In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

107 Dagoberto Gilb agoberto Gilb was born in Los Angeles in 1950 and was raised by his Mexican single mother. In high school, he worked in an industrial laundry, in a warehouse as a shipping clerk, and as a graveyard shift janitor. During college, he worked as a stock boy and a salesman in department stores. After his college years, he became a professional carpenter. He spent his days breathing cement dust and nailing forms as a journeyman union carpenter working on high-rises in and around Los Angeles. His desire to become a published writer transformed his life as a working-class Chicano into something bigger than himself. In the early 1980s, Gilb sent a short story toThe Threepenny Review. Much to his joy, the magazine’s editor, Wendy Lesser, wrote him back quickly saying she loved his work, and she began to publish his short fiction regularly . Gilb’s work began to take shape as a collection, and he soon won his first literary prize in California, the James D. Phelan Award. Gilb moved with his family to El Paso, and there the newly formed Cinco Puntos Press received a grant to publish his work. In 1985, Winners on the Pass Line reached a wide audience, and so did his Chicano working-class protagonists (from plumbers and carpenters to mechanics) and their everyday experiences on and off the job site. In one of these early stories, “Where the Sun Don’t Shine,” we learn the complex reasons why the Chicano character Sal puts up with a racist, unskilled Anglo foreman. In 1993 the University of New Mexico Press publishedThe Magic of Blood—a collection that adds twenty or so stories to Winners and includes even more working-class Chicano characters. After the success of The Magic of Blood (winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award and a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award), Gilb’s fiction caught the eye of Grove/Atlantic’s new owner, Morgan Entrekin. In 1994 Grove Press published The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña, a novel employing an unassuming, unreliable narrator (his trademark) to tell the story. Here, Gilb plunges his readers deep into the troubled psyche of Acuña as he tries to live anew in an El Paso YMCA. Gilb returned to short fiction with Woodcuts of Women (2001). In this collection of ten short stories, he sharpens details and widens his scope to flesh out a panoply of workingclass characters. For example, in “Mayela One Day,” Gilb’s narrator and protagonist is street-smart and wise beyond his years. He muses on one occasion: I’m in a city called El Paso. I could point it out on a map. Right here, here it is. There is longitude, latitude. For most this is enough, a satisfactory explanation. But say we don’t use all these imaginary concepts. Say there is no west of or east of or north of or south of. Forget all that. Forget these legalistic boundaries. No Texas here, no Mexico there, no New Mexico. Forget all that. Here’s the river. Here are mountains. A sky above. (19) Frederick Luis Aldama: So what is your latest writing project? Dagoberto Gilb: It’s a collection of about forty essays that I’ve amassed over the last twenty years or so. Some I wrote for the National Public Radio program Fresh Air. Others appeared in magazines like the New Yorker, and I’ve included the one from Harper’s and ones reprinted in Best American Essays. There’s a piece I did for the L.A. Times about undocumenteds crossing the U.S.–Mexico border. You name it. The collection is broken into four categories: culture, women, family, and work. I titled it Gritos, which I had a little trouble explaining the meaning of to my editor at Grove. In part, he was reacting to my reputation as a bad boy, always causing trouble—he didn’t understand what a grito was and thought it meant that I wanted to scream at Anglos; the other part was that he just didn’t think it would sell because it’s a Spanish word. Any Chicano knows what a grito is; it’s a word like taco. I asked César Martínez to do the cover art. He’s from Laredo; he’s famous for his paintings of pachucos. I want the cover to be an image of a grito, but not of an old, sour-looking 108 Spilling...

Share