I will read almost anything with one exception: any book touching on the subject of Vietnam. That topic has been an unspoken taboo silently agreed on by almost all American baby boomers. With Stella Pope Duarte’ Let Their Spirits Dance, I broke that rule.
Her book tells the story of the Ramirez family, from El Cielito, the south side of Phoenix, making a pilgrimage to the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington DC thirty years after their son, brother, friend, is killed during the Tet Offensive. The book is heartbreaking, heartwarming, infuriating, calming and superb. Baby boomers, and others, particularly perhaps the children of baby boomers, would be wise to make this book their exception.
Duarte is amazing, she’s an award winning author who grew up in and lives in Phoenix. She gives a voice to Chicano America that is unique, while also reminding me of other works such as Americo Paredes’ excellent but little known book George Washington Gomez, though she’s probably most often compared to Sandra Cisneros, the author of The House on Mango Street and Caramelo. Cisneros represents the urban component of the Mexican-American diaspora, while Duarte has mastered the Southwest. I saw Duarte give a lecture recently and immediately afterward ordered three of her published works.
Having categorized her as a Chicana writer let me emphasize that she writes to a much larger audience. Let Their Spirits Dance covers the Vietnam War, family, relationships, Chicano life in occupied Aztlan, politics and faith. The story is told through the character of Teresa, whose brother Jesse is killed in Vietnam. Their mother, appropriately a Guadalupana, plays the moral center of the family.
A significant teaching component of the book, but not a smothering one, involves the time period: the earliest years of the war. In those first years there was a college deferment in place, thus exempting from military service those who could afford and culturally qualify to enroll in universities – hence, the overwhelming majority of draftees were minority, be they Latino or Black or Native American – all treated as second class citizens in the U.S., but good enough for cannon fodder. They were also routinely the grunts on the frontline. When the college deferments ended and white middle-class Americans began to show up in record number on the weekly fatality reports, people began marching in the streets, and the “light at the end of the tunnel” began to come into focus.
Another important aspect of the book is religion. Although less so today than in the past, being Mexican-American meant being Catholic. But it is a very different Catholicism than is familiar to most European-Americans. It’s a blend of Pueblo and Aztec spirituality, mixed in with regulation Catholicism. It’s the beautiful kind of Catholicism that holds its faith in the religion, not in a corrupt structured hierarchy, and not unlike the Irish church in its lack of allegiance to the insular cabal of old men who run the Vatican.
Parts of Let Their Spirits Dance are predictable, but then it’s about a chapter from world history -- we know how it ends. And parts of it will make you cry, particularly the early chapter titled Solitary Man, named after the Neil Diamond song from that era. The fact that Jesse will die is known nearly from the beginning. What is not predictable is when the family will be notified. When it finally happens is during a chapter of the everyday, a shocking reminder of reality.
The book may also make you have faith, still, or perhaps again.
No comments:
Post a Comment