Dispatches From Puerto Nowhere - An American Story of Assimilation and Erasure

by ROBERT LOPEZ • COLUMBUS, OHIO | TWO DOLLAR RADIO | March

Description:

“A Most Anticipated Book of 2023” --Chicago Review of Books

“That I was born Puerto Rican was happenstance, but that I have no connection to what it means is no accident. My grandparents made conscious decisions and so did my father as part of the first generation born here in the States. And none of it bothered me until recently, which is probably why I can’t quite put my finger on any of this. I’m still grappling with what I’ve lost and how I can miss something I’ve never had.

Robert Lopez’s grandfather Sixto was born in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico, in 1904, immigrating to the United States in the 1920s, where he lived in a racially proportioned apartment complex in East New York, Brooklyn, until his death in 1987. The family’s efforts to assimilate within their new homeland led to the near complete erasure of their heritage, culture, and language within two generations.

Little is known of Sixto—he may have been a longshoreman, a painter, or a boxer, but was most likely a longshoreman—or why he originally decided to leave Puerto Rico, other than that he was a meticulously slow eater who played the standup keyboard and guitar, and enjoyed watching baseball. Through family recollection, the constant banter volleyed across nets within Brooklyn’s diverse tennis community, as well as an imagined fabulist history drawn from Sixto’s remembered traits, in Dispatches From Puerto Nowhere: An American Story of Assimilation and Erasure, Robert Lopez paints a compassionate portrait of family that attempts to bridge the past to the present, and re-claim a heritage threatened by assimilation and erasure.

Editorial Reviews:

“Robert Lopez’s Dispatches From Puerto Nowhere is a stunningly powerful work of family recollection on his grandfather, Sixto, his immigration to the United States in the 1920s, and the effort to assimilate that nearly erased the family’s heritage, culture, and language in just two generations.”

“Our 17 Most Anticipated Books of 2023”

“These dispatches correct each other, question each other, answer each other, and complete each other. What does Robert Lopez dispatch here? Any easy or romantic notion of kinship, ethnicity, and nationality. This book is an ode to what we don’t know about ourselves.” —Eula Biss, author of Having and Being Had, On Immunity, and Notes From No Man’s Land

“Armed with little more than a lifetime of questions, one of this country’s best sentencemaking minds, and the twelfth most popular surname in the United States, Robert Lopez embarks on a journey of selfdiscovery and winds up with the heart of America in his hands: peculiar, beautiful, inspiring, sad.” —John D’Agata, author of Halls of Fame, About a Mountain, and The Lifespan of a Fact

“A masterpiece clear and honest and alive to the world and its contradictions. Dispatches From Puerto Nowhere will hit you where you live.” —Justin Torres, author of We the Animals

Author:

ROBERT LOPEZ is the author of three novels, Part of the World, Kamby Bolongo Mean River, named one of 25 important books of the decade by HTML Giant, and All Back Full; two story collections, Asunder and Good People, and a novel-in-stories titled A Better Class of People. His fiction, nonfiction, and poetry has appeared in dozens of publications, including Bomb, The Threepenny Review, Vice Magazine, New England Review, The Sun, and the Norton Anthology of Sudden Fiction – Latino. He teaches at Stony Brook University and has previously taught at Columbia University, The New School, Pratt Institute, and Syracuse University. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

by XAVIER NAVARRO AQUINO • New York, NY |‎HarperVia |

Featured on NPR’s WEEKEND EDITION

Set in the wake of Hurricane Maria, Xavier Navarro Aquino’s unforgettable debut novel follows a remarkable group of survivors searching for hope on an island torn apart by both natural disaster and human violence.

Camila is haunted by the death of her sister, Marisol, who was caught by a mudslide during the huracán. Unable to part with Marisol, Camila carries her through town, past the churchyard, and, eventually, to the supposed utopia of Memoria.

Urayoán, the idealistic, yet troubled cult leader of Memoria, has a vision for this new society, one that in his eyes is peaceful and democratic. The paradise he preaches lures in the young, including Bayfish, a boy on the cusp of manhood, and Morivivi, a woman whose outward toughness belies an inner tenderness for her friends. But as the different members of Memoria navigate Urayoán’s fiery rise, they will need to confront his violent authoritarian impulses in order to find a way to reclaim their home.

Velorio - meaning “wake” - is a story of strength, resilience, and hope; a tale of peril and possibility buoyed by the deeply held belief in a people’s ability to unite against those corrupted by power.

Reviews:

“Velorio recognizes that neither utopia nor dystopia are finite states, that they exist alongside and even inside one another, like the hurricane and the eye, the empire and the island. Xavier Navarro Aquino takes us on a riveting, harrowing journey through the aftermath, where the natural violence of the storm is compounded by disaster capitalists; the dead haunt the living; impossible decisions are made and seemingly impossible futures are born.” — Justin Torres, national bestselling author of We The Animals

“This debut novel traces a group of survivors who fall under the spell of an authoritarian cult leader in the days following Hurricane Maria’s destruction in Puerto Rico. It is deeply imagined and deeply felt – imagistic and strange and haunting – and simmering with grief and rage.”

— Gabriela Garcia, New York Times bestselling author of Of Women and Salt

“Velorio is a novel reckoning with the tragic event of the great Puerto Rican hurricane and a vibrant examination of quiet lives in extremis. It is an assured, brilliant debut from a new, gifted writer.” — Chigozie Obioma, award-winning author of An Orchestra of Minorities

About the Author

XAVIER NAVARRO AQUINO was born and raised in Puerto Rico. His fiction has appeared in Tin House, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, and Guernica. He has been awarded scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, a MacDowell Fellowship, and an ACLS Emerging Voices Fellowship at Dartmouth College. Aquino is currently an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame where he teaches in the MFA program.