SAM QUINONES | ANTONIO’S GUN AND DELFINO’S DREAM: TRUE TALES OF MEXICAN MIGRATION (UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PRESS)
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One day Muratalla shot a rancher, and the rancher’s son, Antonio Carrillo, begged his mother for his father’s pistol to avenge the killing. Fearing for his life, she refused. So Antonio left for the United States, found work, and bought a pistol there. Then he returned to Jaripo and put an end to Muratalla. “That gun was Antonio Carrillo’s alternative to submission,” writes journalist Sam Quinones in his new book, Antonio’s Gun and Delfino’s Dream: True Tales of Mexican Migration, a collection of stories from both sides of the razor wire. “To the man who departs pesoless yet returns with cash to spend, the United States affords dignity, respect, and sweet vindication. Ignore the allure of that psychological boost and you miss a lot of the immigrant story.”
As in his first book, True Tales From Another Mexico: The Lynch Mob, the Popsicle Kings, Chalino, and the Bronx, the stories here are told in the stripped-down language of a daily newsman, but they’re dense with detail: Quinones leaves no tangent unexplored. Just 15 pages into a chapter examining assimilation in the context of a Kansas high school’s soccer season, he’s discussed the cultural underpinnings of football and soccer on the High Plains; soccer coach Joaquin Padilla’s origins in Patzcuaro, Michoacan; the first European explorer to see western Kansas (Coronado, who strangled the Indian guide who brought him there); the invention of the turbine water pump; and the last 50 years of the U.S. cattle industry.
Quinones laments migration from Mexico–not because of what it means for the U.S. or the immigrants themselves, but because of its effects on Mexico. When Delfino Juarez finally gives up on construction work in Mexico City and crosses the border, his country considers it a “minor loss,” Quinones writes. But “his kind of gumption was what Mexico continually lost in its people’s northern exodus–and no amount of money they sent home made up for it.”
Thu 10/25, 7:30 PM, Barbara’s Bookstore, 1218 S. Halsted, 312-413-2665
