Dreams dying in Las Cruces

Benjamin Alire Sáenz

Benjamin Alire Sáenz is a Mexican-American novelist, poet, and author of books for young children.  He is best known to the general public as a writer of Young Adult fiction.  I've read five of his books, and reviewed two of them on this blog.  One of those I've read was marketed as adult fiction, and the other four as YA.  I conclude that the publisher arbitrarily decides the category -- the author, at least Sáenz, doesn't sit down to write a "YA novel" or an "adult novel" in the same way he decides to write a children's book.

In August, I spent a couple of days in Las Cruces, New Mexico, for a relative's wedding.  I liked the town.  I liked the mixture of Anglo and Mexican-American cultures, and the sense I had that assimilation had gone as far as it had.  In my vaguely oblivious way, I felt as comfortable surrounded by Las Cruces Hispanics as I do in Seattle in a room full of Asians. 

Sáenz was born near Las Cruces and graduated from Las Cruces high school in 1972.  He received his B.A. from a Catholic seminary in Denver, studied philosophy and theology in Belgium, and was ordained a priest.  For reasons unknown to me, he left the priesthood after several years, and has since focused on writing.  He attended Stanford on a Stegner fellowship, entered the Stanford Ph.D. program for a couple of years, and then accepted a teaching position in the Bilingual Creative Writing program at the University of Texas at El Paso, where he has taught ever since.

Every writer to some degree writes about his own experiences, but those books by Sáenz that I've read have all seemed unusually autobiographical.  Their stories are told from the point of view of a Mexican-American teenaged boy who is smart and sensitive, but lacks self-confidence.  He is street-wise.  Although usually bookish, he isn't afraid to fight with his fists -- in some stories he is bewildered and upset by his propensity to fight.  Although not "religious," the protagonist is strongly affected by his Catholic background and admires those of his older relatives who are devout.  The books themselves subtly encourage a system of Christian values, as opposed to devotion to any form of orthodoxy.

I just finished reading one of his earlier YA novels, Sammy and Juliana in Hollywood, published in 2004.  "Hollywood" isn't the downtown Las Cruces that I saw in August.  It is -- or at least was in 1968 when the story takes place -- an impoverished barrio on the east side of town.  Unlike the middle class Mexican-American teenagers whose stories were told in some of his other books, the Hollywood kids come from families that are just getting by.  They speak English, but with a lot of Spanish phrases and slang thrown in.

The segregation of Hispanic from Anglo students is marked in this story, as it is in most of Sáenz's other novels.  The segregation results less from Anglo hostility, at least overt and intentional, than from the feelings of inferiority felt by the Mexican-Americans.  (Why are Anglo kids considered brilliant when they learn to speak Spanish well, Sammy wonders?  But we get no credit at all for speaking both English and Spanish well.)

In the early chapters, Sammy is in love with Juliana, a bright but tough-minded young woman.  They eventually make love in a defining moment of Sammy's life.  Shortly thereafter, Juliana's father kills her and her six siblings as a way of showing his wife who's boss.  For the rest of the book, Juliana is not a living character but a center of longing and sorrow, an unattainable ideal of happiness, in Sammy's soul.

At least two appealing girls Sammy's age are in love with him, but he considers them friends, even sisters.  They aren't Juliana.

This book is marketed to young people in grades 9 to 12.  Kids today must be a lot tougher-minded than we were at that age.  The story of Sammy and his friends is a story of wasted time and wasted lives.  It's a story about all the dangers and temptations -- sex, drugs, drinking, fighting -- of the barrio.

As high school graduation approaches, and passes, the little band of Sammy's friends begins breaking up.  Two boys are drafted and sent to Vietnam, where one is quickly killed.  One boy's family moves to California, after a local scandal, where he ends up attending UCLA.  One of the girls who loved Sammy leaves town with a Jewish boy who had been accepted by their clique.   Everyone promises to write, to keep in touch.  No one does.

An elderly neighborhood woman who had offered Sammy tough (very tough) love as he grew up, and whom he had learned to love in return, dies.

All through high school, Sammy has been obsessed with the idea of going away to college -- a rare dream in his milieu -- and of escaping the dead-end lives of Hollywood.  He works like crazy to get the grades necessary, despite the mocking of his friends (they name him "the Librarian") and the contempt and dislike of his Anglo teachers.  (If anyone who taught in Las Cruces high school in 1968 reads this book, he should feel ashamed.)  He applies to eight colleges.  He is accepted at all of them, including his dream school of Berkeley.

Near the end of that summer following high school graduation, his dad is involved in a serious auto accident and loses his leg.  He is unable to work.  There's no one to look after Sammy's younger sister, who he loves and who worships him.  He sends Berkeley his regrets, and enrolls in the local community college.

When I hung up the phone, I cried too. I cried for René and for Pifas.  I cried for my dad's leg.  I cried for never having gotten to go to a school I worked my damned Mexican ass off to get into.  I cried for my mother.  I cried for Juliana.

His dad died soon afterward of a stroke. 

Throughout high school, Sammy had been the only kid in his group of friends who had the ambition to escape Hollywood, to achieve something in the Anglo world, to graduate from a university.  Instead, he ends up the only one who remains in Hollywood after all his friends have either died or left town.

Sáenz seems to remind us, without being explicit, that although Sammy's life seems tragic, he has been true to himself and to his values throughout.  He still has a full life ahead of him.  Starting out in a community college isn't the end of the world.

But still.  Don't read the last half of the book while on an airline flight.  The flight attendants will look at you strangely when they see tears running down your cheeks.

If I could be anybody just for a day, I'd be Jesus Christ, that's who I'd be. I'd go to all the graves. I would stand there. I would close my eyes and lift my arms. I'd be Jesus Christ -- I'd stand in front of the graves of all the people I loved. And I'd raise them back to life.

All of them.

And after they were all alive again, I'd hug them and kiss them and never let them go.  And I would be happy.  I would be the happiest man in all the world.