GORDO, debut story collection from NorCal activist/artist/writer

GORDO
JAIME CORTEZ
Black Cat
$16.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

FINALIST FOR THE 34th Lambda Literary Award—BEST GAY FICTION! Winners announced 11 June 2022.

A BEST BOOKS OF 2021 – FICTION SELECTION FROM BOOKPAGE!

A 2021 NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR!

The Publisher Says: The first ever collection of short stories by Jaime Cortez, Gordo is set in a migrant workers camp near Watsonville, California in the 1970s. A young, probably gay, boy named Gordo puts on a wrestler's mask and throws fists with a boy in the neighborhood, fighting his own tears as he tries to grow into the idea of manhood so imposed on him by his father. As he comes of age, Gordo learns about sex, watches his father's drunken fights, and discovers even his own documented Mexican-American parents are wary of illegal migrants. Fat Cookie, high schooler and resident artist, uses tiny library pencils to draw huge murals of graffiti flowers along the camp's blank walls, the words "CHICANO POWER" boldly lettered across, until she runs away from home one day with her mother's boyfriend, Manny, and steals her mother's Panasonic radio for a final dance competition among the camp kids before she disappears. And then there are Los Tigres, the perfect pair of twins so dark they look like indios, Pepito and Manuel, who show up at Gyrich Farms every season without fail. Los Tigres, champion drinkers, end up assaulting each other in a drunken brawl, until one of them is rushed to the emergency room still slumped in an upholstered chair tied to the back of a pick-up truck.

These scenes from Steinbeck Country seen so intimately from within are full of humor, family drama, and a sweet frankness about serious matters—who belongs to America and how are they treated? How does one learn decency, when laborers, grown adults, must fear for their lives and livelihoods as they try to do everything to bring home a paycheck? Written with balance and poise, Cortez braids together elegant and inviting stories about life on a California camp, in essence redefining what all-American means.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I'm always down for a story collection! This one is set in a world I liked the minute I landed in it, the Mexican American vibrant loud exuberant over-the-top everybody knows where you are, where you came from, and what to expect from you so watch it, FIESTA. Living in Mercedes, Texas, in the Sixties, I was The White Kid in my elementary school, and the Mexican American family who lived and worked on my great-aunt's place in Progreso were, well, welcoming. A little redheaded boy at the table? Okay, here's a tortilla, eat hearty. This was very much NOT to my mother's taste and she snatched me outta there to Austin by decade's end. I missed it. And when I got this collection of stories, I thought, yeah this works, I'm ready for a trip that far past the white-water rapids of Memory!

I'll use the time-honored (eight years and counting!) Bryce Method of short impressions with individual ratings for the stories so as to organize my thoughts and feelings, while hopefully allowing you to reach your own conclusions.

The Jesus Donut makes a point of being about the expectations of the have-nots...no one ever gets something for nothing, and sometimes not even for something...meeting in the quasi-religious, blasphemous use of a special donut as the Body of Christ.

"Twenty cents," {Mister Kentucky} says.
Everybody stops breathing. What's she gonna do? She don't got no money. She gonna take the bag and run? That would be stupid, cuz he could chase her in the van. Besides, if she did that, Grandma would hit her so hard, she'd see the Devil through a hole. I don't know what that means, but Grandma always says that, and it sounds pretty serious.
–and–
"Body of Christ." {Olga says}
"Amen," I say, and I open my mouth. She puts the piece of donut on my tongue. I close my mouth, I close my eyes. Mmm.

This is the way Jesus should taste.

This is the peak, the Best Moment of a transgression...a girl pretending to be a priest, who mysteriously has money no one else has, and her worst moment's seeds are right here. Their delivery is condign. 4 stars, a great start and a terrific introduction to this world.

El Gordo is what happens on that weird, ugly day when a queer kid understands the limits of accommodation.

Shiny white boxer boots with silver stripes and shoelaces and little dangly pom-poms on the side!

"Thank you," I say. "These are soooo pretty!" Pa gets real quiet. He opens his mouth like he's gonna say something, but he don't say nothing. He shakes his head like something bad just happened.

Something bad did just happen to Pa...his son's a maricón and it's not just his imagination. A jump-rope sing-song is the next affront to Macho; but then the script flips. Miguelito, a skinny kid with the same luchador mask that Gordo has, picks a fight to see who claims the wrestler's identity...and loses! Is Pa proud, or what? A strong lesson in the value Macho places on "winning" whether there's blood and pain or not. A Man Wins. Seriously bad, fucked-up worldview...but learning its codes and how to switch into them is survival for a fat queer kid. 4 stars

Chorizo slams into you like a brick. When impoverished farmhands are privileged to the point of granting favors to those even poorer, those whose existence is so precarious that sleeping on plastic sheets under a carport is the benison that makes the end of a day spent walking better, well...just how much more does one need to hear to know one's life is luxurious? And here's Gordo, taking *their* food as a handout! A grandmother's slap is only a small price to pay for such a lesson in class distinction. 4 stars

Cookie gives the generational spread of poverty and hopelessness a face. Mother too young, daughter too wild:

"Fuck her," she says again.

"She brought you into the world, pendeja. She made you in her stomach and pushed you out of her vaginus. That's a fact. She gave you life, the greatest gift in the solar system."

Pitch-perfect kid-fight. Big, scary words like fuck! Counter with smart-kid infowars! Ooohhh, who will win, Gordo (young but smart) or Cookie (wild but angry)? No one, pendejos, this isn't a battle. It's a war. Their side lost. 4 stars

The Nasty Book Wars are exactly what it sounds like. It's kind of a fake-out, because the beginning is Primitivo with the weird-shaped head, a wedding, and la migra...I was kinda wondering what the heck this had to do with nasty books:

By late July, the garlic had been pulled from the dirt and heaped in the fields, where it dried in the baleful San Benito County sun like mounds of tiny skulls. The stoop labor was performed in afternoon temperatures that hovered in the low nineties and sometimes more for weeks at a stretch.

So, while I *am* looking at the garlic heads a bit differently, what's gonna kick off this story? La migra collaring Primitivo (newly and hilariously yclept "Head and Shoulders" by Gordo's dad, the nicknamer in the community) and la jefa cleaning out his space, that's what. Gordo's four-member cousin-kid-gang find a way into Head and Shoulders's old room where they discover what la jefa didn't: Porn!

The natural split, two boys against two girls, occurs; Gordo's sister makes it three to two when she involves Fat Cookie (so this happens earlier than "Cookie"), and a battle of, well, we'll stretch the point and call it "wits" erupts with these dirty magazines getting hauled from pillar to post and trashed and scattered, until one fine day they suffer a permanent accident. As a result of which Gordo's grandmother finds a particularly, erm, juicy bit and blows a gasket. I've got to give this one the full five, not least because I will never again sing "Conjunction Junction" to myself quite the same way....

Fandango recounts one night of drunken stupidity the machos of the community go too far as their steam-blowing drunkenness gets bloody. Gordo's there to witness it because he begged at just the right moment, and got under his mama's defenses...his dad's, um, homophobia has a rest night. But another man's homophobia is on full display and leads him to the Linda Hawkins Memorial Hospital (always referred to that way, a kind of incantation) with a dumb, avoidable, and nasty injury whose nature I really appreciated for its symbolism. Gordo's sad, wistful little meditation on how the men feel about him is so poignant. 4.5 stars

Alex defies expectations...Alex isn't the most ordinary neighbor, nor the softest person to try to get to know, but Gordo's family are johnny-on-the-spot when a disastrous accident happens and a gigantic secret gets out. Sylvie, older sister style, makes Gordo feel bad for being ignorant of the secret...Pa and Mama are ambivalent but kind when it counts. But the night is young, my children. The night has dark and terrible shadows, conceals awful pain and sadness...wickedness is but a Human trait, after all. Basically a novella of the community taking care of their own, regardless of just deserts or origins. 4 stars

The Pardos doesn't really fit the structure of the book...these three vatos, Tinman, Shy Boy, and the mostly absent Spooky...aren't related to Gordo, they go to school with Sylvie (I suspect the editor said "bookhorn something into this to make it part of the collection" and voilà Tinman jacks off to Sylvia in his room) but fit in nowhere. Their father's a scary Salvadoran army vet, wifeless, and working as a janitor in the Jolly Giant broccoli-processing plant...a ticking time bomb, you ask me...their oldest brother's in reform "school" and there's nothing going to arrest this downward slide in Cali's strictly segregated ag economy. Not the star of the collection, 3.5 stars

The Problem of Style presents the solution to the eternal problem of homophobia: don't internalize it; externalize it! Spray the hate back in their ignorant faces with a fine, glittery spray of Style. Revolting, of course, but can you even imagine anything about middle school not being revolting? 4 stars for the ending

Raymundo the Fag does the honors for Shy Boy...the Final Honors...in his new station as Watsonville's Finest (Hairburner). (We're sort of left to assume that, through some odd time dilation, this is Gordo all grown up; I'm rollin' with it.)

"...They need you. It's a tragedy. It's special. Hey, do they pay good?"

"Olga! He's dead, remember?"

"Well, there you go. He won't be tipping, so you need to charge them good up front. For gasoline y todo."

"Yes, Mrs. Scrooge."

Good lawsy me, Olga, too! Does no one leave this town? Well, apart from Shy Boy, who from the way things turned out should'nt've. He saves the day, does our Ray, after a personal moment with the decedent, and more power to him for the gracious send-off he gives his old enemy. And a new love interest there in the cooler, I hope.... 4 stars

Ofelia's Last Ride takes us back to fifth-grade Gordo and the family on a momentous trip to Mexicali, where their parents are from. Nothing prepared them for the news that greets them: Doña Ofelia, a neighborhood pillar and the mother of the mute guy in an earlier story, has died suddenly. You know it's a cataclysm because it's all anyone can talk about. The main thing, for the visiting Chicanos, is that the wake and burial are happening while they're there, so it's all about the family getting its fix of Home. And Gordo, picked on in the approved Mexican style (you think American kids are rude? ha!) for his fatness, hangs around Mama a lot. He sees his first dead body! That's a major rite of passage. (And it explains how he's so sanguine when it's Shy Boy's body he works on above...assuming they're the same character, and I do.)

It's a raucous, vibrant story, and still feels weird to me as the last of the collection. But that doesn't dim the glory of it for a moment. 4.5 stars