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4.0 out of 5 stars
Review Information, December 13, 2007
When I was looking for reviews of this book, I had a hard time finding them. So here are some of what people had to say about this book:
"The Storyteller with Nike Airs and other Barrio Stories (1994) is Kleya Forté-Escamilla's 1994 collection of short stories. These works of fiction explore the lives of women living on the Mexican-American border and find their inspiration within the life of their author. Forté-Escamilla artfully combines English and Spanish narration as she colorfully constructs her barrio scenes. Her characters living in proximity to the Rio Grande face poverty, racism, sexual abuse and broken families. The author herself describes the stories within the collection as the voices that she hears in her waking dreams; she invites the reader to explore these dreams along with her, which are richly narrated and woven with native mysticism.
In "The Pan Birote," la Abuelita is a woman of pride and strength in the face of poverty. Leaving Sunday mass with two loaves of bread for her and her hungry grandchildren, the Abuelita is too proud to allow her family to eat the long-awaited bread in the streets. Her young grandsons, los dos jalapenos, do not yet have the same restraint and pride. They cannot quiet their hungry stomachs, and in the end, the grandmother selflessly sacrifices her share of the pan birote. She can neither bring herself to eat in the street nor tell the boys that they must wait any longer.
Trudi, the main character of "Come Rain of Come Shine," is another example of the strong, self-sacrificing women of The Storyteller with Nike Airs and other Barrio Stories. Trudi is forced to abandon her dreams of escaping the barrio life and taking college classes due to her socio-economic standing. Even worse, she finds herself forced to have sex with a doctor on a weekly basis in order to earn money for her family and provide her sick siblings with the medications that they need to survive.
The women of these stories face incredible challenges, but are by no means powerless victims of their circumstances. They find strength within themselves and each other to conquer over poverty and misogyny. Often, the women of Forté-Escamilla's border fiction find this strength in the arms of another woman. In the story "Black Orchid," Forté-Escamilla explores the coming of age of a young lesbian in a machismo society.
The following passage, from the short story "Old Lady Gin and the Magic Piano," embodies the rhythmic style of the author as she switches narration from English to español, enriching the experience for the reader:
" The Storyteller with Nike Airs and other Barrio Stories (1994) is Kleya Forté-Escamilla's 1994 collection of short stories. These works of fiction explore the lives of women living on the Mexican-American border and find their inspiration within the life of their author. Forté-Escamilla artfully combines English and Spanish narration as she colorfully constructs her barrio scenes. Her characters living in proximity to the Rio Grande face poverty, racism, sexual abuse and broken families. The author herself describes the stories within the collection as the voices that she hears in her waking dreams; she invites the reader to explore these dreams along with her, which are richly narrated and woven with native mysticism.
In "The Pan Birote," la Abuelita is a woman of pride and strength in the face of poverty. Leaving Sunday mass with two loaves of bread for her and her hungry grandchildren, the Abuelita is too proud to allow her family to eat the long-awaited bread in the streets. Her young grandsons, los dos jalapenos, do not yet have the same restraint and pride. They cannot quiet their hungry stomachs, and in the end, the grandmother selflessly sacrifices her share of the pan birote. She can neither bring herself to eat in the street nor tell the boys that they must wait any longer.
Trudi, the main character of "Come Rain of Come Shine," is another example of the strong, self-sacrificing women of The Storyteller with Nike Airs and other Barrio Stories. Trudi is forced to abandon her dreams of escaping the barrio life and taking college classes due to her socio-economic standing. Even worse, she finds herself forced to have sex with a doctor on a weekly basis in order to earn money for her family and provide her sick siblings with the medications that they need to survive.
The women of these stories face incredible challenges, but are by no means powerless victims of their circumstances. They find strength within themselves and each other to conquer over poverty and misogyny. Often, the women of Forté-Escamilla's border fiction find this strength in the arms of another woman. In the story "Black Orchid," Forté-Escamilla explores the coming of age of a young lesbian in a machismo society.
The following passage, from the short story "Old Lady Gin and the Magic Piano," embodies the rhythmic style of the author as she switches narration from English to español, enriching the experience for the reader:
By the time Lea walked back from la Veinte-Dos to her own Barrio, she had almost forgotten about the Campfire Girls. But she felt her heart hurting and she felt guilty about eating the maraschino cherries knowing she couldn't pay her dues. Those feeling extended behind her like a long snake trailing after her corazon and taking small bites out of it. When Lea got to Gin's store, around the block from her house, her corazon was the size of a frijol, and she was feeling pretty empty." - VG: Voices from the Gaps Women Artists and Writers of Color
"There's no story that the Storyteller can't bring you home from. But in the barrio, her hot pink fluorescent Nike Airs are all that she has to barter for your soul. While the Storyteller leaps tall Teflon cactus, stops powerful locomotives with a story thread and burns up the devil incarnate, the people of the barrio stories quietly and courageously triumph over poverty and despair. Kleya Forté-Escamilla gives us worlds of real and magic possibility." - Aunt Lute Books (publisher)
"In The Storyteller with Nike Airs and other Barrio Stories, Forte-Escamilla returns to where her strength lies: writing about small towns brimming with realistic depictions of Latinas and Chicanas, abuelitas y tias, hermanitas y tortilleras. She refers to the stories in the acknowledgments as her 'memories, the voices I hear in my waking dreams. Voices that are my own voice, but are not my own. From first to last, thirteen echoes of those voices showcase her imaginative versatility, and her remarkable talent for creating indelible word portraits." --Teri de la Pena, Lambda Book Report
"The triumph of spirit over despair is a theme throughout, and in each story Forté-Escamilla has created a wonderful sense of place, whether the setting is desert or city." --The Bay Guardian
"The thirteen short pieces in Kleya Forté-Escamilla's collection include tales of lust and passion like "2 Rock Blues" and the enticingly named "The Painter and the Vampire." Another story, "Adonde Vive Dios?" ("Where Does God Live?" ... and where would I be without babelfish.altavista.com?) demonstrates very firmly that God helps those who help themselves. My favourites I think, are stories like "El Velatorio de Chapa Diaz" and "The Storyteller with Nike Airs" that ignore our conventional boundaries between the spiritual and the material worlds. In these, one person might have a petulant exchange with the angel who has dropped by for a surprise visit or a teenager might slide into an old woman's memory to gather some strands of her life's story together to enable her to continue living in this world for a while longer.
I've not mentioned the tales that tell of pain that no one should ever have to live with, and how people just do. Nor the ones in which an unexpected joy is brought in to transform a child's life. The collection is as varied and as full of vitality as is life itself and although many are the same stories that could be spun anywhere in the world, these are enriched with the unique flavours of the Hispanic culture in the United States." - Moira Richards
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