It's Not All about Sex and Violence...

Hernandez, Gilbert. Fatima: The Blood Spinners. #2. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Comics, 2012.

As I mention in the last post, the first issue of Gilbert Hernandez’s Fatima: The Blood Spinners, left me looking forward to issue #2, wondering where Hernandez will take this comic series, concerned about how he will handle an assortment of matters, and, above all else, hoping that Hernandez will take the series in smart, innovative, and thought-provoking directions.

When, a few months ago, I finally got around to buying issue #2 at a comic shop I chanced upon in Chula Vista, the owner of the store remarked, totally unselfconsciously and without any prompting from me, that with this issue Hernandez “finally” includes some sex appeal in the series. Elaborating on his observation, he indicated that he was rather disappointed with the first issue as, based on previous experience with the style of Los Bros. Hernandez, he expected/hoped for sexier images of women in this series. All the while, I was actually thinking that I was rather relieved that the character of Fatima wasn’t too sexed up in the first issue. Based on the little acquaintance I did have with the style and tendencies of Los Bros. Hernandez, sexiness is precisely what I was worried about going into the series. With the particular endorsement offered by the comic store owner (who now appeared to me in a rather creepy light), I found my worried renewed as I purchased and opened up issue #2.

At the very least, the cover plays up Fatima’s badassness rather than any sex appeal. A zombie face covered by blood profusely flowing from a bullet hole in its forehead fills the page. Fatima only appears as a reflection in the zombie’s eye, providing a horroresque spin to John Donne’s poem, “The Good-Morrow,” in which the speaker observes as he and his lover awake next to each other the morning after a satisfying night of passion, “My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,/And true plain hearts do in the faces rest.” On the cover of issue #2, a geometry of reflections suggests an intimacy, too—in this case between Fatima and a zombie—but in contrast to the sort of emotional intimacy captured in Donne’s poem vis-à-vis physical proximity, this intimacy is mediated by the smoking semi-automatic weapon that the eponymous protagonist holds.

Although the inside cover reiterates the apparent promise made by the cover of violent gore to come (two eyeballs are exploding out of the sockets of a zombie, blood issuing forth from the now emptied out sockets) the title page works in a more suggestive (and subdued) manner. It features a half-Fatima/half-zombie head that, as it shows the head from the eyes and above, directs attention to the binaristic opposition between human subjectivity and selfhood and a zombie’s non-human lack of both.

While this latter image seems to prime a reader for an elaboration on the border between the human and the nonhuman, it actually anticipates insight into the differences between Fatima in the past and present. Most notably, the humanity of Fatima is developed vis-à-vis the revelation of a crush she formerly had on Jody, one of her coworkers at Operations. In the opening pages, we are privy to confessions such as, “Nobody got my pulse pounding like science operator Jody” (3), and, “I wish I could have been de-briefing Jody” (3). There’s even an image of the Amazonian Fatima looking like a giddy schoolgirl as she stands in the presence of her notably oblivious crush. As such imaging stands in contrast to the tough, composed numbness she exhibits in the first volume, it presents her as someone who used to be more human than we have heretofore seen.

In fact, it is interesting that Operations itself appears to have been a place where love and romance once abounded. After a few apocalyptic images of Operations now, Fatima narrates a flashback and notes, “But not long ago, ohh, [Operations] was alive, I’m telling you. The place pulsed with vitality and a sense of purpose” (2). Accordingly, in the same panel we see two pairs of obviously happy couples going about their business and the business of Operations. This continues a few pages later when we are introduced to the lesbian couple of Alexis and Teal. In this introduction, which occurs after Fatima relates, “Nobody wants to say it, but it’s looking like the end of the world” (6), Fatima says, “Maybe as long as love prevails, we’ll be safe from oblivion. The love between Alexis and Teal was a ray of hope” (6). Parallel to the evisceration of hope engendered by the zombie outbreak, however, soon enough the love between Alexis and Teal is wiped out when an Operations effort to infiltrate a dealer’s stash of Spin cure goes awry. Undercover as a couple, Teal and another agent, Chad, go to a nightclub owned by Mr. Patch, the dealer. There, Teal and Chad are exposed as Operations agents, at which points guns are drawn, zombies are unleashed, club patrons panic, and in the chaos, Chad purposely yet inexplicably shoots Teal. This breaks Alexis’s heart and registers the waning of hope wrought by the zombie outbreak.

The shooting also opens up another narrative strand: the intimation of corruption within Operations. Shortly after the death of Teal, Chad is found shot. Fatima consequently wonders whether Chad was killed because he knew something, whether the investigation with Teal and Chad inside the club was phony in the first place, and what other sorts of lies Operations might be harboring. Of course, this provides fodder for the remaining two issues in the series.

With Operations dying off, the world progressively given over to zombies, and hope for the return of anything good in the world diminishing at a precipitous rate, issue #2 ends with Fatima and Jody agreeing to put themselves into a deep freeze alongside certain other Operations agents. The plan, according to Jody: “We’ll sleep for 100 years; that’s when our people predict the true cure will be found” (19). With such wishful thinking, Jody toasts, “To a better world,” to which Fatima rejoins, “Whatever” (19), which, of course, anticipates the revealingly dismissive posturing we see in issue #1. On the very last page, the hopelessness that we see in issue #1 is set up with Fatima coming out of her deep sleep and, unbeknownst to her, Jody lurking behind her as a zombie.

In some ways, a circuit between issues #1 and #2 is brought to a close as the background for issue #1 is filled in. With the past now somewhat covered (of course, certain questions remain to be resolved), there is the feeling that with issue #3 we can start to move forward and see where this zombie outbreak (and the story of it) goes.

Now, as for the sexiness that the comic shop owner mentioned/highlighted…well, there is some skimpy workout wear worn (for some reason) by Operations agents (both male and female), glimpses of the crotch of Teal’s panties beneath the ultra-tight mini dress she dons for her undercover role, and the outline of Fatima’s apparently erect nipples beneath her tank top on the last page. Overall, there’s nothing really erotic or provocative…just enough to titillate those who are easily titillated. Of course, why these sorts of details are even included at all is what I am wondering as they are not at all necessary. They seem to be nothing more than juvenile flourishes that reflect and/or cater to stunted heterosexual male fantasy. (The crotch shot of Teal when she is dead and lying on the floor of the nightclub seems especially gratuitous.) This got me wondering about extant criticism on the imaging of women in the work of Los Bros. Hernandez. In a word, am I missing something, or is this simply pandering to/reflecting heterosexual male lust? In her essay, “Feminine Latin/o American Identities on the American Alternative Landscape: From the Women of Love and Rockets to La Perdida,” Ana Merino notes, “The Hernandez Brothers established a reputation for creating female comics characters open to historical change, whose representation can be sexual without being sexist” (175), but this only has me questioning how (and whether) such a differentiation can be drawn. Most immediately, it is something I will be thinking about as I proceed to issue #3 of Fatima.

--phillip serrato, san diego state universty

Work Cited

Merino, Ana. “Feminine Latin/o American Identities on the American Alternative Landscape: From the Women of Love and Rockets to La Perdida,” The Rise of the American Comics Artist: Creators and Contexts. Ed. Paul Williams and James Lyons. Jackson, MS: UP of Mississippi, 2010. 164-178.

Just another zombie story?

Hernandez, Gilbert. Fatima: The Blood Spinners. #1. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Comics, 2012. 

As utterly uncool and disconnected as this sounds, I have to admit that I have no experience with the work of Los Bros. Hernandez. I do know that they are legendary, especially for their Love and Rockets series. And, I do own a few L & R comics as well as the ginormous Luba collection, which I bought when Fantagraphics first published it but which I still have yet to read. Such is pretty much the extent of my acquaintance with the productions of Los Hernandez. Knowing, though, that I really ought to know more about their work is precisely what prompted me to buy Gilbert Hernandez’s Fatima as soon as I saw it at Crazy Fred’s comic shop here in La Mesa, CA. That what I saw was issue #1 of 4 made it even more inviting. Rather than trying to get up to speed with something that had already been going on for some time without me (like the world of L & R), I would be entering a series from the beginning.

The cover of issue #1 shows the eponymous protagonist blasting away at what appears to be a group of zombies that encircles her. Right away this spoke to my interest in horror studies. But as enticing and intriguing as I found the idea of Hernandez offering his own zombie story, it also prompted in me a little reticence and concern. Like the perfectly good genre of Gothic fiction (which in the last few years has been diluted and otherwise ruined by Twilight and the numerous other Gothic knock-offs that now take up too much shelf space at Barnes & Noble), the zombie genre has been overdone in recent years in different sectors of our popular culture.[1] Given the proliferation of zombie texts ranging from Walking Dead to Zombie Musical to Zombies vs. Strippers, I wondered: would Hernandez’s comic say or show anything new or interesting amidst the recent flood of zombie texts? Why would Hernandez choose to work within an already glutted field? To what ends would Hernandez use the genre? With so much to his name already, I figured this could not be a case of Hernandez merely riding or cashing in on the popularity of the zombie genre. Or, at least this is what I hoped.

The story begins with a bloodbath. A well-armed, well-muscled Fatima is blasting away hordes of zombies. Heads explode, eyeballs fly out of their sockets, and blood splatters across the panels. In one panel, Fatima even manages to take out three zombies with one shot (a bullet passes through the open mouths of three zombies lined up one behind the other). The first panel after the title page (which, on a visual level, uses darkness to set up Fatima as a character with an intriguing story to be told) functions as a curious opening strategy. As it brings the reader face to face with a zombie who has a bullet hole in his forehead, it is an interesting play on the usual self-other dynamics operant in zombie texts. A lot of work on zombie texts has elaborated on the ways that the zombie assumes the status of abject other. Its lack of subjectivity, its cannibalism, and its status as a corpse—which Julia Kristeva figures as the epitome of the abject—render it utterly “not-us,” radically alien to “our” civilized world and nature and formulations of selfhood. In spite of its apparent otherness, however, the zombie is actually an uncanny figure because it both is and is not human. The semblance is there, but the subjectivity is not. Consequently, the zombie emerges as an unnerving, unsettling figure who sort of resembles—and, thus, is—“us,” but also doesn’t, and so isn’t. Because the zombie thus eludes categorization, troubling our ability to differentiate between “us” and “them,” one thing that zombie texts like to play on and with is our insistence that the zombie is not-us. Indeed, the more interesting kinds of texts are the ones that deny us the easy ability to figure the zombie as radically other. Along these lines, Fatima mentions that for her, “recent converts” are “the hardest to kill” (6) because their humanity still shows through.

Incidentally, the self-other dynamics operant in zombie texts bring to mind Kristeva’s work on abjection and identity formation, namely her description of the latter’s dependence on the existence and repression of the former. In Powers of Horror, her famous essay on abjection, Kristeva notes that “Excrement and its equivalents (decay, infection, disease, corpses, etc.) stand for the danger to identity that comes from without: the ego threatened by the non-ego, society threatened by its outside, life by death” (71). Because the abject thus “disturbs identity, system, order” (4), it prompts its own suppression and repression. The orgy of killing that we see at the start of Fatima sets up the zombies, in no uncertain terms, as the walking abject, as others to be exterminated because they disturb order in the fashion described by Kristeva. For Fatima, and by extension the reader, the zombies threaten the line between life and death, society and chaos, and ego and non-ego (which is to say, socialized subject and mindless non-subject). As the panels accrue, we see more and more of “them” threatening the “us” that Fatima embodies. In effect, we see dramatized the stakes of the suppression and repression of the abject. Fatima fending off the zombies that threaten to engulf her illustrates Kristeva’s notion of “our” vulnerable relationship to the abject: “[The abject] lies outside, beyond the set, and does not seem to agree to the latter’s rules of the game. And yet, from its place of banishment, the abject does not cease challenging its master” (2). In both Kristeva and Fatima, there is an urgency to our ability to suppress/repress the abject.  

As the narrative unfolds we learn that this is another human-hatched/self-inflicted zombie outbreak. A new illegal drug, Spin, has turned out to be “the worst, most addictive drug ever conceived.” According to Fatima, Spin is so potent that “in a matter of hours it’s zombietime” for users. Symbolically this narrative concoction extends the effects of addiction to its extreme. In this manner, Fatima falls in line with other zombie-outbreak stories that function as cautionary tales for humanity. But while a relevant route to follow, the zombie genre seems rather obvious for a narrative about drugs gone awry. Then again, this is only the first issue of the series, and so I will withhold judgment until I see where Hernandez goes with this narrative strand.

As a flashback, we see that Fatima used to be part of some police force (to which she only refers as “Operations”) that was involved in a raid on Mr. Bittermeat, a Spin druglord. Obviously the motivation for the raid is to contain the threat that Spin and the zombie outbreak constitute. When Fatima and the other agents descend to the drug lord’s property—under the guise of invisibility technology—they start shooting away at the individuals they encounter. Notably, this is not much different from the sight of Fatima shooting away at the zombies she encounters in the opening pages of the comic. In both instances, we see desperate efforts to “stop the disease from spreading y’know” (9).

Fundamentally Hernandez portrays the desire to eradicate that which threatens order (at least as we know it). As occurs in Hollywood films, guns are a favorite means for eliminating that which threatens our order. In this comic, as with most zombie texts, we see that regardless of how much shooting Fatima and the others may do, there are still more zombies out there and seemingly more emerging all the time. Such entropy puts the individual in a position of wavering between fatalism and hope, which might help to explain Fatima’s attitude of “whatever.” With this attitude, she seems to be protecting herself from being bothered by life. That said, maybe Hernandez intends to take his zombie story toward a meditation on the devastating existential implications of the seemingly entropic tendencies of life?

Left as we are by this first issue, it goes without saying that I await seeing where this series goes. In particular, I wonder how Hernandez will differentiate his work from the numerous other zombie texts already out there. To borrow from Harold Bloom and his Anxiety of Influence, what “swerves” will Hernandez execute with his foray into the zombie genre? Will he be able to both work within and bend the zombie genre in original ways? Will “stronger” precursor zombie texts show some kind of influence over the work (either in the form of an inability to escape this previous work or/and too much effort to not repeat it)? Editor Diana Schutz promises that the series will “live up to…lofty expectations,” which leaves me hopeful for the fate of this zombie text.

--phillip serrato, san diego state university

Works Cited

Batti, Bianca L. The Undead Ingestion of the Self: Cannibalistic Identity Formation and Ghoulish Subjectivity in Zombie Literature. San Diego, CA: San Diego State U, 2012.

Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. New York: Oxford UP, 1973.

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1982.

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[1] Bianca Batti offers illuminating, theoretically savvy readings of some recent zombie texts in her Master’s thesis The Undead Ingestion of the Self: Cannibalistic Identity Formation and Ghoulish Subjectivity in Zombie Literature.

A Future of One's Own

Ashley Hope Pérez, What Can’t Wait. Minneapolis: Carolrhoda Lab, 2011. 234 pages.

Recently, substantial concern and work have been devoted to the difficulties with which young Latinas must contend as they grow up. Besides scholarly projects such as Lisa C. Dietrich’s Chicana Adolescents: Bitches, ’Ho’s, and Schoolgirls, Mary Harris’s Cholas: Latino Girls and Gangs, Lucila Vargas’s Latina Teens, Migration, and Popular Culture, and Rosie Molinary’s Hijas Americanas: Beauty, Body Image, and Growing Up Latina, relevant creative work ranges from the picture books of Gloria Anzaldúa (with her aptly named protagonist, Prietita) to novels by Judith Ortiz Cofer and Sandra López to “chica lit” by Diana López and Michelle Serros.¹

Ashley Hope Pérez’s debut novel What Can’t Wait is an important addition to this growing body of work. It depicts a teen named Marisa Moreno growing up in a Houston barrio and trying to transcend the circumstances of her life. The situation of Marisa is sure to resonate with many contemporary readers.

Her education is one of many stressors that this high school senior must negotiate. While her best friend plans on going to the local community college and her family expects her to (just) enroll at the University of Houston so she can stay nearby, Marisa actually has in mind UT Austin, where she would like to study engineering. As occurs in many Latino/a narratives (e.g., Francisco Jiménez’s Breaking Through [2002], Viola Canales’s The Tequila Worm [2007], even Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory [1983]), Marisa feels guilty for wanting to leave her family. That her older sister depends on her to babysit her daughter, Anita, that Anita depends on Marisa to provide the attention no one else seems to provide her, and that her parents depend on her to help out with household finances exacerbate her feelings of selfishness. At the same time, Marisa fears leaving lo familiar for the uncertainty of life elsewhere.

To her credit, Pérez thus opens up an important (re)consideration of the Latino family that offers to speak to the experiences of readers who have felt similarly torn. What emerges is the realization that familial clinging has unfairly constraining, unnecessarily unhealthy effects on adolescent subjects. Rather than attesting to the strength of familial bonds, such clinging emerges as symptomatic of both a fear of change as well as a habit of control. On one level, the text thereby suggests that the terms of familia must be reconfigured such that physical proximity does not continue to be confused or equated with love or loyalty. On another level, the text’s acknowledgment of the emotional stress that such a situation engenders within the adolescent subject problematizes the ways that family (and friends) may unwittingly (but also deliberately) curtail the ambitions and the potential of a teen. In turn, such a portrayal could help to give a teen (as well as her/his family and friends) a critical perspective on Latino/a family dynamics and thereby create a platform for resisting if not transforming them.

Owing to the trying gravitational pull that Marisa’s family exerts on her, her AP Calculus teacher, Ms. Ford, constitutes a crucial presence in her life. It is Ms. Ford who encourages Marisa to apply to UT Austin and provides the support that Marisa needs, especially when Marisa hits a low point and runs away from home (and thus seems to give up any care for her future). Given the utter unfamiliarity of higher education for teens like Marisa, the importance of Ms. Ford cannot be overlooked. For many Latino/a students who are the first in their family to go to or even think about going to college, the world of higher education can be an overwhelming, intimidating, even unreal and frightening one. One might in fact wonder how many futures have gone unrealized and deferred because of uncertainty about the application process or just not knowing what opportunities are “out there.” Ms. Ford provides the guidance that does nothing less than create a spectrum of new possibilities for Marisa. If not for Ms. Ford—and teachers like her—it would be all too easy, even likely, for Marisa—and students like her—to remain hopelessly and haplessly mired in the circumstances they seek to escape.

Thanks to Ms. Ford, now available to Marisa is an alternative to the status quo that threatens to engulf her (as it has done and continues to do to countless Latina teens). The first application essay that she hastily composes suggests as much:

Dear UT,

My sister got pregnant at seventeen, giving up her career at Sonic to take care of the baby and hate her husband Jose full time. My brother has a GED, and his idea of a long-term goal is saving up money to get new rims for his truck. My parents are not interested in learning English—they only took that one class so that they could meet the requirements to get citizenship. Papi loves my paycheck and only tolerates me, and Mami’s biggest dream is for me to get married and live on a house on this same street so that she can watch her nietos grow up just as unhappy. Oh, and if you’re wondering why I missed the PSAT last year when I should have tried for National Merit Scholar, it was because no one else could stay home to watch my niece that day. (27-28)

Reflecting on this draft (which she does not submit), Marisa first quips, “I know that sounds pissy and super-critical,” only to assert, “but it’s completely true” (28). She then relates, “Then it hit me that I feel this way because I know I want something different” (28). As significant as such a statement is for suggesting the poignancy of Marisa’s situation, especially given its fatalistic tone, it also works effectively within the text’s broader gender implications.

Like works such as Luis J. Rodríguez’s América Is Her Name (1998) and Susan Gonzales Abraham  and Denise Gonzales Abraham’s Cecilia’s Year (2007), What Can’t Wait dramatizes a young Latina staring down the barrel of a dead-end fate.² Pérez executes this particularly well with the handling of female lineage. The female line of Marisa’s family includes her mother, her older sister (Cecilia), and her niece Anita. Her mother and sister embody the kind of future she does not want for herself as both are trapped in problematic, stifling relationships that they refuse to leave. (Divorce comes up in the course of the novel for each woman, in fact. As each woman rejects the possibility of leaving her spouse, the entrapment of them becomes clearer.) Moreover, both women threaten to hold Marisa back, tracking her into their same fates. For instance, Mrs. Moreno urges Marisa to marry her boyfriend Alan even though a) they have only begun to date, and b) they are barely graduating from high school. Mrs. Moreno’s rationale that Marisa ought to marry in order “to be away from here a little” (157) owing to problems between Marisa and her father only promises to trap Marisa as both Mrs. Moreno and Cecilia have been trapped.

Thus, when Marisa proclaims, “I want something different,” it is a different fate for herself as a racialized, classed, and gendered subject. With Anita in line to grow up, too, the disruption of the cycle that has already claimed Mrs. Moreno and Cecilia becomes that much more urgent.

While I really appreciate the novel’s engagement with matters of family and education, I find myself a bit leery about the turn toward sexual trauma. When Marisa runs away after a fairly vicious fight with her father (one which includes him declaring, “I am ashamed that you are my daughter” [124]), she first goes to Alan’s house, where she tries to initiate sex with him in an apparent effort at recovering some kind of self-validation. But when Alan stops her, wisely telling her, “You’re upset; you’re not thinking straight” (127), Marisa becomes angry, leaves, and ends up at Cecilia’s. One day at Cecilia’s, Pedro, a classmate, shows up and sexually attacks Marisa. The scene is powerful to be sure, and the aftermath wrenching to bear witness to:

I lock the door behind him and curl up on the floor, hugging myself and crying. When I finally get up and go to the bathroom, I don’t look in the mirror; I just drop my head straight over the toilet and throw up until there is nothing left.

I turn on the shower, dying to scrub every inch of my body…. (143)

In subsequent pages, Marisa is haunted by shame, guilt, and self-consciousness. I have to admit, however, that elements of this segment of the novel are reminiscent of Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak (1999). Of more concern, though, is the handling of Brenda. When Brenda starts seeing Pedro, Marisa wants to warn her but cannot manage it. When Marisa, desperately fearing for the safety of her friend, finally does manage to speak what has needed to be said, Brenda first says, “Don’t joke about that” (197), but then changes to “Oh my God, Marisa. Oh shit. All this time you were trying to tell me, and I just gave you hell. Lo siento tanto, babe” (197). At this point, I thought Brenda’s sympathy worked too easily. Perhaps it would have been more effective—and helpful—to portray more resistance on the part of Brenda to capture what some victims go through? Maybe Pérez wanted to emphasize a resolution for this conflict. Or maybe she was running out of pages and couldn’t flesh out this aspect of the story in all its complexity.

By the end of the novel, Marisa heads to UT Austin (that she was planning on sneaking off to college in the middle of the night struck me as a bit of a stretch) where a new life awaits. The final line reads, “There’s no magic here, just my own life” (232), but I think a more apt line to take away from the novel occurs earlier—admittedly in a different context—when she states, “But the only chance I am going to have are the ones I make for myself” (201). The latter lines stresses the difficult, indeed precarious position of the Latina teen. She’s in a tough spot, and with no guarantees that the conditions of her life will change on their own, it befalls her to protect herself and her own future. 

--phillip serrato, san diego state university

Notes

¹ See, for example, Anzaldúa’s Friends from the Other Side and Prietita and the Ghost Woman; Cofer’s The Meaning of Consuelo and Call Me María; Sandra López’s Esperanza: A Latina Story; Diana López’s Confetti Girl; and Michelle Serros’s Honey Blonde Chica novels.

² In one of the more telling moments in Rodríguez’s picture book, the eponymous girl’s fear for her future (or lack thereof) is succinctly articulated when we read, “América is sad. ‘Will this be my life?’ she wonders. ‘Not to write. To clean houses, get married, have children. To wait for the factory to feed us.’ She sees in her mind all of the sullen faces that look out of third-floor windows when she walks to school and the desperate men without jobs standing on street corners. They all seem trapped, like flowers in a vase, full of song and color, yet stuck in a gray world where they can’t find a way out. ‘Will this be my life?’”

Works Cited

Abraham, Susan Gonzales and Denise Gonzales Abraham. Cecilia’s Year. El Paso, TX: Cinco Puntos P, 2007.

Anderson, Laurie Halse. Speak. New York: Square Fish, 2011.

Anzaldúa, Gloria. Friends from the Other Side. San Francisco: Children’s Book P, 1993.

Anzaldúa, Gloria. Prietita and the Ghost Woman. San Francisco: Children’s Book P, 1995.

Canales, Viola. The Tequila Worm. New York: Wendy Lamb, 2007.

Cofer, Judith Ortiz. Call Me María. New York: Scholastic, 2006.

Cofer, Judith Ortiz. The Meaning of Consuelo: A Novel. Boston: Beacon Press, 2004

Dietrich, Lisa. Chicana Adolescents: Bitches, ’Ho’s, and Schoolgirls. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998

Harris, Mary. Cholas: Latino Girls and Gangs. New York: AMS P, 1988.

Jiménez, Francisco. Breaking Through. Sandpiper, 2002.

López, Diana. Confetti Girl. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2010.

López, Sanrda. Esperanza: A Latina Story. Mountain View, CA: Floricanto Press, 2008.

Molinary, Rosie. Hijas Americanas: Beauty, Body Image, and Growing Up Latina.  Emeryville, CA: Seal P, 2007.

Rodríguez, Luis J.  América Is Her Name. Willimantic, CT: Curbstone P, 1998.

Rodriguez, Richard. Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez. New York: Bantam, 1983.

Serros, Michelle. Honey Blonde Chica. New York, Simon Pulse, 2007.

Serros, Michelle. ¡Scandalosa!: A Honey Blonde Chica Novel. New York, Simon Pulse, 2008.

Vargas, Lucila. Latina Teens, Migration, and Popular Culture. New York: Peter Lang, 2009.

When Things and Words Meld into Poetry

Brown, Monica. Pablo Neruda: Poet of the People. New York: Henry Holt & Company, 2011.

When an author writes a biography, an assortment of political implications arises. Obviously, and in the first place, there is some kind of motivation for writing about the biographical subject at hand. As Julia Watson notes in remarks about autobiography which are equally appropriate for thinking about biography, the writing and publication of biographies “giv[es] cultural status to particular lives” (61). Upon undertaking a book project on a given individual, an author has decided—and concomitantly signals to readers—that this individual’s life is worthy, at the very least, of attention.

When reading a biography, it befalls the reader to deduce why this individual is indeed worthy of attention. The reasons can include the individual and his/her story being admirable, inspirational, and/or cautionary. There might also be an intended educational component to a biography as a biographer might seek to redress a popular ignorance or misconception about a certain person or issue or aspect of history. Of course, all the while there is the matter of what is included in the biography, what is not included, and what kinds of opinions and perspectives the reader is positioned to adopt.

If a given biography is crafted (or marketed) for children, the abovementioned stakes are heightened. One can wonder why exactly a young reader is being introduced to this specific biographical subject and what he/she is calculated to take away from the text and the introduction to this individual.

More than anything, Monica Brown crafts Pablo Neruda: Poet of the People to inspire readers to read and write, which to be sure is something direly needed nowadays as growing numbers of kids spend their time glued to video games and television screens. Granted, such an assessment of the text might raise alarms about biographical objectivity and the integrity and purpose of nonfiction. But in actuality, any text, including, if not especially, a biography, has its own slant and objective(s), not only because in a biography—especially a short picture book biography—choices have to be made and material has to be organized and directed, but because any and every text is biased. This is the point, for example, of George Szanto in Theater and Propaganda when he asserts that any and every text is propagandistic. With such a premise established, Szanto argues that the job of the critic is to evaluate the ideology that a given text propagates and its subsequent effects.

Brown’s picture book begins with Pablo as Neftalí, a child who “loved wild things wildly and quiet things quietly.” Brown then launches the dominant theme of this text when she explains that words “whirled and swirled [around the boy], just like the river that ran near his home in Chile.” Preferring reading over soccer, Neftalí decides as a child that he wants to become a writer.

Notably, a big jump occurs between a teacher giving the young boy books to read and the statement that “when he was a teenager, Neftalí changed his name to Pablo Neruda and began publishing his poems.” At this spot in the text, I actually thought some pages had stuck together, causing me to miss the bridge between his teacher’s gift and the dramatic change that occurs when the boy becomes a teenager. But, no, the narrative really does take this jump. As much as this book is about a writer and implies the magic of writing, I was disappointed that the texts doesn’t go into more depth as to why the boy wanted to become a writer and how the books impacted or otherwise affected him. Such additional commentary might have inspired reluctant readers/writers or resonated refreshingly with others.

I was able to move beyond this disappointment a few pages later when Brown provides a lush, almost excited inventory of the writing that Neruda began to do. She relates,

Pablo wrote poems about the things he loved—things made by his artist friends, things found at the marketplace, and things he saw in nature.

He wrote about scissors and thimbles and chairs and rings.

He wrote about buttons and feathers and shoes and hats.

He wrote about velvet cloths the color of the sea.

So nice about this passage is its emphasis on the fact that writing can be about anything, including our familiar surroundings (which is something Francisco Alarcón does splendidly in his poetry for children, by the way). In effect, writing—and poetry in particular—is demystified and celebrated for younger readers. The accompanying 2-page illustration by Julie Paschkis features streams of images and words. Among other things, this works brilliantly to suggest the endless fluidity of words and things and implies the poet’s ability to bend and otherwise play with them.¹

Indeed, the complentarity between pictures and text in this work is one of the best that I have seen in a picture book for children.² Brown clearly wants to convey that the world can be seen in words, and Paschkis does a fine job of visually demonstrating and enacting this. The result is nothing less than an enticing invitation to the reader to turn empirical sense into poetic sensibility.³

Over the final section of the book, Brown tries to segue into Neruda’s social and political activism. While the move from “Pablo loved mothers and fathers, poets and artists, children and neighbors, and his many friends around the world” to “When Pablo saw the coal miners working dangerous jobs for little money, he was angry” feels a bit clunky, Paschkis’s illustrations hold things together with a sustained portrayal of the omnipresence of words and their polymorphousness. By the time Brown mentions that “[Pablo’s] poems made leaders angry” and that he therefore had to flee the “soldiers [who] came to get him,” she provides important information, but it all makes a line like “Pablo loved opposites, so he wrote about fire and rain and spring and fall” seem like it comes from another book read long ago. But then, perhaps this again just shows the ways that words and poetry are available for all occassions as we grow up.

All of this gets back to the inherently difficult task that a biographer for children faces. Biography carries a host of responsibilities, including completeness. Yet a picture book for children is a very tight space. This particular picture book is at its strongest when it carries on about the wonders of writing. The material about Neruda’s activism seems somewhat included out of Brown’s sense of her obligation as a biographer, but this is fully understandable. To be sure, I might seem to be on the cusp—if I am not doing so already—of complaining about the inclusion of this material, but I don’t mean to do so, really. (If it had not been included, it goes without saying that I would probably be complaining about that.) If anything, I am being sensitive to what strikes me as some difficulties with this book with cohesion. At bottom, I think the difficulties I am seeing stem from an imbalance between the different components or strands of the narrative. That said, what perhaps becomes necessary in the final analysis is a recognition of and respect for the challenges intrinsic to the genre of the biographical picture book. Overall, this is a beautiful and effective picture book that gives readers a lot to think—and hopefully write—about. 

--phillip serrato, san diego state university

Notes

¹ I cannot help but point out that for a moment I personally found this 2-page illustration to teeter on being overwhelming. Words and images are different types of signifiers and require different modes of processing. As they spill across the two page spread, the viewer’s eyes toggle frenetically trying to take everything in and the mind just about convulses trying to process the disparate material. Incidentally, such a moment brings to mind a comment by Fredric Jameson on schizophrenia:

[T]he breakdown of temporality suddenly releases [the] present of time from all the activities and intentionalities that might focus it and make it a space of praxis; thereby isolated, [the] present suddenly engulfs the subject with undescribable vividness, a materiality of perception properly overwhelming, which effectively dramatizes the power of the material—or better still, the literal—signifier in isolation. This present of the world or material signifier comes before the subject with heightened intensity, bearing a mysterious charge of affect, [possibly] described in the negative terms of anxiety and loss of reality, but which one could just as well imagine in the positive terms of euphoria, a high, an intoxicatory or hallucinogenic intensity. (27-28)

I find fascinating the resonance between this passage and the cognitive dynamics precipitated by the encounter of the reader with Paschkis’s illustration (plus Brown’s accompanying rush of text). It strikes me that the reader is put in a schizophrenic position from which he/she will, ideally, emerge with the euphoria that Jameson describes (rather than, or perhaps after overcoming, any initial anxiety and loss of reality). It becomes especially interesting that this is taking place in a book for children. The child is a subject coming to terms with the real world, and it might be said that there is something fundamentally schizophrenic about the child’s negotiation of the real and the not-real. (This is probably where I ought to be consulting the work of D.W. Winnicott, Anna Freud, and Melanie Klein.) Incidentally, if we follow the lead of Jacques Lacan, we could read into the growth of the child his/her entry into the symbolic order. In effect, we might read the illustration in Brown’s picture book as one that captures or recreates or compels a schizophrenic drama in which the child negotiates the material world, the symbolic order, and the infinite horizons engendered by both.

² For an instructive discussion of picture book dynamics, including relationships between text and illustrations, see Maria Nikolajeva and Carole Scott, How Picture Books Work.

³ Richard Flynn offers an illuminating discussion of children, poetry, and children’s poetry in his article, “Can Children’s Poetry Matter?”

Works Cited

Flynn, Richard. “Can Children’s Poetry Matter?” The Lion and the Unicorn 17.1 (June 1993): 37-44.

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991.

Nikolajeva, Maria and Carole Scott. How Picture Books Work. New York: Garland, 2001.

Szanto, George. Theater and Propaganda. Austin: U of Texas P, 1978.

Watson, Julia. “Toward an Anti-Metaphysics of Autobiography.” The Culture of Autobiography: Constructions of Self-Representation. Ed. Robert Folkenflik, 57–79. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1993.

You Might Also Like

Alarcón, Francisco. Angels Ride Bikes and Other Fall Poems. San Francisco: Children’s Book P, 1999.

Alarcón, Francisco. Laughing Tomatoes and Other Spring Poems. San Francisco: Children’s Book P, 1997.

Rodríguez, Luis J.  América Is Her Name. Willimantic, CT: Curbstone P, 1998.

Some "Mextasy" in San Ysidro

Mextasy with Daniel Hernandez, Gustavo Arellano, Bill Nericcio, & Los Hollywood. The Front, San Ysidro, CA. 22 May 2012.

The Mextasy event held at The Front in San Ysidro, CA, last Tuesday was illuminating, inspiring, and invigorating. On the bill were author Daniel Hernandez, Gustavo “Ask a Mexican” Arellano, and San Diego State University professor Bill Nericcio. Los Hollywood closed the proceedings with a badass acoustic performance.

Before going into the wonders and details of what went down, the significance of the location cannot be overlooked. The Front is a space operated by Casa Familiar, a community-service agency that offers a diverse array of programs serving the people of San Ysidro. Within Casa Familiar’s Arts & Culture Division, The Front has been a dynamic space for assorted programs and events. Its position within the border zone where, to borrow a figuration from Gloria Anzaldúa, San Diego and Tijuana bleed into each other provided an appropriate laboratory for the cultural workers gathered this evening to indulge and showcase their postmodern, postnational experimentations.

Hernandez got things started by reading two excerpts from his book, Down and Delirious in Mexico City: The Aztec Metropolis in the Twenty-First Century. I had no previous familiarity with his work, but what he read was enough to prompt me to buy the book on the spot. First, he narrated his return to El Chopo, a traditionally countercultural marketplace in Mexico City that Hernandez describes as “the permanent citadel of the Mexican counterculture. Or what’s left of it” (35). Then, in response to a request from the audience, Hernandez continued with a reading of the opening chapter of the Spanish-language translation of his book, a chapter in which he narrates his participation in a pilgrimage to the famed Basilica of Guadalupe. Coincidentally (since he did not exactly plan to read the Basilica passage), the two excerpts had in common a description of two very different cultural cornerstones slipping away. For different spiritual reasons, people continue to trek to both El Chopo and the Basilica, but as Hernandez says of El Chopo, people’s ideas of these two places seem to be “on perpetual repeat” (35). In a manner that brings to mind another return-to-the-homeland narrative, Jessica Abel’s La Perdida, the author ends up finding his dislocation intact as he meanders through D.F.

Arellano followed with a reading from his newest book, Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America. Arellano has already made a name for himself not only as the eponymous sage of his Ask a Mexican column and book, but also as a historian of Latinos in Orange County (which is something one gets a taste of in his other book, Orange County: A Personal History). Much to my amusement, the selection that Arellano read spoke to a question that has been nagging us over here at Arte y Loqueras: Why do the names of so many taco shops end in “bertos?” For example, here in La Mesa we have within a few miles of each other “Aliberto’s,” “Roberto’s,” and “Rigoberto’s.” As much as the background that Arellano provided helped to explain the –berto’s phenomenon, it also showed that he is a man who does his homework. In his columns he may seem like an off-the-cuff smartass, but he is clearly very smart and informed and can deftly bring together issues of immigration, economics, and family drama into one seamless and instructive explanation. I’m sure his students at Cal State, Fullerton, where he is a lecturer in the Chicana and Chicano Studies Department, appreciate the wit and insight he brings to the classroom.

Nericcio wrapped up the readings section of the evening with a taste of his book Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the “Mexican” in America. This project glosses a broad selection of images and stereotypes of Mexicans in American popular culture, covering everything from dolls to movies to advertisements to cartoons. For his part this evening, Nericcio read from a section about Orson Welles and Touch of Evil. For those in attendance, this proved revealing for thinking about the construction (and distortion) of racial identities in the American imaginary, especially as they necessarily relate to the concomitant construction of racial hierarchies. In fact, for audience members the benefit of Nericcio’s talk was twofold: on one hand, they walked away with a new lesson on the film itself. On the other hand, Nericcio modeled the possibilities that arise when one looks around at and spends some time meditating on the assorted stuff that surrounds us (what he calls “the fabric of popular culture”).

Los Hollywood always put on amazing shows and on this night they not only utterly rocked again, but they also provided the perfect exclamation mark with which to close this evening. Every time I’ve seen them, it has struck me as uncanny how forceful a delivery vocalist/bassist Heidy Flores manages to muster. On song after song, including my—and probably everyone’s—favorite “No te Aguites,” she belted out bilingual lyrics that shook the building and the soul alike. To her left, guitarist Marcos Mondregon was uber-cool as he strummed and moved the music along. (In one of the cuter moments, at the start of a song Flores seemed to express concern to her guitarist about the placement of the capo on his guitar. Nonchalantly, Mondregon shook her off as if to say, I know what I’m doing.) Drummer Gustavo Mojica (who also plays for San Diego band Cabeza de Gallo) sat atop a beat box to Flores’s right. It was amazing to watch his dexterous ability to sustain a driving beat not only with his palms (which reddened as the set continued), but also with a few tambourines, one of which he had at one point duct-taped to his foot to free up his hands.

Musically the trio were impressive (to be sure, they are never anything less). Just as significantly, they effectively finished off what Hernandez started and which Arellano and Nericcio extended: making the audience feel excited about and proud of Chicano/a cultural studies in the 21^st century. All involved in Mextasy provided a much-needed reassurance that Chicano/a ideas, words, scholarship, and art are thriving.