In the September issue of Harper's Magazine, the Sun City is front and center in a short story by acclaimed El Paso author Dagoberto Gilb. The second oldest continuously published monthly magazine in the U.S. (the oldest being Scientific American), devotes eight pages to a fictional piece titled "Willows Village" about an El Pasoan named Guillermo, a working class man surviving in America. The story is a historical snap shot of this time in history and the difficulties the uneducated working class face in today's economy.
The story is an important one because Gilb uses Guillermo not as an invented cliché, stereotype of a Mexican American, but also as an ordinary guy looking for a better paying job, who goes to stay with his wild Aunt Maggy in Santa Ana, California. Aunt Maggy, sister to Billy's mother, is a success by American standards living in a tract development called the Willows Village. The home is filled the best of everything middle class money can buy yet it's empty of human interaction.
Maggy is typically suburban, tract-house successful, in a desire for things, except Maggy has it a little too good. She is a little too spoiled and makes a good trope for the American population and how that population views working class Mexican Americans such as Billy. In one scene Aunt Maggy, tries to counsel him to be unashamed of his Hispanic name, Guillermo.
"I preferred Billy. I didn't like to be formal. I didn't want to sound like I just crossed. I liked people to know I was American, born and raised. I had an uncle, who was more tattooed cholo, who called himself Memo, and I didn't want that. Besides, wasn't she a Maggy? A grateful guest, I didn't say more."
In this one subtle point, where he insists on the name Billy, Gilb gets to the heart of what every Mexican American struggles with in the Anglocentric western world—fitting in. In the story Billy, like Mexican Americans in general, is viewed as an exoticized prop, rather than for whom he really is which is part and parcel of the American culture, landscape, and future of the country. Maggy and the friend she has staying with her in "Willows Village" see Guillermo as an accessory, finding it easier to deal with a stereotype rather than the complex individual sharing space with them.
As if to emphasis his point Gilb has Guillermo go visit a friend who lives on Fort Boulevard in Central El Paso, a street familiar to the author from the years spent in the city raising his children and working as a carpenter and a writer. "One of my favorite restaurants for gorditas is there, Delicious Mexican food, which is right next door to Peking Garden but my favorite lunch food, with the best chile in El Paso, was a place across the street," Gilb says about Marie's Restaurant, which opened in 1984.
El Paso is the setting for what Gilb does best, which is trying to shake off the stereotyping of Mexican Americans in literature and culture. His 1994 PEN/Hemingway Award winning book The Magic of Blood, has become a classic in literature with its Mexican American working class characters. His recent novel The Flowers published this year by Grove Atlantic also uses complex characters who happen to be Mexican American to tackle issues of race and identity.
Gilb is a complex character himself, shunning the Chicano activist mantel yet editing an award winning revolutionary anthology published by the University of New Mexico Press and Southwestern Writers Collection in 2007 Hecho en Tejas: An anthology of Texas Mexican literature. The book won the Southwest Book Award in 2007. An anthology he compiled because he was "exhausted with" New York editors and many Texas editors, in particular, telling him that there were no talented Mexican American writers or artists.
"So I compiled them all in a book to give to them," he says about the anthology that features 16 authors from El Paso. "Now we can say here. Here we are. This is a good place to start. Mexican Americans are not just a few clichés, but a world, an entire culture with a unique history, so that even El Paso isn't so self-contained around border patrol or even Juarez murders, not magical or pachucado, but a culture that has grown complicated as culture gets in any other land."
In "Willows Village" we view a fictional account of one man's upward climb toward the American dream. But more importantly, what Gilb does is use the setting of El Paso in a new way, as a place of home, and one that is not a stereotype of the cholo lifestyle, the undocumented workers' life or families living magical childlike poverty.
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Christine Granados, born and raised in El Paso, is a freelance journalist, lecturer at Texas A&M University and mother of two boys. Her award-winning collection of short stories, Brides and Sinners in El Chuco, was published by University of Arizona Press in 2006. She is a graduate of UT El Paso’s School of Communications and the MFA creative writing program at Texas State University in San Marcos. She can be reached at christine@rockdalereporter.com
