HOMEWARD BOUND: NEW MEXICO

PLAYING THE SCENE READ GAME: THE SANDOVAL SISTERS' SECRET OF OLD BLOOD

If you're in Taos or Albuquerque please come by and say hello.  Please pass this info on to your friends in the area.

TAOS, Saturday, September 28, 2013, 5:00 p.m.

Location: SOMOS Salon at 233-D

Paseo del Pueblo Sur

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ALBUQUERQUE, Sunday, 09/29/2013 3:00 pm

Location: BOOKWORKS

4022 Rio Grande Blvd NW

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The Sandoval Sisters' Secret of Old Blood won First Place at the the 15^th annual International Latino Book Awards, 2013 in two categories: Best Historical Fiction and Best First Book.

I started public school in Santa Fe in the fourth grade after attending parochial schools in Texas. Mom had returned to her Gallegos roots proud of her new Anglo last name: O'Briant. It was a rough transition for me, not made any easier by my thick Texan accent cemented forever with that surname. Mom helped me dress for my first day in a cute dress, petticoat and matching patent leather shoes and purse. A ragtaggle group of kids lined up against the adobe-style wall waiting for the bell. The girls' dresses hung limp and lackluster over their ashy brown legs. One blonde boy pulled a booger from his nose and wiped it on the wall. No one laughed or teased, and everyone seemed tired. My clean hair bounced in Shirley Temple coils around my head. "Hi y'all!" They stared at me without expression and with no shared words picked up the gravel that constituted our playground and flung it at me.

This is the mortar of my making, the porous glue that stuck the last bit of iconoclast onto my isolated self. Did anyone like me?

Only the boys.

Review: Walking Home

          Walking Home: Growing Up Hispanic in Houston by Sarah Cortez is a 76-page mixed-genre literary memoir. Using a stained glass window and its colors to frame her memories, the author looks back at three generations of her family, setting the foundation for her today. The cover of the book is the Annunciation Window found in the Villa de Matel Chapel.

          I flipped to it often while reading the poetry in the first section. It’s the usual flat two-dimensional religious rendering of the Madonna accepting her destiny, but this window is not an exact metaphor for Cortez’ poetry.  Rather, it is the radiant, albeit humbling, effect of this depiction on the prayerful masses to which I responded, and this made her family come alive for me. I’ve never experienced the pure essence of that spiritual belief, but appreciated that there is no judgment in her words, just pure acceptance and love.

          Her mother’s hopes and aspirations also spoke to me.  A mother’s wishes for her child’s future reveal a great deal about her own hopes and unfulfilled dreams. The dichotomy between the then in Sarah’s memoir and her now is what intrigued me the most, especially toward the end of the first section when she changes POV from female to male.  Who of our generation and gender have not done so? For Cortez this meant going to war in “Blood-red” and “Vegetation.”    

          In the second section, Cortez’ family life and growing up in Houston is vivid and filled with scent, humid Texas nights, and gastronomic delight. Her father appears in most of the poem’s here, while her mother recedes, except in relation to her kindness to a dwarf in “The Gift”; her reaction to a handsome gutter salesman in “Joe Angel”; and, perhaps even to the milkman in “The Delivery”.  These poems are lessons learned and depict the growing sexual consciousness of the young Cortez.

          Sarah Cortez is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters.  She has edited five anthologies of poetry, memoir, and crime fiction for both young adult and adult audiences for the publishing houses of Arte Publico Press and Akashic Books. Her work is widely anthologized in collections by Penguin, the Great Books Foundation, and other international publishers.  She is the author of How to Undress a Cop, and edited Windows into My World: Latino Youth Write Their Lives (2007); Hit List:The Best of Latino Mystery (2009); Indian Country Noir (2010); and You Don’t Have a Clue: Latino Mystery Stories for Teens (2011).  She lives and works in Houston, Texas.