Notebooks of a Chile Verde Smuggler (Camino del Sol) - Softcover

Herrera, Juan Felipe

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0816522154 ISBN 13: 9780816522156

Publisher: University of Arizona Press, 2002

Synopsis

Raucous adobe hearts and urban violet mascara. Televised immigration games and ethnic sit-coms. Chile con karma served on a bed of race. In a startling melange of poetry, prose, journal entries, and even a screenplay, Zen Chicano desperado Juan Felipe Herrera fixes his gaze on his own life and times to craft his most personal work to date.

Notebooks of a Chile Verde Smuggler is a river of faces and phrases, jottings and reflections—a personal pilgrimage and collective parade of love, mock-prophecy, and chiste. Tuning in voices from numerous time zones, languages, and minds, Herrera recalls his childhood and coming of age, his participation in the Chicano Movement, and the surreal aspects of postmodern America. He uses broad strokes to paint a historical, social, and familial portrait that moves from the twilight of the nineteenth century to the dawn of the twenty-first, then takes up a finer brush to etch the eternal tension between desire and frustration, hope and disillusionment, violence and tenderness.

Here are transamerican sutras spanning metrocenters from Mexico City to San Francisco, or slinking across the border from Juárez to El Paso. Outrageous, rhythmic lists—"Foodstuffs They Never Told Us About," "Things Religion Makes Me Do"—that fire the imagination. Celebrations of his Plutomobile that "runs on ham hawks & bird grease," and of Chicano inventions such as cilantro aftershave and "the art of eating Vicks VapoRub with your dedos."

Pushing forms to the edge of possibility while forcing readers to rethink reality as well as language, Herrera invokes childhoods and neighborhoods, stand-up clowns and Movimiento gypsies, grandmothers of the buñuelo kitchen and tragicomic soliloquies of dizzy-headed outcasts of paradise. Notebooks of a Chile Verde Smuggler is a crucible of flavorful language meant to be rolled lazily on the mind's tongue—and then swallowed whole to let its hot and savory sweetness fill your soul.

About this title

About the Author:

Juan Felipe Herrera has been a dishwasher, photographer, arts director, teatrista, antropoetista, Aztec dancer, graphic artist, cartoonist, salsa sauce specialist, actor, video artist, and stand-up comedian. A mostly vegetarian Capricorn, sign of the earth-rat, Free Tibet advocate, and Indian rights activist, he lives with his soul partner, Margarita Luna Robles, in Fresno, California, where he is a professor in the Department of Chicano and Latin American Studies at California State University, Fresno.

From Publishers Weekly:

Splicing names, dates and places with a talismanic array of bilingual references, Herrera uses the rough, unfinished notebook form more or less invented by Aime Cesaire in Notebook for a Return to the Native Land to turn his speaker's search for the truth into a force for unsettling existing political and poetic paradigms: "I stand alone on my boulevard, with my small audience of category makers, not word tuners or word flutterers or word hissers or word twisters, I said category makers. I am the idea, I am the concept, I am the liquid syrup that messes with the machine's objectives." By detailing his literary, familial (illustrated with a selection of family photographs) and activist histories, Herrera skillfully confounds preconceptions and prejudices, laying nonviolent dynamite under the tracks of those who would box him in: "We invented Chicano Studies, con manas limpias en las ma¤anas, demanding our rights (this sounds old now but we did demand our rights). With our language, our home-poems, our long walks and fasts for justice Delano, Sacra, Coachella. I can say this." Composed of equal parts generational requiem, personal reckoning and political manifesto, these notebooks are deliberately process-oriented and lack the polish of "finished" work, since they are built to deliver a hot green flavor, "let's call it a flavor; it set out on its own." Readers should dig in.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Arizona Press
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0816522154
• ISBN 13: 9780816522156
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 191