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paul_cornelius's review
5.0
The borderland, you quickly learn, is a state of mind, a psychological orientation more than a strict geographic setting. The people in these stories--as well as in the novella at the end--all seek to latch on to something. Anything, almost. But it escapes them. Some demon in their mind or their spirit continually splits them off from everyone around them. Even those closest to them. Blake identifies this sense of being an outsider as something he is at one with.
But as much as this is a book that explores the psyche, it is also a set of stories and sketches that produce a vivid atmosphere of time and place. And the time stretches from early in the last century down until the mid 1970s in the novella, "Texas Woman Blues." If you know the region, you not only are familiar with these people but the world they inhabit. The sultry nights on the Texas coast and in Florida. The dry, scorching desert wind that blows in from northern Mexico during the summer, all the way to the Oklahoma. And the border, the river that snakes through it all, more a symbol than a real barrier.
What I think I like best about these stories is the times it conjures up, in particular the Texas before the 1980s, in the 1950s and 1960s and on into the 1970s. Mexican migrants passed back and forth without paying much attention to official permission to do so. And sometimes their children would come with them. I remember in fifth grade, Alberto, the fourteen or fifteen year old son of a migrant one day plopped down in the middle of our class of ten year olds. This was 1965. Far from being isolated, Alberto was a hit. Quite literally. During the afternoon, playing baseball, he could slam line drives almost to the bottom of the school building some 350 feet away. He could also snag line drives. With his bare hands. And he roamed centerfield like another coming of Willie Mays. But almost as soon as he came, he was gone. Back home. Back to Mexico. But he had a few weeks in an American school. Gained a little English. Maybe learned a few other things as well. It was an opportunity. A limited one. But you take what you can get. And now, all these years later, after reading James Carlos Blake's stories, I have at least a glimpse of what was going on on the other side of life in the suburbs.
But as much as this is a book that explores the psyche, it is also a set of stories and sketches that produce a vivid atmosphere of time and place. And the time stretches from early in the last century down until the mid 1970s in the novella, "Texas Woman Blues." If you know the region, you not only are familiar with these people but the world they inhabit. The sultry nights on the Texas coast and in Florida. The dry, scorching desert wind that blows in from northern Mexico during the summer, all the way to the Oklahoma. And the border, the river that snakes through it all, more a symbol than a real barrier.
What I think I like best about these stories is the times it conjures up, in particular the Texas before the 1980s, in the 1950s and 1960s and on into the 1970s. Mexican migrants passed back and forth without paying much attention to official permission to do so. And sometimes their children would come with them. I remember in fifth grade, Alberto, the fourteen or fifteen year old son of a migrant one day plopped down in the middle of our class of ten year olds. This was 1965. Far from being isolated, Alberto was a hit. Quite literally. During the afternoon, playing baseball, he could slam line drives almost to the bottom of the school building some 350 feet away. He could also snag line drives. With his bare hands. And he roamed centerfield like another coming of Willie Mays. But almost as soon as he came, he was gone. Back home. Back to Mexico. But he had a few weeks in an American school. Gained a little English. Maybe learned a few other things as well. It was an opportunity. A limited one. But you take what you can get. And now, all these years later, after reading James Carlos Blake's stories, I have at least a glimpse of what was going on on the other side of life in the suburbs.
paulataua's review
4.0
My first James Carlos Blake, but definitely not my last. This is a collection of short stories that are set on or around the border between Mexico and the United States. The borderlands is a geographical location where two countries and cultures come into contact, but the stories are about people caught between two worlds. It is the mental borderland more than the physical one that is the issue here. I really didn’t much like the first story, but then from that point on the stories got better and better. Well worth reading!
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