Tarjetas Postales y Yo

By michele on June 11, 2010 | Add a Comment

Luis Alberto Urrea will be reading at RiverRun Bookstore on Thursday, June 17th at 7pm. For more information on the event, go here.

A Lannan Literary Award winner and recent inductee into the Latino Literary Hall of Fame, Urrea is one of the most critically acclaimed novelists writing today. The Hummingbird’s Daughter, his novel which followed the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Devil’s Highway, won him wide-spread accolades and even comparisons to the great Gabriel García Márquez. Now Urrea continues to create spell-binding literature with his brilliant new road novel, Into the Beautiful North. 


We recently asked him to write a guest blog post for us, and here it is: 

Tarjetas Postales y Yo
By Luis Alberto Urrea

1.

The action in my novel, Into the Beautiful North, is kicked off by outside events invading the staid and eccentric lives of people in a small Mexican town.  If you look at what critics say, they attribute the inspiration for the long adventure the characters undertake to invasion by bandidos (yeah, that’s good); to the influence of the Yul Brynner epic, The Magnificent Seven (right on, baby, now you’re talkin’); even to the malaise of “illegal immigration” (yes, sure, right).  But let’s be frank here.  The whole deal is set to rumbling and rolling by one simple thing:  a post-card.  One cheap post-card from Kankakee, Illinois,  showing a paranoid wild turkey in a cornfield, and the kind of lame, half-awake scrawl a runaway dad might put on such a card that he sends to the daughter he doesn’t intend to see again.  But that daughter, clutching at any vague whiff of love, studies that card as if it were holy scripture.

It’s both funny and sad.  Like everything I write.

2.

If you had been me, you would have grown up semi-poor and nigh-on desperate in San Diego, California—after having been born on the road to the dog track in Tijuana, Mexico.  How picaresque can you get?  I had never been anywhere, and I did not think I would ever go anywhere.  Now, this is important: my father came from an alien place called Sinaloa, and my mother had come from an alien place called New York.  He won the first round of the cultural battle over my soul because she was isolated and estranged from all her relatives.  But the Sinaloan contingent arrived in human waves, and each of them bore tales of the mysterious glories of their home.

Mangos!  Heat!  Ghosts!  Floods!  Iguanas!  Swamps!  Beer!  Bats!  But mostly, girls!

Regularly, cheap, badly-colored post-cards would arrive with murky color shots of crumbling Mexican churches or rowboats in an estuary, or some partially collapsed pyramids in some jungle.  Mexico.  In all its badly reproduced glory.

3.

How could I not want to write about that?  Even though I didn’t know what I was talking about?  And how could I not want to go?

Anyone, trapped in the jail of hopelessness and yearning goes mad when the slightest intimation of hope appears.  Do we not?  I did.  I went nuts.  These weren’t valueless post-cards, but signals of love from souls far away who knew mysteries I had to unravel.

Come to think of it, that feels like what writing a book is all about.

4.

Nayeli, in my novel, can’t contain the magic of this object.  She has access to the internet, movies, music.  But mail—mail, man!  A thing in hand that has the marks of your distant loved one on it!  And it comes to you from mysterious lands with images of those lands!  I get shivers.  It’s like something from a fairy tale.

My kids text all day and all night.  Magic?  No.  This week, our 21-year-old son didn’t know where the stamp goes on a letter.  Think about it.  What a terrible loss for him…for us.
I want mail.  I bet you do too.  I bet you are tired of bills, catalogues from garden centers, and sale flyers for underpants at the mall.  I bet you miss getting cheap post-cards of 6,000 pound prairie dogs, giant grasshoppers with cowboys riding them, The Corn Palace, or motels somewhere in Kansas.

If you do, you will understand my book better than any critic.  And we’ll be bringing you some post-cards.  That’s right.  You put your address on one, and we will mail you a Beautiful North post-card from somewhere farther down the road.

See you soon. I’m looking forward to meeting you.