Review: Stella Pope Duarte. Women Who Live in Coffee Shops. Houston: Arte Publico Press, 2010.
Michael Sedano
Stella Pope Duarte's Vietnam war/Chicano movimiento novel, Let Their Spirits Dance, tells a powerful story that merits reading, both for its view of movimiento organization around the Vietnam war as well as Duarte’s skillful writing.
I know some readers--I among them--were put off by Duarte's stridently nationalistic stance at the conclusion of her Vietnam novel, the roll call of war dead Duarte limits to dead Chicano soldiers, to the exclusion other names. That was her author's prerogative, signalling that Jesse's life and death in Let Their Spirits Dance was the story of all those dead Chicano soldiers whom history and United States literature would otherwise ignore. All the men I trained with at Ft. Ord—not just raza--who followed orders and went off to die in Vietnam deserved to be noticed, not ignored. To me, the only color that mattered was the green uniform we all wore, hence my discomfort with Duarte's politics.
Ultimately, Duarte’s strategy proves prescient, doesn’t it? PBS’ WWII series planned to burn us out of our role in that history. Texas pinheaded textbook writers are erasing us out of US history. In today's Arizona, its "breathing while brown" law would stand Jesse and all those names up against a wall and demand they prove their citizenship. All those names Duarte omitted could walk past whistling Dixie without a care in the world. My apologies to Stella for resenting her insight.
It’s unlikely Duarte’s work in Women Who Live in Coffee Shops will engender even a whit of rejection from readers based on their ethnicity or Duarte’s focus. The thirteen stories feature either very young or very old people, and in addition to Chicana Chicano characters, Duarte peoples her tales with Italian, Polish, and Appalachian Anglos.
Here are Arizonans trapped in their own lives by poverty and its pernicious economic culture. But Duarte isn’t writing some bleeding heart tales of woe, but rather how hard scrabble people find ways to earn hope, or just a soupçon of satisfaction.
The title story, which comes fourth in the sequence, for example, has a host of locals—Chicana, black, Anglo--unite to protest the arrest of an Italian coffee shop owner. Duarte suggests Sal is guilty of something, maybe the revenge murder of a jewel thief, or something else. The piggish cops earn no respect from the locals, who relish poking a sharp stick in officialdom’s eye. When the child narrator’s mother hands Sal back the inciminating evidence she’d absconded in advance of the search warrant, it’s a measure of justice.
“Homage” shows how women and men readily close ethnic and class-based gaps. The first-person narrator is a clerical factotum in the county courthouse. Overdrawn and perpetually broke, she’s painfully aware of the fancy cars in prime parking spots, and the expensive consequences from the letters she and her co-worker stuff and put into the mail. She catches the eye and, owing to a studied vocabulary, the ear, of a mid-level manager. They flirt. He turns a cold shoulder to a needy Chicano couple. She nags. He has a change of heart. The couple will profit, and the clerk and the boss will have a date and who knows, a happily ever after future.
Readers will note how efficiently Duarte uses her words and material. In the coffee shop story, for example, a colorful bagwoman called Margaret Queen of Scots, is good for a couple of paragraphs, then forgotten as the plot turns to the central action. But as the collection closes, Margaret�
By: msedano,
on 9/29/2009
Blog: La Bloga (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
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Reyna Grande. Dancing With Butterflies. NY: Washington Square Press, 2009.
ISBN-10: 1439109060
ISBN-13: 9781439109069
Michael Sedano
Every now and again, one of “those novels” comes along that catches fire and finds itself on everyone’s must-read list. Put Dancing With Butterflies at the top of your list because Reyna Grande has one of “those novels” in her new release, Dancing With Butterflies. The novel combines excellent writing, compelling characters, and acute sense of place to make its 390 pages pass too swiftly.
Readers of “Los Angeles” novels will notice right away how Grande weaves in geographical details from throughout the region, from Highland Park to Boyle Heights, from Downtown to Pasadena. And her characters sometimes ride the bus, or walk. Street level gente, in other words.
Grande brings four women’s lives into acute focus. Middle aged Yesenia lives to dance. But age and arthritis make painful facts Yesenia’s mind refuses to acknowledge. Adriana harbors resentment at older sister Elena’s escape to college leaving young sister to abusive grandparents. Worse, there’s a dangerous second personality in Adriana who now and again runs wild. Elena is 36 weeks pregnant when she feels the baby die. Mourning leads to disaster for her marriage, made so much worse when she seduces a 17 year old boy. Finally comes Soledad. An undocumented worker, Sol’s costuming mastery sets Alegría dance company apart from competitors. Attempting her return from Mexico, Sol’s coyote abandons her in the Arizona desert.
Each character steps forthrightly onto her time on stage, to stand under Grande’s baleful gaze, but given voice by a skilled writer of conversation. Grande’s writing appears effortless, a tribute to the author’s control of her medium because there is so much one could heap on these women to get themselves right, but instead the characters do their own talking leaving the reader to make sense of the muck-ups and damn shames.
Yesenia steals dance troupe money to buy cosmetic surgery. Just as Yesenia’s TJ bargain tummy tuck goes bad, the dancers of Alegría revolt and the troupe breaks up. Much as Yesenia loves dance and this troupe, thinking her bad behavior the cause of this failure tortures but doesn’t defeat the determined dancer.
Adriana remains in an abusive relationship. She wants to sing, not dance, but because her mother danced, Adriana feels it’s a daughter’s duty to dance. And there’s The Other Adriana, some lurid, ugly tragedy looming ever closer.
Elena’s depression at losing the baby is made all the worse when she feels the opprobrium from family and friends because she has bedded the student. She is stunned when one calls her another Mary Kay Letourneau. Maybe she is? But what’s in it for Elena?
Soledad is about to get her own business going when her partner abruptly changes his plans, crushing her dream into yet one more frustration in her undocumented life. Left to be arrested in the desert, Sol is rescued by a hermit. When immigrants fleeing pursuing ICE agents pound on the door for succor, Sol sees the likelihood of capture if she offers an open door. The choice will haunt the remainder of her life, but she survives to return to L.A.
What’s OK? Can desperation mitigate foul selfishness? Where does the balance tip between reaching out to help others and holding on to help oneself? And when the fulcrum tilts in our favor, unfavorably for others, how does one define the outcome? These are tough questions you don’t have to ask, but are there in the text for the taking. Dancing With Butterflies isn’t going to hit someone over the head with an author’s message. The things these characters go through create ample reason to read, digest, and ask one’s own questions. Then recommend the book to a friend. Dancing With Butterflies is one of “those novels” you’ll enjoy so much you’ll want your friends to enjoy with you.
By: msedano,
on 1/13/2009
Blog: La Bloga (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
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By: Lisa Alvarado,
on 7/5/2008
Blog: La Bloga (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: chicana literature, women and literature, chicana fiction, Add a tag
By: John Deininger,
on 2/14/2008
Blog: Sugar Frosted Goodness (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: John Deininger, Valentine, Add a tag
Hi everybuddy. Today is my first day posting after many days (over a year) of lurking - what a wonderful and inspiring group this is!
I'm a freelance illustrator living in Seattle, Wa. Most of my work revolves around my pursuit of entering the children's book market.
I have a website: johnsgalaxy.net and a blog: johndeininger.blogspot.com
Happy Valentine's Day :)
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