Review: Désirée Zamorano. Dispossessed. RIZE Press, 2024. ISBN (pbk) 978-1-960018-43-4
Michael Sedano
People not yet familiar with the historical foundation of the action in Désirée Zamorano's Dispossessed, will turn the book's pages with wide-open eyes. People familiar with Chicano history nod their head and turn the pages hoping for a fairy tale.
Manuel's story begins with the violence of family separation in 1939. Parents disappear, a small boy and his older sister are together another day then the sister and boy get torn away from each other. The sister, a few years older, blesses her brother upon separation with a wish he take good care of himself, " “Portate bien, seas un buen niño, seas mi hermanito, valiente y bueno.”
The Boy grows into a family man, and all those years he seeks his missing sister and parents. It's the loss of a lifetime for one character but not an isolated historical event. As we readers suffer with Manuel, we are keenly aware the Republican president before Biden, that GOPendejo running for a black job, endorsed family separation and today hundreds of Manuels wonder where their parents have disappeared to?
It's not only families who disappear in Dispossessed. Manuel is taken to a foster home in the Palo Verde, Chavez Ravine area of Los Angeles. Now the location of a professional baseball stadium, Chavez Ravine and Palo Verde were thriving, although poverty-stricken, communities.
The destruction of the community happens in the background until the day Manuel and his guardian, Tía Amparo, move out to Whittier to live with Amparo's natural son. By moving out, Manuel escapes crummy schooling, racist teachers, and murderous cops. Who knew that using a playground swing after dark was a capital crime?
Being an historical novel, Dispossessed sweeps across time. Each chapter reflects another year in this citizen's progress and growth of raza sensibilities, despite Manuel's own conservative outlook. When the word "chicano" comes out of a character's mouth--Manuel's wife Lizette--Manuel pronounces it "an ugly word."
The sweep of history requires abbreviated stories. Across the book's 29 chapters, Zamorano spreads the characters' misery while maintaining their decency in the face of one disaster following another.
Manuel meets decent people and rotten people. He meets the local notary who doesn't take much of Manuel's money to help locate the parents and sister. It's this man's tactic that eventually proves fruitful. There's a rotten guy at the docks who skims payroll from the teenaged worker. There are indifferent tipos at the Mexican Consulate who give less than a hoot about Manuel's need to find his familia in Mexico. In a sly critique, a consulate clerk tells Manuel pochos like him need to read Rain of Gold.
Familia is Manuel's greatest need. Not just his deported gente, his own wife and child. Although the couple dream of having three or four kids, after a series of miscarriages, Lizette is able to hold a pregnancy and gives birth to Dahlia. She gives birth at Los Angeles County Hospital, where the doctors sterilize her without her conscious knowledge.
" No mas bebes por vida" Manuel thinks, a thought that cites Virginia Espino's film of that name. https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/documentaries/no-mas-bebes/
Thank you, Désirée Zamorano, for the scene where Manuel tracks down the doctor who sterilized Lizette. An ass-kicking in a parking structure can't recitify the wrongs done to so many women, but a good punch in the face leaves a sense of just desserts, if only in Manuel's thoughts.
It's the 1970s when the story draws to its close. Manuel and Lizette have separated and reconciled, their friend Beto continues living on the edge of money and influence, their chicana activist daughter, Dahlia, is at UCLA getting an MA, and things look good other than Manuel's emptiness and longing for his birth familia.
If Dispossessed were a fairy tale, Manuel would reunite with his familia. His mother would have died, but the father would be alive somewhere in Mexico. Manuel's sister, Lulu, would appear. I would hope the author wouldn't saddle the sister with diabetes and obesity, why would she? I would hope the brother-in-law's disappeared child isn't forced to search for their own origins, a parallel to Manuel's story. That is, if Dispossessed is a fairy tale.
Readers of the book--due for release in September--will have their own views and hopes for these characters.
Read the author's thoughts on writing this book at yesterday's La Bloga
Pre-order from the publisher at https://runningwildpublishing.com/rize-press/
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