Stephen D. Gutierrez—Steve—is trying to write a short story.
He’ll get around to changing the characters’ names to disguise his real-life self and his real-life friends and loved ones. In brackets he notes [deal with name later].
He’s so excited by the prospect of writing his story that he sends his first drafts to Harper’s Magazine and The Atlantic, with cover notes telling them to publish the story AS A WARNING to the nation. When he hears nothing back, he sends more notes urging them to hurry: “Your rivals have this in their hands as you read this.”
Captain Chicano Draws a Line in the American Sand is a record of its author’s attempt to write the story, and of the story itself. The book works hard in the beginning to set its author up as a crank, the sort of person you imagine the editors at Harper’s Magazine and The Atlantic do get angry letters from, and the sort of person whose warning to the country, whatever it is, can probably be safely dismissed.
He introduces a lot of characters, and what they are doing is not immediately clear. There’s Captain Chicano and his female superhero counterpart, Cathy Reyes ChiCANa Xtreme. There’s somebody named Joanna. There’s Edgar Allan Poe and his 13-year-old wife. The book talks about Jesus for a while. The book personifies one of Steve’s letters to the magazine editors as a non-binary person named Leticia. Steve imagines himself riding a trolley in San Francisco and staining his pants with cum; he imagines himself giving birth to a baby on his desk. He separates some of his thoughts with bold outline headings that give writing advice, such as, B) Every short story is a rank confession of need. When the Poe character speaks, he sounds antiquated; when Captain Chicano speaks, he calls Steve “vato” and “cabrón.”
These antics go on for a long time, and I kept stopping to ask myself whether I was following what was happening. Sometimes the antics are funny, and at times they make me feel a kind of kinship with the author, the way you get closer to someone’s perspective when they make you laugh at a joke. But mostly it felt like I didn’t know what I was supposed to be paying attention to or how this story was progressing.
What the opening section does accomplish, while mildly alienating this reader, is establish Steve’s character and background and begin to sketch an artistic or intellectual biography, all of which prepare us for the real action.
Halfway through the book, Steve goes over to his neighbor Bill’s house and finds him watching Fox News. It is showing a looped clip of “invaders” fording the Rio Grande. Bill believes in the Great Replacement theory, and he parrots it while he watches TV.
He says Steve doesn’t have to worry, because he’s already here.
“I should just skip back and forth over the border,” says Steve, “to show them what it means to be an American.”
In fact, the epigraph to this book is a quotation from James Baldwin. It says, “The making of an American begins at that point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other history, and himself adopts the vesture of his adopted land.”
Steve describes himself as the lone member of his Mexican-American family who looks visibly Indian, and says, “I’m proud, finally, after much resistance.” Of farmworkers, he says, “Do I feel any connection to them? Any special bond or kinship? Yes and no. Mostly I feel for them as integral members of this society, who, like all the so-called essential workers, suddenly appreciated in a crisis, are not paid enough.”
Talking about his mother, Steve says, “I’m supposed to say mamá and confirm the picture of a bilingual, bicultural household filled with warmth and stove pot happiness, with mamá in an apron most of the time.”
“We didn’t live it, my family,” he says. “It’s just in my blood, like people are part German or whatever but don’t live like it, like they’re Germans.”
But Bill has caught Steve on a vulnerable day. Steve has been having visions of an organized group of white supremacists driving through his neighborhood, knocking on doors and asking who lives there, taking certain people outside and shooting them.
So Steve takes drastic action. Steve asks Bill to come over and deal with the sound of a heartbeat that’s coming from inside his wall. Bill, a capable do-it-yourselfer, arrives with his tools. And while he’s bent over, listening for the sound of the telltale heart, we see an act of violence that takes us to a new depth of feeling, intensity, and political outrage in the book.
All of the surrealism we’ve seen before, and the author’s tendency to put forth ideas or plot points and then withdraw them, lose their joking quality here. Steve does not rely on the usual rules of cause and effect to move us. Instead, he achieves a disturbing, poetic intensity.
This section feels like the most prolonged period of emotional truth in the book. We get Poe in the cemetery looking for his dead wife. We get a meeting at Steve’s office with a student he calls “the weeping Mexican,” a young person who has no recourse to the humor that Steve has strenuously deployed throughout the book, who takes the world seriously and weeps for everything. We get Captain Chicano, often a stand-in for Steve, feeling the pain of the generation gap. He says, “’Well, what’s new, out in Chicano land? But maybe things have changed. Shit, they have. The youngsters are loud. They listen to Mexican music. They speak Spanglish all the time, Spanish too, like real Spanish, not just basic stuff, fucking around. I don’t get it. I can’t relate. They’ve disrupted the fragile equilibrium of walking the Mexican-American line in America. I’m not their hero. I’m their clown.’”
And then the intensity of this section subsides, Steve backs off again, and the book repeats the “just kidding” tone it had in the opening section. I found this part less compelling, but I also recognize in it a feeling that I have in these times. How seriously are you supposed to take the attitudes of the people around you? When the news that people are consuming is obviously pandering, when people believe in farcical conspiracy theories, when they hate people like you but treat you as an exception, when you can’t tell if they’re serious or kidding, how can you tell what is actually dangerous, and how can you calibrate your own reactions?
This book alternates between sounding the alarm and backing off. But it doubles down, in the end, on its warning. Steve’s terrible sadness, which he says is a condition of being American, overwhelms his playfulness. Yes, things are actually dangerous. They are clowns, and we have to take them seriously.
Captain Chicano Draws a Line in the American Sand, by Stephen D. Gutierrez. Tampa, Florida: University of Tampa Press, August 2024. 140 pages. $25.00, hardcover.
Ashley Honeysett’s debut book, Fictions, won the Miami University Press Novella Award and the Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year Award. If you want to be a more adventurous reader you can subscribe to her newsletter at ashleyhoney.substack.com.
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Heavy Feather Review 