The Guardians: A Novel [Paperback]

Ana Castillo (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 9, 2008

From American Book Award-winning author Ana Castillo comes a suspenseful, moving novel about a sensuous, smart, and fiercely independent woman. Eking out a living as a teacher’s aide in a small New Mexican border town, Tía Regina is also raising her teenage nephew, Gabo, a hardworking boy who has entered the country illegally and aspires to the priesthood. When Gabo’s father, Rafa, disappears while crossing over from Mexico, Regina fears the worst.

After several days of waiting and with an ominous phone call from a woman who may be connected to a smuggling ring, Regina and Gabo resolve to find Rafa. Help arrives in the form of Miguel, an amorous, recently divorced history teacher; Miguel’s gregarious abuelo Milton; a couple of Gabo’s gangbanger classmates; and a priest of wayward faith. Though their journey is rife with challenges and danger, it will serve as a remarkable testament to family bonds, cultural pride, and the human experience

Praise for The Guardians

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE

“An always skilled storyteller, [Castillo] grounds her writing in . . . humor, love, suspense and heartache–that draw the reader in.”
–Chicago Sunday Sun-Times

“A rollicking read, with jokes and suspense and joy rides and hearts breaking . . . This smart, passionate novel deserves a wide audience.”
–Los Angeles Times

“What drives the novel is its chorus of characters, all, in their own way, witnesses and guardian angels. In the end, Castillo’s unmistakable voice–earthy, impassioned, weaving a ‘hybrid vocabulary for a hybrid people’–is the book’s greatest revelation.”
–Time Out New York

“A wonderful novel . . . Castillo’s most important accomplishment in The Guardians is to give a unique literary voice to questions about what makes up a ‘family.’ ”
–El Paso Times

“A moving book that is both intimate and epic in its narrative.”
–Oscar Hijuelos, author of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The acclaimed author of Peel My Love Like an Onion tracks the perilous lives of Mexicans who illegally cross to the U.S. for work. Fifty-something Regina, a poorly paid aide in a public school on the U.S. side, is raising Gabo, the son of her brother, Rafa. Seven years have passed since Gabo's mother, Ximena, was murdered by coyotes, or paid traffickers, during a crossing, her body mutilated for salable organs. As the novel opens, Rafa, who has continued to travel back and forth for work, is due to arrive, but vanishes. With Miguel Betancourt, a divorced teacher at Regina's school in his mid-30s, Regina tries to confront the coyotes who were supposed to cross Rafa. In alternating first-person chapters, Castillo writes convincingly in the voices of the canny, struggling Regina, who remains a virgin after a being widowed in an unconsummated marriage; the desirous Miguel; the passionately religious Gabo; and El Abuelo Milton, Miguel's elderly grandfather. All are sucked into a vortex of horror as the search for Rafa consumes them. Castillo takes readers forcefully into the lives of the neglected and abused, but missing is a full emotional connection to the protagonists, who remain strangely absent even as their fates are sealed. (Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* "I don't think they could come up with a horror movie worse than the situation we got going on en la frontera," muses Milton, a man who has seen it all and now, in old age, is nearly blind. Milton is one of four transfixing voices telling the grim story of life along the border between the U.S and Mexico. Castillo writes fiction and poetry of earthy sensuality, wry social commentary, and lyrical spiritualism that confront the cruel injustices accorded women and Mexicans in America, legal and otherwise. In this tightly coiled and powerful tale, Regina, a virgin-widow in her fifties living in rural New Mexico, cares for her unusually disciplined teenage nephew, Gabo, who believes he's destined for the priesthood. Gabo's father often crosses the border to visit, but this time something has gone wrong, and given the gruesome fate of Gabo's mother, there is cause for alarm. As Gabo intensifies his prayers and penance, Regina, a teacher's aide unaware of her allure, asks Miguel, a chivalrous activist history teacher, for help, and he, in turn, enlists his covertly resourceful grandfather, Milton. At once shatteringly realistic and dramatically mystical, Castillo's incandescent novel of suffering and love traces life's movement toward the light even in the bleakest of places. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks; Reprint edition (September 9, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0812975715
• ISBN-13: 978-0812975710
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.6 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #70,360 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #24 in Books > Literature & Fiction > United States > Hispanic

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Very difficult reading, August 25, 2009

By 

Betty-Anne Olton "sangreal" - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Guardians: A Novel (Paperback)

Reading Ana Castillo's The Guardians turned out to be a difficult experience. She weaves four different Mexican-American voices around each other and attempts to bring cohesion to her story.

The four - Regina, a woman as determined to hold on to her past as she is to see her nephew have a future; Gabo, a sixteen year old boy fighting to cope with a lifetime of loss believing his only choices are the church or the gangs; Miguel, a disillusioned schoolteacher with a somewhat atypical divorce situation and Miguel's grandfather Milton, mostly deaf and half-blind, caught up in the memories of a revolutionary past - are united by the disappearance of Regina's brother (and Gabo's father) Rafa, who has made the crossing between Mexico and the United States several times, but failed to return to the United States this last time.

The main difficulty with this book was the very distracting language issue. Ana Castillo allows all her characters to speak in a hybrid of English and Spanish, which may make sense to persons with a background in Spanish, but kept breaking me out of the flow of the story to the point where I began skipping over words by the time I got to the middle of the book. I can appreciate the use of the hybrid language as a literary device, but just don't think the author achieved her intention here.

Additionally, while her characters are quite distinct, their voices definitely are not. At times it was difficult to distinguish who was speaking when moving from one perspective to another. Sometimes I found myself in the middle of a chapter before I realized the character had changed.

On the whole The Guardians was a moving and beautiful story that at times would leap out of the language issue with a startling clarity, but which mostly got lost. This was the first of Ana Castillo's books that I have read, and despite the difficulties I had with it, I would probably try another of her books to see if I could find more of her storytelling ability.

4.0 out of 5 stars A Vivid Look into Life in a Border Town, November 26, 2011

By 

Ryan Lowery (Colorado) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Guardians: A Novel (Paperback)

Ana Castillo's "The Guardians" is a powerful story told through the eyes of four likable and convincingly honest protagonists: Regina, Gabo, Miguel, and Milton. The book opens with Regina, a widowed teacher's aide struggling to get by, living in a small border town in New Mexico. A strong, independent woman, Regina is also raising her teenage nephew, Gabo. Gabo, who is in the US illegally, is an honest, hardworking boy, who lives his life solely for the Church. While his Tía Regina fears that he is being brainwashed by his "spiritual advisor," she also knows things could be worse, since gangs and drug dealers are ubiquitous in the area.

While crossing the border illegally several years ago, Gabo's mother was murdered by "coyotes," or people traffickers, who were paid to bring her to the US. Her body was found mutilated, with its organs removed for sale on the black market. Now that Gabo's father, Rafa, has disappeared while crossing over from Mexico, Regina and Gabo begin a search for clues as to what happened to him, while fearing the worst.

Seeking advice, Regina approaches Miguel Betancourt, a recently divorced teacher at the school where Regina works. He tracks down the address of a house in El Paso that the coyotes are using, and Regina, Gabo, Miguel, and his grandfather Milton are soon dragged into an exciting and dangerous search for clues leading to Rafa.

Castillo brilliantly shows readers that the political, highly charged issue of immigration is not as black and white as the evening news often portrays it to be. She poetically illustrates to her readers the less-seen gray area of regular people searching for a better life, while not shying away from the realities and horrors of the drug and people trafficking gangs who control the borderlands.

11 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars i expected to like this novel - the cover blurbs are great and the themes are urgent, but . . ., December 26, 2007

By 

NativeRoses (Atlanta, GA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Guardians: A Novel (Hardcover)

i expected to like this novel. The cover blurbs are great and the themes are urgent. Unfortunately, the novel itself veers between long stretches of dreadful plotlessness, highly improbable events that (finally) drive the plot forward, and seemingly endless pages filled with characters' musings to themselves.

It's not as if Ana Castillo's topics aren't engaging. She's telling a story about a family living on and fractured by the Mexican-American border. The characters include a man who vanished crossing the border with coyotes to rejoin his sister and son in the U.S. Years before, coyotes separated him from his wife, harvested her organs, and left her lying dead in the desert. The man's surviving son dreams of becoming a priest and finding his father as he navigates a gang-infested school. His guardian aunt, a teacher's aide, dreams of starting a business and relaxes by working in her garden. The aunt has body issues and is still a virgin since she did not consummate her marriage the day before her husband was sent overseas and killed in the military.

Castillo's didacticism is pronounced and inescapable. Characters constantly provide the details of their pasts and their reactions to current events in long monologues. Two of the main characters are schoolteachers and one of the teachers mourns how little the young people know about their own past. And so, the readers receive Castillo's history lessons and opinions about Mexican-American politics throughout the book.

The author's politics are equally unavoidable. Characters muse that we are brothers and sisters on both sides of the border and there should be no restrictions on people traveling north for economic reasons. Castillo's characters never consider the effect that the influx of low-wage, low-skill workers has on the job market and the wages and opportunities of Americans who are also trying to make a living working minimum wage jobs. She bolsters her opinions by having God himself provide a miraculous vision to two of her characters. Heavy-handed to say the least.

All in all, Castillo submits her readers to a tendentious session of proselytizing that often feels like a diatribe. One wishes the author was better able to make the truly pressing border issues come alive for her readers.