Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me I Have to Wait

Review: Tim Z. Hernandez. They Call You Back. Tucson, University of Arizona Press, 2024

Michael Sedano

I happily began reading They Call You Back by Tim Z. Hernandez. I don’t remember how many days into reading that I looked at the cover and noticed the publisher's bug next to the title. “Advance Reading Copy” it reads. The back cover says publication date of They Call You Back will be September 17, 2024. 

I'm not jumping the gun with this brief review. The book demands attention. Gente, waiting it out is all you can do. When the book hits the market, They Call You Back will be a literary sensation, for its stories, for the writing, for the book's necessity. 

 

They Call You Back is a necessary book at a necessary time. As the nation descends into divisive chaos, only unity can bring it back from the brink.  Tim Z Hernandez has a mission, it's been at the forefront of his work: make visible the invisible. Specifically, bring back from contemptuous disregard the Mexicanos and one Mexicana who were buried known only as "deportee".

 

Hernandez won the 2011 Premio Aztlán for the novel Breathing, In Dust. His 2013 novel is the first "discovery" book: Mañana Means Heaven, earns accolades for the Chicano writer’s uncovering the Mexican woman fictionalized in the beatnik classic, On The Road. Next, this author causes a sensation with publication of his 2018 investigative report All They Will Call You, that “finds” families of braceros killed in the worst airplane crash in history.

 

They Call You Back recounts the birth and growth of the author's mission--perhaps despite himself--to find missing souls. It's not just the deportees, nor Kerouac's lover. Hernandez reveals generational searches for lost graves and lost, missing, or disappeared, relatives. 

 

Asked by historians about his "method," Hernandez can point to dogged legwork but mostly to the lost themselves. A person doesn't need to be spiritual to be influenced by spirits, and that's Hernandez. The author discloses a yearning to be free of his quest, but when he's ready to leave behind the old work, a new story finds him when a relative contacts him. "I think I'm related to..." Skeptical of any claim, the author resists, but they--the spirits--call him back into the search.

 

Writers will devour They Call You Back as an avatar of good memoir writing. Every now and then, Hernandez pulls back the biography curtain to disclose a personal fact--a divorce, alcohol dependence--but his quests always compel the storyteller to get back to the next fact, the next connection between disparate events that, with hindsight, are prophetic. This is the difference between "memoir" and "autobiography," the author's dedication to writing about writing his stuff. The book's the thing whereby the author catches the conscience of a readership.

The author's use of time and location-based incidents will captivate readers and writers alike.  

There's a fly, and a butterfly, that attend a family crisis. The reader notes it, and the writer moves along. Some years afterward, another crisis looms and the author sees another fly, perceives the influence of another butterfly rebounding through family history. Readers recognize matters are not coincidental, but the author remains unable to pin down a concrete connection. In fact, he avers a feeling of being prisoner of demanding spirits that need to be written about.

 

With one glaring exception, the spirits and families seek identification with consequent closure. Because I have an uncorrected proof, there's a possibility editors will eliminate the one chapter filled with black boxes emending the name of one of the deportees. A family, after engaging Hernandez' efforts to find the story of a dead relative, demurs. They pull back permission to name the relative and the author is left helplessly sharing words and grammar--product of years of work-- that build to a name, and instead the name is covered with a black box. It's disconcerting to readers, given the ethos Hernandez builds as a sincere discoverer and sharer of light, to see the story marked up like a mural tagged and ruined beyond recognition by marker-wielding vandals. In this case, the vandal is the author himself.

 

For the author, as for readers, the search for the missing lives comes with powerful emotions. One of the most emotional moments for readers, as for the writer and his children, comes when the California State Assembly fetes the author and book, All They Will Call You. 

 

There's a powerful backstage moment when Joan Baez sings Woody Guthrie's "Deportee" song to Hernandez and three families of the discovered. It's the only time Baez or anyone, has sung the words for members of the families of the Los Gatos plane crash.

 

More powerful, when the State Senator begins to call the names of the dead, Hernandez' son takes up the ritual when raza roll call the absent: "Presente!" the boy mumbles at first to himself. Then, as the roll grows, the boy's voice grows in power and others join him. It's a magnificent piece of writing here. As California government calls out names, the boy's voice draws the elected members of government to their feet. As each name is pronounced--all they will call you is 'deportee'-- the government finally acknowledges its shamefulness; the power of cultura brings back those lives once and for all.

 

Presente!

Link to UofA Press: https://uapress.arizona.edu/book/they-call-you-back