{"id":171620,"date":"2021-08-19T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-08-19T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/?p=171620"},"modified":"2024-02-13T19:54:42","modified_gmt":"2024-02-14T00:54:42","slug":"jaime-cortez-book-short-story-collection-gordo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/jaime-cortez-book-short-story-collection-gordo\/","title":{"rendered":"Queer Self Discovery in a Migrant Worker Camp"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Everyone has something to say in Jaime Cortez\u2019s debut collection of short fiction, <em><a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/269\/9780802158086\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Gordo<\/a><\/em>. There\u2019s Raymundo, the town\u2019s openly gay hairdresser who has a gift of knowing exactly what each of his clients needs to look and feel beautiful; Fat Cookie, a high school chola with a political edge and disregard for authority; the lone gringo, Juan Diego, a man of few words, whose broken heart is stirred by the music of Vicente Fern\u00e1ndez. And guiding the reader along through a terrain of machismo pride, queer self-discovery, notions of home, and harrowing tales of immigration is the earnest and precocious Gordo.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"alignleft size-full\"><a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/a\/269\/9780802158086\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"301\" height=\"450\" src=\"https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/GordoPKcover-340x509-1.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-171893\" srcset=\"https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/GordoPKcover-340x509-1.jpeg 301w, https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/GordoPKcover-340x509-1-201x300.jpeg 201w, https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/GordoPKcover-340x509-1-40x60.jpeg 40w, https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/GordoPKcover-340x509-1-60x90.jpeg 60w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 301px) 100vw, 301px\" \/><\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p>Set in and around a predominantly Mexican migrant workers camp in 1970s Watsonville, California, Cortez\u2019s stories are filled with so much love for the characters who inhabit them. Cortez is unflinching in his portrayals of violence and threat, and still\u2014no matter how tragic their backstories or dire their current circumstances, he holds his cast in perfect balance, allowing levity and humor to always be in focus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I spoke with Cortez on the phone about nicknames, writing semi-autobiographical fiction, and inheriting humor as a tool of survival.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Christopher Gonzalez: I wanted to talk first about the concept of nicknames. They&#8217;re so prevalent throughout the collection with characters like \u201cGordo,\u201d \u201cFat Cookie,\u201d and \u201cShy Boy,\u201d to name a few. I was fascinated by the way in which nicknames create this familiarity among characters but also a distancing. It\u2019s almost like you don&#8217;t get to fully know the person behind the name.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n<aside class=\"related-content-block alignright no-title\">\n    \t\t\t\t\t<article class=\"post-box\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<a href=\"https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/its-time-to-take-california-back-from-joan-didion\/\">\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"post-box-info\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<h2>It&#8217;s Time to Take California Back from Joan Didion<\/h2>\n\t\t\t\t\t<!-- <p>The first lady of West Coast letters needs to share that honor with the Mexican diaspora<\/p> -->\n<!-- temp without tags -->\n\t\t\t\t\t<p>The first lady of West Coast letters needs to share that honor with the Mexican diaspora<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"post-box-lower\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\tMay 12\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t&#8211; <span>Myriam Gurba<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"post-box-image\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<span class=\"post-box-category\">Craft\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/span>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<!-- blah -->\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"640\" height=\"427\" src=\"https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/yannick-van-der-auwera-LpGt-TarYMk-unsplash-768x512.jpg\" class=\"attachment-medium_large size-medium_large wp-post-image\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/yannick-van-der-auwera-LpGt-TarYMk-unsplash-768x512.jpg 768w, https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/yannick-van-der-auwera-LpGt-TarYMk-unsplash-300x200.jpg 300w, https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/yannick-van-der-auwera-LpGt-TarYMk-unsplash-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/yannick-van-der-auwera-LpGt-TarYMk-unsplash-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/yannick-van-der-auwera-LpGt-TarYMk-unsplash-2048x1365.jpg 2048w, https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/yannick-van-der-auwera-LpGt-TarYMk-unsplash-600x400.jpg 600w, https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/yannick-van-der-auwera-LpGt-TarYMk-unsplash-scaled-e1589216653613.jpg 1000w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\" \/>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t<\/article>\n\n\t<\/aside>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Jaime Cortez:&nbsp;<\/strong>I was kind of surprised when I went to college\u2014we were talking about nicknames way back when I was an undergraduate. I didn&#8217;t realize there were people who grew up without a lot of nicknames, and I thought that was such an interesting contrast culturally for me. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Working-class, Mexican people are very big on nicknames, and they do connote belonging and they do connote familiarity, and it certainly can connote a kind of tenderness. And then, on the flip side, there are people, for instance, who are called \u201cgordo\u201d or \u201cgorda,\u201d who might eventually lose weight and still get called that name because the name just sticks. And so, I think that the nickname can also be a kind of a flattening of all that a person can be. In the case of \u201cgordo,\u201d it feels like being a fat kid then becomes one of the overriding factors of life. There&#8217;s also something interesting in these working-class settings of Mexican people. The nicknames often have a kind of blunt truth to them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>CG: There&#8217;s so much violence in the book, and there&#8217;s so much bumping up against one another that happens, especially amongst the kids. I\u2019m thinking of that moment with Los Tigres, the twins, in \u201cFandango.\u201d All the men are drinking and the twins get into this physical fight over who is the best dancer. Then Gordo&#8217;s dad, who thinks the one twin is a little asshole, offers to take him to the hospital when he\u2019s severely injured. While there is tension and not everyone gets along in the camp, there\u2019s still a level of care they have for one another. Can you talk about that dynamic?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>JC: <\/strong>That scene is a very poignant one to me. It was based on something that I actually witnessed. My father and his two younger brothers were drinking. My dad had just gotten the latest Bee Gees album. He put it on and I could hear the youngest of the three brothers stomping around in the living room, dancing, and they got into a fight over who could dance. It was terrifying to hear the sound of these three bearish men throwing each other around, fighting over who was the best disco dancer. It was absurd. It was terrifying and hilarious at the same time. The next day we were laughing, but in the moment we were pissing ourselves because it was scary to be a little kid, hearing this madness going on in the room. Los Tigres were based on what had happened and that intense brutality and tenderness of things. It\u2019s a very male way of operating sometimes, where you have this brutality followed by tenderness.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I watch a lot of MMA and I&#8217;m fascinated by people putting themselves into a situation on purpose where they get hit. The thing that&#8217;s so intense for me, like the emotional kind of payoff, is at the end. They&#8217;ve been just trashing each other, battling each other, and MMA is really violent. And at the end, they&#8217;ll just embrace. And sometimes the embrace is so deep. That is so fascinating to me that those things can sit right next to each other. They&#8217;re bleeding from all over, from their noses, their mouths, around their eyes, and they&#8217;re covered in sweat, exhausted, drained, and they fall into this embrace, and it&#8217;s really intense to me. I don&#8217;t have that instinct of violence as a way of settling anything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>CG: Have you drawn any conclusions about why it is that mostly heterosexual men channel violence into a way of forming connection?&nbsp;<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>JC: <\/strong>I think that it is more comfortable than tenderness. It is more comfortable and acceptable. For men, there&#8217;s something to be lost within hypermasculine settings. There&#8217;s something to be lost when you\u2019re seen as emotionally vulnerable. It is safer to be furious and safer to be violent and to risk being battered yourself than to be seen as soft.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>CG: In this context, I\u2019m thinking about the character Raymundo. He comes in and he deals with a familiar bullying because of his sexuality and his presentation. It was fascinating to read his two stories back to back because he sort of comes out on top. This town that both fought against his very existence in a way, learns to embrace him. Can you talk a bit more about Raymundo\u2019s role in the collection?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-pullquote alignleft\"><blockquote><p><meta charset=\"utf-8\">For men, there&#8217;s something to be lost within hypermasculine settings. It is safer to be furious and safer to be violent and to risk being battered yourself than to be seen as soft.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>JC: <\/strong>It\u2019s an interesting thing. There is a way that \u201cthe queen,\u201d the effeminate gay man, can have a place. I saw that in Latino working class settings, they can sometimes find a place working as a barber or a hairdresser in a men&#8217;s or women&#8217;s salon. That is a place you then have an \u201coficio,\u201d which is a word that has always fascinated me. \u201cOficio,\u201d in its simplest sense, means a job, but I think it also means something deeper. \u201cOficio\u201d feels like you have a purpose, you have a utility and a service that you can provide. You become useful in that way. And I think that finding a place, finding a way to be useful, can sometimes [shield] some of the worst sorts of hatred and exclusion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>CG: How did you approach bringing in narratives about immigrant characters who aren\u2019t Mexican?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>JC: <\/strong>That wasn&#8217;t even necessarily by design, but I think it really jumped out at me when I was a child growing up. I realized Salvadorans were the first Latinos who I ever spent time around who were not Mexicans. And so I kind of had this interest in other people who felt cousin-like, but not exactly like siblings. Culturally, I think it was also just that realization\u2014growing up in the setting that I did, I knew of a million hard, sad stories about migration and immigration\u2014about the desperation and the hope that comes with migration. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>When we first met [Delia in the story &#8220;Alex&#8221;]\u2014because [Delia] is based on real next-door neighbors we had, and they were a lesbian couple, and her butch partner did become physically abusive, and we did help the femme partner escape to Chicago, so all of that really did happen\u2014I think it was the beginning of understanding the difference between an immigrant and really a refugee. She was escaping a very dangerous situation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u200b<strong>CG: I want to ask about writing a main character who&#8217;s fat. As a fat writer myself, all my main characters are usually fat, and I always struggle with how much physical description to include. With Gordo, his name alludes to his appearance. How did you decide on when to explicitly mention his weight in the text?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>JC<\/strong>: In \u201cEl Gordo,\u201d the wrestling mask story, when Pa tries to pull Gordo\u2019s shirt off, there&#8217;s this shame of having his shirt off, because my fat kid body was a place of great shame. And, there was an interesting thing that happened while remembering that when I put on that mask and I saw myself without the shirt, and I thought, oh, this is kind of how the masked wrestlers look. A lot of them are gordo. That was a common thing that you would see with Mexican wrestlers. They were a combo of fat and muscle. So, it comes through in other people&#8217;s comments, and it comes through in Gordo\u2019s thoughts, but I don&#8217;t go a long way towards describing it. It&#8217;s almost kind of by association.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>CG: The kids in these stories are so close to and surrounded by adults in a way I think kids not from working class families aren\u2019t. There\u2019s this backdrop of worrying about money and drinking and danger. What are your thoughts on that juxtaposition of childhood set against very adult circumstances?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-pullquote alignright\"><blockquote><p><meta charset=\"utf-8\">I think that finding a place, finding a way to be useful, can sometimes shield some of the worst sorts of hatred and exclusion.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>JC:<\/strong> Looking back on it, we were extremely exposed to a lot of dodgy, traumatic, dangerous things. We also knew that, compared to the rigors and the horrors that our parents and grandparents had endured, we were definitely positioned as having it relatively easy in comparison. That&#8217;s why I think it was really important for me that I didn&#8217;t want the stories to have a maudlin tone of <em>woe-is-me<\/em>, because these were all kids who knew how much worse it could be.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>CG: There&#8217;s so much humor and life in these characters, in the way the stories are told. And these stories capture exactly what you&#8217;re talking about, that balance. While reading, I was reminded of sitting around with my family listening to their stories, and if you dissect what they&#8217;re talking about, you realize how fucked up things were!<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>JC: <\/strong>[Laughs] It\u2019s really fucked up!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>CG: But, from the way they talk about everything, it\u2019s as if those were the best times of their lives.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>JC:<\/strong> Well, I think there\u2019s a kind of glee, of like, hey we survived that! Sometimes I\u2019ll hang out with my sister and my aunts and uncles\u2014we grew up next door to them for many years in the same migrant worker camp, and we were all about the same age because my grandmother had children too late in her life. So, our uncles and aunts were really kind of like our siblings, and sometimes we&#8217;ll remember back to the things we went through, and we\u2019re laughing, and we&#8217;re saying, it was terrible, wasn&#8217;t it? Yeah, I mean we&#8217;re still laughing. And also, of course, the people who perpetrated all this craziness on kids were also family members, in some cases very beloved family members, grandparents, t\u00edos, t\u00edas, moms. It was just the understanding that they had at the time. And they would have laughed if you told them that it was abusive or wrong to spank, for instance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>CG: How else has humor shaped your life? How do you approach it when you&#8217;re writing and when you&#8217;re editing?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>JC:<\/strong> I was raised around a lot of laughter. That doesn&#8217;t change the amount of trauma that I experienced and that people around me experienced. It doesn&#8217;t change the amount of fear that we might have experienced, fear of violence, or even the looming threat of violence popping up at any time. That was something else I thought a lot about as I was writing, what it meant to feel that the world can explode in violence at any moment. But despite all that, I think that I just grew up with so much laughter. There were so many funny people. Mom was funny, Dad was funny, aunts and uncles were funny. Kids were funny. And we cultivated that and valued that and it&#8217;s very clear to me that it was about survival, like this was how we bear it. This is how we survive it.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Years later, as an adult, gay man in San Francisco, in the \u201990s and kind of being involved in HIV prevention and education work, I was again struck at a certain point by the kind of gallows humor that developed over time. Around living with this pandemic that was threatening to kill most of us. Especially during the \u201980s and in the early \u201990s, it was a death sentence. It wouldn&#8217;t be an overnight death sentence, but the assumption was that it&#8217;s a death sentence. So, the humor around that was also really powerful to me and it felt so familiar. Felt so familiar to hear some of the humor, and some of it was harsh and cruel, but I understand it as just a survival mechanism. Humor can be used in so many ways. Sometimes it can be used to deflect from the truth and sometimes it can be used to penetrate more deeply into the truth of things. And so I&#8217;m interested in those modalities of humor as a way of trying to get at a certain truth. I&#8217;m constantly thinking about humor, and how it functions, and who has agency to use it. And when does it get used and, I think especially right now, there&#8217;s a lot of sensitivity about what is appropriate fodder for humor, and a lot of pushback about it, so it&#8217;s a really interesting and precarious time for humor in so many ways.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Everyone has something to say in Jaime Cortez\u2019s debut collection of short fiction, Gordo. There\u2019s Raymundo, the town\u2019s openly gay hairdresser who has a gift of knowing exactly what each of his clients needs to look and feel beautiful; Fat Cookie, a high school chola with a political edge and disregard for authority; the lone [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":171981,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[350,5567],"tags":[178,202,5662,6038,556],"class_list":["post-171620","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-conversations","category-interviews","tag-family","tag-immigration","tag-latinx-author","tag-western","tag-work"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v25.8 - 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