Mariguano: A Novel

by Juan Ochoa

Set on the Texas/Mexico border during the early years of Reagan’s “War on Drugs,” Mariguano tells the story of contrabandisto Don Julio Cortina’s ill-fated attempt to secure the Plaza at a national level by fixing the 1988 Mexican Presidential elections.

The story is told through the eyes of Cortina’s son, El Johnny, who bears witness to his father’s cocaine-fueled transformation from devoted head of family to self-destructive head of a criminal organization that is rife with betrayal and deceit. 

Anyone who wants to understand the tragedy of modern-day Mexico and America’s complicity in the Mexican drug wars will want to read Mariguano, a novel that recalls classic crime narratives such as Nicholas Pileggi’s Wiseguys or William S. Burroughs’s Junky but also reads like the work of the best Mexican and Latin American novelists such as Carlos Fuentes and Gabriel García Márquez.

216 pages, Paperback

First published August 15, 2013

Reviews

[Gabriel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting coming to age like... not really glorifying this subculture but telling a story more than anything.

[Joshua Chapa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Were its insight merely historical and political, Mariguano would warrant reading and placement on the shelf among similar works of art and literature that focus on the various modern criminal subcultures. The book is written from Don Julio's son El Johnny's point of view and we are not privy to any of the permutations or vicissitudes of the Mexican drug trade that the narrator does not witness firsthand. This is effective in believably establishing the romanticized mysteriousness that often surrounds criminal paterfamilias such as Don Julio. The drug boss' ascent is coupled with insight into the criminal underworld of the Mexican and Texas border.  His fall is Shakespearean as any.

(Longer review here:
http://joshuachapa.blogspot.com/2014/...
)