Word: mexicans
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...book genres. Instead, she has created something all too rare in the medium: a realistic drama for adults told in a straightforward manner. The approach makes sense for a book which spends so much time exploring the nature of authenticity. "In gringolandia you have irony for everything," says one Mexican character, "so you can look at it and know what to think...
...takes place in Mexico City, at the turn of the last millennium. Carla, an American in her early twenties, has the wanderlust of many people her age. She goes to Mexico because she is "sick of everybody" and because she wants to find the roots of her resented "disappearing Mexican dad." The reasons for her arrival and prolonged year-long stay become a central theme in the book, as Carla's ideas of Mexico, loaded with all kinds of cultural assumptions, clash with the reality. Overstaying her travel visa she becomes a reverse illegal immigrant, working under the table...
...Mexico City residents she meets through Memo, a would-be revolutionary who sells Marxist pamphlets at the local market. Memo's relentless denigration of Carla's first-world background tugs on a string of middle-class guilt and self-loathing tied around Carla's soul. Yearning for the "authentic" Mexican experience, Carla eventually ends up in a flat she shares with her new Mexican boyfriend Oscar, who dreams of becoming a DJ in America, but settles for selling pot and T-shirts to tourists. Eventually his underworld connections lead to a strange, international incident that precipitates Carla's return home...
...Perdida as engaging as good theater. A typical scene pits Memo against Carla in a long argument about the purity of Carla's motives for staying in Mexico. It lasts for over five pages with Memo saying things like "You teach over-priced English classes to under-educated Mexican morons who buy into the imperialistic American model?" To which Carla wonders about Memo's real reasons for learning English. "It wouldn't have anything to do with buying into imperialist American aesthetics of female beauty, and wanting to get into some naturally-blond pants?" It's a rarity to find...
...While comix travelogues have become a burgeoning sub-genre, Jessica Abel's La Perdida goes one better. It processes the experiences of the foreign traveler into a focused examination of the relationship between foreignness and being "native," particularly the nature of "Americanness." Even its liberal use of Mexican colloquialisms in the original Spanish puts the book at the edge of today's controversy over the purity of English. La Perdida includes a glossary for all the Spanish at the end, except strangely, a translation of the title. My crude Google-based research roughly translates it as "The Lost...