Walking on the Moon

Crux was a memoir that derived its impact from the literary framing that Guerrero put on her family’s story. In Always Running, Luis Rodriguez comes at his memoir from another direction. He tells his story plainly – starkly in places. That clean, simple approach lets his times and his perspective imbue his experience with heft and meaning.

Rodriguez writes crisply and evocatively without poetical flourishes that might distract from his narrative. Much of his point is that so many shared his circumstances and faced their own difficulties, victories, and tragedies all around him. Directly relating his life and the others it touches magnifies it.

That said, the differences that inspire him to challenge his readers and his society are all the more powerful because they seem so small at first. A few little choices mean the difference between a life of petty violence and a life of social reform. His life and his friends’ lives are continually balanced on a razor’s edge.

Recommended.

Crux is the well-told story of Jean Guerrero’s unique life and relationship with her father tinted with the political and cultural world of Southern California and Northern Mexico. In that way, it is almost the definition of a memoir.

Memoirs are more than a recitation of a life, of course. Guerrero transcends simple history by casting her father’s life and her journey in discovery of it as a mythic hero’s journey. That journey takes her through an underworld spiced with the imagery and metaphor of the Southwest. She is quite effective.

I found her telling powerful, but not universal. She ties her narrative to the personalities in her family which makes it fascinating and unique. As a tale this is powerful, but specific.

Recommended.