CROSSINGS; iUniverse, 2004; 261 pages; $17.95
FROM THE DUST JACKET: Amid the cracked granite and boulder-strewn mountains across the California-Mexico border, two villages exist side-by-side. Aurelio Gonzalez, a headstrong but naïve college graduate, arrives from Mexico City to fulfill his national teaching commitment.
In the early 1990s, international turmoil has turned the villages' peaceful coexistence into a cauldron of conflict. When Aurelio learns that he is but a "ghost" professor in Baja California, he crosses the newly tense border to find work in the U.S. and touch es the heart of his boss, Kristin Kuhl.
But U.S. Border Patrol agent Raul Camacho has other ideas for Kristin's affections. Complicating Aurelio's troubled world, Mexican villager Marta Uribe tempts Aurelio with a more profitable, more sensuous path. The mysterious smuggler on the hill also has a sp ecial plan for Aurelio.
Through it all, the dreamy magic of the jungle lands of southern Mexico helps Aurelio find his way.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY: Wyrd, a literary magazine published by San Diego State University. In Crossings, McNeece humanizes those who cross the border from Mexico searching for economic opportunities but who never truly leave their homeland. He creates Mexican characters with frailties and strengths for those of us who seldom or never come in contact with Mexicans in a familiar way but only view them from either the often condescending perspectives of employer or customer. The reader comes to know McNeece's main characters as he knows his own family.
This novel, McNeece's first, is clearly the work of an accomplished craftsman. Few authors, even long-establish novelists, have McNeece's ability create fully developed characters, characters you feel for, root for, and-in a few cases-hate.
For anyone who lives in and loves the border area or simply would like to know what it's like to live near the Mexican-American border, this is a book for you.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: P. Brian McNeece, 52, is a Fulbright scholar in Mexico and [an] English professor at Imperial Valley College. He lives in El Centro with this wife, Angie, and three sons.
A CONVERSATION WITH THE AUTHOR: Crossings is set in Jacumba, a small community of the U.S.-Mexico border, six miles west of San Diego County.
When had he last visited?
"I went up there three weeks ago. They had a big music and arts festival. The town is having a new golden age. They had five stages going. There's a little art institute up by the railroad; they bought a big tin building and they're putting on what they call 'the operas'.And there's an outdoor art gallery." McNeece laughs, "It's pretty funky, but it's kind of neat." A moment goes by, then another. "You do know the whole border-crossing-thing is over?"
"Up until the mid-90's Americans living in Jacumba who wished to walk over to the Mexican village of Jacumé were free to do so. Likewise, Mexicans living in Jacumé who wished to walk over to the American village of Jacumba were free to do so. "No more walking across the border for parties or visits?"
"Maybe it happens at night where the fence is low-there's still that section of low fence-but, basically, you can't go over to Jacumé. If you climb the fence coming back, you'll be arrested."
McNeece was born in the Imperial Valley. "My dad ran a tire, brake, and wheel shop until 1971. His dad started it in the '20s. I'm still in El Centro, although I was in San Diego for ten years and L.A. for three years."
"I assume that's a rite of passage for Inland Empire teenagers; everybody has to go to San Diego or L.A. for a while?"
"Yeah, that's right. I grew up in the '60s, and we felt this was the most miserable place in the world to live. We spent all our time driving up and down Main Street looking for... something. Everybody in my peer group was going to get out of town as soon as the gavel came down on graduation. The day after I graduated from high school, two friends of mine and I got in a Volkswagen bus and hit the road."
"Where did you go?"
"All the way to Quebec, Canada. Toured the United States. Two months. I didn't come back to the Valley for six years. Then I spent a couple years here and went back to San Diego for another eight years."
"Education?"
"UC San Diego. I got a bachelor's degree in philosophy. Took four years. Then I went to San Diego State and studied linguistics. I got a master's in linguistics."
"I see you're teaching. How did you come by your job at Imperial Valley College."
"I was teaching English as a second language at San Diego Community College. Part-time. It was 'I need a job. I need a real job.' Looked in the paper and answered a classified ad."
"You're kidding me."
"I'm not kidding. I never did plan to go back to Imperial County. It was just circumstances that go me here. I interviewed for a job I didn't get. Then, two weeks later somebody retired unexpectedly. I was the number two candidate, and I was in. In those days I taught seven classes, now I'm teaching five, but we still have to work; we're not like UC professors."
"Ironic. Fate driving you back to El Centro."
"People around me were hanging their heads. It was 'You've got to go back to Imperial Valley.' I said, 'Man, this is a pretty good deal. And you know, I enjoy living in Imperial Valley now. We've got Mexicali and San Felipe nearby, and I speak Spanish."
"I was wondering about that. Where did you learn Spanish?"
"In high school. I went to Guadalajara with a friend of mine. I was 17 years old, stayed down there with a family, and got tuned up. And then I've had a couple jobs. I was a family-planning educator when I was kicking around and had to give lectures in Spanish."
"That's how you got into Aurelio's head, how you incorporated a Mexican point of view into your lead character?"
"I went to Chiapas in the mid-'70s, two summers in a row. I taught English down there. I met a guy, Mayan Indian fellow. He was very idealistic, and sort of passive. That's where the germ of the book started."
I asked about his writing life.
McNeece says, "I've kept a journal since I was 15. I've got stacks of those handwritten journals. Now I journal on my computer. Thirty-seven years."
"What made you decide to make the leap? You were in your 40s when you started writing Crossings. That's pretty late in life to say, 'I'll write a novel.'"
"That's a good question. This particular topic grabbed me. I've been going through Jacumba all my life. When I was a kid, my parents used to stop at the old hotel. It wasn't until 1994, the period this book covers, that I found out there was a little village on the Mexico side. Friends of mine had a house right on the border. These are middle-class American people, and they're living 20 feet from the border, and they were saying nobody had ever bothered them and how this was such an open crossing. I was fascinated by this microcosm of the border and the relations between our two countries. "I walked over to Jacumé, by myself, met the school teacher and his wife. Came back. And then somebody told me, 'Heck, you don't have to walk; just go and sit by the fence and you'll get a ride.' So, that was my second trip. I stepped over the fence, sat on the boulder, and waited for a ride. That's where that scene in the book came from-the seven kids getting in the smuggler's car. I was just sitting on a boulder and it happened."
"Did you figure you had a book for the very beginning or did it grow on you?"
"As soon as I found out about Jacumé and saw that it was a thriving little world, I said, 'This is perfect for a novel.' I knew my way into it. I've had a lot of ideas for a novel sitting in my computer, and they never have taken spark, never really grown. This one leaped."
"Which character was hardest to write?"
"Raul, the macho Border Patrol agent. I wanted to make him more likable. That was a guy I struggled with, how much of him to put in and why he was such a fanatic. And Aurelio, the main character, was hard because I'm not Mexican; that life is distant from my experience. I got him from conversations I've had with friends in Mexicali, college graduates. There is an idealism and naïveté that keeps coming through."
"I thought you caught that." I mention that I'd once had an office in a small Mexican village 80 miles sought of Ensenada. Spent the best part of three years in the area. "There's a long, narrow climb through a mountain pass on the way to the village. The residents, including those who'd been to school and spoke very good English, said that if you are alone, and it's late at night, an angel will come, sit on your shoulder, and guide you through the mountain pass. Then they watch TV, drive their cars, eat their frozen foods, telephone their relatives in New York City-everything is First World-and none of it disturbs the magical thinking."
"Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up. I wanted to make Aurelio skeptical of that, because he's formally educated, but it's so much a part of his culture that he eventually becomes swept up in it."
"When did you start writing the book?"
"I started in '96. I had a sabbatical, one semester. I made a proposal to do something else, not write a novel. I was conducting a research study on our students and writing the novel surreptitiously. I got 80 percent of my first draft done in one semester. That was in '96. Then it was slow going. Picking along with it. Then in '98 I was diagnosed with cancer. I was on chemo for all of '99. Stage-three melanoma. I didn't have a mole; I had a tumor. Two surgeries in late '98. Stuff called high-dose interferon, where you're in the hospital for a month and then give yourself injections three times a week for year. It was pretty bad. It was tough. It worked. "I didn't back to the novel for another year. Until 2000. And then I kept working on it, working away on weekends, here and there. Characters finding their own lives, finding their own identities, really happened to me. The novel had been set aside for two years, so when I picked it up again, I already knew all those people, knew those places."
"In two years, you changed, which means your characters would have changed."
"That's right. Everything in me changed. Life was serious business, more fragile than I'd seen it before."
"How did it change your manuscript?"
Three days after this conversation I received an e-mail from McNeece.
Pat, I was thinking about your question: How did my characters change after the two-year hiatus from novel writing that my cancer caused? My first reaction on the phone was that I became more sensitive to them, and they became more sensitive to each other.
Upon further reflection, I would have to say that they did not change so much as they became more insistent. I guess that's what I meant when I said I grew more sensitive to them. It was like they had been on break from the job of telling their stories for those many months. All the coffee had been drunk and the cigarettes smoked and the magazines perused. They were ready to get back to work, ready to discuss with me how to improve their various scenes in the book.
And I say scenes deliberately, for though it's a novel, my thinking is definitely film based, and I visualize my actors in their places on the set of each scene.
As I re-read through my manuscript, Aurelio would tell me, "I need more magic in this scene; you've neglected that element here. You're not being consistent."
And the mysterious smuggler on the hill said, "I need to be introduced earlier on; the readers will be offended by a late, unannounced entrance."
Kristin would complain, arms akimbo, that I hadn't given her much of a reason to fall for Aurelio, and why was she offering Raul something to eat right after he had told her about Javier dying. And so on. Certainly I had been changed by my siege against cancer (mediated by my siege against the malaise of high-dose interferon). But my first year after that battle was also a struggle against an, "Ah, what's the use?" attitude of maybe not having time to finish the novel. I wallowed around in that mode for a while, until a sense of urgency began to creep up on me. Like, well, if I'm not going to die soon, at least I have to finish this thing before I croak. Meanwhile, the real life situation that my novel was trying to illuminate was fading into the past. So my characters were impatient with me; they had a job to do-tell the story of Jacumé and Jacumba through the transition from a tranquil, funky village symbiosis across an international border to a tense war zone invaded by strangers. They wanted me to get to work to tell the story. When I came back to the work after those two years of ignoring it, I came back sighing and intimidated. Would I be able to find my way again?
One afternoon following a family spat, I got in my car and started driving. I headed to Mexicali then west toward La Rumorosa, where I stopped for directions. Night fell and I found myself sailing north on the undulating gravel road to Jacumé. My character Aurelio had taken this road, but I hadn't. Until then, I always walked or hitched a ride from Jacumba. Once in Jacumé, the heavy darkness and deserted streets made me feel vulnerable and exposed. At the dry goods store, I asked for Maria [Maria Mercado, owner of the store and a character in Crossings]. A wiry clerk with penetrating green eyes gave me the once over and told me offhandedly, "Oh, she died. Her truck rolled." I mumbled my regret. He said, "Ah well."
He gave his name as Chivo. I told him I was writing a book about Jacumé. His quick retort, "Still?"
I began to ask him questions about the changes in the town since the fence went up. A woman called to him from the back. "Wait a minute," he answered. "I'm talking to the detective."
I drove back home that night energized by a sense of danger, but also replenished by the air of Jacumé, the sound of crushed gravel beneath my feet, the forlorn tatters of decorations on the barren town plaza, the dark streets, the muffled conversations beyond the fences and closed doors.
So I came back to my characters and their demands for attention-and started listening to them page by page.
Later I realized that Chivo was undoubtedly Maria Mercado's brother. It was the powerful eyes that gave him away. And the store must have stayed in the family.
-Patrick Daugherty
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