Cross Over Water (review)

In his first book, El Paso del Norte: Stories on the Border (2003), Richard Yañez narrates, for example, the challenges faced by a Chicano outsider adjusting to life in a new El Paso junior high ("Desert Vista") and tells of a boy named Ruly, not unlike Antonio in Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima (1972), who prepares his brother Frankie for communion by practicing the taking of sacraments using tortillas and Kool-Aid ("Sacred Heart"). In his first novel, Cross Over Water, Yañez develops the character of Ruly in a bildungsroman marked by a distinctive sense of place—El Paso's Lower Valley.

Cross Over Water utilizes a four-part structure as Raul Cruz develops, matures, and gains understanding. In part 1, "Ruly," the twelve-year-old has been uprooted from the El Paso desert home he loves. Now a chubby outsider at Valle Vista Junior High, this seventh-grader cannot swim, dance, or understand sex. An older cousin, Laura, moves in with his family, provides him stability, but soon moves on. At thirteen, Ruly remains stuck with "his gordito self " (48). In part 2, "Raul Cruz," Raul at sixteen gets a football locker at Ysleta High School—as varsity team manager. Invited to a party with the team, he is thrown into a pool where he is rescued by "a big-breasted angel," Julia, who later drops naïve Raul for Benny, her journalism classmate (63). Unhappily still a virgin, Raul cruises with the huge All-City lineman Alberto Baca, drinking in Juárez before Alberto joins the Air Force.

In part 3, "Rauluis," after graduation Raul Luis moves into Alberto's vacant casita, works at BigWay Foods collecting grocery carts, and "at eighteen, he was full of energy and muscles" (113). Searching for carts, he discovers the Peoples' Park full of the homeless and there meets Elena, a California student working with Hands United. She helps him learn—about compassion, sex, family roots, César Chávez, music, reading, and the importance of his own stories. She returns to her California college; Raul remains for his cousin Laura. In part 4, "Cuz," cousin Laura returns from Juárez pregnant and stays with Raul, who waits on her, like a team manager. Accompanying her to parenting class at El Paso Community College encourages Raul to enroll. His English class with Dr. Sánchez sets him free; now "he wasn't freaked out that he still had more questions than answers" (189). In Thomason Hospital, Laura, mom-to-be, asks Raul to go climb that special childhood hill, La Loma, that she, Raul, and their Chicano friends used for playing King of the Hill. For her, yes, he will—Raul Luis, ever the team manager, but learning well.

Yañez is gifted, creates memorable characters, yet his skilled evocation of a sense of place for El Paso is limited, too regional. William Owens, another Southwest writer, puts it precisely in the Texas Humanist (1983): "The only reason for regionalism is to make it an opening onto the universal" (27). Yañez can learn much from Rolando Hinojosa's Dear Rafe (1985) in which, as Robert Houston notes, "although his sharp eye and accurate ear capture a place, its people and a time in a masterly way, [Hinojosa's] work goes far beyond regionalism" (New York Times Book Review 1985). I especially recommend that Yañez examine Rudolfo Anaya's recently published collection The Essays (2009), where, in "My Heart, My Home," he remarks, "I like not only to write a good story, but to explore in it the core of human nature" (244). Cross Over Water is a good start.