Floricanto Press

Far from my Mother’s Home. By Bárbara Mujica. E.L. Doctorow-award-winning stories of cross-cultural perspectives. ISBN: 0-915-745-28-3        $35.00; $23.95  college use

La Mujer Latina Series

This is an award-winning anthology of short stories by the author of the novel The Deaths of Don Bernardo (Floricanto Press, 1989). Mario Bencastro, from The Washington Review says that "Bárbara Mujica narrates with singular mastery and luxury of detail, creating characters that are both remarkable and familiar... [She] has succeeded in transcending the narrative itself in order to convey emotions and exalt human values."

Far from My Mother's Home is Bárbara Mujica’s collection of stories were written during the decade prior to the publication of her novel, The Deaths of Don Bernado. These tales are truly dramatic and perfectly conceived with respect to form and content. The themes are modern and pertinent. The action is encased in a viv­id realism that creates a certain visual quality. The situations, which are both specific and universal, are brought to life through an abundant and direct lan­guage. It is as though the writer were moved by a keen desire to show us each predicament from all angles.

            In Far from My Mother's Home Bárbara Mujica examines the realities of highly mo­bile societies in which individuals or even entire populations move from one locale to another either to escape danger or to seek solutions to problems. Nearly all of her characters are in one way or another torn from their familiar surroundings—their “mothers' homes.” Some, such as Doña Francisca (“Francisca's Friends”), are strangers in their own lands, isolated by circumstances. The ex­ploration of the different ways in which these characters relate to each other and to the demands of their environment pro­vides a unifying thread.

            Bárbara Mujica is fascinated by the interplay of cultures in the Americas, and believes this theme to be a constant in nearly all her writings: “Perhaps, because I myself am a member of a multiethnic family, I am in­tensely aware of how people of different cultures interrelate and how cultural biases prevent us from understanding one another…”     Mario Bencastro

 Far from My Mother's Home is Bárbara Mujica’s collection of stories written during the decade prior to the publication of  The Deaths of Don Bernado. Therefore, they offer the reader a glimpse of the development of certain aesthetic and conceptual elements that bore fruit in the novel. For example, in these stories we see a growing concern for the ways that different ethnic groups interact. Like the novel, many of these stories are constructed upon a multicultural perspectivism in which persons from different ethnic and social groups—Hispanics, Americans; whites, Indians; landowners, peasants—react to a single circumstance in diverse ways because of their particular cultural outlooks. Furthermore, in both her novel and her stories, Bárbara Mujica uses humor to emphasize the absurdity of the dilemmas that result from our intransigence in ethnic (and other) matters.

 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

 THE ARTISTIC activity of Bárbara Mujica includes the direction of El Retablo, a theater group that has performed Spanish and Latin American plays with great success, and the publication of several critical anthologies, among them Texto y vida: Introducción a la literatura española (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1990), Texto y vida: Introducción a la literatura hispanoamericana (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), and Antología de la literatura española, Vols. I and II (John Wiley and Sons, 1991)—works that demonstrate her extraordinary talent for literary analysis. A professor of Spanish literature at Georgetown University, Bárbara Mujica has written books on the literature of the Golden Age as well as numerous essays on Hispanic cultural issues that have been published in major newspapers such as The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Houston Chronicle, and The Miami Herald. In fact, in 1990 her essay, “Bilinguism's Goal,” was selected as one of the best op ed pieces of the decade by The New York Times. However, her creative personality finds its strongest expression in her fictional narrative for which she is receiving growing recognition. In 1992 she won the prestigious E. L. Doctorow International Fiction Competition.

            In her first novel, The Deaths of Don Bernardo (Floricanto Press, 1990), Bárbara Mujica reveals an impressive ability to conceive characters that are so convincing and realistic that they prove unforgettable. Her writing achieves verbal quality through the accumulation of physical and emotional details. More than simply recreating a particular circumstance or presenting a point of view, Bárbara Mujica tells her story with the magnetism and flair of an old-fashioned story-teller.

              Floricanto Press is a Latino publisher of books on Mexican illegal immigrants, Hispanic Americans, Mexican immigration, Mexican immigrants, Mexican American books, Hispanic books, Latino books, on Latino and Latina contemporary issues, Latino books, Mexican American books, Hispanic books, Latina books, Chicano books, Books on Mexican immigrants, Mexican immigration and Mexican illegal immigration, Mexican American History, Mexican American education, Mexican immigration, Mexican illegal immigration, Mexican American books, Hispanic books, Latino books, Latinos, Latinas, Chicano Studies.

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Last modified: 06/21/07