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Paletitas de Guayaba/On
a Train Called Absence.
By
Erlinda Gonzales-Berry.
English-Spanish bilingual text.
English translation by Kay (Kayla) S.
García and Erlinda
Gonzales-Berry.
ISBN: 978-1-888205-20-6
$23.95
"On a Train
Called Absence/Paletitas de Guayaba the story is
narrated in the first person by the protagonist, Marina, who is traveling by
train from New Mexico to Mexico City in search of her identity, her history, and
answers to many questions that are tormenting her. As the train carries her
through the Mexican landscape, she has flashbacks of her life in New Mexico, a
failed romance, and a previous journey. The narration also flashes forward to
her arrival, and to her discoveries and adventures in Mexico, where she
confronts both her historical and mythical past as well as her complex,
multicultural present. The themes of hybrid identity, the Chicano movement,
Mexican history, U.S.-Mexican relations, and female sexuality are explored, in a
highly experimental and self-reflecting narratorial style that is lyrical,
profound, and sometimes profane. Although there are many books describing the
reality of life for Chicanos living in the United States, only a few books
address the problem of identity with an actual journey back to the "madre
patria" (Mexico). This experience allows the protagonist to deal directly with
contemporary issues of identity and transculturation, and to reach a more
transcendent understanding of her own history as a bilingual-bicultural manita/chicana/pocha
and that of her fellow Chicanos and Mexicans. Paletitas de guayaba delivers the
powerful lesson of how multiple identities and subject positions can be
constructed from the other side of various international, inter-ethnic, and
sexual borders. By combining this lesson with humor and a wonderfully executed
language, the novel instructs at the same time that it entertains, and in this
way seals its connection to the best of the Chicano oral tradition."
Angie Chabram-Dernersesian Dictionary of Literary Biography 2009
"La novela de Gonzales-Berry, como otras muchas
novelas femeninas contemporáneas, se rebela contra las limitaciones
tradicionales del bildungsroman femenino que, según el conocido análisis de
Annis Pratt, se había caracterizado de buena medida por su utilidad para "domesticar"
a las mujeres lectoras. Marina, por el contrario, aprende a deshacerse de esos
mecanismos culturales reductores y a establecerse a sí misma como persona madura
y compleja." Manuel M. Martin-Rodríguez Latin American
Literary Review (Jan-June 1995)
In a 1993 interview
with Manuel de Jesús Hernández and
Michael Nymann,
Erlinda Gonzales-Berry described her professional life:
"I am first and foremost an academician. I write
literary criticism,
and I dabble in creative writing. I hope to change that
order in the near future." Her early creative output is
limited--she published a few poems in 1975 and 1984 and
excerpts from a promising novel, "Rosebud," which
explores the lives of five New Mexican sisters living on
a ranch, in 1988. The 1991 publication of Paletitas
de guayaba (Guava Popsicles), written after her
return from taking
students on a study
trip to Mexico in
1980-1981, firmly established Gonzales-Berry as an
important New Mexican writer.
Erlinda Viola Gonzales-Berry was born on 23 August
1942 in Roy, New Mexico,
to Carlota and Canuto Gonzales. Her mother was a rural
schoolteacher, her father a rancher."
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