Carmen Boullosa: Texas

texas

The latest addition to my website is Carmen Boullosa‘s Texas. The novel is about an event taking place in 1859 between a Mexican and an US sheriff in a thinly disguised version of Brownsville, Texas, leading to sides being taken by the two nationalities (with the Native Americans, slaves and former slaves and other itinerant nationalities thrown in). It is, of course, told not from the US point of view, with shifty or servile Mexicans, but from the Mexican point of view, showing a completely different viewpoint from the one we may be used to from Western films and where the bad guys are the Americans and not the Mexicans. A poor carpenter aand worse sheriff is beating up a drunken Mexican, who is urinating in public, when a well-to-do Mexican intervenes. It ends up in a standoff and then a shooting, with the sheriff mildly wounded in the leg. This leads to a whole chain of events, with a somewhat different outcome from your usual Western. As always, Boullosa tells a hilarious story, gives us a wild ride through the period and culture and, at the same time, makes her point about US hypocrisy vis-à-vis Mexico.

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