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Page 12 American Book Review Brown, Black, and White René Martinez There’s no shortage of popular lies: Columbus discovered America, the Pilgrims and Indians got along, anybody can grow up to be President. For the most part, these are benign, allowing for a temporary delight in fantasy. Yet others, while as attractive, aren’t as harmless. One involves the issue of race. School children are told the color of a person’s skin doesn’t matter in today’s enlightened society. Bullshit. Skin color is more important than SAT scores, a college degree, or an annual salary, and denying this is dangerous and foolish. Mexican Americans know this well, especially in a time of border fences and Minutemen, but few contemporary writers of this ethnicity have effectively explored challenges of the situation. Dagoberto Gilb dares to in his remarkable new coming-of-age novel The Flowers, which examines divisions between browns, blacks, and whites and shows racism is alive and well. The novel is narrated by the young Sonny Bravo, whose life is drastically altered when his beautiful Mexican American mother marries the white owner of Los Flores apartments. Sonny is a teenager who steals dirty magazines, enjoys music, and longs for true love. Like the protagonist of Gilb’s previous novel, The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña (1995), Sonny is smart and independent, but unlike Mickey, he initially lacks understanding of how strange things can be. He learns, though, as he works at the apartments; has sex with the girl upstairs ; and attempts, often unsuccessfully, to avoid confrontation with his alcoholic stepdad. This last aspect, the tense relationship between Sonny and “the Cloyd,” is the root of a prolonged conflict between the narrator and white characters. Gilb uses Sonny to develop the brown-against-white idea, subtly by letting readers cringe with Sonny when he overhears his stepdad say, “I love to eat them tacos, and now I even got myself married to a pretty little Mexican gal,” and overtly, when Sonny, on his way home from the bowling alley, bumps into “some old white man,” and after being insulted, gets into a fight and steals the man’s wallet. The fight and theft are despicable acts, and if performed by anybody else, would be recognized as such, but by this point, readers sympathize with Sonny’s plight and believe him when he says, “It was [the old man’s] own fault, but I felt sorry and dirty.” It’s apparent minorities are meant as downtrodden heroes and whites as unredeemable villains. Along with Sonny, the good guys include Pink, an albino black man who gives Sonny a Chevy BelAir in exchange for spying on Cloyd, whom Pink identifies as one of the “‘blue-eyed-devil motherfuckers.’” He tells Sonny, “‘It all gonna change, little brother man, it all gonna change, no other way.’” Cloyd is leader of the bad guys. Cloyd is described as having a smile that always “[comes] out looking stupid,” and he is made to appear foolish for his misuse of Los Flores (the correct form would be “Las”). When violence spills into the streets, he has no qualms about handing Sonny a gun and saying they’re protected if any blacks try to break in. Cloyd’s closest friend is Bud, who insists he’s “‘tired of these kind of people’” in reference to blacks and later that he is “‘Sick of Mexicans too.’” Gilb paints these men as hypocrites who, despite fears they’re losing their country, lust after Mexican women and take advantage of cheap labor provided by minorities. Feelings of animosity between races eventually erupt into riots. The city is never named, though Gilb implies its location in California, and by doing so, parallels actual race riots that have occurred in Los Angeles. These include the 1943 Zoot Suit Riots, in which Mexican American youth clashed with white military personnel; the 1965 Watts Riot, in which twenty-eight blacks were killed; and the 1992 Rodney King Riots. Gilb makes it clear minorities won’t stand to be kicked around for long. The message is simple: life is hard for everybody, but it’s harder for people with dark...

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