Bulletproof Vest: The Ballad of an Outlaw and His Daughter by Maria Venegas (review)

I stared down the barrel of the gun without flinching. I knew he wouldn’t pull the trigger. Not that night, or any of the other nights that he had tested my nerves. I knew that no matter how much he had had to drink, he must remember that I was his daughter. I shot him a smile and he exploded with pride.

In her griping first novel, Maria Venegas spares nothing as she recounts what life was like as the daughter of an outlaw. With the skill of a practiced author, she orchestrates the details of her father’s life with her own and pays homage to the critical role of parents—even outlaws—in composing the ballad of our lives.

Bulletproof Vest opens with Jose Venegas speeding down a dusty trail in Mexico when a sudden shower of bullets shoot through his truck and send him off the road. Assuming the job was finished, his attackers leave him for dead. Somehow Jose manages to crawl to help, escaping death once again. Thousands of miles away in New York City, his daughter, Maria, hears the news and pauses only briefly to ask if he is dead before returning to her lunch.

In Mexico, a corrido (or ballad) is sung to glorify legendary heroes, outlaws, and bandits. Like the notes that make up a ballad, life is also made up of notes—or experiences—that shape who we are and who we become. The experiences that compose Jose’s life seem to come straight from a Hollywood movie: gunfights, kidnappings, romances, murders, and revenge. He is the quintessential outlaw—thick mustache, cowboy boots, and a .45 pistol in his leather holster.

For his children, however, life is not so glamorous. Venegas relates being left in her grandmother’s care for two years while her parents worked to bring her across the border; the nights her father would drink too much and keep the family awake shooting his pistol in the air; and how her father deserted the family when she was still a girl. Being raised in such an environment fashions in each sibling a sense of self-assertiveness. Strong-willed and determined, Maria learns to stand up for herself and never back down from a fight, skills that serve her well.

Desperately trying to escape her father and her past, Maria goes to college, travels, and lands a successful career in New York. At first she feels a part of the city, a place with nameless faces and untraceable origins, but eventually she does not belong. Torn between her race and her new identity, she realizes the only hope for her future is to reconcile her past. She travels to Mexico and as she spends time with her father, she realizes that he is as much a product of his environment as she is of hers. In a country where the law is kill or be killed, Jose has learned how to survive, yet he is forever haunted by his choices. Maria sees him for what he is—not an outlaw, but a man with common concerns and fears.

Fate is an active character in the novel. Today the word has almost a romantic appeal, conjuring images of winding roads and serendipitous meetings, but anciently the notion was terrifying. It meant being thrown around by the winds of chance, governed by a completely uncontrollable force propelling life forward at an unstoppable rate. Like Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment or Fitzgerald’s Gatsby in The Great Gatsby, Jose is as much a victim of fate as he is a perpetrator of destiny. He often alludes to the idea that our actions are not our own. He feels watched over—either by Diosito, or Little God as he calls him, or the Other One—and seems forever a plaything of circumstance.

The novel is entitled Bulletproof Vest because Maria’s father wears a bulletproof vest for protection. The vest...