Against Tokenism Part 2; Manuel Muñoz won’t be your Carmen Miranda (no matter what The Times says)

If restraint in Latino queer writing is a fine art, Manuel Muñoz is its preeminent new craftsman. It’s what he doesn’t show you that’s often most heartbreaking in the lives of the men and women who dwell within the 10 stories of his second collection. Shelved between Walter Mosley and Alice Munro, The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue reads like a novel with lives intersecting on the various streets of small-town California: Gold Street, Olive Avenue, and Avocado Lake. He gives his characters unapologetically Latin names: Joaquín, Roberto, Perla, Guadalupe, Sebastián, Concepción, Ignacio, and Claudio. And they’re not meant to be mispronounced (the way you don’t see or hear words like entrepreneur or cappuccino italicized and mispronounced). His characters are as brave as he is relentless. In “Señor X” we follow a young man who’s recently moved back to the valley. Motorcycles collide against unforgiving summer roads in “Lindo y Querido.” And beer cans clink as sincerely as glass in “Bring Brang Brung.”

Since Munoz has nothing to prove, he lets you figure out what the Spanish words mean in context—don’t expect a glossary or italics. He doesn’t pretend to be a cruise director en route to the old New World. He grants you free access into these precarious lives with no filters, no gate-keeping. If the Latino-gay literati had a movement, Munoz would be the leader of the pack. Still he rejects the idea of “a pack.” On his subject he’s intrepid, but he’s cautious. He’s conflicted with the narrow scope that gay literature provides, and he won’t be a token. He once wrote me, “It requires a great deal of courage to be a writer who demands these barriers be broken down.” The New York Times Book Review has said about Munoz that his stories are “too rich to be classified under the limiting rubrics of ‘gay’ or ‘Chicano’ fiction….” That he transcends category into universality. But I’d argue that it is in fact his specificity—the limiting borders of Gold Street and the families that drive their pick-up to and from the Fresno suburbs–that yields the kind of universality that distinguishes Munoz as not only a good gay writer, or a good Latino writer, but a good writer. Period.

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