VIDAS

A memoir chronicles a young man’s travels in Mexico and Spain.

In this book, Stanton recounts his experiences with the Spanish language and Spanish-speaking countries. The early chapters are set in his 1950s California childhood, where he learned both idiomatic Spanish and a sense of masculinity through his interactions with undocumented Mexican immigrants. When the author reached his teen years, he ventured into the seediness of Tijuana, Mexico, visiting local sex workers and conversing with them, losing his virginity in the process. Later, he spent time living in other parts of Mexico. After college, he made his first visit to Spain, where he stayed for a while, returning in later years. The book delves into the cultural and political aspects of his travels—for instance, Stanton takes note of the repression of Franco’s government during the author’s early years in Spain and contrasts it with the socio-economic changes he found on his post-divorce visit more than a decade later. The work also examines the lessons in community and identity, particularly what it means to be a man, that Stanton absorbed through his cultural exchanges. The author is a lyrical writer (“More than immigrants they were like swallows migrating to California from their winter roost in Jalisco”), adopting a tone that suits the work’s nostalgic mood. Descriptions of his participation in iconic events, such as the running of the bulls or his first bullfight, are elegant and stand up to the inevitable comparisons to Steinbeck and Hemingway, who makes his own appearances throughout the text. Stanton employs the second person in his memoir, an unusual stylistic choice (“Your room opened onto the light-filled patio”), though there are awkward detours into other point-of-view language that can be slightly jarring (“As we watched those corridas, your friend taught you most of what you know about the bulls and the men who meet them”). The female characters, while plentiful and active in the narrative, do tend to feel secondary to the volume’s very male perspective. But as a story focused on the lives and experiences of men, the book achieves its goal and provides an enjoyable reading experience.

An engaging coming-of-age account that explores manhood across cultural boundaries.