To Live and Die in El Valle by Oscar Mancinas

Abstract

Reviewed by: To Live and Die in El Valle by Oscar Mancinas Sophia Martinez-Abbud Oscar Mancinas. To Live and Die in El Valle. Houston: Arte Público P, 2020. 156 pp. Paper, $18.95. Oscar Mancinas’s collection of short stories is as heartbreaking as it is comforting to those of us who grew up around the US–Mexico border. Set in what is called the Arizona desert, To Live and Die in El Valle exposes the complex relationships that border-dwellers build with their landscape, as well as the illegibility of the borderlands experience in other parts of the US and Mexico. The characters in the collection, swept by promises of financial mobility and sociocultural integration, modify their relationships to the border accordingly: [End Page 327] some leave, others arrive, others yet return, and some even refuse to be anywhere else. Mancinas’s collection calls attention to the different and adaptable interpersonal relationships around settler-colonial landscapes to highlight how the needs, wants, and desires of border-dwellers are always stunted by far-reaching, de-placed bordering regimes. The characters in this novel are hardly ever self-identified Chicanes or Mexican American; instead of ethno-national affiliations, characters are marked by their relationship to the desert heat and the historical trauma that the border landscape signifies, complicating any legible categorization of identity. Thus, when characters refer to the “pinches gringos,” it is not only Anglo America that is being indicted but also those beneficiaries of “Don Porfirio’s war to exterminate the Yaquis” (“Melissa Gets Out,” 103). Characters live in the Salt River Pima–Maricopa reservation and have no intention of leaving Arizona to chase dreams of social mobility— particularly not if it means being someone’s “lil’ Indian sidekick on the East Coast” (“Arizona Boy,” 122). Indeed, Kino, a self-hating queer Pima youth uses the lived experience of the reservation to navigate the settler-colonial world: “he said he took the rez everywhere he went, like a rag he could use to wipe away any mess life gave him” (109). This racialized geography— at the borders of not only the US and Mexico but also multiple Indigenous nations like the Maricopa-Pima, Yaqui, and Tohono O’odham lands—is represented in its full complexity through the characters’ interactions with each other and with the world beyond the border. Yet, the collection also challenges the idea that there is a “beyond”— the border is everywhere for these characters. Many of them leave the borderlands to pursue higher education elsewhere, but assumptions of racialization, class affiliations, and cultural prejudice always follow them. In “Tourista,” the narrator, who is a student at a New England college, is summoned to give a tour of the school to a visiting Mexican family; once the father learns that the narrator is not only of Mexican descent but Raramuri as well, any sense of familiarity and levity between the two parties is replaced by the affect of historical trauma and the realities of class-and race-based stratification in settler-colonial nations like Mexico and the [End Page 328] US. In the final story, “The Survivor’s Guide to What’s Next,” a suicidal creative writing professor joins a trauma support group in Boston, but when the narrator shares his own difficulties being a writer of color in the northeast, group members are skeptical about his racialized problems: “What about writing got you stressed? And what’s color got to do with any of this?” (143). Whether it is explicit or implicit, the border structures how these characters are perceived by others, and how they perceive themselves in relation to others. From the first story Mancinas gives readers a framework with which to engage with the collection. “Comenzamos: Falsas Promesas” establishes the noncathartic affect that pervades in each story as characters modify their relations to either side of the border: “It’s been the same darkness their whole lives, even now— even en el otro lado . . . the darkness overflows from the cups, the cans and the bottles, and we try to drink it” (2). El otro lado beckons with its multiple implications: the other side of Mexico, the other side of the rez...