The Brothers Durán of Mexican South Chicago
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"Two sons of a South Chicago Mexican steel worker family, one leaving home to become a professor, the other remaining and emerging as a key player in his community. This is the story Hugo Martínez-Serros tells in his new novel. "Now, Enrico Durán ill with cancer and facing his final days, his brother Martín returns from years away to join Enrico, to commune with him and explore their ethnic and family ties, as well as the bifurcated trajectory of their lives, in a telling narrative about the effects of South Chicago's steel mill area environment on the brothers, their family and the Mexican...
"Two sons of a South Chicago Mexican steel worker family, one leaving home to become a professor, the other remaining and emerging as a key player in his community. This is the story Hugo Martínez-Serros tells in his new novel. "Now, Enrico Durán ill with cancer and facing his final days, his brother Martín returns from years away to join Enrico, to commune with him and explore their ethnic and family ties, as well as the bifurcated trajectory of their lives, in a telling narrative about the effects of South Chicago's steel mill area environment on the brothers, their family and the Mexican immigrant milieu out of which they grew. "In 1987, Arte Público Press published Martínez-Serros's first book, The Last Laugh and Other Stories, with fictionalized accounts of South Chicago Mexican family in the 1930s and 40s. Including allusions to incidents and situations the author wrote about in his story collection, this new book evokes, deepens and sometimes counters details and perspectives found in his earlier book. While centering his narrative on the conversations of the two brothers, the book achieves an added dimension, as Enrico drifts into coma, and Martínez Serros bravely and wisely risks narrative unity by having the brothers' sister tell her version of the family story, thus bringing in matters which would have otherwise been lost in a more one-sided male-centered treatment. In so doing, the author achieves the richest fictional account we have of South Chicago Mexicans and indeed Midwest Mexican life from the Depression to recent years. "Born in 1930 in the shadow of South Chicago steel mills, and son of a steel-worker father from Mexico, Hugo Martínez Serros attended neighborhood schools and went on to earn his B.A. at the U. of Chicago and his Ph.D. at Northwestern U. He is Professor Emeritus of Spanish from Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin and now lives in Madison. His recent books include a new edition of his Last Laugh stories entitled Steeling Chicago, and Enamoured Dust, a novel taking place in Zacatecas during the Mexican Revolution. Approaching his mid-90s, Martínez-Serros now presents his late-life meditation on ethnic resistance and accommodation-on ways to rise out of the industrial ashes to find meaning in life."
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