Summer Reads

Abstract

WORLDLIT.ORG 77 We’re standing up for Turtle Island and the waters, we’re standing up for the future we refuse to gamble away as if it doesn’t matter, as if it should be someone else’s story, someone else’s problem. We may not be Skins in Space but we invented Science Fiction—the awareness that almighty science divorced from wisdom is a reckless beast. The dominant society made a fiction of our science though their breakthroughs are leading them back to what we knew all along, what we tried to tell them in the very beginning. They’ve been educating us for years, for several lost generations, but we’re up-ending that one-sided desk, that one-sided conversation that can only tell stories in a single direction. Don’t tell us we’re finding our voices in some new academic-artistic renaissance you can study at conferences or exploit in pages on Amazon.com—we’ve been speaking all along as poets and rappers, counselors and prophets, healers and politicians. The problem was, no one was listening to our parents and grandparents, and for certain not our great-grandparents who were too busy facing down guns to hand over their dissertation. You may not want to listen now, but that’s okay, we’ve learned your language and can ride our ponies through communication highways that cross reservation lines. Our ancestors never gave up and they’re singing us awake. We’re inside and outside, listening and speaking, standing up and dancing, connecting and reaching—we’ve got a world to save, yours as well as ours. Saint Paul, Minnesota There are three recent books from the University of Oklahoma Press that I know would make great summer reading. My own Mestizos Come Home! Making and Claiming Mexican American Identity deals with current social and cultural issues essential for understanding the Latino community and what they are working through during this difficult time. A. Gabriel Meléndez’s The Book of Archives and Other Stories from the Mora Valley, New Mexico is a haunting collection of stories that takes readers into a vibrant and magical community in New Mexico that they otherwise would never know about. Alfredo Véa’s The Mexican Flyboy is one of the most notable novels of the recent era, a book with the combined appeal of Roberto Bolaño, Rudolfo Anaya, and Thomas Pynchon. – RC DavisUndiano , Executive Director Robert Con Davis-Undiano Mestizos Come Home! Making and Claiming Mexican American Identity This book tries to demonstrate already-existing cultural connections between the US and large patterns of historical development evident throughout Latin America. It focuses on six ways that Mexican Americans and Latinos have changed mainstream American culture since the 1960s, ultimately arguing that US mainstream culture needs to stop making Latinos the “enemy” and that Mexican Americans and Latinos need to take the final steps toward full assimilation through political involvement and greater success in education. A. Gabriel Meléndez The Book of Archives and Other Stories from the Mora Valley, New Mexico This beautiful book works with the actual history of the Mora Valley in New Mexico and weaves a large southwestern cultural fabric that many mainstream readers will know little about. Mora is a small village in which people still speak Spanish and English as two primary languages and celebrate their ties to traditional lands that house aspects of themselves, their families, and their pasts. This book’s treatment of the Book of Archives, a literal and figurative connection to tradition and the past in New Mexico, is a tour de force. Alfredo Véa The Mexican Flyboy This is one of the most impressive books to appear in English in recent years. Véa’s previous three novels— La Maravilla (1993), The Silver Cloud Café (1996), and Gods Go Begging (1999)—are known to followers of high-quality experimental fiction. This new novel—about Simon Vega’s use of a time machine to wander through history to save people who died unjust, tragic deaths—will bring Véa into a new circle of importance among contemporary novelists. We’re standing up for Turtle Island and...