Octavio Solis - Retablos: stories from a life lived along the border

Copyright 2018 by Octavio Solis

All rights reserved

Cover and book design by Linda Ronan

Some of the stories in this book were previously printed in the following journals:

Retablos, Bad Blood, The Sister, Keening, The Cotton, Tumble-Down, and My Right Foot under the single title

Retablos in Zzyzzyva, Winter Issue 102.

Wild Kingdom and World Goes Away in Zzyzzyva, Winter Issue 108.

The Want and El Segundo in Huizache: The Magazine of Latino Literature, Issue No. 6

La Migra, Siren Songs, Red, Nothing Happens, and Neto in Arroyo Literary Review, Spring 2017.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Solis, Octavio, author.

Title: Retablos: stories from a life lived along the border / Octavio Solis.

Other titles: Stories from a life lived along the border

Description: San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2018. | These retablos are true stories, but theyre filled with lies. The core events are real, they happened, but the images on the peripheries which were faint to my view have been elaborated on... Page).

Identifiers: LCCN 2018023444 (print) | LCCN 2018029844 (ebook) | ISBN 9780872867888 | ISBN 9780872867864

Subjects: LCSH: Solis, OctavioChildhood and youth. | Mexican American authorsBiography. | Dramatists, AmericanBiography. | Authors, AmericanBiography. | Mexican-American Border RegionSocial conditions.

Classification: LCC PS3569.O5572 (ebook) | LCC PS3569.O5572 Z46 2018 (print)

| DDC 812/.54 [B] dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018023444

City Lights Books are published at the City Lights Bookstore

261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94133

www.citylights.com

For my father and mother, who bravely undertook the life of every immigrant family in America and by doing so, changed it.

Octavio Solis does with words and imagery, lyricism and details, humor and heartbreak what the master craftsmen and women of the traditional retablos do with wood and paint, achieving the same results: these short luminous retablos are magical and enticing. Unpretentiously and with an unerring accuracy of tone and rhythm, Solis slowly builds what amounts to a storybook cathedral. We inhabit a border world rich in characters, lush with details, playful and poignant, a border that refutes the stereotypes and divisions smaller minds create. Solis reminds us that sometimes the most profound truths are best told with crafted fictionsand he is a master at it. His is a large, capacious, and inclusive imagination. Just as the traditional retablos are objects of beauty ultimately meant as devotional pieces, Soliss Retablos will make devotees of his readers.

Julia Alvarez is the author of numerous books, including How the Garca Girls Lost Their Accents, and recipient of the National Medal for the Arts

The murky flow of the Rio Grande River, the border patrol we call la migra, demons, a petty crime of stolen candy, street urchins, family squabbles, eccentric neighbors, and bike rides in which dust envelops a skinny kid named Octavio Solis. When he stops pedaling years later, hell spank the dust from his clothes, but not all of it. Some of it clings to his very soul, and will cling to us, the readers, in this tender and perceptive memoir. This is American and Mexican literature a stones throw from the always hustling El Paso border.

Gary Soto, author of The Elements of San Joaquin

Octavio Solis isnt a painter, but he ought to be. Hes not a poet, but he could be. His isnt fiction or memoir but, like dreams, might be either. His vision of El Paso and the border is as though through an undulating haze of desert heat.

Dagoberto Gilb, author of Before the End, After the Beginning: Stories

Solis has written beautifully about his youth on the border, never flinching from his childish blunders, nor failing to find soul in the frailties of others. These stories soar and shimmer with poetry and a playwrights gift for dramatic compression, comedy and pathos running through them arm in arm. Retablos is deeply moving, and a joy.

Elizabeth McKenzie, author of The Portable Veblen: A Novel

To enter into this book is like walking into a shrine, walls lined with beautiful paintings, each one colorful and visceral, depicting memories, life on the border, death and sadness and joy. This is one of the most memorable books written about the borderlands in years. Solis writes, every memory we have has a patina of invention to it. These stories have layer upon layer of images, meaning, and grace. Each short piece, each of the retablos is a stunning, masterful painting. Some you will want to stand in front of for a long time, and others are brilliantly uncomfortable and can make you weep if you linger too long.

Daniel Chacn, author of Hotel Jurez: Stories, Rooms and Loops

The short-short format is often called flash fiction these days, but Octavio Soliss stories are more like slow fiction: a moment unfolds, revealing a life, a way of life, generations. He explores the borderlands, not just the streets of El Paso where he grew up, just across the Rio Grande from Mexico, but also those liminal zones between fiction and nonfiction, childhood and adulthood, and magic and melancholy. Small but mighty, these stories will stay with you long after the moment has passed.

Frances Lefkowitz, author of To Have Not: A Memoir

A retablo is a devotional painting, playwright Octavio Solis tells us. In this poignantly written, heart-warming comingof-age memoir, Solis pays tribute to those cornerstone moments in his life, negotiating borders at once personal and cultural, with such color that the reader is left spellbound. Astonishing, what more can I say?

Greg Sarris, author of How a Mountain Was Made: Stories

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Author of more than twenty plays, Octavio Solis is considered one of the most prominent Latino playwrights in America. His works have been produced in theatres across the country, including the Center Group Theatre and the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, South Coast Repertory, the Magic Theatre and the California Shakespeare Theatre in the San Francisco Bay Area, Yale Repertory Theatre, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Dallas Theater Center, and other venues nationwide. Among his many awards and grants, Solis has received an NEA Playwriting Fellowship, the Kennedy Centers Roger L. Stevens Award, the TCG/NEA Theatre Artists in Residence Grant, the National Latino Playwriting Award, and the PEN Center USA Award for Drama.

His fiction and short plays have appeared in the Louisville Review, Zyzzyva, Eleven Eleven, Catamaran, Chicago Quarterly Review, Arroyo Literary Review and Huizache. This is his first book.

For more information: www.octaviosolis.net

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to acknowledge the following for inspiring and supporting the work of these Retablos throughout their various stages of development: Oscar Villalon and Laura Cogan of Zyzzyva, Elizabeth McKenzie, Catherine Segurson and Chorel R. Centers of Catamaran, Jenn Bennet of Arroyo Literary Review, Dagoberto Gilb and Huizache, Peter Maravelis, Stacey Lewis, and my scrupulous editor Elaine Katzenberger of City Lights Books, Charlie Jane Anders of Writers with Drinks, Word for Word Performing Arts Company, Frances Lefkowitz, Amanda Moody, and Karen Macklin. None of this would be possible without my daughter Gracie and my dear wife Jeanne, who with her unerring love and counsel helped me navigate the faulty shoals of memory and invention. But to the family represented in these pages, I owe so much more.