The Curtain of Trees

by Alberto Alvaro Ríos

Book Overview

Re-creates a time and place forgotten these days except by grandparents and elders. The stories in this book are part folklore, part oral history, but in full measure literary as they recollect family... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0826320716
• ISBN13: 9780826320711
• Release Date: January 1999
• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Length: 146 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.6" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

A writer of consumate skills

War came to the Arizona border in the late 1920s, and Americans could sit on the hills and watch the bombing and shooting in the Mexican half of Ambos Nogales. Rios was there, a five-year-old in Sonora, one of those who huddled behind a stove when the bombing began. In those days Nogales was small and unimportant, not the massive 'maquiladora' and 'narcotrafficante' city of today. In those days it was neighbourly where "We were related to everybody, and everybody was related to us." It was a time before technology and computers and cell phones and television; the rich had 'Cafe Combate' coffee. His mother made 'Caracolillo' by carefully roasting pea beans in a pan on the stove, coating them with sugar so they wouldn't burn and would acquire a chicory flavour: "The fire and the beans and the sugar and the grinding -- it all had a loud and happy smell that could not be ignored. It was as if the coffee had hands, which it would put around our faces and try to draw us to its chest. They were strong hands and would not give up. Even after the coffee was made, the hands came up out of it as steam, and they still tried to wave us over." The "war" was the dying embers of the Revolucion of 1910, embers of which flickered weakly until the 1940s. But this isn't a book about war; instead, it's about a small boy who changed as Mexico slowly evolved from peons to professionals and the world changed from simplicity to complexity and change. Rios offers a fond remembrance of this lost world of the innocence of a young boy. His writing is artistry in words, his stories have a comfortable elegaqnce because they are so long past. Traces of that life can sometimes still be found in some small and remote villages. Today most towns and cities in Mexico, as in the U.S., have matured into violence and anonymity. Rios writes of a time of innocence a nd trust that is now only a fond distant memory. Day-to-day lives are different in various lands, but basic memories are often similar. I remember similar quiet idylls of little towns from Orillia in Canada to Ringstedt in Germany to Desemboque in Mexico. Feelings and attitudes are much the same in these quiet safe havens of the past. There is an unspoken brotherhood of small towns which Rios evokes with introspection and deft charm. This is less of a book about Mexico than the wistful recollections of a small town in a simpler era. Rios offers some sunshine sketches of a Mayberry in Mexico.