The Madonnas of Echo Park Read online

  Praise for The Madonnas of Echo Park

  Pick of the Week, The Boston Globe

  “This first novel tells the intertwining stories of three Mexican-American families in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, from the 1980s to today. … As the narrators pass the story backward and forward in time, the characters unknowingly bounce off one another like particles in the Large Hadron Collider.”

  — The New York Times

  “A revelation … the summer’s most original read … extraordinary. … The novel is richly detailed, offering varying perspectives that collide into a singular narrative from an evolving neighborhood in the shadow of downtown L.A. (Think Gabriel García Márquez fused with Junot Díaz.) … The immigrant experience may very well be the defining narrative of the United States in the 21st century. When juxtaposed against its literary rival, the self-confession, the results can be breathtaking as exhibited by Skyhorse’s startling author’s note at the start of the book. … Powerful.”

  —Examiner.com

  “Gritty … a bittersweet love letter to the neighborhood [of Echo Park].”

  — Los Angeles magazine

  “A literary glimpse into the often unseen world of Mexican Americans trying to make it as Americans.”

  — USA Today

  “The work of a significant new voice, full and rich and richly subtle… . ‘Rules of the Road’ is filled with so much texture and detail and humanity and the kind of weirdness that seems utterly true and believable [and] the rest of the [book is] filled with the same qualities. … Also, for a man, Skyhorse has an amazing eye and ear for the way women talk, look, behave—and think and feel… . Brando Skyhorse’s first book is the real deal.”

  —Chauncey Mabe, Open Page, Florida Center for the Literary Arts

  “Skyhorse’s control and capability as a storyteller make the story clear, compelling, and meaningful. … Above all, The Madonnas of Echo Park is about people trying to understand why their world is changing… . There is much to marvel at, beginning with Skyhorse’s excellent writing. … Its structure, repeated descriptions, interlocked plot elements, even that metafictional “Author’s Note,” all work to do the most important thing fiction can do: create a complex world in which readers can practice empathy.”

  — The Rumpus

  “Wonderful … moving, lyrical … a complex, multifaceted portrait of the community [of Echo Park].”

  — Washington City Paper

  “I really loved this book. Skyhorse successfully finds the voice of such vastly different people and it is all brought together with lyrical beauty, even when he writes about the gritty side of life.”

  — Latina-ish

  “Social fiction meant to shine a light on the lives of Mexican immigrants and illegals. … The story is bright with description, and dialogue so well-written you can hear it.”

  — Winnipeg Free Press

  “Told in a series of vignettes so strong and well-written they could be stand-alone stories, The Madonnas of Echo Park centers around the life of one young woman, Aurora Esperanza, as told by the men and women of her east L.A. community. It addresses the issues of immigration and assimilation, of being Mexican and American, and of staying true to who you are and where you come from. Skyhorse has written such a beautiful, poignant and well-crafted novel that I feel compelled to encourage everyone to pick it up and immerse themselves in Echo Park.”

  — Inkwood Books Newsletter

  “Skyhorse gives life to people on the peripheries of Los Angeles who are often invisible.”

  — New York Journal of Books

  “Skyhorse devotes a chapter each to a panoply of quirky characters who people the streets, all connecting to a girl caught in the gang wars that ravage the area.”

  — Asbury Park Press

  “Brilliant. Go buy this book right now.”

  —Sewtransformed.blogspot.com

  “To embrace a community, to capture its fabric, to syncopate its rhythms, lives, views and experiences is a difficult feat. But Brando Skyhorse manages to do just that with his breathtaking and, at times, soul-churning novel. … Skyhorse [finds] breadth and diversity in Echo Park. … Stories zigzag through the book, introducing lives unique and full, bisecting one another at times, standing at solitary edges at others. … [W]e are carried away by this intricately crafted tale. Taken together, the tales spin around the axis of a few streets yet splinter off into infinite dimensions.”

  — Chattanooga Times Free Press

  “Vivid… . These are the people we pass every day and never give much thought. Now Skyhorse demands our attention as he deftly humanizes their stories. … Eye-opening and haunting, Skyhorse’s novel will jolt readers out of their complacence.”

  — Booklist

  “Vivid. … Skyhorse excels at building a vibrant community and presenting several perspectives on what it means to be Mexican in America, from those who wonder ‘how can you lose something that never belonged to you?’ to those who miraculously find it.”

  — Publishers Weekly

  “First-time novelist Skyhorse offers a poignant yet unsentimental homage to Echo Park, a working-class neighborhood in east Los Angeles where everyone struggled to blend in with American society but remains tied to the traditions of Mexico. … Essential for fans of Sherman Alexie or Sandra Cisneros but with universal appeal for readers who favor in-depth character-centered stories, this is enthusiastically recommended.”

  — Library Journal (starred review)

  “Brando Skyhorse brings a chronically invisible community to sizzling, beguiling life. . . . With this debut novel, Skyhorse has earned comparison to Sherman Alexie, Junot Diaz and Sandra Cisneros. . . . And like those writers, there’s little danger Skyhorse will be pigeonholed as an ethnic writer: his work is simply too good. . . . In The Madonnas of Echo Park, Skyhorse claims the disparate elements of his life and spins them into gold.”

  — The Oregonian

  “There are a few reasons you should read Brando Skyhorse’s The Madonnas of Echo Park this year … a fresh … and authentic … writer to shake … controversy through the discerning scrim of first-person fiction. … If timeliness and social relevance don’t sell you on the book, then read it for its beautifully imperfect characters, the wise certainty of its prose, its satisfying emotional heft—the basic things we hope for when we pick up a novel … elegantly written. … The book cleverly expresses the tangled nature of multicultural identity and the physical geography of off-the-grid Echo Park. … The thing about tortuous roads and confusing intersections is that we often find ourselves returning to the place where we started, even when we think we’ve left it forever. And while many of us might see this as a lack of progress or hapless water-treading, Skyhorse celebrates it as a kind of hopeful recovery.”

  — The Brooklyn Rail

  “[A] potential best-seller. … [Skyhorse] has a way with fiction, as he demonstrates in this lovely debut novel about Mexican-Americans in LA. The engaging storytelling, informed by a keen understanding of contemporary immigrant life, is reminiscent of Junot Díaz and Chang Rae-Lee.”

  — Vanity Fair

  “Brando Skyhorse writes with great compassion and wit (and a touch of magic) about the lives of people who are often treated as if they are invisible. The stories that make up this novel weave together to create a complex and vivid portrait of a Los Angeles we seldom see in literature or film. The Madonnas of Echo Park is a memorable literary debut.”

  —Dan Chaon, author of Await Your Reply

  “In its depiction of what amounts to a parallel social universe The Madonnas of Echo Park provides a master class in nonlinear narrative, written with imaginative generosity and emotional precision, poign
ant, brutal, and refreshingly unsentimental. Brando Skyhorse has what can’t be faked: talent. His book is an understated triumph.”

  —Glen Duncan, author of Death of an Ordinary Man and I, Lucifer

  “In this gorgeous and suspenseful book, the admirably talented Brando Skyhorse takes his readers to a kingdom that he has made very much his own—Echo Park, California. I loved reading about his richly imagined characters, both Mexican and American, and how their lives intersect with our much more familiar versions of Los Angeles.”

  —Margot Livesey, author of The House on Fortune Street and

  Eva Moves the Furniture

  Free Press

  A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents

  either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead,

  is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2010 by Brando Skyhorse

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or

  portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address

  Free Press Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas,

  New York, NY 10020

  First Free Press trade paperback edition February 2011

  FREE PRESS and colophon are trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your

  live event. For more information or to book an event, contact the

  Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our

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  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

  Skyhorse, Brando.

  The Madonnas of Echo Park : a novel / Brando Skyhorse.

  p. cm.

  1. Mexican Americans—Fiction. 2. Echo Park (Los Angeles, Calif.)—

  Fiction. 3. Domestic fiction. I. Title.

  PS3619.K947A44 2010

  813'.6-dc22 2009034403

  ISBN 978-1-4391-7080-9

  ISBN 978-1-4391-7084-7 (pbk)

  ISBN 978-1-4391-7085-4 (ebook)

  Here. I want you to have this.

  It’s an opening, and you’re welcome.

  It’s a city, and in the palm of the city

  is a lake. In the heart of the lake is a wing.

  All the people, all the exhaust & sprawl:

  it’s perfect. Let them sleep in you

  when you sleep. And wake with you,

  that you might know them and their streets,

  and the light that makes them fall in love,

  the light that has always been your light.

  —JEFF G. LYTLE

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  Bienvenidos

  The Blossoms of Los Feliz

  Our Lady of the Lost Angels

  Rules of the Road

  Yo Soy el Army

  The Hustler

  Cool Kids

  La Luz y la Tierra

  Gracias

  They thought I was a Mexican, of course; and in a way I am.

  —Jack Kerouac, On the Road

  I wish I was born Mexican, but it’s too late for that now.

  —Morrissey

  It’s no fun to pick on Mexicans. You guys got a country.

  —Richard Pryor

  Author’s Note

  This book was written because of a twelve-year-old girl named Aurora Esperanza. In the 1980s, before I knew I was Mexican, Aurora and I were in a sixth-grade class of American-born Mexicans and first-generation Vietnamese immigrants, both groups segregating themselves into clusters on opposite sides of the room. This was an awkward arrangement for me, because though I felt I belonged to neither group, my Mexican-ness would peek out every so often from under the shadow of my stepfather’s last name when I rolled a vowel too long in my mouth, or grew coarse tufts of premature facial hair. Emphasizing my “in between” status, a desk chair shortage placed me alone at an oversize table with an obstructed view of the chalkboard and my back to the American flag.

  There was a constant tension in the classroom, each group suspicious of the other for conspiratorial hushes peppered with strange, foreign-sounding words that shared jokes, kept secrets, plotted insurrections. We were, however, still kids, and our hunger for the latest fads led us to break ethnic ranks and whisper in a common language of desire. We wanted Garbage Pail Kids and Pac-Man sticker trading cards, packaged with sticks of bone-hard bubble gum you could rub against the pavement to write out your name in pink zigzagged letters, a scent of hot caramelized sugar lingering on the concrete. We wanted futuristic digital watches that blinked out the time in a blood-red neon LCD phosphorescence, as bright as a sparkler strapped to your wrist.

  And, of course, we wanted our MTV.

  It was the rare child in Echo Park whose family could afford something as frivolous as cable television. Most families had one or two parents working a spread of jobs to support both their kids and their in-laws living under one roof. My family had a different arrangement, but I was as astonished as any of my friends would have been when one afternoon I found MTV installed on my very own television in my room, a present for getting a part-time job as an after-school ESL tutor. I sat twelve inches away from the screen, transfixed for the next seven hours, leaving it on when I went to bed with the sound off like a night-light. The next morning, I spread its legend in Ms. O’Neill’s class, watching the tale jump from Mexican to Vietnamese and from boy to girl, just as difficult a bridge to cross at our ages. You could watch music on television? Yes, and every song has a story, and every story has a happy ending. You could watch Michael Jackson dance whenever you wanted? Yes, and when he walks, each step he takes lights up the sidewalk. Here was a way you could see how the music on our cheap transistor radios looked, these popular songs that throbbed with glamour, desire, and plastic gratification—a reimagining of the American Dream in bright pastels. Our parents didn’t comprehend the words and were fearful that the songs they had fallen in love with growing up would be attached to a language we’d never speak and a country we’d never see.

  Right before lunch, Ms. O’Neill intercepted a note I’d written to a table of Mexican boys outlining everything on MTV the night before: girls in short skirts dancing down a street in a conga line; girls with shorter skirts dressed as cheerleaders forming a bright Day-Glo pyramid; girls in bikinis dancing by an open fire hydrant. Ms. O’Neill asked how many of us thought MTV was “cool,” and thanks to my classroom gospel, everyone’s hand shot up. MTV was now our mutual language.

  The next day, Ms. O’Neill announced plans for an “MTV Dance Party” in our classroom on the Friday before spring break. There would be those expensive Soft Batch cookies that got gummy and elastic like rubber bands if you left them out for more than a day (making them an impractical purchase for most of us because junk food had to last in our houses), two-liter bottles of Coke and Pepsi (not the generic, white-label, noncarbonated sludge with SODA stamped on its side that we drank at home), and Domino’s pizza. In a neighborhood where takeout was considered extravagant, this was the equivalent of a Roman bacchanal. There would also be music. Each of us was to bring in a record and play it. A number of hands shot up in confusion. What if we didn’t have any records of our own? Borrow them from your brothers, sisters, or parents, Ms. O’Neill said. What if they didn’t have records either? Buy a record you’d want to play. What if we can’t afford to buy one? Buy a single, she suggested, they cost the same as two packs of those gross Garbage Pail sticker cards you’re so fond of. All but one hand went down. Aurora Esperanza’s pink fingernails sparkled as her white cotton blouse sleeve fell back down her arm and curled up against her bare shoulder.

  “Will we b
e allowed to dance in the classroom?” she asked. “Will there be dancing?”

  “It’s a dance party,” Ms. O’Neill said. “Yes, there will be dancing.”

  Dancing? The boys didn’t like the sound of this. Were we expected to dance with girls? And were Mexican boys to dance with Vietnamese girls? What about Vietnamese boys—would they dance with Mexican girls? Then a more terrifying thought arose: Who would I dance with? By the end of class, I had formed a pact with two Vietnamese boys I had never spoken to before, not to dance with any girl, even if we were asked. There were many other treaties of convenience made that day, as boys and girls who had segregated themselves by race and language throughout the year became unexpected allies in an effort to outsmart our teacher, who was white. Who, we wondered, would she dance with?

  * * *

  In the short weeks between the announcement and the party, every classmate had seen or at least stolen a peek of MTV. Was this because I did the charitable thing and invited friends over to my house to watch? Hell, no. Part of the fun of being a kid comes from having things other kids don’t have and lording it over them. On the playground, I recounted the videos’ story lines with such relish, anyone overhearing me would have thought these on-screen adventures were my own experiences, and in a way, I felt they were. What I hadn’t counted on was my classmates’ determination to see these videos for themselves, no matter the cost or inconvenience. Distant and more prosperous Vietnamese relatives, who lived in actual houses (not one-room box apartments) as far away as El Monte, had their remote controls hijacked. Mexican girls took the bus together to the Valley, racing through the Glendale Galleria to the electronics section of JCPenney. With each passing Monday, the MTV circle widened, and with it my reign as the “MTV King” diminished until the day of the party, when the two poorest boys in the class, twin brothers who alternated their clothes in an effort to project a larger wardrobe (the stains gave them away) were what remained of my empire.

  The bare turntable wobbled in slow circles like a drunk uncle at a quinceañera in search of a young girl’s ass to grope. Hands rustled in peeling vinyl backpacks, plastic supermarket bags, and cheap store-brand three-ring binders, a shassh of ripped-open Velcro fasteners as 45 records poked out from snug butterfly folders. While I had agreed not to dance, I didn’t want to fail an assignment, so I bought Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Its $9.99 price tag embarrassed me, the large record sitting on my desk like an arrogant boast; many of the other students had brought ninety-nine-cent, seven-inch singles from Thriller, each priced with a distinctive blue El Tocadisco sticker. El Tocadisco was a local discount barateria that sold Spanish music but reserved a small section at the front of the store for American pop stars. (It had occurred to no one to bring in a Menudo album, or any other kind of music. There was a tacit understanding among Mexican and Vietnamese kids alike that MTV music meant American music, and American music meant English men with keyboards, white women with big hair, or Michael Jackson.) Thriller had been out for over a year, but kids here didn’t have a lot of disposable income, meaning pop culture filtered through in spurts. Our teacher grimaced as she collected copies of “Beat It” and “Billie Jean.” The boys nodded to each other in smug conspiracy—there would be no dancing today.