Thursday, May 02, 2019

The Truth about Fiction

The truth blurred
What to make of a novel whose protagonist, Art “Arturo” Keller, is the offspring of an Anglo father, who abandoned him early at in life, to be raised by a Mexican mother in San Diego's Barrio Logan, birth place of Chicano Park, Las Tres Milpas, Alurista's Aztlan-Chicano identity, all in the shadow of the Mexican border, but a twenty-minute jaunt away. As a product of Barrio Logan, one would think, our protagonist might ponder his Chicano-Mexican-Hispanic ethnicity.

However, in his novel, the last in a trilogy, crime novelist Don Winslow never allows our protagonist to consider his Raza bloodline, unless he did in first novel of the trilogy, which I didn’t read. \

A master of numerous narrative voices, Winslow creates a narrator who tells us Keller served with the U.S. Army in Vietnam, law enforcement afterwards, and, as the novel opens, directs the DEA, yup, the top guy, el mero jefe, el director, living in Washington D.C. with his Mexican wife, Marisol.

Backstory: in the early 1980s, our protagonist did a stint in Guadalajara as an agent with the DEA, where he and his partner Ernie Hidalgo, a thinly veiled Enrique "Kiki" Camarena, broke the back of the Guadalajara cartel, infuriating one of the cartel’s leaders, Rafael Caro (standing in for the Caro of Quintero fame), who takes his revenge on the DEA by kidnapping Hidalgo, torturing and killing him, setting off an international border crisis with the U.S., while Ronald Reagan was president and the Nicaraguan Contras were running drugs, with the permission (and assistance) of Ollie North and elements of the CIA, to fight their war against the communist Sandinistas. Sound familiar?

Our hero, Keller, who is all Arthur with barely hints of an Arturo, eventually executes those responsible for his partner’s death, albeit, using his own, sometimes, illegal methods of retaliation, blurring the lines between truth and fiction, possibly frustrating readers knowledgeable about the so-called drug war.

Of the novel’s primary characters, the majority are Mexican or Latino, even Chicanos, like DEA agent Hugo Hidalgo, following in his martyred father's footsteps, big time drug runner Eddie Ruiz, many convicts, and members of the Mexican Mafia, all cogs in the complex machinery of the illegal drug industry, which includes bankers and high-level public officials on both sides of the border, from the White House to Los Pinos, in Mexico City.

Many of the characters are Mexican and Guatemalan nationals, some good, some not so good, some down right evil. Others, like Los Hijos, the spoiled, opportunistic, and ruthless Mexican twenty-somethings, who are in the process of inheriting their fathers’ businesses and wealth without suffering any of their fathers' experiences, are the next generation of cartel leaders, who begin to deconstruct.

So goes the 716-page novel.

I must admit, the last long novel I read was “War and Peace”, which took me about six months to finish, keeping two copies, one at home and one in my car, to take advantage of my free time. I made it through Winslow’s book in record time, for me, about eight days, a true page-turner, a roller-coaster ride, plot heavy but light on character development, which brings me to my point.

With such an array of Mexican, Latino, Hispanic characters, whether he means it to or not, Winslow’s novel stands as a commentary on a segment of Latino culture? In fact, much of Winslow's success as a writer is owed to his Latino characters, and Latino culture, going back to his book and movie "Savages."

Winslow gives Latinos their due. They play prominent roles on both sides of the law, as criminals and in law enforcement. They are good, smart socially conscious journalists and social workers through which the writer works his magic, keeping a myriad of plot lines in the air at one time and connecting all of them at novel's end, seriously, a masterful job of fiction writing. Yet, as provocative and entertaining as I found much of the novel, I also found it disconcerting by the end.

I’ve written before how I find it fascinating that millions of readers in all corners of the world soak up popular fiction, as I'm sure does Winslow's global readership, maybe due to good storytelling, but often, more than not, strong, strategic marketing.

I mean, to me, it is mindboggling that Mexican, Latino characters enter the households of readers in such faraway places as Nebraska, the Dakotas, the deep South, the New England states, places where readers rarely rub shoulder to shoulder with Mexicans. How are their imaginations being shaped by Winslow's, and other writers' Chicano, Mejicano, Latino characters? After all, Winslow does use the word "Chicano" to identify his Mexican-American characters.

So, if a writer’s setting is Mexico, Latin America, U.S. Latino barrios, or let's say, the Chicano-Latino community, in any of its many facets, this must impact readers’ imaginations? For many, the line is blurred between truth and fiction. I believe our current president has given us a good example of this. It is scary to think some people believe everything he says. Even going back to Obama's campaign for the presidency when a woman told John McCain Obama was Muslim.

Shouldn't we, as Latino readers, writers, and teachers, be concerned with how artists are depicting us to the world, not just our characterizations, but our stories, and lives? Do those ignorant about Latinos blur fiction and reality? Since few Americans will ever take an ethnic studies class in school, do they come away with negative images of Latinos the read about? Do they think that Chicano-Latino communities are bastions of drug dealing and drug use, that the border is being overrun by all Latin America? How can we measure the impact of popular fiction by bestselling writers when their focus is the Latino community?

Winslow’s book is brutal and portrays Latino characters committing the most heinous acts, even the exploitation, murder, and rape of innocent men, women, and, yes, children. When a character is portrayed as a one-dimensional monster, one is left with a one-dimensional interpretation. So even as Winslow clearly places blame on the U.S. drug policies and drug use as the cause for Latin America's drug problem, it is also clear that Mexicans do the dirty work of ingeniously disappearing human beings.

It reminds me when I took issue with Chinua Achebe claiming one of my favorite writers, Joseph Conrad, was a racist for his portrayal of Africans in his classic, Heart of Darkness. After reading Achebe's essay on the topic, I began to understand, especially when he said, in Conrad's book "all of Africa stands as the backdrop for the destruction of one puny European mind." Ah, I got it. I started to understand the subtle racism, even in books that purported to portray people of color in a positive light.

Of course, Winslow's imagination, and research, is not too far from reality. There is probably nothing he describes that isn’t true to life.

Still, as I read the book, I began to distance myself from the story and the characters. It is the Mexicans who participate in the most treacherous and vile acts. Mostly, though, since I’ve read so much about the drug wars, I know much about the topic, and I began to sense a weakness in the storytelling as Winslow’s plot mirrored real life, to the point where I felt I was re-reading what I already knew, old wine in new wine skin.

I kept telling myself, “Wow, Winslow did a lot of research, twenty years of his life dedicated to the topic, but lacking in verisimilitude, the backbone of classic fiction. He reaches fictional conclusions that, perhaps, should have remained vague or abstract, as they did in real life..

What is truth, even if fiction? Is it enough to say, “Well this is fiction, so the writer can create whatever he/she conceives”? Or do even fiction writers have some responsibility to the truth, some responsibility to the people and communities they portray, some understanding that what they create might just be taken out of context in a different part of the world, or the country, causing one weak mind to lose a grasp of reality and seek to punish those (or that) he does not understand, which could lead us to more incidents like Poway or Charlottesville ?


Unknown said...

Daniel, your astute column makes a very important point about the role of minorities in the American arts. I have often said that in film, minorities generally serve merely as background scenery before which which character take the limelight. Too many movies, for instance, infuse the story of a white protagonist with background "soul" music in order to portray that character as hip and sophisticated. Minorities too often are the foils in Hollywood films. This laziness, I see now from your example of this novel, is now present in fiction. It's my hope that, as Latino fiction receives greater distribution in bookstores and libraries across the entire nation, our experiences and perspectives will be given more attention and respect. I'm pleased that my own YA novel, "Iron River" received an award from an organization in New Jersey, al the way across the country from its California birthplace!
Daniel Acosta

Daniel Cano said...

Daniel , yes, exactly, your points are well taken. When many non-Latino writers try getting into the minds/spirits of their Latino characters, to me, anyway, there is something lacking. It has nothing to do with writing skills since many are master writers. It's something else. Congrats on your own novel.