Fatherhood in the Borderlands: A Daughter's Slow Approach by Domino Renee Perez (review)
2023; University of Texas Press; Volume: 22; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/lag.2023.a915685
ISSN1548-5811
Autores Tópico(s)Latin American and Latino Studies
ResumoReviewed by: Fatherhood in the Borderlands: A Daughter's Slow Approach by Domino Renee Perez Stuart C. Aitken Domino Renee Perez Fatherhood in the Borderlands: A Daughter's Slow Approach. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2022. vii + 328 pp. Figures, notes, index. $29.95 paperback (ISBN: 978-1-477-32634-3); $29.95 e-book (ISBN: 978-1-477-32636-7). Fatherhood in the borderlands is a thought-provoking, insightful, and delightful read. Domino Renee Perez examines a cornucopia of movies and (to a lesser extent) fiction books that focus on border relations (mostly fathering) between men and young people (mostly Latinx). Interspersed with the film and literary stories are Perez's Texan tales of growing up on and with borders. What makes the book such a compelling read is the means by which she weaves scholarly and personal stories in a slow and methodical way that draws the reader into what she is doing and how she is doing it. With the advent of ChatGPT and other assorted artificial ways to quickly create texts and images, Perez offers the best and most creative form of writing—the kind that gets [End Page 211] to the emotional center, the very heart of what academic scholarship needs to do. Her work is authentic, persuasive, and compelling because she does not soft-pedal the frustrations, splendors, pleasures, stresses, pains, joys, and sheer hard work that a monograph of this kind entails. Nor does she soft-pedal how such a venture intersects with, distorts, and challenges other aspects of her life. Perez's theoretical foundations come from the work of Gloria Anzaldua, whose brief career influenced so many of us. Perez activates Anzaldua's "new tribalism" with questions about what it does for us today, as she tries to understand the ghosts that reside in borderlands and how they haunt us still (p. 173). Perez's approach is through slow scholarship, which has been around for several decades now. I have read articles and books on why we should practice slow scholarship in this time of academic privatization, mechanistic research, and neoliberal pushes to produce more, but few are as convincing as Perez, who provides with this book one of the best examples of slow practice. I love her metaphor of the Chicanx low-rider car, which she argues epitomizes the radical nature of slow practices: "low and slow as an aesthetic and an ethos" (p. 10). Slow scholarship is not just about quality over quantity, or thoughtfulness countering the need to produce. Slow scholarship presents radical opportunities to innovate, to proliferate, and to have a lasting impact. It is a way to offset our roles as academic replicants, borrowing an iconic personification from Bladerunner—which brings me to some of Perez's content. She deals with a host of somewhat obvious Latinx movies, like Gregory Nava's Mi Familia, Peter Bratt's La Mission, and Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland's Quinceañera, but she also weaves her way (in ingenuous and pertinent ways) through Ridley Scott's Bladerunner, George Lucas's Star Wars franchise, and James Mangold's Logan, among others. Perez takes pains to bring these popular science fiction movies into her narrative oeuvre because these were the Saturday picture shows that she and her father internalized as part of their relationship. Part of slow scholarship, Perez reminds us, is to raise and render important lesser-known works. As part of her project, Perez devotes a fairly long chapter to the ways fathers and sons show up in edited collections of fiction and poetry, most of which I am unfamiliar with, such as Ray Gonzalez's The Ghost of John Wayne and Other Stories and his The Heat of Arrivals poetry. By doing so, she raises more of the archetypes and ghosts that she is trying to simultaneously embrace and dispel through her writing about movies: El Rey, bandido, Diablo, macho, Aztec, Día de Muertos, and so forth. I was delighted to see that my favorite Tijuanan writer, Luis Alberto Urrea, and my favorite book of his, In Search of Snow, is dealt with in detail. The novel is a tender and funny exposition of the soft...
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