Crossing Territories: New Spaces in Six Works of Fiction
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José Cruz Soria. Retablo. 1960. Oil on metal. 17.2 cm × 18 cm. Durand-Arias collection. Reprinted with permission from Jorge Durand. The text along the bottom, translated from its original Spanish, reads, "I give infinite thanks to Our Lady of San Juan de los Lagos for having enabled me to cross the border and return with health. José Cruz Soria. San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato. February 2, 1960."
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Works Reviewed
Talk these days of borders—how they are created, how they are designed to separate, and ultimately how they are crossed—leads to the rich, myriad ways in which we might treat notions of space. The six books gathered for this review—three of which come from Houston's Arte Público Press—might suggest at first that geography could serve as the deciding factor in determining a book's thematic cohesion. In story after story (with Hinojosa's work being the only novel), setting is approached consistently by nearly all of these writers (including some of the seventeen comprising Hit List: The Best of Latino Mystery) as something characters are likely to transgress. In many of these narratives, we get an undercurrent of movement, of people longing to break past the confines of their own geographies, personal or otherwise.
It's curious that the celebratory nature of Robert Roripaugh's 2007 collection, The Legend of Billy Jenks, is muted a bit by a defensive foreword, written by John D. Nesbitt, who posits Roripaugh as a sort of Wyoming laureate in perpetuity by nature of his "native" status to the state. (Roripaugh did serve as the state's poet laureate from 1995 to 2002.) [End Page 67] Literary Wyoming, if we are inclined to agree with the foreword, has fallen under the too-strong identification with the success of Annie Proulx, an "outsider" whose mere presence suggests that one—and only one—writer can accurately represent Wyoming. While it may be true that national attention brought on by the phenomenal story "Brokeback Mountain" (1997) has led to an uneasy pairing of author to state, would we entertain this idea for any other region of our country? Mississippi, after all, is equated with fervor on behalf of William Faulkner and Eudora Welty. There's certainly space for both.
The comparison to Proulx in the foreword, even in anticipation of its inevitability, is unnecessary, since Roripaugh's wide-ranging work, published over a fifty-year span from 1953 to 2003, is quite remarkable in its fidelity to bringing as many different facets to Wyoming as possible. In the 1972 title story, it isn't long before Roripaugh begins releasing the kinds of details Nesbitt lauds quite correctly as true to "a sense of … being based on Wyoming as people who live here know it" (ix). In recounting the heavy toll of a blizzard, Roripaugh writes of the effort to save livestock with a startling earnestness over its futility: "Baled hay had to be dumped out of airplanes to feed starving cattle in places where they aimlessly waded around belly-deep in snow with their eyelids frosted over" (36). "A boy raised on a ranch gets used to stillborn calves, horses ripping themselves up in barbwire, and cows infected from retained afterbirth," says the narrator of "The Man Who Killed the Split-Toed Wolf," who readies himself to either accept or dispel a story he...
