Gordo: Stories

by Jaime Cortez

Overview

This debut story collection "masterfully navigates adverse conditions of migrant life while . . . managing to find joy and amusement, love and triumph" (San Francisco Chronicle).
Gordo brings readers inside a migrant workers camp near Watsonville, California in the 1970s. At the heart of these interrelated stories is a young, probably gay, boy named Gordo, who must find a way to contend with the notions of manhood imposed on him by his father. As he comes of age, Gordo learns about sex, watches his father's drunken fights, and discovers even his own documented Mexican-American parents are wary of illegal migrants.
We also meet Fat Cookie, high schooler and resident artist who runs away from home one day with her mother's boyfriend, Manny. And then there are Los Tigres, the twins who show up every season and whose drunken brawl ends with one of them rushed to the emergency room in an upholstered chair tied to the back of a pick-up truck.
These scenes from Steinbeck Country are full of humor, family drama, and a sweet frankness about serious questions: Who belongs to America and how are they treated? How does one learn decency when grown adults must fear for their lives and livelihoods?
Gordo "announces a vibrant new voice on the literary scene, at once wise and authentic and supremely gifted" (Booklist, starred review).
Finalist for the 2022 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction
Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802158093
Publisher:	Black Cat
Publication date:	02/22/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	206
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

JAIME CORTEZ is a graphic novelist, visual artist, writer, teacher, and occasional performer. Cortez has historically used art and humor to explore sexuality, social justice, HIV/AIDS, and Chicano identity.

Table of Contents

The Jesus Donut 1

El Gordo 12

Chorizo 27

Cookie 37

The Nasty Book Wars 57

Fandango 80

Alex 99

The Pardos 149

The Problem of Style 162

Raymundo the Fag 180

Ofelia's Last Ride 200

Acknowledgments 225

Editorial Reviews

A "Best Book of August" by Bustle, Orion Magazine, and Alta

“[Gordo] gives the reader an unobstructed view into the lives of those who are often relegated to statistics and political talking points: people who come to the States for a better life for themselves and their offspring …The strength of Cortez’s work is that he lays out these stories without defining his characters by their worst actions, showing us people who are closer to reflections of ourselves than we think, even if they do not look like us, or come from the places we call home. And this is the book’s superpower: the cultivation of empathy.” —New York Times Book Review

“Funny and incredibly charming, despite highlighting the acute poverty of the camp’s Latino migrant residents…Cortez, a Bay Area author, masterfully navigates adverse conditions of migrant life while prioritizing in these stories the way people adapt to their circumstance — managing to find joy and amusement, love and triumph, that which makes us delightfully human — amid its challenge.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“A lovely book that masterfully evokes 1970s California, but manages, nonetheless, to feel truly universal…. The town that inspired John Steinbeck has a new literary star.” —NPR

“Intimate and irreverent… This hilarious short story collection gives incisive glimpses of blue-collar Mexican American life.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune

"Like Diane Arbus or Weegee, Cortez depicts warts-and-all moments of vulnerability precisely, sometimes even harshly, and without sentiment... Cortez artfully frames these characters’ daily struggles and captures them in the freeze-frame flash of a master at work." —BookPage , starred review

"Exuberant... A bright, clear voice that avoids stereotypes and navigates issues of identity with ease... Readers will be delighted." —Publishers Weekly

"These stories are elemental and unfussy, their emotional hearts affecting and memorable. [They] serve as unvarnished, even fond, testaments to a tough, queer life." —Kirkus (starred review)

“Cortez’s dialogue, timing, and humor is quick, dark and hilarious and the voice of Gordo, singular and soaring, full of naivete and grit that wrangles humor and human complexity with serious high-stake themes… Gordo, like Winesburg, Ohio, is capable of changing not only what it means to be American today, but what American literature can be… Hands down, top debut of 2021.” —Kerri Arsenault, Literary Hub

'"What a voice, what a charming, idiosyncratic voice! Cortez tells the untold stories of California. Set what you know aside, lay your expectations on the couch next to you, put your feet up, pick up this book, and journey into a land as real and complex as the state itself." —Rabih Alameddine

“What if David Sedaris and Richard Rodriguez were the same person? What if it was possible to tell stories about farmworkers and Latinx rural people with hilarity, queerness, tenderness, and poetic precision? What if Jaime Cortez existed and had a book coming out and you were lucky enough to read it in a few months’ time?” —Rebecca Solnit

“Some people have to walk around with so many sad stories. They have to get up, brush their teeth, wash their face, go to work like everybody else, but they’re not like everyone else. Jaime Cortez is a wise guy with a wide heart, who sees what ‘no one else wants to see.’ His funny/tragic tales, luminescent with love, are lanterns for our dark times.” —Sandra Cisneros

From the Publisher

★ 2021-06-29
The pudgy, queer kid at the heart of these stories must navigate the harsh but loving community of migrant farm workers in rural California in the mid-1970s.

“I get picked on all the time for being fat, cuz I can’t throw a ball, for speaking English all wrong," Gordo confesses in “Fandango,” in which he confronts the rare phenomenon of an apparent gringo coming to work at the garlic fields. It’s an indication of how baffling Gordo finds the adult world that he doesn’t understand that someone with red hair can be a Mexican named Juan Diego. The redhead encourages young Gordo to down some tequila at a boisterous Saturday night fandango that Gordo would prefer to observe, sitting on an upturned bucket just outside the circle of men who are drinking and listening to a Vicente Fernández record. “It tasted awful, but now everybody likes me,” Gordo says. “For once, all the guys like me!” That party ends in two brothers having a violent brawl, one of them rushed to the emergency room by some of the other men even though they’re furious at the brothers for fighting so intensely. Gordo has grown up in “Raymundo the Fag,” by now the most talented hairstylist in Watsonville, such a star that Olga, his colleague, urges him to move to San Francisco or even just Salinas, which is at least a bigger town than Watsonville. “Half the culeros in this town have harassed or beat me, when they weren’t trying to get into my pants,” Ray tells her. “But I’m still here and taking their money to make their wives and girlfriends look foxy. That’s home, Olga. I’m not going nowhere.” Raygay, as he was known by his bullies when young, is asked to make one of his middle school tormentors look good in death; one side of Shy Boy’s head is punctured by a bullet and only Ray can make the wig look stunning. These stories are elemental and unfussy, their emotional hearts affecting and memorable.

Stories that serve as unvarnished, even fond, testaments to a tough, queer life.

Kirkus Reviews