Teenage Stories

The Chicano literary movement in the seventies was about allowing Mexican American voices free expression, which meant that there was a bias against shaping or editing or revising. What counted then was immediacy, rawness, and reality of voice. The question to ask after reading a twenty-first century Chicano writer is whether or not the narrative on the page is more valuable when told in the raw, natural voice of a human person telling you a story, or is the better tale that raw voice refined, shaped, polished, and pushed to some kind of purpose?

Gutierrez's book Live from Fresno y Los begs the question. Rather than letting thoughts fly in a flurry of essays, recollections, and meager short stories as in his first book elements (1997), Gutierrez refined and shaped his unique voice and produced seven separate accounts set in Los Angeles and Fresno, where he grew up. In this, his second effort, there is more structure and control, but the stories may still need more refining and editing.

The first story in the collection, "Just Everything," uses a metaphor (in the first sentence) to grab a reader's attention, but then Gutierrez dilutes the metaphor by mentioning it again and again throughout the story. Walter and Nadia are making out under a "moon the size of a grapefruit" in the opening scene. In case his readers didn't catch the citrus reference five lines above it, he repeats the image in the paragraph below when the two star-crossed lovers look "up at that moon the size and shape and color of a grapefruit." Gutierrez hits us with the moon metaphor several more times within the narrative and gives readers reason to question the writer's reliability. The honest story about teenage lust and love then degenerates into an italicized memoir filled with too many adjectives and unintentional word repetition.

I really liked her, but was too shy to pursue it seriously. I was ugly, thought I was ugly anyway because of the way other girls reacted to me (I must have been ugly, I was ugly!) and was terribly, terribly shy around girls in those days….

His most ambitious effort, "Harold, All American," tells the story of America, which is to say of the Mexican American population in suburbia and in between. Frank the narrator captures the constant state of panic and self-doubt all teenagers go through with simple clear sentences.

Detail from cover

We were pretty boring kids, after all "normal," "average" working-class kids out of Southern California, barriotainted, maybe, suburban-influenced to some degree, certainly, ambiguous in our blue-collar backgrounds, drawing from everything around us, positively and without doubt true.

We were unglamorous Southern Californians, neither barrio nor suburban, one thing or the other, but most often mistaken for the inner city guys we really had nothing in common with.

At his best, the Cornell-educated Gutierrez gives voice to a father and son relationship by showing a telling moment between a too-busy father and his over achieving son in this poignant true to life scene in "Harold, All American."

My dad sat in his armchair. He said, "Give me a beer, son. Tell me how you're doing in school."

"I don't know, I'm class president."

"Really?"

"Really."

"Wow." He lifted the empty to his lips, put it down on the end table next to him. "Virginia, why didn't you tell me about this? What do you think, I'm—"

"Sordo? Yes, sordo," she said, pointing to her ear. "You don't hear these things. You don't remember them."

"I forget," he cleared his ear of wax. "Speak up. Do something!"

"I'm trying, Dad."

"I know you are, son," he said. "That's all you can do in this world, just try. Do something! And show them your balls when you're in a pinch. Fight back until it's over. Then walk away, too, like a man." Then my dad bent his...