About the Book

Capirotada: A Nogales Memoir book cover




Capirotada: A Nogales Memoir
by Alberto Rios

University of New Mexico Press
1998
pp. 157
Paperback
ISBN 0826320945
$16.95

 


Synopsis

Capirotada, Mexican bread pudding, is a mysterious mixture of prunes, peanuts, white bread, raisins, milk, quesadilla cheese, butter, cinnamon and cloves, Old World sugar--"all this," writes Alberto Ríos, "and things people will not tell you."

Like its Mexican namesake, this memoir is a rich mélange, stirring together Ríos's memories of family, neighbors, friends, and secrets from his youth in the two Nogaleses--in Arizona and through the open gate into Mexico.

The vignettes in this memoir are not loud or fast. Yet like all of Ríos's writing they are singular. Here is the story about a rickety magician, his chicken, and a group of little boys, but who plays a trick on whom? The story about the flying dancers and mortality. About going to the dentist in Mexico because it is cheaper, and maybe dangerous. About a British woman who sets out on a ship for America with the faith her Mexican GI will be waiting for her in Salt Lake City. And about the grown son who looks at his father and understands how he must provide for his own boy.

This book's uncommon offering is how it stops to address the quiet, the overlooked, the every day side of growing up. Capirotada is not about prison, or famous heroes. It is instead about the middle, which is often the most interesting place to find news.

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Read reviews

“A master of the coming-of-age story, Rios is the author of several short story collections (The Iguana Killer, etc.). Fans of his fiction will recognize the origins of numerous stories in this short memoir of growing up in a small Arizona border town. The Nogales of Rios’s childhood shared a virtually open border with Nogales, Mexico: business was conducted casually between the two towns and playmates wandered back and forth. Now there is a solid steel wall separating the communities. ‘This is not the border,’ Rios writes. ‘It's something else, something underscoring the difference between danger and grace, which is not something that separates people. It's something that joins them, as they face the same border.’ The wall forms a dark subtext to this otherwise delightfully innocent memoir, which is magnified when Rios and his first grade ‘gang’ rush home to take midday baths after the sewage treatment plant contaminates the town's one dry riverbed. Later, effluents from unregulated maquiladoras (foreign-owned factories) create a stream that can bleach blue jeans on contact. Now Nogales has the highest rate of lupus in the U.S. But Rios’s memoir is not an environmental diatribe. Rather, it is an extremely personal family history filled with small anecdotes and finely drawn landscapes. As a literary autobiography, it is perhaps too true to its title (capirotada is a kind of catchall Mexican bread pudding): a collection of memories that fails to match the power of Rios’s fiction.” – Publishers Weekly

“Rios (Pig Cookies and Other Stories) is Regents Professor at Arizona State University and a native of Nogales, AZ. In this new book, he shares his experiences growing up in this small town on the Mexican border, where he learned to value the unique cultural mix of the area. Much like capirotada, a Mexican bread pudding, made with lots of different ingredients and traditionally served at Lent. Rios came of age among a mixture of peoples, ideas, and traditions in both his community and his family (his mother is from England, his father from Mexico). Finely crafted and emotionally powerful without being heavy-handed, this well-balanced narrative recalls the universal experiences of childhood and unique personal reminiscences of the author. For all collections, especially those with a regional emphasis.” – Library Journal

About the author

Alberto Alvaro Ríos is Regents Professor at Arizona State University, Tempe. Among his other books are The Curtain of Trees and The Iguana Killer, both available from UNM Press.

Learn more about the author by visiting his website.

Visit your local library to borrow a copy of Capirotada.

Or purchase it from the University of New Mexico Press.