December 15, 2020
Essayist and literature professor Gonsalez's first book is a sui generis memoir that challenges readers to follow him along far-reaching paths to explore antiracist concepts associated with minoritized bodies, decolonial aesthetics, and queer critique. Gonsalez entwines his story with the experiences of Pedro, a Mexican Everyman in the U.S. Pedro takes on multiple identities; he's a cousin, a neighbor, an unknown fatality at the border, the Pedro in the movie Napoleon Dynamite. With Pedro kicking off each of the book's three sections, Gonsalez wanders and wonders far and wide, turning his nuanced and critical gaze on everything from the reason his surname is spelled the way it is to the history and significance of burlap to James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, D. H. Lawrence's Mornings in Mexico, and more. The book advances more or less chronologically, beginning with chubby, part-Mexican, part-Puerto Rican Marcos growing up in New Jersey to his angst-filled years as an undergrad in New York to, finally, his post-graduate journey through therapy and dissertation woes to a place where he can create body positivity and find love.
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Starred review from November 1, 2020
A searching memoir by an essayist and literature professor finally "proud of being Mexican and Puerto Rican" and "gay and femme and fat." Gonsalez begins with his childhood as the son of working-class immigrants in what had been a New Jersey farming town on its way to becoming "a middle-class haven of housing developments." There, living in two languages and what his classmates considered to be "the Mexican ghetto," "a no-man's-land of savages," he came to understand his essential differences: different because he cried easily, different because he was ordered not to speak his native language in school, different because he was always made to feel the outsider. "It's just procedure for little brown kids to be treated as a problem," he writes. "For our ways of speaking to be policed at every turn. For us to be corrected by a world that would rather we not exist. Gonsalez got little help along the way: His father was not always present, and his mother was detached. White children, it seemed to him, were treated as something almost sacred, but, he asks, "what of the little queer and fat and feminine and neurodivergent child of color?" Such a person, he answers, is never allowed to have a childhood. When the author's young brother died in a car accident, he was scarcely allowed to grieve. Instead, Gonsalez takes up the cause of all the "Pedros" in the world around him, a name he borrows from the Mexican immigrant and aspiring American Pedro of the film Napoleon Dynamite but who has counterparts everywhere, including the gay Cuban American TV personality Pedro Zamora. Like the first Pedro, Gonsalez writes, he overcame "peak pobrecitoness"; unlike him, he adds, he refuses to "identify with the false meritocracy this settler colonial country likes to imagine itself being." A subtle, expertly written repudiation of the American dream in favor of something more inclusive and more realistic.
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