Food, Poetry, and Borderlands Materiality: Walter Benjamin at the taquería

Abstract

In a short story entitled The Properties of Magic by Tejano writer Ray Gonzalez (2001) a boy named Augustino wakes up in the middle of the night to find a headless man standing at the foot of his bed. Dressed in an old army uniform, the man reaches into the hole in his neck where once a head stood and to the bewilderment of the child pulls out a donkey pinata just like one the boy's parents had given him for his fifth birthday. Readers quickly learn that this eerie nocturnal vision (we can't be sure it is a dream) is not that unusual in the boy's life. Haunting epiphanies and omens manifested through the appearance of familiar objects out of place saturate Augustino's everyday experience: his play is interrupted by finding a broken rosary on the school playground; the flickering of lights at church startles him; a drawing he brought home from school seems to attract the attention of a bird that flies through the bedroom window; sitting on the porch of his house, he feels observed by blue