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Capirotada
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Go to University of New Mexico Press, Amazon, or One Book AZ for further information and reviews.
Capirotada. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1999. Republished in 2008.
Memoir.
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2009 OneBookAZ selection. Latino Literary Hall of Fame Award. 2000.
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Publisher Description
“‘Capirotada, Mexican bread pudding, is a mysterious mixture of prunes, peanuts, white cheese, butter, cinnamon and cloves, Old World sugar—all this,’ writes Alberto Ríos, ‘and things people will not tell you.’ Like its Mexican namesake, this memoir is a rich mélange, stirring together Ríos’s memories of family, neighbors, friends, and secrets from his youth in the two Nogaleses—in Arizona and through the open gate into Mexico. “The vignettes in this memoir, exploring the borders of memory and narrative, are not loud or fast. Yet, like all of Ríos’s writings, they are singular. Here is the story about a rickety magician, his chicken, and a group of little boys, but who plays a trick on whom? The story about the flying dancers and mortality. About going to the dentist in Mexico because it is cheaper, and maybe dangerous. About Ríos’s British mother who sets out on a ship for America with the faith that her Mexican G.I. will be waiting for her in Salt Lake City. And about the grown son who looks at his father and understands how he must provide for his own boy. “This book’s uncommon offering is how it stops to address the quiet, the overlooked, the everyday side of growing up. Capirotada is not about criminals or famous heroes. It is instead about life in the middle, which is often the most interesting and difficult place to find news.”
Ríos Grande By Jim Carvalho DECEMBER 7, 1999: Capirotada: A Nogales Memoir by Alberto Alvaro Ríos (University of New Mexico Press). Paper, $15.95 The Curtain of Trees: Stories by Alberto Alvaro Ríos (University of New Mexico Press). Paper, $14.95
READERS LOOKING FOR tough talk won’t get any from Alberto Ríos. While neither weak-kneed nor sentimental, his writing is never loud, harsh or flinty. In fact, Ríos may be the gentlest writer around.
Capirotada, a Mexican bread pudding made from a panoply of ingredients (prunes, peanuts, white bread, raisins, milk, cheese, spices, and the “old world” sugar known as “panocha”) is what Ríos calls the Mexican version of fruitcake, a huge jumble of good things. Capirotada: A Nogales Memoir is similar in construction, also employing a huge jumble of good things, but the results are infinitely more satisfying than any fruitcake. The 26 short non-fiction pieces in Capirotada are as diverse as they are satisfying. Told in a conversational tone, the stories about food, family, language and locale ramble along like so much friendly barroom banter. And if the deliberately casual tone produces a few awkward sentences, the prose is well-suited to the subject matter. If the tales in Capirotada go down like cold Tecate (workaday, but nonetheless thirst-quenching) the stories in The Curtain of Trees taste like an expertly-mixed Manhattan. Curtain’s eight short stories and one novella, all set near the Arizona-Sonora border, contain some of the most mesmerizing and finely-crafted prose anywhere, as in the opening of “The Orange Woman, the Walnut Girl”: “I have always been guided first by the smell of the leaves. The cottonwood leaves in fall are full of moisture and sigh, while the big-ear leaves of the cactus suppose themselves indifferent to the world. They buy one good coat for life and stick with it stubbornly to the end. Why not? they say, shrugging their shoulders as if to suggest the spendthrift folly of anything else. “The Privet leaves do not want to go away and try to hang on all year. They hear everything and want desperately to be friends with the world, very different from the mesquite, which goes about its workaday business, dropping leaves and growing more, always on schedule, with the added bonus of mesquite pods, so many of them and so happy in their bodies and their music but inexplicable given the attitude of that tree.” The stories in Curtain also display Ríos’ talent for getting inside the skin of his characters to narrate stories in the first person: as a crazy girl in “The Orange Woman, the Walnut Girl,” as a wayward boy in “Don Gustavo, Who had a Hand for an Ear,” and as the daughter of the town crier in “What I Heard From the Bear.” Ríos has much in common with the author Luis Alberto Urrea: both writers are border-town half-breeds (Ríos comes from Nogales, a Mexican father and an English mother; Urrea comes from Tijuana, a Mexican father and an American mother). Both are college professors, and both are accomplished in multiple disciplines (fiction, poetry, non-fiction). But Urrea’s a little tougher. In fact, when it comes to tough-talking Chicanos, Ríos is no match for the hammers and heroin of Dagoberto Gilb, or the tough-girl tempers of Ana Castillo and Sandra Cisneros. It’s hard to imagine Ríos writing about the street meaning of “panocha,” for example, and downright impossible to imagine him writing about it the way Cisneros did a few years ago, when she wrote about her big purple vulva in Ms. magazine. In Ríos’ writing, readers will find no questionable subject matter, and nary a curse word. It’s the literary equivalent of what stand-up comedians call “working clean.” And it works. Ríos’ writing is quiet, graceful, often luscious, but never sentimental or cloying. With Capirotada and especially The Curtain of Trees, Alberto Ríos proves again that writers are like teachers and lovers. Sometimes the gentle ones leave the deepest impression.
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