Publishers Weekly
06/21/2021
Artist and graphic novelist Cortez (Sexile) celebrates Chicano life in this exuberant collection. Stories such as “El Gordo” focus on the experiences of the title character, a child of migrant farm workers. Cortez then moves with ease from depictions of Gordo’s family to the intersecting lives of the inhabitants of Watsonville, Calif., in the 1970s. In “The Jesus Donut,” a heretical young girl becomes a hero after she shares a donut with other kids, offering bits of it as communion. In “Alex,” Gordo’s family helps out their injured butch lesbian neighbor, Alex, and the burgeoning friendship becomes a cover for Gordo’s mother to help Alex’s abused femme partner escape to safety. In “The Problem of Style,” bullied sixth grader Raymundo gains confidence when he decides to grow his hair out and become “artistic.” At their best, Cortez’s stories highlight the community’s functional and paradoxical stew of interpersonal relationships, brimming with threats as well as love. Cortez has a bright, clear voice that avoids stereotypes and navigates issues of identity with ease: “Raymundo tossed his hair, turned smartly on his heels, and crossed an unmarked border into a new country.” Readers will be delighted. (Aug.)
From the Publisher
A "Best Book of August" by Bustle, Orion Magazine, and Alta
“[Gordo] gives the reader an unobstructed view into the lives of those who are often relegated to statistics and political talking points: people who come to the States for a better life for themselves and their offspring …The strength of Cortez’s work is that he lays out these stories without defining his characters by their worst actions, showing us people who are closer to reflections of ourselves than we think, even if they do not look like us, or come from the places we call home. And this is the book’s superpower: the cultivation of empathy.” —New York Times Book Review
“Funny and incredibly charming, despite highlighting the acute poverty of the camp’s Latino migrant residents…Cortez, a Bay Area author, masterfully navigates adverse conditions of migrant life while prioritizing in these stories the way people adapt to their circumstance — managing to find joy and amusement, love and triumph, that which makes us delightfully human — amid its challenge.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“A lovely book that masterfully evokes 1970s California, but manages, nonetheless, to feel truly universal…. The town that inspired John Steinbeck has a new literary star.” —NPR
“Intimate and irreverent… This hilarious short story collection gives incisive glimpses of blue-collar Mexican American life.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune
"Like Diane Arbus or Weegee, Cortez depicts warts-and-all moments of vulnerability precisely, sometimes even harshly, and without sentiment... Cortez artfully frames these characters’ daily struggles and captures them in the freeze-frame flash of a master at work." —BookPage , starred review
"Exuberant... A bright, clear voice that avoids stereotypes and navigates issues of identity with ease... Readers will be delighted." —Publishers Weekly
"These stories are elemental and unfussy, their emotional hearts affecting and memorable. [They] serve as unvarnished, even fond, testaments to a tough, queer life." —Kirkus (starred review)
“Cortez’s dialogue, timing, and humor is quick, dark and hilarious and the voice of Gordo, singular and soaring, full of naivete and grit that wrangles humor and human complexity with serious high-stake themes… Gordo, like Winesburg, Ohio, is capable of changing not only what it means to be American today, but what American literature can be… Hands down, top debut of 2021.” —Kerri Arsenault, Literary Hub
'"What a voice, what a charming, idiosyncratic voice! Cortez tells the untold stories of California. Set what you know aside, lay your expectations on the couch next to you, put your feet up, pick up this book, and journey into a land as real and complex as the state itself." —Rabih Alameddine
“What if David Sedaris and Richard Rodriguez were the same person? What if it was possible to tell stories about farmworkers and Latinx rural people with hilarity, queerness, tenderness, and poetic precision? What if Jaime Cortez existed and had a book coming out and you were lucky enough to read it in a few months’ time?” —Rebecca Solnit
“Some people have to walk around with so many sad stories. They have to get up, brush their teeth, wash their face, go to work like everybody else, but they’re not like everyone else. Jaime Cortez is a wise guy with a wide heart, who sees what ‘no one else wants to see.’ His funny/tragic tales, luminescent with love, are lanterns for our dark times.” —Sandra Cisneros
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2021-06-29
The pudgy, queer kid at the heart of these stories must navigate the harsh but loving community of migrant farm workers in rural California in the mid-1970s.
“I get picked on all the time for being fat, cuz I can’t throw a ball, for speaking English all wrong," Gordo confesses in “Fandango,” in which he confronts the rare phenomenon of an apparent gringo coming to work at the garlic fields. It’s an indication of how baffling Gordo finds the adult world that he doesn’t understand that someone with red hair can be a Mexican named Juan Diego. The redhead encourages young Gordo to down some tequila at a boisterous Saturday night fandango that Gordo would prefer to observe, sitting on an upturned bucket just outside the circle of men who are drinking and listening to a Vicente Fernández record. “It tasted awful, but now everybody likes me,” Gordo says. “For once, all the guys like me!” That party ends in two brothers having a violent brawl, one of them rushed to the emergency room by some of the other men even though they’re furious at the brothers for fighting so intensely. Gordo has grown up in “Raymundo the Fag,” by now the most talented hairstylist in Watsonville, such a star that Olga, his colleague, urges him to move to San Francisco or even just Salinas, which is at least a bigger town than Watsonville. “Half the culeros in this town have harassed or beat me, when they weren’t trying to get into my pants,” Ray tells her. “But I’m still here and taking their money to make their wives and girlfriends look foxy. That’s home, Olga. I’m not going nowhere.” Raygay, as he was known by his bullies when young, is asked to make one of his middle school tormentors look good in death; one side of Shy Boy’s head is punctured by a bullet and only Ray can make the wig look stunning. These stories are elemental and unfussy, their emotional hearts affecting and memorable.
Stories that serve as unvarnished, even fond, testaments to a tough, queer life.
