Summary
[Sam Quinones] begins by recounting the tale of "Antonio's Gun," a story about a boy who, following his father's murder at the behest of his village's resident tyrant, journeys to the United States to earn money, buy a gun, and avenge his fathers death. He earns the money, gets the gun, and returns to Mexico, never to revisit the States again. Because Mexicans are nothing if not cognizant of other peoples schedules, [Antonio] even sends the tyrant a card announcing the day he will return to kill him (which is not only a badass move, but also has to be the worst kind of letter to find in your mailbox). I shouldn't tell you whether Antonio kills the tyrant... but he does. Sorry.
The desire for a glorious return to Mexico is the vehicle that drives these characters. It's one of the book's main ideas and serves as half of an answer to the fundamental Mexican migrant quandary: Why don't Mexicans who are in the United States illegally attempt to assimilate more wholly into American life? You know how, when people go to Italy, they ride around on Vespas and smoke skinny cigarettes, but don't really bother to learn anything about Italy because they don't plan on staying? It's kind of like that.To approach the tales in [Delfino Juarez]'s Dream as an attempt to "solve" the immigration problem would be a mistake. Quinones uses each of his book's journeys to humanize immigration, while other chroniclers have too often hyped it. This is easily Quinones' greatest feat in Delfino's Dream. He personalizes portraits of immigrants with a seemingly bottomless supply of compassion, honesty, and forthrightness, foregoing the standard exaggerations often associated with illegal immigrants. These are not mere parasitic culture thieves, as Lou Dobbs would have you believe, nor are they the beacons of peasant nobility leftwing sympathizers insist you see. Illegal immigrants, like most everyone else, exist somewhere between their polar presentations in popular culture, mired in the gray area of argument, as people with aspirations and fears and families and stories all their own.See the full content of this document
Extract
The Long Way Home
The Long Way Home Antonio's Gun and Delfino's Dream: True Tales of Mexican Migration By Sam Quinones University of New Mexico Press 326pages, $24.95
Sam Quinones came to be one of America's preeminent border journalists almost by happenstance when, in 1994, he traveled to Mexico with the intent to study Spanish. Once there, he became en...See the full content of this document
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