Nobody's Son: Notes from an American Life

Urrea's elegant, painful memoir completes the poet/novelist's Border Trilogy, following Across the Wire and By the Lake of Sleeping Children. The son of an Anglo-American mother and a Mexican father, Urrea muses on the frustrations and logical fallacies of anti-Mexican racism as he traces the often-forgotten multicultural origins of Anglo-American culture and language. Particularly moving is his account of his mother's horrifying experiences in the Red Cross during WWII. After being seriously wounded and witnessing the horrors of Buchenwald, she took refuge in San Francisco, where she met Urrea's father, the then blonde-haired, blue-eyed top security man to the Mexican president. By the time Urrea was born in 1955, though, the family was barely making ends meet in Tijuana, where they stayed until Urrea was three. In meandering, discursive portraits, Urrea chronicles his growth, from childhood in San Diego to a cross-country trip in writer Edward Abbey's car, during which he reminisces about the betrayal he felt discovering the anti-Mexican-immigrant sentiments of his favorite writer. Over time, Urrea's mother rejects her son's Mexican origins, even after he begins teaching at Harvard, declaring, ""You are not a Mexican! Why can't you be called Louis instead of Luis?"" Urrea's interests are not only in the personal but include, for example, the etymology of racist slang: Mexicans came to be called ""greasers"" because they had been the only people with the skills to grease the wheel axles of covered wagons traveling west; ""gringos"" because of ""Green Grow the Lilacs,"" a favorite of American soldiers during the Mexican-American War. This is not, however, just a book about race. In fact, it's just as much about writing, and at its best Urrea's staccato phrases build up to a vivid, often brutal image. (Sept.)