Renaming the Earth: Personal Essays

by Ray Gonzalez

In his distinctive and spirited way, Ray Gonzalez, the well-known essayist, poet, fiction writer, and anthologist, reflects on the American Southwest—where he was raised and to which he still feels attached (even though he has lived much of his life elsewhere). It is a place that tugs at him, from its arid desert landscapes to its polyglot cities—part Mexican, part Anglo, part something in-between—always in the process of redefining themselves.

Nowhere does the process of redefinition hit Gonzalez quite as hard as in his native city of El Paso, Texas. There he finds the “segregated little town of my childhood” transformed into “a metropolis of fast Latino zip codes . . . a world where the cell phone, the quick beer, the rented apartment, and the low-paying job say you can be young and happy on the border.” Readers will wonder, along with the author, whether life along the “new border” is worth “the extermination of the old boundaries.”

But there is another side of the Southwest for this “son of the desert”—the world of dusty canyons, ponderosa pines, ocotillo, and mesquite. Here, he writes, “there is a shadow, and it is called ancient home—structures erased from their seed to grow elsewhere, vultured strings searching for a frame that stands atop history and renames the ground.”

Rooted in the desert sand and in the banks of the Rio Grande, the muddy river that forms the border between nations, these essays are by turns lyrical, mournful, warm to the ways of the land, and lukewarm to the ways of man.

Genres: Nonfiction

216 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

The work of award-winning poet and editor Ray Gonzalez is inextricably linked to his Mexican ancestry and his American southwestern upbringing. Born and raised in El Paso, Texas, Gonzalez has employed Chicano imagery in his poetry, oftentimes alluding to America's indigenous past, and particularly to the southwestern desert cultures. Gonzalez has published several collections of his poetry and has served as editor of several anthologies of writings, most of which emphasize the contributions of Chicano authors to the literary scene. These anthologies, including 1998's Touching the Fire: Fifteen Poets of Today's Latino Renaissance, provide a medium for many up-and-coming Latino writers to get their work to the public.

Reviews

[Patricia Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I always appreciate Ray's thoughtful (sometimes pensive) observations. I remember Ray always saying to me, "turn off your computer for a year," and lingering over these essays I know that I really need to do just that. Some moments I savored, because he did, were "Why do we pause when the days burn in yellow and green?" And "Under the leaves, the kiss of the snail."