Intoxicated by Light (A review of "Peeping Tom Tom Girl")

                                                           
What is the measure of desire, of what stuff are hopes and dreams and appetites made that so torment and infuriate but also console and seduce us as we weave through time? If our appetites define us, can it ever truly be said that our identity is fixed, or does it fluctuate, coalesce and dissipate, like the haze that permeates an urban metropolis like Los Angeles, or the exhaust trailing a lonely MTA bus on a last pass through the city? There is a wonderful line that is paraphrased by the poet Marisela Norte in her last meditation that appears in Peeping Tom Tom Girl., one entitled “East L.A. Days/Fellini Nights”. This  is a deeply meditative piece that crosses boundaries, merging autobiography with lines from famous movies, prose reflections with poetry and the languid rhythms of an experience that depicts not only a sense of place and time (beaches in Mexico, the barrio in East LA, film noir sets and the cosmopolitan reflections of a life steeped in cinema with reflections on family intimacy), and it portrays what at first seems a dichotomy, but one that is ultimately resolved into a merger that attests to the formative role of desire. It is the line which states, in one beautiful stanza, that evokes another literary example of haunting, the opening line in Daphne du Maurier’s novel “Rebecca” (“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again”), but that could well be renamed “Marisela”:

As  I read this, I was left to savor other famous literary example of hauntings, and of how, perhaps, our most compelling ghosts are provided by those we seed in the past, our prior selves, who accompany us always, who seem so piercingly familiar and yet faint, glowing with a slowly dissipating light. We weave together these ghost to combine the many strands of our experience, and this act of weaving is, fundamentally, an act of creation, the source of our own rhythm, the merging with the world.

Marisela Norte is a poet from East L.A., one who makes love to her past and who weaves together her personal history of longing and dreams of escape with that of the community in which she was raised. She recreates and binds together her experiences utilizing the trope of the trip, the journey that is undertaking together, the bus trips to the downtown Los Angeles where so many stories of suffering and hope and desire mingle in a way that is anonymous but, nonetheless, compelling to the sensibility of an artist. These hidden stories (more ghosts waiting to take visible form) loom large in our imagination, for they are illustrative of the drama of human life, of mundane existences that are rendered beauty by the breadth of desire. They appeal as well to our notion of how communities are formed, and in particular, our ideas of a specific community, that of East L.A.

If Los Angeles is a pastiche of cultures melded together in a dreamscape of the future, a place that evokes not only a futuristic vision (like that of the slightly dated LAX terminal that greets visitors who arrive at the airport), it is also a place with histories that are like compressed epics of arrival and departure, an ideological terminus that is at once transient (everyone comes from somewhere else in Los Angeles) but at the same time settled into a hierarchy of adjacent yet separate neighborhoods. To speak of Los Angeles is to speak not of one neighborhood but of many, to speak of communities that arrived in tatters and formed communities only to later disperse or be displaced, like the Jewish community in East L.A. and the renaming of what was once Brooklyn Avenue to César Chávez St. It is to speak of repressed energy and rage that erupts periodically in episodes of violence, episode such as the Watts riots of 1963 but reprised almost thirty years later in the Rodney King riots that signaled the deep fissures in this city. But it is also a shared community, one drawn to the craft of fiction (aren’t all immigrants writers of their own fiction, that of the self that will be reborn?), to the aura of the familiar (the dry mountains that remind Iranians so much of their homeland), to the ghosts of past traumas that will somehow be exorcised in the land of eternal sunshine. But there is also a seedy side to this spectacle of dreamlike Mediterranean light, captured in the work of poets such as Charles Bukowski, with his evocation of the down-and-out non-conformists, the alcoholics and drug addicts and perpetually unemployed artists, the exhausted and aging vixens, or the world-weary detective fiction of a Raymond Chandler, a cynicism that is nonetheless quite earnest and innocent, in the deeply appealing figure of such detective as Phillip Marlowe.

To come from a community such as East L.A. is to be a perpetual dreamer. It is a gritty place, densely packed with what seems to be a constant arrival of newcomers, a world where omnipresent murals, rendered all the more poignant for being continually tagged, a yin and yang of defiance and celebration, where street vendors on almost every street corner, brown-skinned men and women selling tamales and paletas and elotes (corn) out of buckets and coolers, where the color palette is much brighter, as if to repudiate the shadows.  The streets are packed with old cars and the old houses packed with the young, and in these intensely territorial neighborhoods perpetual vendettas are constantly reaffirmed with deadly result, in the battles of ignorant armies clashing in the night (to quote Dover Beach, or should it be, Venice and Santa Monica and Redondo beaches?). It is a place that is vibrant and beautiful despite the challenges faced, squat houses located on undulating hills, with one eye hungrily turned towards the glittering skyscrapers of vertical L.A. that loom so tantalizingly close. It is a community where the other eye is turned to the past, to histories of departure and communities left behind, to the history and fellowship forged in close-knit neighborhood and housing projects, in the grinding poverty that was never really left behind in that rural past in Latin America, in the ranchitos of Mexico. East L.A. is like the vision of this a separate epoch, one that is invested in emotional drama, that of loss as a rite of passing, the right to pass through the ugly wall that separates two civilizations, two modes of being, one grounded in the stability of a collective ethos, the other grounded in individualism and the constant search for something new. East L.A. is the prototypical Mexican barrio that is found everywhere throughout the United States, but also, in a more general sense, the prototype of any and every immigrant ghetto.

The poems and prose pieces in Marisela Norte’s collection reflect this community through the prism of a female perspective. The writer is furthermore an artist who chooses to write about the common people she grew up with, family members, mothers and children, workers, people such as those that ride on the bus as they go to and from work and school. This is, indeed, the framework that is established in this collection, that of a journey by an artist who seeks to capture as many of the common stories of the common people as she can, as envisioned via the medium of the bus ride on public transport, a panorama of a living community, a mural filled with living, breathing people, travelling along at thirty miles an hour on city streets. “She rides those buses I do / Balancing boxes of Pampers marked half price / And pulling two kids “ (p. 22). She becomes them, becomes the community, internalizes all these stories and weaves them with her own.

The poet reflects as well on painful episodes in what one would imagine are autobiographical reflection, in poems such as “The Daily Grind”, a poem that would seem to demystify sexuality by pointing out the contradictions involved in an idealized notion of feminine sexuality that is marketed ubiquitously, and the female perspective, one that encompasses the possibility of unwanted pregnancies. Out of these experiences come a startling new comparison, in which the scalpel of the abortion doctor is met by the creative impulse of the artist. “This pen is dipped deep in between / The legs of the writer / The daily grind of urban clit lit” (p. 39). There is as much affirmation as accusation in this comparison, involving as it does an attempt to resolve personal conflicts that are apprehended as if through a haze of passing years, in memories as well of fellowship, of friends lost to illness, of the Wolf Pack in San Diego (in the term used to refer to a group of friends during the 80s, several of whom succumbed to AIDS),  or the images of female empowerment from an earlier age, the story of Big Red, the older woman who dresses as if she were still a diva from the 70s Disco age, “I only wish I were brave enough / To follow her on to the dance floor / For the triumphant return of Cold Duck” (p. 73). The poet captures these characters and makes them singular, reproducing the mix of English and Spanish, the vibrant informal expressions used by working class Chicanos, describing the wardrobe and mannerisms and expressions of people who are rendered in a timeless fashion, because the stories are themselves timeless, reflecting desire as it percolates through the everyday rituals of life.

These passengers remind the poet of herself, for these people are also on a journey, and there is a fellowship involved, albeit one that reflects most intensively on her own journey as an artist. Of course the stories are also multi-faceted, but they weave together, a Chicano analogue to the Boccaccio’s Decameron or to Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, collections told by other voyagers. It is the projection one individual’s sensibility on the world and a community, encompassing as it does not only historical time (the war in Vietnam, the Disco Era, AIDs in the 80s, etc.) but also a dreamlike vision of her own encounters, of the many figures who seem to haunt her as well. There is a certain wish-fulfillment involved in the way that she captures these figures.

One such figure would seem to reside in the description of an unlikely Lothario, embodied by a Greek fry cook at a hamburger joint, a cook who is middle-aged and is oblivious to the way in which he, also, can be transmuted into a figure of desire.  In the prose poem “Dolores Fuertes”, this cook is described in a certain flirtatious way by the poetic persona as one who has “thick lashes”, ones that “lower themselves deep into that space between her breasts where Jesus hangs from a thin chain” (Dolores Fuertes, p. 32). “The uniform, it fits these days like a Latex glove, ever since she discovered the Golden Greek at the Ox Burger. And all day she will fight to ignore the rustle of her fleshy thighs rubbing together, trying to start a fire only to be trapped inside AMPLE white panty hose.” (ibid) She is playing, or course, with the idea of the Greek hero, but the poet also humorously reflects on the symbol of the Ox, an animal of sacrifice according to ancient lore, an offering to be burnt in a bonfire, and in which it is she herself who assumes the contours of such a sacrifice, consumed as she is not only by lust but also by the idea of confinement when, ironically enough, it is the cook who labors behind a screen during his job shift. (A comical but also touching inversion.)

There is also reverie around the figure of someone who is in a sense a prototype, the masculine figure who is not endlessly out for sexual conquests, but who represents instead an ideal of domesticity. Are we not dispelling the myth of the Lotharios, the Don Juans, and is the poetic persona of these two poems not revealing a preference for the everyman who is the father and spouse and paragon of devotion, a “Manny” such as can be found at a karaoke bar, “, the kind of Manny who’d have enough sense to fetch you another Corona because he’s been watching your heels sinking into the still damp grass every time you walked across the lawn because he was the only one who noticed you’ve been sitting there not sure what to do with the empty bottle in your hand” (The Secrets of Chinese Restaurants, p. 65). Aren’t these fantasies of men who are not so self-involved that they can actually be in tune with what their partners might desire? Is there not a hidden accusation here?

There are similar evocations of other men, of uncles who seemed impossibly glamorous like the idols of a the movie screen,

 

                                  

like that of the father for whom another kind of love was projected, a need for intimacy, for shared stories such as those that involved his earlier days as a movie projectionist in Mexico, bringing the classics of a golden age of Mexican cinema to the people, but also, assuming the contours of a wizard, one who projects the dreams of the people, evoked in the poem “Dance in the Shadows of What Never Was (and Drink to These Lives Without Meaning)”:

 

There is still the search for a type of intimacy that is painful to evoke, and that impels the journey that is undertaken by the poet, whose intimacy at times seems lonely despite the company of so many strangers with so many stories.

These poems and poetic prose pieces delve into the anxieties and frustrations of an artist who is entranced by the stories she creates, who drinks these fictions like a fine wine and who narrates her own journey of desire as she discovers the markers of her own personal story. Is there any such thing as a “mundane” reality? The possibilities afforded to the artist seem infinitely more seductive, ultimately more fulfilling, more honest, truer to her sense of the world and how she envisions the many imagined communities she evokes (East L.A., female artists, Chicanos and Chicanas, Cosmopolitan wanderers, etc.). What is evident, however, in this collection, is that we have the recurring juxtaposition of two opposites, evident in the contrast between East L.A. and downtown, between the grit and exhaustion of everyday working-class life and the shimmering ideals of luxury and grace (even if in the form of aging figures such as Big Red), and the contrast between loneliness and the desire for community, for love, for domesticity, for the simple intimacy of an affectionate word, “mija”, for example.

There is also a contrast between murky lights and shadows and the bright, searing light of midday, and perhaps it is the shadows that proves more comforting. For the artist, writing is also a way of drinking this light, the light of frustrated relationships that seemed so promising in the beginning but withered in the end or was tragically cut short (as it was for her loved members of the “Wolf Pack”), the light of the past and those first impressions when young, lying on a beach in Cancun, the light gleaming on the water in the Honeymoon Suite of that hotel on the top floor, she who is able to still see the ghosts that haunt these memories that others have lost, “Only I can’t hear him anymore / Only his lips are moving” (Act of the Faithless, p. 95).

Light symbolizes desire, and it is found everywhere in these poems and prose pieces. It is outlined all the more effectively by the shadows and those grey spaces, the memories of Friday nights, of murky bars, of karaoke rooms, and of enclosed spaces like that of the bus that makes its daily rounds. It weaves and dissipates like a hazy smoke, a fog of memory, the fire of a veil brought too close to a candle during what must have been a religious ceremony, an incense that is meditative, akin to a religious experience. These trips are fueled by desire and by memories on a trip that chronicles the formative experiences of an artist and what it entails to weave her own spells.

OGRomero © 2013
(Copyrighted by OGRomero, 2013)

The Return of the Lobo

Don Malvino is a curious old man. He lives by himself, not anywhere near the town but in an old house that seems to be darker than he is, way out on a hill that looks down on the road. Why he should live on the hill, by himself, no one knows. You can see him most of the time sitting under a tree, looking down as people walk or ride by, just sitting in an old chair.

It is usually considered a good thing to have friends, but don Malvino is curiously solitary. He is known to be very resourceful, and has a way of getting what he wants. He is a tall and thin old man with what look to be scars on his cheeks, and he hasn’t ever worked as far as anyone can tell. It is said that he has a deal with old spirits who protect and warn him, and while he isn’t a frequent church-goer, he does make it a point of going one or two times a year. For some reason he always makes it to Ash Wednesday. He has never been see on Christmas or Easter, although he does make it to the Feast Day of San Gorgonio. It seems he has an affinity for spirits, but everyone respects his privacy.  He does have crosses around his hut, after all, so he is considered a spiritual man, although he seems to prefer what the spirits tell him, and not what Father Sánchez does in mass.

It is curious, but there is no one better for forecasting he weather.  He can usually tell if a storm is approaching, sometimes a week in advance, and he has been known to warn people that hail might accompany the downpour. He is also very good with diagnosing the ailments of animals. In a small pueblito such as this one everyone has animals, whether they be chickens or marranitos or codornices, cows and goats and even a turtle or two. It is said that doña Jimena even raises snakes, because of the snakeskin boots and belts and little decorations she sells from time to time, but no one has ever bothered to go to her house to see if she does indeed raise them. Curiously, the dogs for some reason prefer to keep their distance when he is in town.

For a small town in which there is no television or radio and in which people live by simple rituals, minor events can assume big proportions. For example, from time to time animals have a way of disappearing. It doesn’t help that the pueblo of Noguerra is out in the middle of nowhere, in a hilly area of northwest New Mexico, far from the big cities. The pueblito has maybe 15 families in all, and a few old Indians or Mexican farmhands who come in from time to time to spend to help with the harvest and who collect their pay in a few meager sacks of corn or beans before they move on. There are transients who pass through, both the well-dressed kind as well as the poor one. The latter are usually poor mexicanos, finding itinerant trails and looking for seasonal crop work, and the latter are, at times, ranchers looking for investment opportunities, or drill operators who have heard that there might be oil or minerals waiting to be exploited, or once in a blue moon, one or two artists who have heard about the serene beauty of this part of the state and wish to find inspiration where it is lacking in the big cities. The townspeople are very hospitable but, curiously, these artists are never allowed to set up their easels on don Malvino’s hill.

Most people live modestly, growing corn when they can, working in Los Pueblos fifty miles away when they can’t, a place that is nothing like a pueblo but is instead a big city with asphalt streets and two and factories, with a railroad line that passes through and more cars than anyone can see in a year out in Noguerra. It is also a curious place, because it makes people feel different, makes some of them feel a little ashamed of themselves and wish instead that they could change their clothes and change the way they speak and maybe replace the old teeth that have been missing, and maybe people would look at them in the funny way they do. At night there is still movimiento in this small town, and it is curious, but you don’t see hardly any animals. People ride on cars, some on buses, maybe some on bicycles, but almost no one on the back of a rickety old truck that sputters each time it stops, sending smoke signals that can be read from one hill to the next. It is out of pure necessity that people move out there, pura necesidad. They need to work in the tool factory, or maybe out on the work crews that build new roads, or maybe on construction crews that put up houses that don’t look anything like the humble little brick and adobe buildings in Noguerra. It is a way of getting through the lean times, and lately, the lean times are lasting longer than ever.

But back to what I was saying. At times, animals disappear, and in a place as poor as Noguerra, it is easy to imagine that this is due to the fact that someone took liberties. Animals are smart, after all, and they know better than to leave home on their own. They might want to explore a little, that is understandable, and to peck here or there, in doña Graciela’s tomato patch, or behind don Tomás’ feed lot where he keeps bags of feed, but most of the time, they don’t go far, and they are easy to find. It is said that a coyote or two will wander in out of the desert, but most of the time there is plenty of warning, for almost everyone has a dog, and while they may be no match for a clever coyote, they can be counted on to bark without stopping when they smell that a strange animal or person is around. People can tell, and when they bark, the owner will always step outside and make sure the chickens, pigs and goats are secure in their pens.

But sometimes a burro has a way of getting lost, especially don Perico’s burro, who in reality is named Moisés but is called Perico because of his penchant for talking on and on as he walks with his burro. And everyone knows that burros are very smart animals, despite their name. They have the patience of, well, burros, and they work like, well, burros. This one is named Alegría, for some reason that escapes understanding, since no one has been able to make it through one of don Perico’s interminable and tangles stories that tread one way and then another, and that end up leaving you sleepy, unable to remember the point of the whole story anyway.

So, Alegría it is, and from time to time, say, two or three times a week, don Perico will wander from house to house, knocking on doors and announcing to the weary families that “No hay Alegría”, or, “No se halla Alegría”, which can be translated as “There is no happiness”. Now, you might possibly be tempted to view this as a tired joke told by a doddering old man, but the way he says it, with a look of earnest suffering, with a drooping lip and eyes on the verge of tears, couldn’t possibly be interpreted at anything other than face value.

And everyone always asks him the same thing. Where were you today, don Perico? Did you go by the old Sycamore tree? Were you looking for wild cactus again? Were you checking your rabbit traps out by the hills again? Did you go to church and maybe forget to tie Alegría up? (It is well known that don Perico likes to take naps in the early afternoon in the little church, because it is cool and quiet in the old adobe building, and because the benches are as familiar to him as the furniture he has at home, but a little less rickety, a little smoother, and a little less dusty.)

People are patient with don Perico, because that is the way people are in general in Noguerra, a place that might be thought to have few other generalities. And what happens is the same. Don Perico will look in one direction then another while shuffling his feet (he invariably refuses to come inside, not because he is a rude man, but precisely because his sense of courtesy dictates that a dusty man should respect cleanliness, and that the only public place where he should step in should be the feed lot or the little supply store or, of course, the church), and he mumbles about how he was here and there, and he didn’t pay attention, and walked home, and he thought that Alegría was with him, but when he arrived home the burro wasn’t anywhere to be found.

Now, who would steal a burro in this small pueblito? Ni pensarlo! What people do, however, is to offer don Perico a little food, which he never refuses, for invariably, he always manages to visit during the evening hours when people are settling down for their dinner, and it has become such a custom that most families know to expect him at least once a month. But don Perico is a courteous man, he never makes it a point of visiting a house two times in a row, he cycles through the fifteen houses that are clustered together, so as not to be a burden.

It is, of course, known that the burro has a penchant for old cactus, and that the cactus is particularly abundant around the hill where don Pepe lives. So, it is only a matter of finishing their dinner before either the head of the house or one of the older teenage sons will accompany don Perico as they head to the hills, holding a lantern because you never know if a snake might be around, and a good thing that they take one or two dogs with them on the trip to bark a warning if this is the case, and they circle around in the shadows calling out until the find the burro, who for all the world must have a penchant for cactus spines for the cactus around this area has to be among the spiniest of all the cactus in New Mexico.

But we were talking about don Malvino’s acumen and his special affinity for animals, weren’t we? Well, it just so happened that one night, after don Perico had made his visit to the next house on his weekly schedule, and after having enjoyed two bowls of beans with beef, seasoned with chiles and accompanied by a few tortillas, that the obligatory trip to the cactus patch was made. It was taken as a virtual certainty that Alegría would be found there, and in the meantime, don Perico talked incessantly about his favorite topic, about how he used to hunt with his brothers when he was a child, and about how his grandfather used to talk about the lobos that were so abundant back then, and about how they were hunted when cattle drivers used to pass through this area on their way to slaughter and market. It seemed the times had been much more romantic back then, although he knew enough not to trust the cattle drivers or the ranchers who had little sympathy for the old communities, much less for the Indians who used to be such a proud people.

And they couldn’t find Alegría that night! They called and called, and they shone the light of the lantern around the entire patch, and the smaller patches around that area, but they didn’t find the burro. It was such a novelty because it represented a change almost as drastic as if the rooster failed to crow. They took don Perico to his modest little hut and put him to sleep, waiting for the next day to decide what to do.

That next day they still couldn’t find Alegría, and don Perico as a result was becoming less talkative than he normally was. The men took to using his real name, Moisés, as a way of recognizing the transformation and giving him comfort. No te preocupes, don Moisés, no es serio, por allí ha de estar. The little ones were confused. Who was Moisés? There was only don Perico, now for the first time that anyone could remember actually entering into someone’s house, and he wasn’t talking and telling stories about the old lobo hiding among the big rocks, or the cattle ranchers and their droves of cattle that trampled everything in their path, he was sniffling silently, unable to make eye contact.

Could an old lobo have come back and made off with the burro? Or worse yet, some stranger, some desperate man who hadn’t bothered to come into the pueblito but had found Alegría in the cactus patch and decided to take the animal? The animal, after all, was known to be very sensible despite the fame attributed to his species, and could not have wandered off. How far could he go in one day?

It was decided that they should go visit don Malvino up on his hill, which was the natural step to take if it weren’t for the fact that it was rumored that he was an old cuervo, and who had something of the sinister in him. Most people would not visit him in his perch on the old cerrito, and if they say him under his tree, looking down at the pueblito, they were content to look away and continue on with their normal activities. Don Malvino, after all, had a very steady gaze.

So, a few men decided to join don Perico, and they walked up the hill, following the faint trail and winding trail they had seen him take as he climbed up. There were trees here and there, and little alcoves that seemed as if they could harbor dens of animals, and tall grass here and there, swaying in the wind. It was a somber journey, and for once, the men were forced to admit they would have enjoyed hearing don Perico’s tales of yesterday that had been repeated so often they were as threadbare as his sandals. don Malvino was waiting for them as they arrived.

Amigos, ¿qué se les ofrece? He greeted them. He looked from one man to the next, and it seemed as if there was a collective flinch. Don Perico couldn’t hardly gather the courage to look him in the eye, and just mumbled quietly while one of the men, don Cirilo, explained the reason for their visit.

Don Malvino, forgive us for bothering you, we hope you are well as we get ready for another summer. We could certainly have used more rain, is that not so? But we can’t complain, we are doing the best that we can, and for now, and most of us have finished planting. Don Malvino, forgive us, but we are missing a burro. I mean, an animal, don Perico’s animal, who likes to eat cactus down by the side of your hill, and who we can usually find there, but except that yesterday he went missing, and we hope that maybe, since you are able to watch over us, that you might have seen him. For you see everything, no es así?

He couldn’t have felt more tongue-tied than we he went to ask for his wife doña Teresa’s hand almost thirty years ago. And the thing was, the don Malvino didn’t seem to react. All he did was stare steadily, without wavering, into don Cirilo’s face, then he turned quietly to don Perico, who never once had met his gaze, and was unable to do so now, limiting himself to a quiet assent with his head. Why don Malvino stared people never knew. It was unsettling, and when he made his weekly trip into town, few people bothered to chat with him, preferring to look off to the side and to move the brim of their hat down.

Así que se trata de un animal perdido. Un burro. Bueno. Déjenme ver.

And he turned around and walked into his little house, the rickety house that seemed to be held up with little else other than a spell and rope, and that most town residents had marveled had never seemed to sustain any damage during the heavy seasonal winds or dust storms or pounding rains that hit from time to time during the year. It was very dark inside, and he left the door open when he walked inside. Two or three of the men who accompanied don Cirilo could have sworn that they saw five or six pairs of glowing eyes inside, but were unable to determine to what animal they might have belonged. Something rattled inside, and then don Malvino stepped out.

Vengan conmigo.

And the party of six men, seven including don Malvino if he could indeed be grouped among the men and not as wizard, walked up slowly to the highest point of the hill. There were other hills in the area, but this one was the tallest, and it offered the best vantage point to survey the area. The sky seemed very clear up here, being less obscured by dust that seemed to form a layer down below although, in truth, it wasn’t it very tall hill. It just seemed tall.

Don Malvino took his time and looked in one direction then the other. He held what the men could have sworn was an eagle’s feather in one hand, and he brought up his arm and looked steadily at this feather. Then he mumbled, and called out to what seemed to be “quirinoah”, calling out, in a language that they couldn’t understand, but they were sure was a language, “quirinoah shoala kitupu, sorolia quirinoah jo jo rin”. Whether this could be considered an exact transcription of what he said or only an approximation, no one can say. All they knew was that they seemed to feel, at least for a moment, as if a shadow passed overhead, and what might have been an eagle’s call. They were very quiet, hoping to hear it again, but don Malvino just looked off to the southeast, to another smaller hill about a mile away, and grunted.

Por allá, mis amigos, por allá, busquen el animal. Y que tengan serenidad. No teman, el verano pronto pasa. Cuiden a sus hijos, y si ven un lobo, no lo toquen, me avisan primero. Que tengan serenidad.

And with that he turn away, and walked back to the tree that stood next to his hut. It was a very tall oak, unusual, but also very sturdy. The men all gave thanks to his retreating back, and they hurried down the hill. It wasn’t until they had reached the bottom that they remarked how unusual it was that Don Malvino seemed to have no dogs, and that none of their dogs had climbed the hill with them. As a matter of fact, the dogs seemed to avoid don Pepe when he traveled into the pueblito, and that was what made him seem more eerie than ever. Someone who scared even the dogs!

Well, the part hurried over to the hill and before they knew it, they found old Alegría, who had apparently found another patch of cactus. But he also seemed a little unsettled, and it was readily apparent that he was scared. Don Perico immediately noticed that his burro had been bitten on one of his ears. It was still intact, but there had been blood, and the bit had left indentations that looked to be those of a dog, but with fangs and a wider jaw than any dog that they knew lived in the area.

And Alegría never went back to the patch of cactus that stood at the foot of don Malvino’s hill. This altered the ritual of life in this small town, and for a town that depended on rituals because there was little else, this was a big change. It was not nearly enough, however, to prepare them for the arrival of the lobo that winter.

OGRomero © 2013
(Copyrighted by OGRomero, 2013)

Of Revival and Redemption: A Review of "A Better Life"

The movie "A Better Life" is structured around several journeys. These involve not only the quest for economic progress according to the classical understanding of every migrant’s journey, but also a cultural journey (in the sense of discovering one’s roots) as well as, in a very powerful way, an emotional journey that will bring two people together. There are many obstacles encountered along the way, coalescing around emotions and the experience of fear, intimidation, anger and the general impulse that is best expressed by the father toward the beginning, an innate instinct for self-preservation that leads people to hunker down and not take chances. The undocumented immigrant in particular strives to fade into the background, tolerating conditions that most people would find intolerable, striving to becoming invisible because the alternative might be worse. But these obstacles are all overcome by the persistence of hope, by something that has lured immigrants to the country from the very beginning. It justifies the gut-wrenching dislocations that are always involved when someone decides to leave their home country and start a journey, crossing vast geographical and emotional distances. There is the hope that they can rewrite their histories and achieve a different, hopefully better, ending.

Carlos Galindo is a middle-aged Mexican immigrant who lives with his teenage son Luis in a desperately poor neighborhood in Los Angeles.It is a cramped house with what appears to be only a single bedroom, and it feels lonely and besieged. Despite the humble garden that he cultivates outside, one that makes the place seem just a little brighter and more inviting than the sum of these dispiriting concrete surrounding, he lives in a neighborhood that is volatile and dangerous. The house is perched on a slope and as a consequence things seem to be off-kilter and out of balance, like the emotional landscape within. His relationship can best be characterized as one of emotional austerity. There is little friendly conversation between the two, little informality, and Carlos seems shell-shocked most of the time, with a limited emotional vocabulary. Despite living together they barely communicate, and neither one appreciates the experiences of the other.

To reiterate, it is a gritty neighborhood of old houses and limited open space. The streets have many potholes, and there is the pervasive sound of police helicopters which of necessity circulate continually overhead add to the sense of being besieged. There are double sets of locks on the doors, and the curtains are always drawn closed, making it feel as if they live within a dimly-lit cave. The inhabitants, frustratingly, live within sight of a glittering downtown Los Angeles that seems dreamlike despite being so near.

This sets up a contrast, for the father is forced to scale heights on a daily basis as he and his employer (an elderly man named Blasco) drive from one part of town to another in a rickety old truck. Carlos works as a landscaper, pruning not the glittering skyscrapers of a teeming city of dreams but the palm trees that are emblems of wealth and desire. The owners of the many beautiful and luxuriant gardens found throughout Los Angeles seem to have little appreciation of the workers who attend to their needs. In all probability these workers can be seen as belonging to another world, a labor force best ignored.

Of course, immigrants always have to start out in the lowest rungs of the economic ladder. They are cooks and dishwashers, they gather on street corners at times to look for work, they perform hazardous work at construction sites, they work bent over in searing heat in the agricultural fields, and of course, they work as janitors and as landscapers. It can’t help but provoke in me a measure of vertigo to see these workers climb these tall trees, wearing only a modicum of gear, risking falls that could be fatal. These tragic accidents are a common occurrence, particularly among landscapers who are paid little and have to find creative ways to cut corners. They rely, as so much of the American economy does, on the work of unskilled laborers, particularly, on undocumented workers. What must it feel like for workers such as Carlos, an undocumented worker who has no safety net, no legal protections, no savings, no insurance, nothing to protect him?

His son Luis has to deal with dangers of a different sort. He attends a crumbling high school in his neighborhood, one beset by drug dealers and as heavily monitored by police officers as his neighborhood. There is no respite from this feeling of being contained and monitored, for this is an inner-city school. It is overcrowded and characterized by high dropout rates and low academic achievement, and it would seem to be a place where dreams crumble. It underscores the ironies involved that so many immigrants who undertake perilous journeys to the United States find themselves in precarious circumstances that seem fully as dispiriting as the ones they left behind.

Their respective circumstances are perilous and yet neither father nor son seems to understand the common difficulties they are facing. They are both reaching a crossroads, a moment when important decisions will have to be made, and the father is also undergoing what for him will be a gut-wrenching transformation. Will he continue to be a laborer without any hope of achievng a "better life"? Things can’t continue the way they have, because to do so would risk leaving a promise unredeemed.

It seems that Carlos’ boss Blasco will be retiring, and he has offered to sell the truck and the business to his employee. Carlos has a tantalizing prospect before him, that of becoming an owner and not an employee, with all that it involves about completing a psychic journey and finally gaining a measure of independence. But things are complicated. (When are they not so?). He needs the support of his family, since he needs a loan from his sister and he also needs to find a way to inspire his son with this dream, to make it all worthwhile again before he risks losing Luis forever. With so much invested in this decision, it is inevitable that further complications would arrive, namely, that the truck would be stolen.

I am struck by the blind and searing faith of Carlos, played powerfully by Mexican actor Demián Bichir. He has a universal quality in his demeanor and expression, one that I am sure would be familiar not just to a son of Mexican immigrant parents such as myself, but to anyone who had immigrant forbearers. Whether pioneers on the newly-settled plains of the American Midwest, or meatpackers in Chicago, or fishermen on the coasts, these parents sacrificed everything and endured punishing workdays, performing work so exhausting that it left them in a daze at the end, barely able to collapse into chairs or onto bed and sofas, as is the case with Carlos in this film who sleeps in his workclothes. Is it not the case, then, that these parents might be mistakenly seen to be lacking in a certain vitality by their children who are unable to understand why their parents might settle into an alcoholic stupor when they return home? Is it any wonder that they are perceived as being distant and uncommunicative, gruff in manner and unable to offer a word of encouragement to their children that isn’t accompanied by a threat? There is frequently an emotional desert that seperates the generations and that is just as arid and forbidding as the one that separates the United States from Mexico.

Forced as they are by circumstances and by the unsettling sight of his father’s panic, both father and son undertake a journey to find the stolen truck. In so doing they descend into a netherworld. This journey seems very reminiscent of classical mythology, for it is a descent into Hades, into a sort of underworld of starving and lost souls, one fueled by the perhaps irrational hope that they might be able to retreive something that had disappeared forever. (Trust? A renewed relationship between father and son?) They enter into this dark world searching not for Eurydice but for Santiago, the elderly and frail immigrant who stole his truck and lives in South Central Los Angeles, in an apartment complex teaming with tri-headed Cerberus figures who guard the entranceways, and who might not let them leave (the gangsters who lounge around the tenements, challenging all newcomers). They enter one apartment only to find a crowded warren filled with many single and desperate men, almost all of whom are undocumented immigrants like Carlos. It is a measure of his own emotional detachment that Luis is not able to see these men as analogues to his father, and it brings out the worst in him, a fury that his father tries desperately to contain. It is a scary journey, but it signals the start of a reencounter with his own father, and an evaluation of why the son has become so poisoned.

Is it any wonder that these sons and daughters find so little hope in their surroundings? They didn’t share in that great dream that drives so many migrants from their rural villages to the cities, from one country to the other, in overflowing boats and hidden in leaking trucks, crossing searing deserts with a few cans of tuna and a gallon of water. These sons and daughters of immigrants who don’t manage to make the initial climb up the socioeconomic ladder find themselves in circumstances that can't help but be considered degrading, dangerous, desperately unfair and at times hopeless. That is one of the things that distinguishes Carlos from his son. The father still holds on to hope, and he is the one who feels the burden of rekindling this dream in his son who is on the verge of becoming enmeshed in the gang culture that pervades these areas and that sees life as a form of perpetual warfare.

Father and son are thus undertaking a journey together, with the father recapitulating his role and perhaps functioning as a guide as he tries to rescue his son from his own netherworld. It leads to a cultural awakening on the part of Luis, to a realization that he isn’t that different from other Mexican-American kids, those who have managed to retain a firmer connection with their parent’s culture. It is also evident in the lesson of forgiveness, for they will find Santiago, and they will have to find another way out other than to engage in an act of violent retribution.

This is not a formulaic movie with a happy Hollywood ending, however. It is a movie that is emotionally honest, because it also captures the real-life perils faced by all people, by Carlos and Luis and by we ourselves as we try to understand our loved ones and try to cope with the confusion provoked by difficult circumstances. The most gut-wrenching scene is the final dialogue between the two, held in prison, when Carlos is finally able to answer the desperate question that had been posed earlier by his son: Why did you have me? It is a powerful scene, and Bichir captures the sense of hesitation but also the urgency involved in providing an answer to the son he may possibly no longer see. The pain is roiling across his face like temblors from an earthquake, and we can see how much it pains him to break through that barrier of restraint, that feeling that so many of our parents retained from cultures that are much more emotionally restrained, especially in their interactions between parents and their sons and daughters.

My parents were certainly the same way, feeling very uncomfortable expressing their feelings with us and being what we came to think of as emotionally-crippled. Perhaps we were too judgmental, and perhaps we didn’t understand that it was a reticence that comes from a certain mindset, one that is rooted in rural stoicism, in the certainty that, as in a Juan Rulfo story, tragedy was always around the corner for those who were born poor the way our parents were in their ranchitos in Mexico or other parts of Latin America. In their framework perhaps the best way to deal with it was not to give expression to your feelings but instead to internalize them, to repress them, to bind them into a knot and bury them deep down inside.

It is a searing culmination to a film about journeys, and it is more honest because of it. Both characters have come to a crossroads and, while they may have to separate, they are closer than ever. The journey is complete, and the father has managed to communicate his hopes to his son, believing as he does in the inevitability of an eventual reunion, and in the promise of a "better life". The father has redeemed his son. They have redeemed each other.

OGRomero © 2013
(Copyrighted by OGRomero, 2013)