Notebooks of a Chile Verde Smuggler (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780816522156)

Raucous adobe hearts and urban violet mascara. Televised immigration games and ethnic sit-coms. Chile con karma served on a bed of race. In a startling melange of poetry, prose, journal entries, and even a screenplay, Zen Chicano desperado Juan Felipe Herrera fixes his gaze on his own life and times to craft his most personal work to date.

Notebooks of a Chile Verde Smuggler is a river of faces and phrases, jottings and reflections--a personal pilgrimage and collective parade of love, mock-prophecy, and chiste. Tuning in voices from numerous time zones, languages, and minds, Herrera recalls his childhood and coming of age, his participation in the Chicano Movement, and the surreal aspects of postmodern America. He uses broad strokes to paint a historical, social, and familial portrait that moves from the twilight of the nineteenth century to the dawn of the twenty-first, then takes up a finer brush to etch the eternal tension between desire and frustration, hope and disillusionment, violence and tenderness.

Here are transamerican sutras spanning metrocenters from Mexico City to San Francisco, or slinking across the border from Juárez to El Paso. Outrageous, rhythmic lists--"Foodstuffs They Never Told Us About," "Things Religion Makes Me Do"--that fire the imagination. Celebrations of his Plutomobile that "runs on ham hawks & bird grease," and of Chicano inventions such as cilantro aftershave and "the art of eating Vicks VapoRub with your dedos."

Pushing forms to the edge of possibility while forcing readers to rethink reality as well as language, Herrera invokes childhoods and neighborhoods, stand-up clowns and Movimiento gypsies, grandmothers of the buñuelo kitchen and tragicomic soliloquies of dizzy-headed outcasts of paradise. Notebooks of a Chile Verde Smuggler is a crucible of flavorful language meant to be rolled lazily on the mind's tongue--and then swallowed whole to let its hot and savory sweetness fill your soul.

Author: Juan Felipe Herrera
ISBN-10: 0816522154
ISBN-13: 9780816522156
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Language: English
Published: 05/01/2002
Pages: 191
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.65lbs
Size: 8.96h x 6.16w x 0.51d

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 07/22/2002 pg. 171
Library Journal 08/01/2002 pg. 101
Multicultural Review 03/01/2003 pg. 67
Univ PR Books for Public Libry 01/01/2003 pg. 76 - Strongly Recommended
Library Journal 08/12/2002