DRY CRIK Journal

BREATHING, IN DUST. By Tim Z. Hernandez. (Texas Tech University Press, 2903 4th Street, Suite 201, Lubbock, TX 79409) http://www.ttup.ttu.edu/ 192 pp. Cloth $26.95

A generation between the author and I, Tim Z. Hernandez’s slice of time during BREATHING, IN DUST is quite different in this place where we both grew up, and in three decades Mexican-American families have displaced the remnants of the Dust Bowl Okies in the fields of the San Joaquin Valley, the kids of whom I went to school with and whose fathers were heroic examples of ingenuity and hard work, storytellers with a coarse and basic humor in the vineyards and orchards of my grandfather when I was a boy.

But growing up in the fictional town of Catela (an alias for Cutler, California, named for my maternal great great-grandfather), Tlaloc manages to dodge the bullets of poverty, drugs and gangs, taking risks with ample introspection and serendipity, yet choosing his own path towards manhood. Hernandez develops unforgettable characters with heart, with a pathos that permeates this timely and exciting odyssey. This is not a read for the squeamish or easily offended, nor are his explicit descriptions inserted for shock value – ‘it is what it is’ – his each vignette is an original and artful perspective full of both hope and despair, a deep vulnerability that enriches humanity and connects us all.

         There is a bullet hole in my fence that stares at me every time
         I walk up the driveway. A hole, where every year around Thanksgiving
         a family gathers and brings flowers and candles and sits around and talks
         until the pigeons fade into darkness. I’m left to watch these flowers dry up
         and flake off. Left to dream about that hole, time and again. Sometimes
         I fall into the hole and can’t get my footing. Other times, my right eye is
         the hole looking out over the front yard, and my body is the fence post, and I
         feel as if I’ve seen more than I care to.

It’s easy to ignore Catela, to ignore what the other Valley farm towns like Cutler have become, to avoid a part of what our big cities have become as well, and leave it all on the morning news. But within their tragic squalor and drug-infested gang wars, within their core are the innocent whose only shortcoming is that they are poor.

On my California bookshelf, I’d have to place BREATHING, IN DUST alongside Didion’s WHERE I WAS FROM, Arax and Wartzman’s KING OF CALIFORNIA and Steinbeck’s GRAPES OF WRATH. This is a courageous book that has no ending, really – a spellbinding story of one man’s reach for something more.

- JCD