Capirotada: A Nogales Memoir

by Alberto Alvaro Ríos

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 Rios, "and things people will not tell you." Like its Mexican namesake, this memoir is a rich melange, stirring together Rios'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 Rios'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.
Capirotada was selected as the 2009 ONEBOOKAZ by the Arizona State Library, Archives and Public Records.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction

157 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1999

About the author

In 1952, Alberto Alvaro Ríos was born on the American side of the city of Nogales, Arizona, on the Mexican border. He received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Arizona in 1974 and a MFA in Creative Writing from the same institution in 1979.

He is the author of several collections of poetry, including Dangerous Shirt (Copper Canyon Press, 2009); The Theater of Night (2007); The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body (2002), which was nominated for the National Book Award; Teodora Luna's Two Kisses(1990); The Lime Orchard Woman (1988); Five Indiscretions (1985); and Whispering to Fool the Wind (1982), which won the 1981 Walt Whitman Award, selected by Donald Justice.

Other books by Ríos include Capirotada: A Nogales Memoir (University of New Mexico Press, 1999), The Curtain of Trees: Stories (1999), Pig Cookies and Other Stories (1995), and The Iguana Killer: Twelve Stories of the Heart (1984), which won the Western States Book Award.

Ríos's poetry has been set to music in a cantata by James DeMars called "Toto's Say," and on an EMI release, "Away from Home." He was also featured in the documentary Birthwrite: Growing Up Hispanic. His work has been included in more than ninety major national and international literary anthologies, including the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry.

"Alberto Ríos is a poet of reverie and magical perception," wrote the judges of the 2002 National Book Awards, "and of the threshold between this world and the world just beyond."

He holds numerous awards, including six Pushcart Prizes in both poetry and fiction, the Arizona Governor's Arts Award and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Since 1994 he has been Regents Professor of English at Arizona State University, where he has taught since 1982. He lives in Chandler, Arizona.

Reviews

[Eugene · Rating 2 out of 5]

Author Ríos writes about growing up in ‘50s and ‘60s Nogales, Arizona and its extension across the border into Nogales Mexico. He includes earlier parts of both his parents’ lives as well as summary descriptions of life after his entrance into adulthood and fathering a son himself.
The book is short, perhaps 150 pages, so nothing is limned in detail; Ríos has authored several books of poetry, and this short tome reads much like a prose poem. His style meanders, and somehow floats in time rather than narrates, a bit confusingly for me. I would compare it to Sandra Cisneros’ The House On Mango Street, but here an evocation of a Latino “growing-up” in a southwestern rural locale as opposed to hers in a northern urban locale. If you’ve read and enjoyed that book, you may be attracted to try this one.
A bit too disjointed for me, the best part was the 15 pages (italicized) which I believe to be his mother’s paraphrased account of how a young woman who’d never been further than 2 train stops from her rural England home found the courage to travel by boat to America and by train to Salt Lake City to reunite with and marry the Mexican-American GI she’d met when he was stationed in Britain.
Worth a read.

[Jennifer Griffith · Rating 3 out of 5]

What is Capirotada? It is this year’s selection for One Book Arizona, a 147-page memoir by Alberto Alvaro Rios, telling stories of growing up in Nogales in the 1950s and 1960s—and a few other things.
What is capirotada, really, though? For those like me uninitiated in Mexican holiday cooking traditions, it is a recipe, quite similar to bread pudding, but with a large variety of add-ins. Rios ate this as a youth living on the Arizona-Mexico border at Lent, and he equates it to a folk story, where everyone has his or her own version. It’s an apt title for his book, which is simply his version of events in his life and his town and his family, with a little of everything thrown in.
The essays are short, and can be read in almost any order. I expected them to be chronological, but they aren’t. Rather, the book becomes something to be taken a little at a time, and digested slowly, to consider what wisdom Rios is trying to impart.
He tells a variety of vignettes, ranging from being a little boy and seeing a magician with a chicken in a box, to the feelings he has for his aging parents. They are rich with details: the contents of the shelves of the general store, music he loved, the appearance of the ponytail of the town hermit. It’s a feast.
I especially enjoyed the stories of his British mother, how she met and married her husband after World War II, as well as the letter to the author he included from her. It was touching and real, and made the whole book worth reading, for me.

[Vansa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ve been reading books to prepare for my upcoming visit to Arizona, and this one was recommended by almost every list I read. Nogales is a town divided by a border, and it has the same name on both sides.
Alberto Alvaro Ruiz, the poet laureate of Arizona, grew up there and this is a lyrical memoir his
experiences. The border doesn’t seem to have been heavily patrolled to begin with, till nearly the 80s, with people visiting each side quite easily. One of the most interesting bits was Ruiz’s memories of the 9th November 1963-there was a regular weekly bowling tournament for children, that involved kids for across the border as well-most had close families on either side. As always, the kids participating were dropped off at Nogales, Az. BY evening, however, news filtered in of the assassination, and suddenly, all the border crossings were shut, and heavily staffed by security, leaving a bunch of small children on the other side! And as anyone with any experience of children knows, they absolutely do not like to sleep in unfamiliar places. Ruiz describes how the confusions of trying to accommodate by then weeping children in different houses took up everyone’s attention, with that being his overarching memory of Kennedy’s assassination and not really how the event itself made him feel! Politics is indeed, always personal. There’s a moving section where he lets his English mother narrate her story-his parents fell in love when his father was stationed in England during WWII; USA deciding to offer citizenship to everyone who volunteered to fight, and his father took that opportunity. His CO in England could not stomach the idea of an inter-racial marriage and shipped his father back to the USA the day before their wedding, and Ruiz Sr. asked his fiancée to make the trip there instead. In an unbelievable act of trust and love, she did just that-made the journey all the way there once the war had ended-the longest
journey she would take in her life, when she had barely been 20 miles from her childhood home till
then. It’s quite a telling story of racial attitudes, apart from being a moving love story. The metaphor of capirotada is used to describe how he views Nogales-it’s a Mexican dessert, but influenced by the Moorish traditions of Spanish, and refined by the Aztecs, using New World ingredients, and now associated with the days leading up to Lent; much like Nogales itself, that pre-dates the formation of the US, and over the years has felt the unmistakable influence of the country it became a part of, while still being distinctly its own place.

[Anthony Ray · Rating 2 out of 5]

From a structural standpoint, this book is poorly written. There were some typos and severe issues with syntax that were very distracting while reading. Often, it felt like a stream of consciousness, or, as if this were the first draft and no further edits were made. Occasionally, his writing displayed moments of brilliance, but for the most part it felt rather dull and juvenile in its descriptions. I had high(er) hopes for this book since my family is from Nogales.

However, I did enjoy reading it, and I think anyone with ties to Nogales would find it interesting and nostalgic. Based on that fact alone, I would still recommend it with the warning that it is not what one might think it to be.

The best approach to reading this is to think of it as a transcript of a recorded oral history interview. It'll make all the difference.

[Paul Mena · Rating 5 out of 5]

This memoir is both poetic and sentimental, and as such is less of a chronological narrative than it is a meditation on the author's upbringing in Nogales. It weaves in background history of both parents, including an expansive note from his mother, who grew up in England and traveled by herself to be with her husband in a foreign land. It provides a vivid sense of the Mexico-U.S. border that I found uniquely enchanting.

[Carol · Rating 1 out of 5]

A group of disconnected short memories of the author's childhood growing up on a border town in Arizona in the 1950's and 1960's. I, personally, don't like "stream of conscience" writing.

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting book. I don’t know what possessed me to read it. The title is the name of a Mexican bread pudding. But it gives me some insight what living in a border town was like.

[Carol · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful collection of short stories of Rios' childhood. I read portions of it to my class of juniors and seniors years ago when I was still teaching, and they loved it too.

[Miz Lizzie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though the individual essays don't entirely read smoothly one to the other to create an organic whole, they are individually interesting as snapshots in growing up in Nogales, Arizona with an English mother and Mexican father. The pieces on family celebrations of holidays and special foods (such as capirotada) were the most interesting to me and would be a great jumping off point for inspiring family and personal storytelling and writing exercises.

[Karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was the One Book Arizona selection for 2009. Previous selections have been generally good. This one was pretty much stream of consciousness, growing up in Nogales, AZ in the 50s. His English mother and Mexican father were not your standard couple, but that was apparently never an issue. The border was open and was easily, and often, traversed. But, I finished the book feeling like I didn't get to know any of the people in it, not even the author.

[John Damaso · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ríos mixes together vignettes from growing up on the border as a metaphor for the namesake of the memoir, Capirotada, a traditional Mexican bread pudding that everyone loves to throw together from interesting ingredients, but doesn't enjoy eating. My students said the same of the memoir: a work comprised of interesting parts devoid of cohesiveness. As far as pursuing a metaphor like a mad-dog, Ríos nails "border."

[Shane Westfall · Rating 3 out of 5]

A quick and pleasant read, but very inconsistent. At times the author seems brilliant, using tales of his childhood to drive home political and social commentary. Other vignettes are just dull. A collection of memoirs, the author does repeat himself several times which I found a tad annoying. It almost seemed as if some of the tales were rough drafts of ideas that were later polished.

[Mary Louise Sanchez · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rich, layered vignettes of the author's Mexican-American childhood, family memories and customs in Nogales, Arizona, like the Mexican bread pudding, Capirotada,with its rich layers of traditional ingredients of bread, raisins, cheese and sweet syrup which nourished the body during Lent.

[Nicolita · Rating 4 out of 5]

filled with longing. nostalgia-addicts, do inquire.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good read for anyone who has lived on or along the border...takes place in Nogales, south of Tucson. This book was chosen for "One Book AZ".

[Jennifer]

A bit dry, not a very fun read, but I did pick up some good info.

[Melanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author tells of growing up in Nogales, AZ. Lovely vignettes and eloquent prose.

[Sabrina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poetic approach to theme of "exile in the homeland".

[Kay · Rating 1 out of 5]

I understand Alberto is a poet. He is not a writer.

[Ana Contreras · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful. Mythical. Funny. Loving reflections on family and memory. Made me hungry!

[Jennifer · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very dry, not a fun read, but I did pick up some interesting info.