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Book Description

In this beautifully wrought memoir, award-winning writer John Phillip Santos weaves together dream fragments, family remembrances, and Chicano mythology, reaching back into time and place to blend the story of one Mexican family with the soul of an entire people. The story unfolds through a pageant of unforgettable family figures: from Madrina--touched with epilepsy and prophecy ever since, as a girl, she saw a dying soul leave its body--to Teofilo, who was kidnapped as an infant and raised by the Kikapu Indians of Northern Mexico. At the heart of the book is Santos' search for the meaning of his grandfather's suicide in San Antonio, Texas, in 1939. Part treasury of the elders, part elegy, part personal odyssey, this is an immigration tale and a haunting family story that offers a rich, magical view of Mexican-American culture. (Courtesy of Penguin Group)

 

Book Reviews

From Library Journal

As remembering is to Jews, forgetting is to Mexicans. In a remarkable, bittersweet, and often tragic memoir, Santos, a journalist, television writer and producer, and the first Mexican American Rhodes scholar, attempts to reverse this cultural generalization by reflecting on the early years he spent in San Antonio and Mexico, traveling the paths his family followed between two cultures. Always at the center of tales told by his aunts and uncles is the suicide of his paternal grandfather in 1939. In seeking to unravel the tragedy, Santos carries us through years of cultural mixing in the city that was "an umbilical tether to a past that otherwise seemed to be disintegrating, memory by memory." Much of his story is of poverty, yet rich portrayals of Mex-Tex life also provide a perspective too often forgotten by sociologists, historians, and writers who dwell on acculturation. This is an important book, both as memoir and because it helps us grasp the history of a people who are an integral part of the national identity. Highly recommended for academic and larger public libraries.
-A. Boyd Childress,
Auburn Univ.
Lib., AL

From Publishers Weekly

 "Mexico was always an empire of forgetting," writes Santos in his elegantly crafted chronicle of one of the thousands of Mexican families who fled to El Norte during the Mexican Revolution. An award-winning documentary television producer for CBS and the first Mexican-American Rhodes Scholar (1979), Santos struggles with the destiny of "every Mexican" to either embrace or lose entirely the "hidden light left behind in the past with los Abuelos" (one's grandparents). In a story told in part by ghosts, Santos takes the reader through the Inframundo, the timeless underworld of the ancient peoples of Mexico, to find out how he came to be the scion of a now-childless family. His tale is inhabited by eclectic characters: a clairvoyant albino aunt; a great-grandfather stolen by the Kickapu Indians; an aunt who learned English from the young Lyndon Baines Johnson in exchange for cabbages and potatoes. Then there was Santos's grandfather, Juan Jose, whose unresolved death by drowning in 1939 haunts the book. Combining traditional memoir, ancient Mexican history and beliefs, personal sacramental journeys and ghostly interviews, Santos gallops across the desert mountains of Coahuila through a flood of migrating Monarch butterflies, recalls long-ago predawn breakfast rituals in a Mexican village and flies with the Aztec "guardians of time", the Volador dancers at the 1968 HemisFair in San Antonio. His book is one of the most insightful investigations into Mexican-American border culture available.

"Like Kathleen Norris's memoir of life on the Dakota plains, [this] is a spiritual geography, a reflection on time and the often unbearable tension between the spiritual and material." --The Boston Globe

"Such wonderfully suggestive vignettes erase barriers between the old and the young, the living and the dead, Texas and Mexico." --The New York Times Book Review, Suzanne Ruta

"This is a splendid memoir filled with universal themes of strong family bonds and appreciation for remembering the past." --San Diego Tribune