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The City of Palaces
Michael Nava
Terrace Books, University of Wisconsin Press, 2014




Michael Nava published his first novel, The Little Death, in 1986. That book marked the debut of Henry Rios, a gay Chicano lawyer/detective who has become an iconic character in the crime fiction genre. The seven books in the Rios series, hailed as groundbreaking, have won six Lambda Literary Awards. The books recently were reissued in the Kindle format. In recognition of the excellence and popularity of Nava’s writing, he was the recipient of the 2000 Bill Whitehead Lifetime Achievement Award in LGBT literature. That year also marked the publication of the last book in the series, Rag and Bone, along with Nava's announcement that he had retired as a mystery writer. Lucha Corpi, one of the cornerstones of Chicana/Chicano crime fiction and a person obviously qualified to judge, has noted that many consider Nava to be one of the “grandfathers” of the Chicano mystery genre (along with Rolando Hinojosa, who published Partners in Crime in 1984. See Lucha’s Confessions of a Book Burner, page 55.)

The City of Palaces marks Nava’s return to book length fiction, much to the relief of his many, many readers. And what a grand return it is.

Nava’s explanation of how he came to write this novel is worth repeating. Here are a few paragraphs from the author’s website:

Beginning in 1995, Nava started researching a novel about the life of silent film star Ramon Novarro, a Mexican immigrant who came to Hollywood in 1915 after his family fled their homeland during the Mexican Revolution. Novarro was one of the first generation of internationally famous movie stars, like Rudolph Valentino, Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin. Nava was drawn to Novarro not only because of their shared ethnic heritage but also because it was an open secret in Hollywood that Novarro was gay.
 
At the same time, he became interested in the Yaquis, an Indian tribe that inhabited the northwest state of Sonora along the border with Arizona. In the late nineteenth century, the Mexico government began to forcibly evict the Yaquis from their ancient homeland, a lush river valley at the edge of the Sonoran desert, to make way for Mexican settlers. But the Yaquis put up a fierce resistance and the Mexican government ultimately pursued a policy of extermination against the tribe that resulted in its virtual extinction. Nava’s great-grandparents were among the few Yaquis who had survived by escaping to Arizona where his grandfather, Ramón, was born in 1905.
 
Eventually, these interests converged and he began to write a novel that would tell the story of the Mexican Revolution, the near-genocide of the Yaquis, and the rise of silent film. Midway through his first draft, he recognized that this undertaking was too vast for a single book, so he conceived a series of novels called The Children of Eve, after the line in the Salve Regina addressed to Mary, the mother of Jesus: “To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve.” The first novel in that series is The City of Palaces, which is set in Mexico City in the years before and at the beginning of the 1910 Mexican Revolution.

At its heart, The City of Palaces is the love story of Alicia Gavilán and Miguel Sarmiento. Alicia is wealthy, religious, saintly, and beautiful but scarred (from smallpox.) Miguel is an atheistic doctor with a long family history of involvement in Mexico’s political scene. Miguel feels something like love at first sight when he encounters Alicia, but he struggles against his “manly” aversion to her scars. Alicia, on the other hand, may be spiritual and otherworldly, but she is sensual and most pragmatic. The two star-crossed lovers overcome obstacles put in their way by their families, the social stratification of early twentieth century Mexico, and their own inhibitions, fears, and prejudices. Yes, love conquers all.

A sure sign of excellent writing is that we read the words but see the images created by the author. As I read this book, I saw not only the decay and corruption of Mexico City at the end of the Díaz dictatorship, but I also met the people – the poor and oppressed masses that struggled together in the colonias and slums of the city, the wealthy elite hanging on to their fantasies of Europeanization and ostentatious glitter as their world collapsed, the passionate and somewhat naive revolutionaries who courageously rallied around the doomed Francisco Madero. The images are clear enough, and the writing is so direct and on point, that it does not take much to imagine this story as an HBO miniseries.

The novel sweeps through sixteen years of Mexican history. Nava has done his research, so the details are perfect. He hits high notes with his descriptions of neighborhoods, cafes and churches, references to historical figures such as Huerta, Zapata, Orozco, and Madero, and the sense of tumultuous change that was inescapable no matter how hard some tried to ignore it.

At the end, the book has transitioned to include the story of Alicia’s and Miguel’s child, José, described as a beautiful, sensitive boy who steals away from the safety of his grand “palace” to feed his secret desire for the new moving pictures, shown in dark and dirty alleys where only the most common people enter. Although there is tragedy at the end, there also is hope. The story finishes with these thoughts from Miguel: “[T]here appeared in the desert darkness an archway lit up with electric lights. It spelled out a greeting so simple in its unintentional arrogance he did not know whether the tears that filled his eyes were tears of anger or gratitude, but he wept them all the same as he spoke the words aloud: ‘Welcome to America.’” How many times has that scene been repeated by our own families?

Michael Nava tells a timeless story, a literary jewel waiting for La Bloga’s readers. I can only patiently anticipate the second novel in this series.

For another review of this book, see Michael Sedano’s post on La Bloga at this link.


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[from the the author's website]

I'm very proud of this collection of scholarly essays. You'll find pieces on Sor Juana, on la Malinche, on Chicana feminist artists and lesbian theorists, on the murdered girls and women of Juárez, as well as a rewriting of the Coyolxauhqui myth, and an opening letter to my paisana from the border, Gloria Anzaldúa, in gratitude for her lenguas de fuego. There are also 8 color plates and 37 black and white photos. Artwork includes different images by Alma Lopez, beginning with that fabulous cover she created for the occasion of the book's publication, as well as pieces by Ester Hernández, Yreina Cervantez, Liliana Wilson, Patssi Valdez, Laura Aguilar, Deliliah Montoya, Alma Gómez-Frith, Miguel Gandert, Alfonso Cano, the "Saint Jerome" of Leonardo da Vinci, the iconic "American Progress, 1872" by John Gast, and a painting of Juana Inés by my very own mother, Teyali Falcón that she created for the publication of Sor Juana's Second Dream.




Hearts & Hands: Creating Community in Violent Times, Second Edition
Luis J. Rodriguez
7 Stories Press - July, 2014

[from the author]

Join us in celebrating the book release of Hearts & Hands: Creating Community in Violent Times, Second Edition this Saturday, July 26, 2014 from 5pm to 8pm.

Live art by Rah Azul and silent art auction fundraiser during reception beginning at 5pm followed by author reading at 6pm. The event is free to the public, donations welcome.

The event will begin with a reception that will include live art by Rah Azul, a self-taught painter, muralist and poet based in the San Fernando Valley. Rah Azul's work is featured on the cover of the new Hearts & Hands book. There will be limited prints available of the book cover artwork for sale. The silent art auction will feature a special edition by this featured artist.

"Hearts & Hands is a book that belongs in the hands of any person or organization wanting to understand and work with youth and community in a respectful, meaningful way."

-Trini Rodriguez, Co-Founder of Tia Chucha's Centro Cultural & Bookstore

Tia Chucha's Centro Cultural & Bookstore | 13197 Gladstone Ave., Unit A | Sylmar | CA | 91342
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Many of you know that as part of La Bloga's 10th anniversary commemoration several bloquistas participated in a panel at the International Latina/o Studies Conference. See Amelia Montes's most recent post for more info about and photos of the event. The panel invigorated and inspired all of us, and many of our readers and friends gathered to talk about and help us celebrate La Bloga. Seven of our eleven contributors made it to the Windy City, and we had a great time together. We hope to do something similar again. No rhyme or reason, here are a few photos taken in Chicago. 

Toddlin' Town

Palmer House Stairwell

Millennium Park - Selfie

Millennium Park - Face

Millennium Park - Heads

Dessert at Zapatista - Free for La Bloga!

Long Live the Blues!

From the Galería Sin Fronteras Exhibit at the National Museum of Mexican Art

Wrapping Up the Panel

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One of the regrettable things that has happened to Denver’s North Side, where I've lived for more than thirty years, is the rise and victory of the “suburban aesthetic”: boxy, boring housing lined up in rows; a uniform “non-conformist” style from clothes to music; restaurants that are destinations rather than good places to grab a bite to eat; an obsession about “making it,” a flaccid, common denominator cultural perspective. A great neighborhood has to be more than that.



Later.

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Alicia Gaspar de Alba has done it again, created an incredibly arresting novel, Calligraphy of the Witch. It’s a deeply emotional story with some of the same flavor as Gaspar de Alba’s important 1999 novel, Sor Juana’s Second Dream. In Calligraphy of the Witch, a character from Sor Juana’s convent—the nun’s scribe, in fact—frees a slave from the sadistic Mother Superior and they flee hopefully to freedom they seek in a black colony near Vera Cruz. But Aléndula, the slave, and Concepción Benavídez, the amanuensis, are captured by a Dutch slaver and carried into rape and captivity, up to Boston.

The pirate captain’s surname, de Graaf, is too much for the British tongue, so he’s been christened Seagraves by the Boston merchants. When he sells Concepción as a slave, her given name is irrelevant and the Greenwoods name her Thankful Seagraves, in honor of her freedom to be their slave.

Gaspar de Alba partitions Concepción’s story into manageable parts. An introduction in a daughter’s voice. The brutal voyage from New Spain, her earliest years in Boston, a middle passage when Thankful Seagraves is married to the old man Tobias Webb--Goody Greenwood’s father-- Concepción’s trial and imprisonment as a witch, and the end story. Several passages are typeset in script in the manner of a scribe. Fortunately, the script font is entirely legible, thus adding to the reading experience.

The voyage to New England for the twenty-something Concepción is one rape after another followed by beating and all manner of brutality. Unknown to the dark-skinned de Graaf, he’s impregnated the girl with his blonde genes. That’s what Concepción’s daughter looks like, far more resembling Rebecca Greenwood’s blonde blue-eyedness than the mestiza birth mother’s brown skin and bi-colored eyes.

The merchant Greenwoods have been unable to sire another offspring, so Rebecca starts a devious program to steal the child and raise the girl as her own daughter. This entails turning the child against the mother in truly horrific ways. The culture of the Visible Saints breeds hatred into the child, and when the mother Thankful Seagraves is arrested for witchery, her Popery, the devilish Spanish tongue the mother speaks provide persuasive evidence of guilt. Even more persuasive is the brainswashed daughter has provided the most damning evidence, such as the devil’s own creed embroidered on a cloth the mother lovingly insisted the child memorize:

Hombres necios que acusáis
a la mujer sin razón,
sin ver que sois la ocasión
de lo mismo que culpáis:

si con ansia sin igual
solicitáis su desdén,
¿por qué queréis que obren bien
si las incitáis al mal?

Forced to translate, Concepcíon recognizes how Sor Juana’s satire could turn itself into evidence before the clouded evil of Cotton Mather and his ilk:

Whose is the greater fault
In an errant passion?
She who falls for pleading,
Oh he who, fallen, pleads?
Who is more to blame,
Although both be guilty of transgression,
She who sins for a commission,
Or he who for sin will pay?

Hence with much logic do I unravel
That men’s arrogance wins the battle
For in ways direct or subtle
Men are the sum of world and flesh and devil.

With Concepción’s differences with her world viewed therein as not mere deficits but signs of evil, the reader is not surprised at the tragic consequences that befall the Mexican slave. Yet, the author keeps the reader hanging on every incident and development. Despite foreshadowing the story’s most tragic elements—the novel’s introduction in the estranged daughter’s voice, the seer’s vision that daughter would be stolen by the barren merchant’s wife and turned against mother, Concepción’s education at Sor Juana’s hand plopped in the middle of superstitious Puritans—Gaspar de Alba keeps a reader in thrall through every incident and stomach-turning violation.

Against these fearful pressures, Alicia Gaspar de Alba builds an almost unbearable tension. Will the innocent woman be hanged as were others? Will the daughter discover the truth, and if discovered, accept it? What could possibly save Concepción from the inevitable? So intense does the author build the tension that the reader keeps turning pages repeating the incantation, “it’s only fiction, it’s only a story”.

An excellent story, and, as one would expect, more than a mere historical exercise. There’s a strong contemporaneity in Concepcíon Benavídes’ Thankful Seagraves story that reflects our times or echoes themes of earlier literatura chicana. An uneven struggle for identity caught in the conflict between the weaker Spanish-speaking culture and the dominant English-speaking world creates strength in the parent but a burning desire of the daughter not to be seen as her mother’s child. As the witch hysteria begins to cool, the validity of confessions won through torture takes on a clarity for some that others refuse to accept. An underlying greed and covetousness masked by the guise of righteousness infects the rise and ebb of injustice.

Concepcíon is one of those flies to wanton gods who bounces helplessly from powerful enemy to powerful enemy until the abuse grows too great. Much of the tension in Calligraphy of the Witch grows from the seemingly total helplessness of women and the evil of men. What’s a woman to do? When Greenwood’s lust turns to rape, in a blind rage Thankful Seagraves wraps a rope around her former owner’s neck and throttles him good. The reader’s heart leaps with joy, so completely evil a character Gaspar de Alba has crafted, then sinks in dread. Had she killed him, there could be no possibility of reprieve. But what of hope? When a woman is battered so much that her only recourse seems to be murder, what should she, what can she do?

Among Concepcíon’s practices is writing letters to Sor Juana, Aléndula, and Concepcíon’s mother, only to burn them later, in the woods. This deviltry becomes evidence against her in her witchery trial. But in one such letter, the scribe offers a lesson she hopes her daughter might one day profit from:

“Aléndula once told me that there are always four choices to every decision: the wise choice, the foolish choice, the safe choice, and the choice that someone else makes for you. “

In the end, Hanna Jeremiah Greenwood, née Juana Jerónima Benavídez, is faced with this logic. It is 1704. Her mother has been gone a decade, and Mama Becca has died, too. Hanna Jerónima, la bebita de Concepcíon is a mother of twins whom she’s named in English after herself and her unknown Mexican grandmother. Daughter comes to a point in her life when she can finally shed herself of all that heritage and go on with her English life. She will make one of those four choices, either leaving the reader frustrated, or completely frustrated, either a little joyful or fully relieved. In that welter of emotions will be a bit of sadness accepting that the story did have finally to end.

La Bloga welcomes your comments and observations and this or any column. Equally welcome are guest columnists. Please express your interest in being our guest by clicking here, or leaving a comment during the week.

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During the last two years, pretty much every aspect of my life has changed, with things only now just starting to settle down. For the first time during that window, I took a month off (August) and am not doing any travel or presentations for work. Instead, I’ve spent a small portion of this newly-recovered time trying to re-establish routines that long ago fell by the wayside.

One of those routines is how I keep up, something I haven’t been doing very well during this time. I’ve been experimenting with different aggregators, trying to find one that makes me more efficient that I can access while on the go. I’d given up on the mobile access, mainly because I was looking at it through the lens of my Treo since it’s the one internet access point I always have with me. It took me a while, but I finally got around to trying Google Reader, and so far I’m pretty impressed, mainly because of Google Gears. Besides the fact that it’s pretty cool, it’s incredibly useful if you’re a laptop user and I think it has the potential to play an important role in the next few years.

Basically, Google Gears is code that anyone can embed in their online tools to make them available offline. It’s integrated into Google Reader via a one-time install that doesn’t even require you to restart your browser. Once activated, a little icon appears in the upper right-hand corner, green for online, purple for offline.

It sounds simple enough, but here’s what happens when you click the green button. Gears downloads all of the posts in your Reader (minus the images) so that you can keep reading when you’re offline. You can still use the standard keyboard commands to navigate and quickly scan your news, just as if you were online. When you do get back to a live connection, you click on the purple icon, Reader goes back online, and it synchronizes your un/read items back to the Google servers, including any items you starred for future reference.

–or–

Now that I have a laptop I am willing to carry back and forth to work, Gears has been a godsend. I load up feeds at home in the morning, go offline, read them on the train, go online before leaving work, load up my aggregator again, go offline, read new items on the train, and then synchronize again when I get back home. I’ve had so little time lately (moving to a new house could be a full time job in itself!) that this has been the only way I’ve been able to track the online world for the past couple of months.

Like other disruptive technologies such as digital video recorders (like Tivo), MP3 players, and feed readers, it’s changing how I interact with information/media, especially since other sites can use Gears, thereby offering their services even when the user is offline. The other place I have used it is on the to-do site Remember the Milk. One day I logged in there and could magically add Gears to it. Now I can manage my lists on the train, at the airport, or anywhere else (as long as I’ve remembered to click on that icon and tell Gears to take that site offline so I could keep using it). These days I really wish I could add Gears to WordPress so that I could also blog while reading my aggregator. I wonder how long it will be before Google adds this functionality to Blogger, Google Docs, etc.? And what if the rumored gPhone includes Gears in an ebook reader, mobile Google Apps suite, Gmail, etc.? The combination of mobile and offline could be powerful.

It’s a great idea, one that has already helped me. It’s not as useful for you if you’re not a laptop user, but it’s still an interesting idea to think about. Eventually, wireless broadband will be ubiquitous and mainstream, and we’ll just never be offline. But we’re a few years away from that, and I’m now wondering if there are any library services that could benefit from incorporating Gears so that users can keep accessing them when offline. It’s probably not possible to make the catalog available this way, and really, what patron would think to take the catalog offline to keep searching it (plus, you’d lose accurate shelf status). Maybe there are other pieces, though.

This type of tool is a bridge to an approaching future when we’re all a live IP address all the time, wherever we are, so it’s something I’m keeping in the back of my mind. Especially when I’m offline.

It will be interesting to see if other sites implement Gears, and maybe it will even show up on InfoDoodads list of the Top 13 Web 2.0 Tools for Librarians. We’ll see.

behaviors, google gears

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