[Review] Renaming the Earth: Personal Essays by Ray Gonzalez

Abstract

The most striking moments of the text are autobiographical, primarily the two essays of Part I. Gonzalez immerses himself in contemporary US border discourses, including topics such as bilingualism, the Minutemen vigilantes, new Homeland Security legislation on immigration, Latino/a student activism in the shadow of figures such as the Chicano Movement's Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzalez and the rampant commercialization of Mexican cuisine. Across this and the two subsequent sections, startling descriptions sprout like vibrant desert flowers: how a wasp's nest has gray convolutions resembling those of the human brain (162); how a reputed witch poured honey over a troublemaking boy and then released a dark cloud of bees (87); how sexual athlete and revolutionary Emilio Canales had 32 children by different women and kept meticulous records of these encounters to avoid any possible repetition (93).