Book Reviews : A Texas Mexican-American Suspended Between Cultures

A Shroud in the Family by Lionel G. Garcia (Arte Publico: $9; 319 pages)

In “A Shroud in the Family,” Lionel G. Garcia accommodates the grandeur and scope of novels like Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude” and Isabel Allende’s “The House of the Spirits.” In a highly original and at times ironic fashion, his work chronicles the lives of the Garcia family from the dusty south Texas town of San Diego.

The novel is divided into two sections, in essence two distinct perspectives of Texas history. In Book I, Don Andres, the 105-year-old family patriarch, is valiantly fighting against his preordained death when “the locust would emerge but would not sing and in the year when the honeysuckle would bloom in December.” The story is conveyed in motifs that play off and often parody the magical realism and mythic tableaux of earlier Latin American classics.

The old man’s impending death compels him to recount his family’s history to anyone who will listen. In what he calls his “altered state,” he is surrounded by the “ghosts of his antecedents,” heroes of the Texas war of independence on the Mexican side. His father fought at the Alamo, obtaining the supposed “Shroud of Tamaulipas,” imprinted with the body of Gen. Santa Anna. The real or imagined existence of the shroud becomes an important family icon, symbolizing a parallel and historically ignored aspect of their cultural heritage.

Altered Events

Don Andres Garcia’s personal version of official history is one in which Sam Houston uses “his Masonic ties to lure Santa Anna to Texas,” in which Davy Crockett joins the Mexican army at San Jacinto, changing his name to David Cruz, and in which his father kills a cowardly James Bowie.

In this phase of the novel, author Garcia writes lovingly of the people of San Diego in the early 1940s, of family ties and honor, friendships, superstitions, affairs of the heart, and the constant dust. He proffers a joyous vision of a time and a people rooted in the traditions and myths of south Texas.

Book II takes place in 1986. Here the novel’s focus shifts abruptly from this quasi-mythical rural ambiance to the sprawl and humidity of Houston today. Don Andres’ heir, his great-grandson, is a well-intentioned and accomplished lawyer, Andy Garcia. He is a man suspended between two cultures, unable to fully embrace the Anglo world where he has become financially successful and where he is perceived as “different from other Mexicans.” The conflicting impressions that Andy receives as he moves between the new Houston, the high-tech boom town gone bust, and the old ways of his parents exhaust him physically and spiritually.

The novel portrays a mythless city of “diverging people.” Andy Garcia is never able to fully assimilate into the American mix of transplanted and complaining Northerners and confused, upwardly mobile native Texans. He is also shown as not always at ease in a Mexican-American subculture where unspoken traditions, residual machismo and familial unity are ever present. He has left his first wife Dolores, a woman existing well beyond the bounds of sexual repression and a favorite of his parents, to marry a sensuous Anglo divorcee. Andy comes to realize that neither woman is able to satisfy him.

‘Bilateral Cultural Loss’

The daily strain takes its toll, as it is now Andy who, like his great-grandfather, is visited by his “antecedents.” His waning physical and mental health drives him to seek the help of an unhinged yet sage psychiatrist who concludes that “bilateral cultural loss equals shame.”

This theme of identity loss dominates the work, occasioning and dramatizing Andy Garcia’s personal crisis. The narrative is populated with an array of Anglo and Mexican characters through whom the author is able to freely comment on the destructive attitudes and myths held by both cultures. For Andy Garcia, his “antecedents,” the mythical and perhaps apocryphal personages of his family’s social history, are now his only anchor in a world in which he is no longer able to cope.

This is author Garcia’s second novel and signals the coming of age of a talented storyteller. The book holds the reader’s interest through a wide variety of narrative strategies. His style is crafted and crisp, moving effortlessly from the humorous to the tragic, from the real to the surreal.

“A Shroud in the Family” will probably be viewed by many as an example of Chicano or Mexican-American writing; however, the novel transcends the restrictions of categorization, evolving as a passionate evaluation of one man’s life.