Virgins, Guerrillas, and Locas: Gay Latinos Writing about Love

Rating:
Summary: A Very Necessary Collection of Perspectives
Review: I bought this book just to read the latest from Erasmo Guerra and it was toally worth it. Not to slight the others in this book, but Guerra's work is always so poignent and beautiful. Getting to read his work now is like reading the early work of a great master. If you're gay and live in New York you HAVE to read his story (which I think is an excerpt from his upcoming first novel).

Rating:
Summary: A Very Necessary Collection of Perspectives
Review: If I had come across this collection of fiction ten years ago, my teenage years would have been much, much less painful than they were. As a young gay Latino from a homophobic culture and in a racist environment, I needed to know that the voices of brown jotos were important enough to be expressed, written and certainly compiled in a book. There is much pain expressed in these stories, but also hope and redemption. Though these stories have come a little too late for me, it is heartening to know that they are now with us and that they are accessible to the young joteria.

Rating:
Summary: In My Mouth
Review: Lingering narratives leave a hard aftertaste in my mouth. Honest creative work breathes life to this anthology. I felt linked by the "geography of individual pain" (101, Rane Arroyo, "The Europe of Their Scars"). Learning to love is hard enough but as a man secretly loving another man, the task gets even harder, especially in a culture doused in a twisted definition of manhood. In latino families, words for pain are unspoken. Roger Schira's piece (83), "News of Your Country" captured the essence of solitude---where the unspoken beauty of tropical love between two men is ceaselessly replayed in dreams, where maps of our places of origin and birth hover in our memories. Aguilar's unpunctuated "Nueva Flor de Canela (183)captures the raw anger and cold reality stemming from AIDS, of "...queer lovers afraid of taking up a relationship that is bigger than each one anticipated, but the relationship is unavoidable..."(190). The stories evoke a mosaic of my insignificant life, only this time, confronting my very self without flinching in self-hate is easier because it is their story not mine. Better yet, it is OUR story, not just mine. In short, this collection opens wounds, like bare stares from folks shocked to see that a man can kiss another man just as well as they can. Flip through the pages and drown, but skip the empty ones...**

Rating:
Summary: Important but Flat
Review: Lingering narratives leave a hard aftertaste in my mouth. Honest creative work breathes life to this anthology. I felt linked by the "geography of individual pain" (101, Rane Arroyo, "The Europe of Their Scars"). Learning to love is hard enough but as a man secretly loving another man, the task gets even harder, especially in a culture doused in a twisted definition of manhood. In latino families, words for pain are unspoken. Roger Schira's piece (83), "News of Your Country" captured the essence of solitude---where the unspoken beauty of tropical love between two men is ceaselessly replayed in dreams, where maps of our places of origin and birth hover in our memories. Aguilar's unpunctuated "Nueva Flor de Canela (183)captures the raw anger and cold reality stemming from AIDS, of "...queer lovers afraid of taking up a relationship that is bigger than each one anticipated, but the relationship is unavoidable..."(190). The stories evoke a mosaic of my insignificant life, only this time, confronting my very self without flinching in self-hate is easier because it is their story not mine. Better yet, it is OUR story, not just mine. In short, this collection opens wounds, like bare stares from folks shocked to see that a man can kiss another man just as well as they can. Flip through the pages and drown, but skip the empty ones...**

Rating:
Summary: Important but Flat
Review: This collection is certainly timely, and more like it need to be published. However, with the exception of a few stories (namely those by Guerra and Arroyo), I wasn't too impressed. Some of the contributors are obviously not creative writers which made for frustrating reading. Pick it up, but be on the lookout for future anthologies.