Line of Fire: Detective Stories from the Mexican Border

The compilation of detective stories from SDSU Press’ Baja California Literature in Translation publication series, Line of Fire: Detective Stories from the Mexican Border, features non-orthodox takes on a genre that has been popular in the Latin American literary tradition. Names like Jorge Luis Borges and Roberto Bolaño have been celebrated as important figures that have paved the way for the detective novel, and as the genre continues to develop, SDSU Press has captured short detective stories taking place in Baja California and its surrounding areas. The stories that form part of Line of Fire were originally published in Spanish in En la línea de fuego: Relatos policiacos de frontera and are written by Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz, Héctor Daniel Gómez Nieves, Leobardo Saravia Quiroz, Edgar Gómez Castellanos, José Manuel Di Bella, Carlos Martín Gutiérrez , Federico Campbell, Harry Polkinhorn, and Sergio Gómez Montero.

The English version of these stories, published by SDSU Press and edited by Leobardo Saravia Quiroz, whose own story is also included in the book, has opened the door of accessibility to a greater audience. Saravia Quiroz comments on the divergence from more conventional forms of the detective story that is clear in Line of Fire, “An indifference towards reason and justice prevails: the entirely modern ‘banality of evil.’ This is one difference from the conventions of the genre.” With the introduction setting the way and the “banality of evil” present in the stories that follow, the reading experience of Line of Fire will have you stepping into worlds of confusion, mystery, and unsolved endings set in the border regions of the US and Mexico. Filled with thoughts and images of paranoia, longing, belonging, betrayal, sounds of music and of bullets, you are bound to become immersed in the Mexican borders portrayed in each story that forms Line of Fire.

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A Baja California Indian Community

William D. Hohenthal, Jr.’s Tipai Ethnographic Notes is a wonderful text on the native people of San Diego County and Baja California.  It dives into and explores every aspect of the Tipai history and culture. Hohenthal has laid the foundation for the research of the almost forgotten Tipai. Considering that this part of California's history was almost forgotten, this book is incredibly valuable for the appreciation and understanding of the Tipai.

Since this text is fantastic collection of ethnographic notes on the Tipai, it serves as an excellent scholarly source for research. The notes are organized into beautifully researched sections: natural environment, settlements, substance, social life, law and government, etc. If you're interested in San Diego’s ancient past or you need an excellent source for research, this book will quench your thirst for knowledge.

Kristi Phillips' wonderful piece on the growing interest of the Kumeyaay.

There is an ongoing exhibit at the San Diego
 Museum of Man, Kumeyaay: Native Californians. 

Buy your copy here

Vidas Fronterizas: Creative Non-Fiction from the U.S./Mexico Border... Somewhere Beyond the Border

Enter their lives…

The border seems to have turned into the largest iron monster- transmuting everything from wealth, art, territory, people, and dust. Yet, it seems to exist in a fractured reality, and like broken bones or scars, the land receives a blow, healing in the makeshift slings of bureaucracy. The borderland, it receives a jailhouse sentence with graffiti walls for prison tattoos. And the only people feeling it are those who have itch-a-sketched, with barbwires, the borders of their bodies with the physical land of which they belong. In the mind: a hallucinogenic Polaroid imprints its experiences, souls, corpses, and the ultimate art of life into the slings of the conscience unconscious.

And so the definitive questions is posed, and it is not who am I? But, "where are you from?"

Vidas Fronteriza/Border Lives balances and rumbles the binary border of the U.S. and Mexico, excavating between the buried and alive, flirting with past ghost and patrols-finding, and always finding the genesis of when the definitive line was drawn. But, who's asking the questions around here... anyway.

EZLN marching into San Cristobal de las Casas
January 1994. 

Existential break-downs and mental-shakes frisk the definitions of each of these essays. From Harry Polkinhorn's introduction to the creative non-fiction essay genre to Ramon Mejia's Loteria-like visions, writing a death defying game of chance. As well as William Anthony Nericcio's Nietzschean deconstruction of border memories and the ever-persistent, pesky, little TRUTH. Or the Chorizo James Bradley dishes out. Even Emily Hicks wills a kaleidoscope collage of performance in ink and paper.

Emily Hick's performance character La Marquesa

Essays like James Bradley transcend experiences from the page answering our enigmatic question:

"I am from the Border (i.e. ,Borderlands)". Or if I really wanted them to have something to think about, I'd say, "I was born in San Diego, like my mother and my mother's father, and raised in the foothills east of there along the Mexican Border." Not U.S. Border, or U.S.-Mexico Border, but the "Mexican Border, as if to emphasize the relationship with the "other" country, the proximity of the "foreign."

And it is this "foreign" nature that does not marginalize the indentations of these border text but give life to a fluid identity. These voices speaking not from a wound but a womb, the divide, Beyond the Border.
In Vidas Fronterizas

Jose Manuel Di Bella at center with friends in Ensenada B.C.
circa 1953

Nailed to the Wound... Tales by Jose Manuel Di Bella

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Nailed to the wound

There are books, titles, works , and so on that deal with a "peculiar" literary technique that seems to have fallen into an awkward void. People seem to constantly put anything from William Faulkner to Joyce on their reading list, the title of which might read "'Summer books...' I need to read to seem more cultured, but won't understand," otherwise known as Stream-of-Conscious. And it is ok! I have authored such a list as well, and cannot begin to comment how many times I have to had re-read a page of The Sound and The Fury, at this point I should just re-read the whole book.

But by far the most moving piece I have encountered, and I recommend for anyone who wants to start maneuvering and breaking into a pair of new stream-of-consciousness reads is Carlos Fuentes "La Raya del Olvido" or "The Line of Oblivion," found in his novel of short stories La Frontera de Cristal or The Crystal Frontier. The reason why, its complexity veiled in simplicity. The language and sentence structures will not take a toll on many, but yet reveal a dramatic mentally savage end. It's also short, for those of us that say we have no time.

If yiu want to get a taste of Carlos Fuentes, this link will take you to a Dance performance video Arturo Fuentes did based off Carlos Fuentes "The Line of Oblivion." Go ahead and click on it and peer a little into the Crystal Frontier

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pEWxjAES40

Somwhere on this path do I find myself with Jose Manuel Di Bella's Nailed to the Womb. 

His sentence lines move with controlled swiftness and dissonance. For example, in his short story "The Card," which involves a translator, who takes the role of narrator, illustrates his last interactions with his lost  friend. This quote highlights their friendship and the beginning of the end..

I had thought to call Lucia to have her invite Magui, but soon this idea dissipated, too far away, on hearing the first thing he said: 'Time only exists for those who dare to measure it. I have no beginning or end.' and he cackled impressively. Used to his phrases, I also started to laugh and added somewhat uncertainly: 'If you hide a minute in a box, and then open it after 20 years the minute will still be there.' his response left me cold: 'yes, but you have to be very careful about hiding it. It can be the minute of your recapitulation.' And he again cackled, which now didn't last as long, and with that naturalness he asked me how the matter of the translations was going...

This should also provide a taste to Jose Manuel Di Bella's caliber by impressively creating vivid characters through not only the eyes of others but the characters own internal experiences in a few concentrated pages. Which perfectly portrays the power of a stream of conscious. This is as close as we can get into someone else's skin before losing ourselves. 

Another example of Jose Manuel Di Bella's narrative power resonates in each character's boundary breaking voice tearing through the pages and our atmosphere. In the main titles story "Nailed to the Wound" the narrator begins:

Well I'll tell you. I don't worry too much. As long as you don't interfere with what I want to do, good luck and good-bye. It happens that suddenly you adopt high integrator flights of dispersed masses and want- really it's a reverend ingenuity- feel yourself the inspiration of something that transcends us...but the truth is that you have an authentic leader complex.

Each ending also brands a picture of longing. I would give you a quote to peak, but I think 1) that would ruin the ending 2) you need to find out by yourself 3) if I gave you any more passages I might end up showing you the whole book. And you need to read this. It is a beautiful mental piece without the surgical price or deathly scavenge.

Just click here to get the whole text…

Jose Manuel Di Bella
if you want to know more about him visit this site, hopefully you can read spanish... http://larc.sdsu.edu/baja/autores/di_bella_jose.html

To Anthropologists And Explorers of Culture (that means you, Indiana Jones)--The World of the Tipai available through our Tipai Ethnographic Notes

front cover

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click here to purchase paperback
click here to purchase hardback

Jerry Moore, Professor of Anthropology at California State University, Dominguez Hills calls   Ethnographic Notes: A Baja California Indian Community at Mid-Century a "salvaged treasure."

American Indian Studies Professor at San Diego State, Richard L. Carrico, praises the book for bringing "new life" to the work of anthropologist William D. Hohenthal.

And Ken Hedges, Curator at the San Diego Museum of Man describes the work as "a vivid account of a living culture making its way in the 20th century while holding onto ancient traditions," adding, "Tipai Ethnographic Notes deserves an honored place on the bookshelf of every California and Baja California anthropologist."

The endorsements are strong, but buy this important historical account and make your own decision.

The book contains incredible ethnographic details about family life, society, religion, government, healing, ethnomedicine and much, much more. Because cultures are constantly evolving, this work provides a snapshot of a way of life that no longer exists.

It's perfect for anyone interested in other cultures, indigenous groups, anthropology, changing societies, religion or the fieldwork of the 1940s--not far off from the time of Indiana Jones, might I add.

Each copy includes a separate, large and detailed map of Baja California during the 1940s, copied from Hohenthal's hand sketches of the area. You'll be hard pressed to find the like anywhere else.

So, buy a copy today (in hardcover or paperback) and let your own anthropological adventure begin.

back cover

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click here to purchase paperback
click here to purchase hardback

Don't Pass Up This Chance to Feel Superior! Buy The Border: The Future of Postmodernity

Can't you just see it?

You're walking down the street and there he is. That arrogant, pseudo-anarchistic, over-compensating, Urban Outfitter's-wearing, Deleuze-worshipping, hair-always-just-a-little-too-messy, brings-his-own-coffee-mug-to-the-coffee-cart guy.

"Oh. Hey." He'll say to you.

"Hey." You'll say back, bracing yourself for his latest attempt at intellectual superiority.

"Have you ever read Chomsky's Modular Approaches to the Study of the Mind?" He'll ask you. "My friend and I just got into a debate over his comparison of Newton's postulation of action at a distance to Descartes' postulation of a creative principle. She's such a fascist."

You, as a frequenter of this blog and a lover of SDSU Press books, will reply, "Why yes, I have. Actually, something I just read in Segio Gómez Montero's The Border: The Future of Postmodernity reminded me of that. Of course, you've read Montero?" You'll query.

"Um, no. I haven't." He'll reply, looking surprised and a little flushed.

And smugly, victoriously, you'll answer, "Really? Odd. I guess some people can't recognize the value of Latin American intellectual thought."

Looking down your nose, you'll deliver the death blow. "Well, maybe you'll get around to reading it someday. When you aren't too busy shopping at Walmart or drinking Starbucks or whatever."

That's what we're offering you. Right here. Only $5.95.

Gómez Montero is considered one of the most important thinkers in northern Mexico. Director of the National University of Education in Mexicali, he's known for his work in linguistics, cultural anthropology, political economy and cultural criticism.

The Border: The Future of Postmodernity is one of his best books. It contrasts regional and national culture, explores the relationship of indigenous sources to the cultural politics of a centrist state, and critiques the tradition of the literary essay.

We have the only English translation available, the third book in our popular Baja California Literature in Translation series. We don't have many copies left, so order yours now!

Marco Antonio Samaniego’s Award Winning Novel Available in English Translation

Marco Antonio Samaniego’s Donde las voces se guardan, winner of the 1992 Augustín Yañez award, is now available in English translation from SDSU Press as The Whispering Voices of Atabalpa. Hit the image above to order it right away via Amazon.com (our online distribution lackey!)

The fifth novel in the SDSU Press series “Baja California Literature in Translation," the book centers on La Chueca, the crooked and deformed female. Condemned from birth for her appearance and her inability to cry as a newborn girl ought, La Chueca grows into a woman who flees her small, unforgiving town to experience life, desire and death. 

Following is an excerpt from the novel described by famed Mexican journalist and author Elena Poniatowska as a “great literary effort.” 

From the moment she spied the little clump of flesh, she knew it was deformed, but she said nothing; she kept quiet, not wanting to be accused of having the evil eye. "It’s a girl, it’s a girl!" She ran outside shouting, where the crowd had gathered, gossiping about the slut Vicenta who had gotten involved with the Silerios and stolen the husband of La Manuela, the daughter of the town’s religious zealot. The women crowded in to see her. Her eyes were red and squinty. Her mouth twitched and her skin was the color of the evening sun, The child had hardly cried at all. That’s why the tongues began to wag; she was born during the sofoque: "The child that doesn’t cry is the child that brings evil; the sign of Satan, of the devil, of evil itself."