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A Passing West: Essays from the Borderlands
A unique voice in American fiction, Dagoberto Gilb is also a singular writer of personal and journalistic essays. In A Passing West he casts a penetrating gaze upon the culture and history of the Southwest, Mexican American identity, and his own family.
Gilb has a forceful message for there is a Mexican America, and its culture is the lifeblood of the Southwest United States, which was Mexican land until the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The rest of the country, Gilb declares, does not want to know or respect the long history of Mexican America. His mission is to defend and proclaim its beauty and importance.
Ranging from accounts of research in Spain’s Archivo General de Indias and the culture of farming corn in Iowa to meditations on Mexican and Mexican American writers, deconstructions of Mexican American food, and the experience of teaching students confused about their own culture and identity, these sharply observed portraits are both thought provoking and entertaining. His parents, his youth and manhood, his new disabled life, and snapshots of Mexico City and Guatemala, California, and Texas—all are unforgettable thanks to Gilb’s brilliant vision and style.
ACCLAIM
“Dagoberto Gilb is a national treasure. In these essays we ride with him on his mad journey—from high-rise construction worker to pioneering man of letters to unstoppable Latino literary force of nature.”—Héctor Tobar, author of Our Migrant A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino”
“The whole Southwest is his stage. He revisits childhood, marriage, literary snobbery, and Mexican history with rough care. Gilb’s trouble is authentic and the stuff of literary craftsmanship. No one writes like him.”—Gary Soto, author of A Simple Plan
“Un trip fantástico through the reading and the life of a celebrated Chicano devastating in its honesty, stunning in its knowledge.”—Santiago Vaquera-Vasquez, author of One Day I’ll Tell You the Things I’ve Stories
“One of the most important American writers of his generation, Dagoberto Gilb has created exquisite works of fiction that have cast the Chicano experience as the site of the universal. In this collection of his nonfiction, Gilb displays that same mastery of prose, meditating on family, work, art, love, identity, and the very stuff that makes the human condition both confounding and exalting.”—Oscar Villalon, editor for ZYZZYVA
“Dagoberto Gilb’s A Passing West is a potent and incisive addition to American letters. His essays tackle matters such as racism, city life, education, the politics and history of Latinx publishing and writing, and the relationship between work and citizenship. His writings are both thought-provoking and passionate. Excellent!”—Yxta Maya Murray, author of The Queen Jade and God Went Like That
“One of the most powerful writers in his generation.”—Larry McMurtry
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dagoberto Gilb is the author of two previous books with UNM Press, The Magic of Blood, winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award and a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the anthology Hecho en Tejas, winner of the PEN/Southwest Book Award. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in both the New Yorker and Harper’s, and his work has been featured in Best American Essays and O. Henry Prize Stories.
Gilb has a forceful message for there is a Mexican America, and its culture is the lifeblood of the Southwest United States, which was Mexican land until the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The rest of the country, Gilb declares, does not want to know or respect the long history of Mexican America. His mission is to defend and proclaim its beauty and importance.
Ranging from accounts of research in Spain’s Archivo General de Indias and the culture of farming corn in Iowa to meditations on Mexican and Mexican American writers, deconstructions of Mexican American food, and the experience of teaching students confused about their own culture and identity, these sharply observed portraits are both thought provoking and entertaining. His parents, his youth and manhood, his new disabled life, and snapshots of Mexico City and Guatemala, California, and Texas—all are unforgettable thanks to Gilb’s brilliant vision and style.
ACCLAIM
“Dagoberto Gilb is a national treasure. In these essays we ride with him on his mad journey—from high-rise construction worker to pioneering man of letters to unstoppable Latino literary force of nature.”—Héctor Tobar, author of Our Migrant A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino”
“The whole Southwest is his stage. He revisits childhood, marriage, literary snobbery, and Mexican history with rough care. Gilb’s trouble is authentic and the stuff of literary craftsmanship. No one writes like him.”—Gary Soto, author of A Simple Plan
“Un trip fantástico through the reading and the life of a celebrated Chicano devastating in its honesty, stunning in its knowledge.”—Santiago Vaquera-Vasquez, author of One Day I’ll Tell You the Things I’ve Stories
“One of the most important American writers of his generation, Dagoberto Gilb has created exquisite works of fiction that have cast the Chicano experience as the site of the universal. In this collection of his nonfiction, Gilb displays that same mastery of prose, meditating on family, work, art, love, identity, and the very stuff that makes the human condition both confounding and exalting.”—Oscar Villalon, editor for ZYZZYVA
“Dagoberto Gilb’s A Passing West is a potent and incisive addition to American letters. His essays tackle matters such as racism, city life, education, the politics and history of Latinx publishing and writing, and the relationship between work and citizenship. His writings are both thought-provoking and passionate. Excellent!”—Yxta Maya Murray, author of The Queen Jade and God Went Like That
“One of the most powerful writers in his generation.”—Larry McMurtry
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dagoberto Gilb is the author of two previous books with UNM Press, The Magic of Blood, winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award and a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the anthology Hecho en Tejas, winner of the PEN/Southwest Book Award. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in both the New Yorker and Harper’s, and his work has been featured in Best American Essays and O. Henry Prize Stories.
224 pages, Paperback
Published October 7, 2025
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About the author
Dagoberto Gilb
38 books44 followersDagoberto Gilb was born in the city of Los Angeles, his mother a Mexican who crossed the border illegally, and his father a Spanish-speaking Anglo raised in East Los Angeles. They divorced before he began kindergarten. He attended several junior colleges until he transferred to the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he studied philosophy and religion and graduated with both bachelor'
s and master's degrees. After that, he began his life as a construction worker, migrating back and forth from Los Angeles and El Paso. A father, he eventually joined the union in Los Angeles; a member of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, he became a class-A journeyman carpenter, and his employment for the next twelve years was on high-rise buildings.
s and master's degrees. After that, he began his life as a construction worker, migrating back and forth from Los Angeles and El Paso. A father, he eventually joined the union in Los Angeles; a member of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, he became a class-A journeyman carpenter, and his employment for the next twelve years was on high-rise buildings.
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May 11, 2025
What is a stuttered, Super-8-like memory was that we were standing at what must have been a highway pullover, staring over at El Capitan and the Guadalupe Mountains. Like most, I loved a blue sky that was from the feet up, from this end and corner to that. But it was better still with the howling, hard blow of the West Texas wind, bending the creosote and sage. Higher than any in Texas, the mountain peak is not all that big to anyone who’s seen the many bigger. But they’re not in the Chihuahuan Desert, and El Capitan is, a limestone tomb carved craggy like an old Mescalero’s face.
I have never read this author before and was so glad to find this book of essays via my library. Some chapters were hard reckonings of the relegation to the people who have lived on this land longer than most Europeans, and the chapter where the author traveled to Spain to research Mexican and Latin American history was powerful, something I never thought of, thinking all would be in Mexico, but now, the “explorers” brought all their knowledge back to Europe. This author is a storyteller and a compass, a carpenter who writes like a poet. Really resonating with me as my love for the West is only amplified by its different cultures and practices, and despite some learning curves in the way, we will only be stronger for it. Becoming more white is not a possibility for this country no matter how many people are deported or paltry sums are offered to women to bear children, will that be overtly racist as well, with only white women being eligible, and who checks or proves that anyways. The new Pope has African/Creole ancestry. It is melting pot tapestry, this world of ours, and this book should be required reading.
I was living in an El Paso YMCA, financially zeroed, in 1977. That’s where I was exactly. Whatever the cause, I was the closest to “home” I’d gotten. It was like I was smelling the first musky wisp of desert rain, and I needed the rain. My girlfriend (who would become my wife) had given up on me and moved back to Eagle Pass. She took a job at Crystal City High School. Cristal, in the Spanish pronunciation as it’s known by raza, was the source and beginning of the Chicano movement in Texas, beginning in the late ’60s. And there my girlfriend had found a book in its library, and she … though I still have it today, let’s say she checked it out for me. It was Estampas del valle y otras obras, and it was by the author Rolando R. Hinojosa-S*, a name so convoluted it seemed more from a Borges short story. A bilingual text, on the surface it was as it stated it was, “sketches” or vignettes of the valley, which is to say the Río Grande Valley, far closer than Argentina. It was in this book, by this writer, Rolando Hinojosa, that I found my lost where.
The Egyptian Library of Alexandria is lost forever, but right in the heart of Sevilla—which for two hundred years, as the capital of the Conquest, was the richest city in the world for not only the Indigenous gold and silver that would cargo up the Río Guadalquivir, but as the port city of all trade coming into and out of the New World—there is a library archive that has amassed all the documents of trade, law, and government from the last great political, cultural upheaval in our human history. If there were an interest in an updated, color-drawing book of a current, surviving Ancient Wonders of the World, and if, as I believe, it included a library holding our most valued ancestral documents, then it would surely feature the Archivo General de Indias.
There are around 43,000 legajos, and somewhere close to eighty million pages, three centuries of documents with details and implications small and large, historical, economic, political, social, religious, engineering, architectural, cartographical, concerning the southern United States, Mexico, Central and South America to Tierra del Fuego and east to the Philippines, and the Spanish government has set in motion a plan to digitally scan them all and has scanned approximately 14 percent of them. As my eyes stare glassy into display-case examples of early sixteenth-century escudos—royal coats of arms designed for newly anointed nobles, some even related to Indigenous royalty—I am wondering how many people it took and how much so far to get to that percent, and (this is how I am) I am visualizing these ancient pages rolling through a scanner that resembles a mechanized tortilla-maker, that last step a drop onto a dark manito that makes a neat, counted stack.
These essays are another version of my want to write prose with the constraint and discipline of poetry. To capture, to have been alert to images over ideas. That haunt and linger, slow down, alter perspective. Not to plot and advance political points but to reach the art source of the brain, not the momentary rhetorical, political blah. The method: Small scenes over catchy endings, tight sentences and graphs over lots of pages.
There are lots of LAs, and mine was really a neighborhood that was cut through for the newest freeway, meaning not just cheap, dispensable land and people, but story. The heroic fable that ran in my head was one that warped significantly from larger facts, and only incidentally overlapped with the name of the city. When the truth penetrated, it was worse than being the earth and finding out the sun wasn’t swooning around it. I was, at most, a fleck of dust on this planet that was but a fleck of dust in the huge sky. I realized that, as LA goes, story accuracy aside, mine wasn’t of much unique interest either. We’ve all heard that perennial who am I? I began with where, which came with a how, as in, what kind of mess did I get myself into? My East LA dad lived more like a cliché Mexican, or German, forty-nine years at one job—beginning at age thirteen, interrupted only once by the Marine Corps—until he got laid off in his sixties. My mom, who I grew up with, was born in Mexico but was nobody’s stereotype but for the drinking one.
Just the other day, a few years ago, in the past when my mother was young and too alive, wasn’t dead, when I was younger than him, all this invisibly alive still in what is me. My son clicking photos, hearing the stories, seeing what I saw—this seeing, a mind-altering inhalation of father and son musks, actual or psychic, time gone and now, as much me as my memory of him is still as the smallest smiling baby, the memory not real and more than real, in a haze of symbol and myth, all the bright colors not yet faded to inevitable death, memory even when it’s right there in front of you—in front of him. A son, precocious here too, who wants to know, who is taking notes to crack what is to all of us the source of this secret, the ontological paradox, we all have to live.
This is about the tortilla. This is about corn grown in Iowa. This is about the people who are in the campos of Iowa picking the vegetables and walking the cornfields. Those people are Mexican people. They are of the culture where hand-ground masa was first patted into tortillas and, because of that, it is said that the physical body of any mexicano is at least half corn. They are from the civilization that worshipped the corn plant as a god—in some regions, such as what became known as Guatemala, the God, the image of God—and they are from the soil and nation where this corn we all have learned to eat and to feed as grain for healthy livestock was first developed and harvested 5,000 years ago. They are the people who now are driven here, because even corn, and the tortilla, is going up in price since the 1990s NAFTA treaty, and subsidized corn in the United States is cheaper to import, and the demand increases its value to the corporate farmers in Mexico. Because corn has become an ethanol fuel industry, its hybrid grain is even more wanted. In Mexico, the ordinary milpas— cornfields—are shrinking in size, and those people who traditionally worked them can’t make enough to survive in their villages and so they are leaving, like animals in a drought, going to the big cities to find jobs, and they are crossing the border because that is where most jobs are. They have come even to Iowa because they will be hired and work in meat-packing plants cheaply, hard, and they work in the fields cheaply and hard. And as they work las milpas in Iowa to do as their culture has done for thousands of years, anti-immigration ideologues bash them for spoiling what they see as a field of dreams as clean and pure as Iowa butter, as nostalgic as baseball, as all-American as Kevin Costner.
How little Mexico and Mexican culture are valued in the world—and not only in this huge southwestern quadrant of the United States, but in the entire country. For instance, think of the state in the union most American, its true “back home.” One that reflects the most nostalgic image America has of its lush bounty, where all presidential candidates must go to begin the election cycle. And what is Iowa famous for? What is that crop that is the most fresh, healthy icon of American virtue and wholesomeness? Corn, yellow as the sun on a spring day. It is in the cornfields where Kevin Costner builds his field of dreams. Oh so American roots romantic! Bueno, sorry, you may be a little surprised, but it so happens that corn is the most indigenous, ancient product of Mexico—central México exactly, the first seeds there and by sacred cultivation and meticulous cross-pollination over many centuries. Where corn was God, was worshipped as a god, where working the milpas was what people did, and corn, as tortilla, was what all people were made of.
I have never read this author before and was so glad to find this book of essays via my library. Some chapters were hard reckonings of the relegation to the people who have lived on this land longer than most Europeans, and the chapter where the author traveled to Spain to research Mexican and Latin American history was powerful, something I never thought of, thinking all would be in Mexico, but now, the “explorers” brought all their knowledge back to Europe. This author is a storyteller and a compass, a carpenter who writes like a poet. Really resonating with me as my love for the West is only amplified by its different cultures and practices, and despite some learning curves in the way, we will only be stronger for it. Becoming more white is not a possibility for this country no matter how many people are deported or paltry sums are offered to women to bear children, will that be overtly racist as well, with only white women being eligible, and who checks or proves that anyways. The new Pope has African/Creole ancestry. It is melting pot tapestry, this world of ours, and this book should be required reading.
I was living in an El Paso YMCA, financially zeroed, in 1977. That’s where I was exactly. Whatever the cause, I was the closest to “home” I’d gotten. It was like I was smelling the first musky wisp of desert rain, and I needed the rain. My girlfriend (who would become my wife) had given up on me and moved back to Eagle Pass. She took a job at Crystal City High School. Cristal, in the Spanish pronunciation as it’s known by raza, was the source and beginning of the Chicano movement in Texas, beginning in the late ’60s. And there my girlfriend had found a book in its library, and she … though I still have it today, let’s say she checked it out for me. It was Estampas del valle y otras obras, and it was by the author Rolando R. Hinojosa-S*, a name so convoluted it seemed more from a Borges short story. A bilingual text, on the surface it was as it stated it was, “sketches” or vignettes of the valley, which is to say the Río Grande Valley, far closer than Argentina. It was in this book, by this writer, Rolando Hinojosa, that I found my lost where.
The Egyptian Library of Alexandria is lost forever, but right in the heart of Sevilla—which for two hundred years, as the capital of the Conquest, was the richest city in the world for not only the Indigenous gold and silver that would cargo up the Río Guadalquivir, but as the port city of all trade coming into and out of the New World—there is a library archive that has amassed all the documents of trade, law, and government from the last great political, cultural upheaval in our human history. If there were an interest in an updated, color-drawing book of a current, surviving Ancient Wonders of the World, and if, as I believe, it included a library holding our most valued ancestral documents, then it would surely feature the Archivo General de Indias.
There are around 43,000 legajos, and somewhere close to eighty million pages, three centuries of documents with details and implications small and large, historical, economic, political, social, religious, engineering, architectural, cartographical, concerning the southern United States, Mexico, Central and South America to Tierra del Fuego and east to the Philippines, and the Spanish government has set in motion a plan to digitally scan them all and has scanned approximately 14 percent of them. As my eyes stare glassy into display-case examples of early sixteenth-century escudos—royal coats of arms designed for newly anointed nobles, some even related to Indigenous royalty—I am wondering how many people it took and how much so far to get to that percent, and (this is how I am) I am visualizing these ancient pages rolling through a scanner that resembles a mechanized tortilla-maker, that last step a drop onto a dark manito that makes a neat, counted stack.
These essays are another version of my want to write prose with the constraint and discipline of poetry. To capture, to have been alert to images over ideas. That haunt and linger, slow down, alter perspective. Not to plot and advance political points but to reach the art source of the brain, not the momentary rhetorical, political blah. The method: Small scenes over catchy endings, tight sentences and graphs over lots of pages.
There are lots of LAs, and mine was really a neighborhood that was cut through for the newest freeway, meaning not just cheap, dispensable land and people, but story. The heroic fable that ran in my head was one that warped significantly from larger facts, and only incidentally overlapped with the name of the city. When the truth penetrated, it was worse than being the earth and finding out the sun wasn’t swooning around it. I was, at most, a fleck of dust on this planet that was but a fleck of dust in the huge sky. I realized that, as LA goes, story accuracy aside, mine wasn’t of much unique interest either. We’ve all heard that perennial who am I? I began with where, which came with a how, as in, what kind of mess did I get myself into? My East LA dad lived more like a cliché Mexican, or German, forty-nine years at one job—beginning at age thirteen, interrupted only once by the Marine Corps—until he got laid off in his sixties. My mom, who I grew up with, was born in Mexico but was nobody’s stereotype but for the drinking one.
Just the other day, a few years ago, in the past when my mother was young and too alive, wasn’t dead, when I was younger than him, all this invisibly alive still in what is me. My son clicking photos, hearing the stories, seeing what I saw—this seeing, a mind-altering inhalation of father and son musks, actual or psychic, time gone and now, as much me as my memory of him is still as the smallest smiling baby, the memory not real and more than real, in a haze of symbol and myth, all the bright colors not yet faded to inevitable death, memory even when it’s right there in front of you—in front of him. A son, precocious here too, who wants to know, who is taking notes to crack what is to all of us the source of this secret, the ontological paradox, we all have to live.
This is about the tortilla. This is about corn grown in Iowa. This is about the people who are in the campos of Iowa picking the vegetables and walking the cornfields. Those people are Mexican people. They are of the culture where hand-ground masa was first patted into tortillas and, because of that, it is said that the physical body of any mexicano is at least half corn. They are from the civilization that worshipped the corn plant as a god—in some regions, such as what became known as Guatemala, the God, the image of God—and they are from the soil and nation where this corn we all have learned to eat and to feed as grain for healthy livestock was first developed and harvested 5,000 years ago. They are the people who now are driven here, because even corn, and the tortilla, is going up in price since the 1990s NAFTA treaty, and subsidized corn in the United States is cheaper to import, and the demand increases its value to the corporate farmers in Mexico. Because corn has become an ethanol fuel industry, its hybrid grain is even more wanted. In Mexico, the ordinary milpas— cornfields—are shrinking in size, and those people who traditionally worked them can’t make enough to survive in their villages and so they are leaving, like animals in a drought, going to the big cities to find jobs, and they are crossing the border because that is where most jobs are. They have come even to Iowa because they will be hired and work in meat-packing plants cheaply, hard, and they work in the fields cheaply and hard. And as they work las milpas in Iowa to do as their culture has done for thousands of years, anti-immigration ideologues bash them for spoiling what they see as a field of dreams as clean and pure as Iowa butter, as nostalgic as baseball, as all-American as Kevin Costner.
How little Mexico and Mexican culture are valued in the world—and not only in this huge southwestern quadrant of the United States, but in the entire country. For instance, think of the state in the union most American, its true “back home.” One that reflects the most nostalgic image America has of its lush bounty, where all presidential candidates must go to begin the election cycle. And what is Iowa famous for? What is that crop that is the most fresh, healthy icon of American virtue and wholesomeness? Corn, yellow as the sun on a spring day. It is in the cornfields where Kevin Costner builds his field of dreams. Oh so American roots romantic! Bueno, sorry, you may be a little surprised, but it so happens that corn is the most indigenous, ancient product of Mexico—central México exactly, the first seeds there and by sacred cultivation and meticulous cross-pollination over many centuries. Where corn was God, was worshipped as a god, where working the milpas was what people did, and corn, as tortilla, was what all people were made of.
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