I grew up in the 1970s and ‘80s in a transnational community on the Texas-Mexico border. Though I lived first in the city of McAllen, then Weslaco and Pharr, it always felt to me like the cities of Reynosa and Nuevo Progreso, just across the Río Grande, were simply other neighborhoods in my community where relatives of my dad’s Mexican American family had their homes.
For a good chunk of my youth, I spoke both English and Spanish (mixing them liberally with other bilingual folks) and relished the oral storytelling tradition of my big transnational clan. But an ugly divorce pushed me from that side of my heritage as a teen, and the message I was receiving from teachers and counselors was that if I wanted to be the first person in my family to go to college, I was going to have to set aside my Chicano identity and embrace white academia.
Years later, I found myself teaching English at a middle school in the border town where I now live, Donna, Texas. And as I began teaching the state-adopted text to students who were not engaged by that material, I came to realize that I was about to do to them what had been done to me. I stopped and instead listened. To my heart. To the border kids in my classroom. To our shared cultural heritage.
The Right Stories
What I discovered was that the time-worn stories we all knew, but that came alive with the particular voice of each new storyteller, could serve as a bridge for students into “traditional literacy.” I adapted the tales told by my abuela, by my tíos and father, into short stories—predictable text with all the literary devices I needed to teach, but engaging and centered on the border, on our ways of knowing and being. The students came alive in that class. So I taught them how to do what I had done, ethnographic work that hinged on their particular voices.
It changed all of us, that recognition that our community had to take precedence in our literacy and literary efforts. Many of those kids—now adults with kids of their own—are still my friends.
The Right Kind of Writer
Up to that point, I had yearned to do something truly monumental, to write a magnum opus of the sort that would be taught for generations, to become the Chicano Ernest Hemingway or Herman Melville. But that experience made me understand that I didn’t really want to be that sort of writer. What I wanted was to touch hearts and minds with my books, to show young people from my community and others like it that their stories mattered, that their lives were worthy of being preserved in books.
The wrongs that had been done in public schools to me and my father and my grandfather—going back generations—I wanted to help right them. No more erasure of Mexican Americans from the literature curricula. No more denying the value and importance of our culture, language, storytelling tradition.
I would write for children. For border kids. Proudly.
The Right Voice
Every book is different. Each needs a different approach. After spending years teaching young people to write, I had become a planner—a writer who systematically brainstorms, researches, outlines, writes, and revises using a heightened version of the writing process I taught in my classroom. But when I wrote the poem “Border Kid” and was offered the opportunity to create an entire book in the voice of its narrator, I found myself taking a bit of a risk.
The conceit is straightforward. Güero Casas—the boy behind the poems in They Call Me Güero and They Call Her Fregona—has fallen in love with poetry (and with a particular tough girl named Joanna). The books need to feel like they have arisen organically from his intermittent writing of poems, rather than being tightly plotted in outline form.
Of course, I know border kids. I am one. My children and students are, as well. So I took a chance. For the first time, once I had established the character in my mind, I let go. Through me, Güero wrote a bunch of poems about being a Chicano seventh grader on the border. As the shape of his story arose organically from those pieces, I began filling in gaps with new poems to create a loose novel-in-verse.
It turns out that trusting the voices of folks in your community is a smart idea. They Call Me Güero became my most successful book, resonating with young readers and critics alike.
The Right Direction
You’ve probably noticed an annoying phenomenon in entertainment. If a movie or book does really well, producers and publishers attempt to replicate that success, often by just doing a bigger, bolder, more expensive version of the original. It’s less common for creators to take a risk in part two. They figure they’re giving viewers or readers more of what they want.
The truth is that audiences just want good stories about their favorite characters. It’s pretty simple. I learned this almost immediately when a group of girls at an elementary school in Eagle Pass, Texas—who had read and loved They Call Me Güero—insisted that I needed to write a sequel … and that it needed to focus on the character of Joanna Padilla, who appears in only a few poems in the second half of the original book.
I’m a smart guy. I listened to them. And by following the interest of my readership in Joanna and other characters, I discovered that the entire script needed to be flipped on the first book. Where Güero had fallen in love with poetry, had been proud of his family, had found his place in his community as it stood up against outside oppression … now he would be faced with the darkness in that community, push back against some loved ones, use his lyrics to fight.
And at the center of it all would be an exploration of Joanna Padilla, the girl he adores but whose life—despite all the culture they share—is quite different from his own. If the first book is about coming to terms with privilege in an underprivileged community, its companion is about what happens when that privilege isn’t enough to protect the ones you love.
As Güero Casas tells Joanna Padilla, “I’m learning to be more like you, / mouth shut, sitting with the hard truth.”
It’s a lesson that many young Latines learn. I’m no exception. That’s why I listen to my readers and to the echoes of my own inner child.
The power of border kids is that they can see both sides of the artificial lines we draw in this world. Standing in the middle, “a foot on either bank,” they’re not deceived by the rhetoric.
Their story, as rooted as it may be in borderlands culture, is everyone’s story.
The two worlds? They’re actually one.
David Bowles’s critically acclaimed novel in verse is available digitally for $0.99 from September 1st through the 8th! In advance of the companion novel, They Call Her Fregona (on shelves 9/6), you can get They Call Me Güero for under one dollar! Buy now!