The Mystery of Survival and Other Stories by Alicia Gaspar De Alba

The Mystery of Survival and Other Stories

Alicia Gaspar De Alba

‘A people that loses its memory loses its destiny.’ So reads the graffiti on a wall, read by the narrator of the first and best of these works while she and her mother are fleeing a man who has abused her. Unfortunately, Gaspar de Alba drums in that message over and over in these pieces, set on both sides of the Mexican-American border, that read more like morality lessons than short stories. In one tale, a Mexican-American man who applies for a position, in 1921, as a reporter for the El Paso Herald is offered instead a humble clerk’s job. In another, a Chicana lesbian takes up with a white woman who has changed her name to Zulema as a gesture of solidarity with women of color. A Mexican-American woman studying poetry-writing in self-exile in Iowa goes to a Tarot reader for an interpretation of her recurring dream about a pinata, and a strange woman pronounces herself the curandera , or healer, of a modern-day Mexican village even though its inhabitants reject her. Gaspar de Alba is a poet, and she sketches the characters in delicate language, but that spareness can also be frustrating when it results in a lack of action and plot. Two of the stories are in Spanish. This is a debut collection.

Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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