As I start this review for “Strawberry Fields” (Chuy Hinojosa), I recall growing up far from South Texas. How I miss the mountains and trails and the land. The people of the past are more or less interchangeable, here or there. I don’t miss them. Here or there, there are nice ones, not so nice ones…Pretty girls, not so pretty ones, and so on. It’s more like the land itself, or the essence of it, or something. I really don’t know.
At times the sense of place is overwhelming. At a certain age in life this “nostalgia” kicks in. But it’s not really nostalgia….It’s another something, hard to exactly define. Is it the emotions ingrained from the past? The experiences? They are all squirreled away back there somewhere in an often “access denied” mental closet on the hard drive of the soul. Not forgotten, just inaccessible to the user…That is until he finds again the path.
In the Rio Grande Valley there are so many people two or three generations back that have come from another country. While there are plenty of people here that speak Spanish and the food and many customs are the same as Old Mexico, many never lose that sense of being out of place. Some don’t worry too much about it. It depends.
In the book, Benancio is the Father of Joaquin. He comes to the mythical town of San Felipe as an adolescent to work with his Father in the desenraize. Or the brush clearing that started during the land rush to the Valley from the Midwestern states around the turn of the 20th Century. He stayed, married a local girl, raised a family, but never felt at home, never escaped his past; He was Mexican and that was what he wanted to be. But there was nothing for him in Mexico. For him there was no going back, and no going forward.
Let go and love, vato! But he can’t. He never connects with his family and in the end he abandons them. This theme hit home. Bulls eye. Bingo.
The poet says you can never go back home again, but in the book “Strawberry Fields” he does. Just that it was never his real home, only a way-station in the protagonist’s adolescence. Something happened there, the only clues Joaquin has are in his dreams and recollections gaping in their incoherence and incompleteness. He journeys back to the fields of his youth in Michigan. The history here of migrant life is priceless. In this novel the tale of the Mexican and Mexican-American migratory experience may reach a wider audience, I hope so. We would all be very hungry if we had to depend on white and black people to pick all the crops, and that’s just the truth.
The one caveat I have concerns the book working as a crime novel. Essentially it’s not a crime novel. This part of it seems to be bolted in to serve as a device on which to hang the reason for the story. But, it is well worth the read for many other reasons.
Grab a copy at Amazon:
Strawberry Fields, a Book of Short Stories
