A Passing West
A Passing West
Essays from the Borderlands
A unique voice in American fiction, Dagoberto Gilb is also a singular writer of personal and journalistic essays. In A Passing West he casts a penetrating gaze upon the culture and history of the Southwest, Mexican American identity, and his own family.
Gilb has a forceful message for readers: there is a Mexican America, and its culture is the lifeblood of the Southwest United States, which was Mexican land until the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The rest of the country, Gilb declares, does not want to know or respect the long history of Mexican America. His mission is to defend and proclaim its beauty and importance.
Ranging from accounts of research in Spain’s Archivo General de Indias and the culture of farming corn in Iowa to meditations on Mexican and Mexican American writers, deconstructions of Mexican American food, and the experience of teaching students confused about their own culture and identity, these sharply observed portraits are both thought provoking and entertaining. His parent, his youth and manhood, his new disabled life, and snapshots of Mexico City and Guatemala, California, and Texas—all are unforgettable thanks to Gilb’s brilliant vision and style.
“The whole Southwest is his stage. He revisits childhood, marriage, literary snobbery, and Mexican history with rough care. Gilb’s trouble is authentic and the stuff of literary craftsmanship. No one writes like him.”—Gary Soto, author of A Simple Plan
“Dagoberto Gilb’s A Passing West is a potent and incisive addition to American letters. His essays tackle matters such as racism, city life, education, the politics and history of Latinx publishing and writing, and the relationship between work and citizenship. His writings are both thought-provoking and passionate. Excellent!”—Yxta Maya Murray, author of The Queen Jade and God Went Like That
“Dagoberto Gilb is a national treasure. In these essays we ride with him on his mad journey—from high-rise construction worker to pioneering man of letters to unstoppable Latino literary force of nature.”—Héctor Tobar, author of Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino”
Dagoberto Gilb is the author of two previous books with UNM Press, The Magic of Blood, winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award and a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the anthology Hecho en Tejas, winner of the PEN/Southwest Book Award. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in both the New Yorker and Harper’s, and his work has been featured in Best American Essays and O. Henry Prize Stories.
Preface
I
A Passing West
Hurray for Losers!
A Little Bit of Fun before He Died
Thou Shalt Not Steal Books
Father Close, Father Far
A Los Cielos de México
Oily Hair con Slicked Back Notes on Greasy Literature
II
The Hexagon of the Conquest
The One Who Left
Border Petroglyphs
Las Milpas en Iowa
The First Resident of Belken County
We Have Been Here All Along
Remembering the Alamo
How Books Bounce
Tomato Potatoe, Chalupa Shaloopa
III
Now You Don’t See Us, Still You Don’t
Rivera and Rulfo
Doors in Old Guate
Hecho en Tejas
Texas Lit
La Próxima Parada Is Next
Huizache
Snow Angel
Fights
Publication Credits
