The Five Acts of Diego Leon by Alex Espinoza

(Cuban State TV Roundtable program)ġ4ymedio, Yunior García Aguilera, Madrid, - The Cuban dictatorship has practiced for decades the exclusion and extermination of anyone who thinks differently. Packed into a truck one night, they share stray thoughts on hamburgers and soiled diapers memories of financial and physical hardship and tender ruminations on family and life.“WE ARE FIDEL” – The greatest challenge that we Cubans face is not only to overthrow a despicable dictatorship, but to know how to build a democratic country tomorrow, truly free, without dogmas. And in one stunning chapter, titled 'When We Arrive,' a group of migrants reveal their dreams and frustrations in an ever-shifting sequence of narrators. In another, a mother's prayer to God and the Virgin for her son's return from the war is rendered with such compassion that each word weeps with agony and love. In one section, a tragedy with horrific consequences unfolds when a child stops working in order to take a drink of water. Rivera's writing throughout is Faulknerian in its hallucinatory prose, while his immigrant working-class characters and their hardscrabble lives are reminiscent of John Steinbeck or Tillie Olsen. His memories are punctuated by the stories of other characters in a collage of fragmented conversations and vignettes, overlapping and circling one another in a structure that can only be called postmodern. Published in 1971 (and appearing in the 2008 Tomás Rivera: The Complete Works), the novel recounts a year in the life of a nameless boy called to bear witness to the injustices faced by his community of migrant workers in the American Southwest sometime in the mid-20th century. Then one day in a literature course, a TA gave me Tomás Rivera's. Now, instead of celebrities yelling at me, it was over-caffeinated tweens buying bodices and spiked chokers.Īlex Espinoza is also the author of Still Water Saints. To make ends meet I took another retail job, this time at a goth-inspired clothing store in the local mall. I had a penchant for killing off my characters, always under awful circumstances in one, for example, a toddler crawled into an abandoned refrigerator and suffocated. I entered the university with a lackluster GPA, and in my writing workshops, my stories never felt as refined as those of my peers. Eventually I grew frustrated and, determined to reinvent myself as a writer, I quit and went back to school.

How?Īlex Espinoza is the author of The Five Acts of Diego León.īefore becoming a novelist and educator, I was a manager at a shop in Santa Monica, Calif., selling sofas and custom-framed art to movie stars and wealthy Angelinos.

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The Five Acts of Diego Leon by Alex Espinoza