
watching myself in its blank stare.

The moment scatters. Motionless,
I stay and go: I am a pause.

The Boy Kings of Texas by Domingo Martinez

I read this memoir because it was on a list of books that one should consider reading if you wanted to know more about Mexican-American immigration and the border experience instead of American Dirt.
This memoir has been described as gritty and that makes it sound cleaner than it ended up reading to me.  It chronicles the struggles of a Latino boy who is inexplicably tied to the rough border town of Brownsville of his birth.  It is a scary, poor place where fathers and sons team up to smuggle pot into the United States, curanderas are consulted about border crossings, and a kid who  dared to go out with some drug thug's girl invariably ends up dead.  He captures what it is about leaving your family behind, how hard that is to accomplish, no matter how toxic they are for you.  It is a rough read.  The information divulged — about extreme poverty and misplaced machismo in a land where higher education is actually discouraged — can be as unbelievable as it feels unbearable.

Leaving Tabasco by Carmen Boullosa

My spouse is a man who has a great deal of difficulty leaving a free book behind.  He has read countless books that he would have returned to the library had we taken them out but that he cannot leave in the seat pocket on a plane.  As addictions go, it is a benign one but that is how this book came into our lives.  We were staying at a hotel in the very center of the tourist section of Oaxaca, where the staff spoke remarkably little English, but which had a little impromptu book exchange shelf right outside our gorgeous room.  He left something there that my mother had given him and he picked this book up.

The heroine of the story is Delmira.  She is raised in an unapologetically emotionally austere home in Tabasco.  Her mother and her grandmother are singularly unappealing and unfeeling women, and in the case of the grandmother, she has the magical realism of a Gabriel Garcia Marquez character.  Delmira sees her grandmother float above the bed when she sleeps.  But that is not all--stones turn to water and there are other strange goings on.  There is a backdrop of the political changes that were going on in Mexico in that later part of the 20th century, and all in all it is a good book to read when you are enjoying some Mexican sun in the dead of winter.

Almost Never by Daniel Sada

Daniel Sada is a giant amongst Mexican authors.  He is a writer's writer, and those of us who read him in English are apparently missing his best qualities (which I suspect would be true about reading David Foster Wallace in translation--the brilliance in his use of words and the melodies that he creates would be a real challenge for a translator to manage, and those are the sorts of things that Sada is known for).  He died before this was published, and I think it is a pleasant afternoon read that is well worth picking up.

This is a salacious, almost tongue-in-cheek, story about sexual obsession that well might appeal to any sentient human being with a few nerve ends and a beating heart. Demetrio, a young agronomist in Oaxaca — it is 1945, in a vibrant metropolis of Mexico — falls in love with a beautiful and inexhaustibly athletic prostitute by the name of Mireya. He is gleefully enjoying her countless charms, visiting her so often that she has no time for other customers, when his mother writes and insists that Demetrio accompany her to a wedding in the desert town of Coahuila. At the wedding, he meets the virginal Renata, whose beauty is so arresting that he cannot help but propose marriage. Although Renata accepts, she is not so easily won. There is to be no touching, she tells him, and certainly no conjugating. Not even a whisper of love, for at least a year. But Demetrio is full of vim and vigor — this is post-World War Mexico, after all, and the country is bursting with possibility. So it’s back to Mireya. And then forth to Renata. And then back, forth, back. You get the picture. It is a quick read that gives many cultural insights alongside the eternal struggles between men and women.

The Island Beneath the Sea by Isabel Allende

The New York Times review of this book describes Isabel Allende as a lone female amongst authors of the 'Magical Realism' school of writing, and that is a wonderfully descriptive title for her. Starting with 'The House of the Spirits' she has walke din the footsteps of the great South American authors that came before her. This book is less in that vein, but no less of a compelling story for all of that.
The story is told from a female perspective, which is a hallmark of Allende's work. Her women are not lucky, nor do they always fare particularly well, but they are strong, they are resilient, they are flexible, and they survive. The story takes place in the late 18th century--beginning in Haiti. Zarité is a slave who we follow from young girlhood into her life as a grandmother--which doesn't take as long as you might think. Pretty girls who are enslaved become 'concubines' early, as young as 12 or 13 years old, and so have children early as well. As do their children, being born into life as a slave as well. The book moves to New Orleans at the beginning of the 19th century, as Napoleon's empire is starting to show a crack or two and France looks vulnerable, beatable even. As that happens, Haitian slaves begin to rise up against their viscious, hard-hearted masters, and Haiti moves from an island of brutal slavery to one of brutal independence with a vestige of slavery thrown into the mix of misery. The extended family moves to New Orleans for a variety of reasons, and are there at an uncertain time--when Napolean sells the Louisianna purchase to Jefferson, and the Spanish and the French in the city are uncertain what the change of nationality means for them.
Napoleon Bonaparte, upon completion of the agreement to sell France's holdings in the U.S., a piece that is equal in size to what the young nation already has, stated, "This accession of territory affirms forever the power of the United States, and I have given England a maritime rival who sooner or later will humble her pride." A fine example of why cutting off your nose to spite your face is never a particularly bright plan. But their loss was the United States and Jefferson's gain, and the story that Allende weaves includes all the historical truths of the time, but it is told in a wonderful and accessible way. This might be my favorite story of hers to date.