One Community, Undivided, Uniquely on This Side of the Border

Frank Bergon reviews two new collections from Dagoberto Gilb: “New Testaments” and “A Passing West: Essays from the Borderlands.”

By Frank BergonOctober 15, 2024

• Fiction

• Memoir & Essay

DAGOBERTO GILB’S reputation as a major American writer with an original voice emerged nationally when he won the PEN/Hemingway Award for his first collection of stories, The Magic of Blood (1993). Thirty years later, after an additional half dozen books, his remarkable literary achievement continues to expand with two new books, New Testaments and A Passing West: Essays from the Borderlands.

Gilb’s rambunctious voice booms through the pages of these collections with volcanic force and unexpected twists and turns. Nothing he writes is uninteresting. He tells us how, at a young age, he “was aspiring to be, if not already, an elitist.” Hey, wait a minute, a reader might think, isn’t this guy supposed to be the defender of the underdog against the nation’s elitist prigs? Isn’t he the champion of working-class Mexicans, like those in fields where the Rio Grande flows between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez?

We read on to discover the fresh way Gilb works, with intelligence and humor, to smash stereotypes and enliven definitions. He thought of himself as “elitist” because he “wanted more, better, the best possible, at whatever it was.” He expands on the term, usually associated with snobbery or privilege, by explaining, “I was an elitist to my mind, or at least someone who believed in the better being better, that some can and will do better than others and should. Of course that meant that I could.” The author’s typical manner of circling back on his own thoughts in search of greater precision helps refresh our own thinking.

To read Gilb’s two new collections in tandem enlightens each reciprocally because the essays define and the stories vivify his central subject. Though Mexican Americans comprise close to 50 percent of the entire American Southwest (in some places, already 90 percent), Gilb observes that there is still “so much misunderstanding about who we are here, where we’re from.” He has confronted this topic for so many years with the insistence of a hammer clanging on recalcitrant metal that you’d expect his later essays to reflect some change, some progress. In a recent TEDx Talk Gilb delivered in Texas, “Now You See Us, Still You Don’t,” he intensifies his claim about “how little Mexico and […] Mexican American culture [are valued] in this world—not only in this huge southwestern quadrant of the United States, but in the entire country.”

As Gilb points out in his essays, Mexican Americans are still considered a foreign ethnic minority, when in fact they are “long-residing American citizens of American soil” going back more than 200 years, long before the fable of the Alamo turned history upside down. In his own pursuit of Mexican American history, Gilb takes us to Spain in one charming essay, where he holds in his hands an ancient legajo (file) from among some 80 million pages of documents stamped “Archivo General de Indias, Sevilla.” Many of the documents are related to Gilb’s American homeland, which was formerly an outpost in New Spain, then Old Mexico, then the US Southwest. He finds the document, in the swirls and curlicues of its cursive script, “terribly, startlingly beautiful,” but he confronts the blanks of history as well as his own limitations when he admits, with typical candor, “I cannot read any of it.”

Ignorance of Mexican America is also reflected in an overall neglect for its distinctive literature. With a wink and a nod, Gilb introduces Cormac McCarthy as “our most beloved ‘southwestern’ writer,’’ who came to Texas from Rhode Island via Tennessee but whose “Gothic border Romanticism,” Gilb wryly notes, “has nothing to do with Mexican Americans.” Other writers actually born in Texas, whose novels are about the Brown people McCarthy fails to see, begin with Américo Paredes, “the father of Mexican American lit.”

Gilb sticks with the term “Mexican American” because the word “Latino,” with its trendy journalistic “ting like the joyful mambo of Tito Puente,” marginalizes and distorts the Mexican experience of many of those labeled Latinos. (He finds the “x” in “Latinx” even more flattening.) Gilb traces the rise of the 1970s Chicano literary movement in California’s San Joaquin and Sacramento valleys through small-press publications of young, newly educated Mexican American poets, playwrights, and novelists. The 1990s surge of Chicana writers with feminist goals and ideals reached a wider audience through strong critical writing as well as fiction, poems, and plays. During the 2000s, Gilb taught for many years at the graduate level in an MFA creative writing program for mostly Chicana/o students, those he prefers to identify as “young MexAm writers.”

Gilb felt separated from the early Chicano movement because it wasn’t urban enough for him:

Those were days when to me Chicano meant someone who was involved with the United Farm Workers and César Chávez, and I had come from the city, from Los Angeles, where adults I knew drove beer and delivery trucks, were butchers, office and shipping and sales clerks, plumbers, firemen, repairmen, secretaries, assemblers, mechanics, taxi drivers. I myself had worked so many jobs already—industrial ones, in factories, both union and not—from early in high school on.

Some writers still garner polemical cred in the publishing world via knowing acknowledgments to Chávez’s UFW and fantasies of migrant-labor farmwork they know nothing about, but Gilb admits, “I really had no idea how broccoli or carrots grew or where they came from but a supermarket—and who ate vegetables not already in cans? […] I didn’t really have a clue about what it meant to work in the fields.”

The only essay in A Passing West dealing with farmwork came out of an assignment to write about Iowa for a 2008 anthology called State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America (2008). Gilb spends time with “H2A workers, meaning they have papers and are hired temporarily,” bused from Monterrey, Mexico, to work in the summer cornfields, a job that local boys and girls used to do. He talks to Raúl, originally from Big Spring, Texas, and Alejandro, from Nayarit, Mexico. Alejandro tells Gilb he has picked every fruit, every vegetable: “This is a good job, he says. He’ll come back as often as he can.” Gilb’s matter-of-fact acceptance of the Mexican workers’ satisfaction with their treatment and pay will be surprising to many readers.

Clarity comes when we read, in “The One Who Left,” about the contrasting plight of an urban worker who leaves his wife and children in Mexico and arrives paperless in a city to sweep sawdust, pound spikes, dig plumbing trenches, lift cinder blocks, scrub masonry tools, and coil hoses. “He is a loyal citizen to a job, and he is a patriot of its country. […] Like everyone else, he wants to become wealthy in his country.”

Gilb illuminates the contemporary working-class urban West with unparalleled originality. Drawing on his own experience and that of people he knew in the cities where he lived (Los Angeles, El Paso, Santa Barbara, and Austin), he brings into view those “unseen in plain sight” in urban Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, and California. Gilb grew up in L.A. as the only child of a single mother born in Mexico, who “was gone too much, dated plenty, and liked to dress plush and drink from cocktail glasses.” When Gilb was three, she divorced his German American father, a gruff, shadowy figure who fought in the Second World War as a US Marine Corps sergeant, learned Spanish growing up among Mexicans in East Los Angeles, and then served as the floor supervisor of some 200 workers, mostly Mexican, in an industrial laundry plant for 49 years. Gilb later knew him only as the “boss” when, at 13, he went to work for him in the laundry during summers, after school, and on weekends. He quit after his dad suggested that his hair was too long. In his senior year, Gilb attained a security clearance to work as a janitor on the graveyard shift at a McDonnell Douglas aircraft plant.

“Nobody ever told me to go to college. That I should,” Gilb says. But he was the only one in his high school class to push on (“it was either Vietnam or, to stall, junior college”), where he got an F in English as opposed to the Ds he got in high school for not doing his homework. He continued working full-time while taking night courses at another community college, finally getting a B in freshman composition. He was thrilled to be discovering books at last: “It was like discovering girls for me. And my world flipped. […] I was starving for it all.” In his junior year, he transferred to UC Santa Barbara, where he majored in philosophy and religion, eventually earning a master’s degree in religious studies. When he “backdoored” his way into the University of Texas at El Paso as a part-time teacher of remedial composition (under the false presumption that he had a graduate degree in English), he worked full-time across the street as a carpenter on a construction site, the second-highest-paid on the job because he could also tie steel, an ironworker’s trade. When writing stories there—and later in Los Angeles, married with two sons—he continued to work construction for 16 years, mostly as a union carpenter on high-rise buildings.

Unsurprisingly, many of the stories gathered in New Testaments are set in El Paso, Austin, and Los Angeles, while others take place in Mexico, where Gilb has been spending more time in recent years. The first tale, “Gray Cloud on San Jacinto Plaza,” opens with a boy from a poor family in El Paso experiencing a mysterious gray cloud over the city, maybe from the nearby Asarco copper smelter. As a student at the University of Texas at El Paso, the boy falls in love with a mexicana—“from Mexico. Real México, not like our house’s version.” Once married, they both work as translators “for government and lawyers and business people. We didn’t have to live in El Paso. We bought a house in Mexico City, in Coyoacán, on Calle Xicoténcatl.” (Gilb identifies Colonia Coyoacán as his home in the preface to his essays.)

Moving to Mexico isn’t the same for all. Another story centers on Samuel, born in Mexico City but raised in East Hollywood: “His LA was Armenians, Turks, Lebanese, Filipinos and Thai and Cubanos, Blacks, Mexicanos, and Chicanos. Also aging and old white people […] Nobody rich or close to it.” A high school dropout, he earned Ds and Fs in English and speaks Spanish like a sixth grader, but he lands “a great maintenance job” in a hospital, works his way up to department supervisor, and, after retiring with a pension, goes back to his “natal birthplace.” His brother, a successful painter in Mexico City, is dead, his paintings no longer selling; Samuel’s sister-in-law is a Zapoteca from Oaxaca, once called an “india” though she now prefers “indígena.” Samuel takes an Uber and strains to recall words to tell the driver about his shock at all the trees and plants in Mexico City: “It’s so beautiful […] All this green here. Nothing like where I live.” He learns that the driver has no pension, savings, or social security from his work for prominent television and radio programs, so he started driving for Uber. “I’m sixty-seven. I couldn’t find any other job. It’s been very hard.” That night, in Samuel’s cheap rental flat, rain puddles on the floor as it did during his childhood, and he wakes to a rumbling earthquake. His hand touches the wall, whose “plaster had become plastic, molten, wavy”—nothing like the little quakes he’s felt in Los Angeles, but he’s back where he came from.

Several characters who work construction jobs appear in these pages, such as Carlos, who has a moment of glory when he’s featured in a magazine article titled “A Chicano Climbs High,” showing him “hanging off about ten floors” of a high-rise being built at Wilshire and Grand. His interview for the piece evolves into a dalliance with the journalist, who calls to meet him again years later in a Starbucks when he’s out of work, divorced, “a poor Chicano getting by.” Originally an L.A. native and R & B fan (Smokey Robinson, Mary Wells, Sam Cooke), he had demonstrated an ease in both English and Spanish that impressed the “mexicanos” in a nearby diner. Now, years later, he hates his old flame’s use of “de nada” and her misuse of “con chingados”: “In the past, Spanish meant I was in with a white girl like her. […] Now it was only aggravating.” The sting of racism hits him when a “slobbish” street person, clearly troubled, accosts him in Starbucks, conflating ethnic slurs as he shouts, “Stay away from me, you stinking wetball! Go back to where you came!”

In another story, after pouring cement on the ninth floor of a downtown L.A. high-rise, with 16 floors to go, a construction worker is approached for drugs during his morning break. He’s sitting between the Spanish-speaking laborers and some carpenters, all white guys except for his Black partner, “Doc,” a former running back from Compton. He later defends himself and his brother against his wife’s criticism for dealing drugs, their “movido”: “We need the money, right? […] He wants better. […] We both want better. […] You think he should just work for some pendejo and say a sus ordenes all day?”

The code-switching in these stories—mixing two languages in conversation—reflects a “people who speak two languages at once,” with varying degrees of competency, as Gilb explains in an essay in A Passing West. These are not “two cultures. […] [T]his community is one, undivided, uniquely on this side of the border.” The nonfluent reader can usually figure out the meaning of occasional Spanish words from their context. For example: “Well, I love las mujeres making las tortillas. […] We are the people of esta tierra. It isn’t always easy, but así es.” Some phrases may be a bit harder to understand, but none require more than the rudimentary Spanish that should be a reasonable expectation of US citizens today.

Gilb says he doesn’t write to “advance political points,” avoiding “political blah” even in his nonfiction, but his stories illuminate political questions that befuddle many pundits, particularly regarding the increasingly conservative leaning of many Mexican Americans in the Southwest. “We want better” becomes the spoken and unspoken refrain of many workers in these stories. The teenager who drops out of high school and goes to work for his uncle in an industrial laundry is happy to be “making coin” and buying “a nothing-special, four-door Ford—no more bus!” His co-workers include a Mixtec villager whose name the kid can’t pronounce, another from San Luis Potosí, and one claiming to be an Arizona Mexican Indian, though he can’t speak English or any Native language. When the boy dangerously falls in love with a “super cute” woman at the plant, “years older than [him], who was married” and “in her 20s, a grown woman,” a co-worker can only interpret his quiet joy by asking: “You get a raise?”

Humor filters through the colloquial telling of even the saddest of Gilb’s stories. A boy abandoned by his parents ends up sleeping on a couch in a South Gate home with a tío and tía, two primos and two primas: “We were a family like in a TV show that was never on any TV.” The boy works full-time while attending junior college and ends up “extremely happy” writing about high school sports for the El Paso Herald-Post and living in a hacienda-style apartment with his girlfriend Emily, who makes “un chingo from her job […] with a cross-cultural-international Mexico-USA institute.” He explains, “I never expected to meet anyone like her in El Chuco. She’d gone to Brown, way above me,” spoke “Mexico City-learned Spanish,” and had money from birth.

Of course, things erupt when the boy’s Tía Velma arrives on her way to San Antonio with her daughter, the boy’s prima, who just finished serving four months in the Orange County jail for something related to “solicitation”—that is, “saying yes for money […] a specific word that Tía Velma omitted.” Unlike the boy and his girlfriend, his cousin had neither education nor money, nor did her brother, the boy’s primo, who “was [a] tatted cholo by 16 […] made it through juvie and out and then signed up for the army […] until he got a long stint in the pinta, San Q.”

In writing about a wide range of people, Gilb follows the literary tradition of “writers [he] loved [who] lived in an outside world” that “probably reflected the writer’s actual personal life, region, and occupation.” Three funny, affecting stories in New Testaments are about men late in life, all solitary and fragile, one a former high school and college football star, another an accomplished guitarist and dealer for 10 years in the music scenes in Texas, Denver, and Los Angeles, both disabled by car crashes. Gilb writes in an essay about his own experience, both funny and terrifying, while alone and snow-trapped in his Texas home during an Arctic freeze without power or heat. Disabled from a stroke—a “brain injury,” he says, a decade earlier, that affects his right side—he could no longer sign his name and strained to type on his computer with his left hand, as he does today. By now, it’s clear that the credibility of Gilb’s fiction comes from writing out of his own experience, and what distinguishes his work from the autofiction that has recently come into vogue is his artistry.

Five of the 11 stories in New Testaments are first-person narratives, five are told from a limited third-person point of view, and one reflects the dual views of a Chicano and his Anglo girlfriend at a restaurant run by an Asian Mexican. Gilb’s aesthetic is distilled in a dicho that should be announced to all aspiring fiction writers on the first day of class: “A story has a closer kinship to poetry than to novels.” Even his nonfiction strives for poetic constraint and discipline. His stories emphasize—in a way that makes another implicit political point—that education is important for how it can improve lives. For Gilb, the experience was life-changing: “I found out about literature. It became the religion I believed in.”

This brings us back to his repeated claim: “I am an elitist. That is, I believe in the best and that it should be admired and learned from and supported. It’s just that my own view of best isn’t what goes for best in this country of my birth.” The “best” in his view stems not from a pro-business education or the latest ecstasies of consumer culture but from stories, essays, and poems that invite us to empathize with the lives of others and that shock us into learning what we don’t yet know. Whether featuring the endearing naivete of a teenage dropout or the protective self-regard of a socially neglected old person, Gilb’s stories reveal the characters’ inner lives as they broaden the perspectives of readers. While his fictional techniques may bleed into his nonfiction, there’s a difference: his essays perceptively tell us about people, while his stories get inside their skins. Nobody does it better.