Names on a Map

The big, graceful buck cautiously and gracefully approached the water hole.  Gustavo, then age 15, had tried to make his father happy by joining him on a hunting trip.

And then I heard the shot -- deafening -- as it echoed in the dusk.  The buck looked up, took a step -- then stumbled to the ground.
This -- this was why we had come.
It was a beautiful thing.
I never went hunting again.

His father had already assured Gustavo, when he was only ten, "You just don't understand the aesthetics of being a man." That night, young Gustavo looked up "aesthetics" in the dictionary.

Benjamin Sáenz's adult novel, Names on a Map (2008), explores at greater length and with greater sophistication many of the same themes he has developed in the Young Adult novels discussed in my earlier posts.  Sáenz, both a poet and a novelist, writes in simple language and short sentences that, much like the poems of Robert Frost, convey with great sensitivity and restraint a depth of feeling for his characters and an understanding of the inescapable tragedies of human life.

As in his YA novels, this novel -- taking place in 1967 El Paso -- shows us the lives of a middle class Mexican-American family, a family that escaped from Mexico and bribed its way across the U.S. border while fleeing the leftist revolution of the early 1900s.  Gustavo's paternal grandmother, who dies near the end of the novel, was the family's last living tie with Mexico.  His father Octavio -- stern and rigid, loving but unable to communicate his love and distant from his children, and his mother Lourdes, softer and more expressive, but with firm principles of her own -- were both brought as children to America.  Gustavo, now 18, and his twin sister Xochil are two sides of the same coin -- different in personality in  many respects, but bound so closely that they virtually read each other's minds.  Both of them intelligent, literate, thoughtful, and little affected by peer pressure.

Their 13-year-old brother Charlie is the least complicated member of the family -- loving, happy, and optimistic -- considered by others to be the most "American" of the kids, although he himself feels himself closely attached to the Mexico that his grandmother had described to him in stories of her youth.

The framework of the novel is the war in Vietnam and its effect on America's young people.  But the real themes, attached to that framework, are many of the same themes to which Sáenz has returned in his other writings -- the bonds of family, both joyful and stifling; young people's struggle to become adult; the sacrifices that teenage boys make of so much that is good and worthwhile in their lives -- in the name of "manhood".

Each chapter is narrated by a different character, allowing us to understand and empathize with each.  Despite much conflict and argument, and frequent hurt feelings, there are no villains.  We understand the father's belief that every American boy should fight for his country -- not only as a civic duty, but as a means of establishing his own manhood.  As his wife observes somewhat bitterly:

Octavio believed that wars cleansed the world like a good rain and it was our duty to sacrifice our treasure and our sons and saw the whole matter as resembling the story of Abraham willing to sacrifice his son on the altar of God.

We recognize the pride of those boys who joined the Marines, partly because they wanted to fight for their country, but largely because they wanted to show themselves, as much as show others, that they were truly men.

We understand as well the conviction by both Gustavo and Xochil that true manhood didn't allow you to fight a war, to kill people, just because everyone was doing it, or because the government said you must, or because it was a rite of passage like killing a deer.  But Gustavo always understood both sides of every argument, and he always attacked himself with the full contempt of his potential adversaries.  Xochil felt her principles more single-mindedly, and with fewer scruples.  She saw the true bravery and intellectual honesty -- the manliness -- Gustavo always displayed, in both small and large matters.

The story is not a political, anti-war tract, as a few reviews have suggested.  The war in Vietnam is just the accidental subject on which the family differences are played out.  This is a story of a most believable family, with all the happy and sad moments that every family experiences.  But it is a family drama revealed in the context of its being a Mexican-American family living in the fraught year of 1967.

Sáenz once again demonstrates how "American" second and third generation Mexican-American families truly are.  Gustavo and Xochil and Charlie are Mexican only in superficial aspects of family traditions.  President Trump would see their family, and the people they know, as a slap in his face, rendering absurd his claims that immigrants across the southern border were largely murderers and rapists.

In a wrenching conclusion, Gustavo receives his draft notice.  The decisions he makes in reaction tear him apart from the family that has meant everything to him for 18 years.

You have left everything you have ever known.  You are taking a journey that millions of immigrants have taken.  Immigrants who leave behind their homelands for reasons that are known to them alone.

A strong and deeply moving story.  A tragedy in the Greek sense of good people facing and accepting the conflict between their conscience and the implacable forces they confront. 

And thus their ultimate fate.