Product Description

In this beautifully wrought memoir, award-winning writer John Philip Santos weaves together dream fragments, family remembrances, and Chicano mythology, reaching back into time and place to blend the story of one Mexican family with the soul of an entire people. The story unfolds through a pageant of unforgettable family figures: from Madrina--touched with epilepsy and prophecy ever since, as a girl, she saw a dying soul leave its body--to Teofilo, who was kidnapped as an infant and raised by the Kikapu Indians of Northern Mexico. At the heart of the book is Santos' search for the meaning of his grandfather's suicide in San Antonio, Texas, in 1939. Part treasury of the elders, part elegy, part personal odyssey, this is an immigration tale and a haunting family story that offers a rich, magical view of Mexican-American culture.

"With its multi-generational cast, many legends and ghostly visitations, Santos' book is evocative of Gabriel Grcia Mrquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude."--San Antonio Express-News (front page)

"This is a splendid memoir filled with universal themes of strong family bonds and appreciation for remembering the past." --San Diego Tribune

"Like Kathleen Norris's memoir of life on the Dakota plains, [this] is a spiritual geography, a reflection on time and the often unbearable tension between the spiritual and material."--The Boston Globe

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #704380 in Books
• Published on: 2000-08
• Released on: 2000-08-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Amazon.com Review
Mexican American journalist John Phillip Santos's lyrical and loving memoir explores his family's history in magnificent prose touched with the singing cadences of his Spanish-language heritage yet vibrant with the energy of American English. It's a combination utterly suited to his native San Antonio, where las viejitas--the little old ladies of the Garcia and Santos families--ruled over their children and grandchildren with the toughness and grandeur of the Mexico they left during the revolution of 1914. "Poised between those ancient Indio origins from the south ... and our Mestizo future in the north," these new Texans made Mexico live for their descendants in the magical stories and folkloric practices of an older culture. Yet there was also a sense of secrets kept and cherished possessions left behind, of people who had traveled far and traveled light. The "wind of story" was also "a wind of forgetting," and as Santos probes his heritage, he comes to understand that "it is okay to move on and forget." Nonetheless, this is a book that restores to memory the drama not just of a single family but of an entire people whose past is more closely entwined with that of the United States than some Americans care to remember. Santos depicts them with care and dignity. --Wendy Smith

From Publishers Weekly
"Mexico was always an empire of forgetting," writes Santos in his elegantly crafted chronicle of one of the thousands of Mexican families who fled to El Norte during the Mexican Revolution. An award-winning documentary television producer for CBS and the first Mexican-American Rhodes Scholar (1979), Santos struggles with the destiny of "every Mexican" to either embrace or lose entirely the "hidden light left behind in the past with los Abuelos" (one's grandparents). In a story told in part by ghosts, Santos takes the reader through the Inframundo, the timeless underworld of the ancient peoples of Mexico, to find out how he came to be the scion of a now-childless family. His tale is inhabited by eclectic charactersAa clairvoyant albino aunt; a great-grandfather stolen by the Kickapu Indians; an aunt who learned English from the young Lyndon Baines Johnson in exchange for cabbages and potatoes. Then there was Santos's grandfather, Juan Jos?, whose unresolved death by drowning in 1939 haunts the book. Combining traditional memoir, ancient Mexican history and beliefs, personal sacramental journeys and ghostly interviews, Santos gallops across the desert mountains of Coahuila through a flood of migrating Monarch butterflies, recalls long-ago predawn breakfast rituals in a Mexican village and flies with the Aztec "guardians of time"Athe Volador dancers at the 1968 HemisFair in San Antonio. His book is one of the most insightful investigations into Mexican-American border culture available. Agent, Janis Valelly, Flaming Star Literary Enterprises; 10-city author tour. (Sept.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
As remembering is to Jews, forgetting is to Mexicans. In a remarkable, bittersweet, and often tragic memoir, Santos, a journalist, television writer and producer, and the first Mexican American Rhodes scholar, attempts to reverse this cultural generalization by reflecting on the early years he spent in San Antonio and Mexico, traveling the paths his family followed between two cultures. Always at the center of tales told by his aunts and uncles is the suicide of his paternal grandfather in 1939. In seeking to unravel the tragedy, Santos carries us through years of cultural mixing in the city that was "an umbilical tether to a past that otherwise seemed to be disintegrating, memory by memory." Much of his story is of poverty, yet rich portrayals of Mex-Tex life also provide a perspective too often forgotten by sociologists, historians, and writers who dwell on acculturation. This is an important book, both as memoir and because it helps us grasp the history of a people who are an integral part of the national identity. Highly recommended for academic and larger public libraries.
-ABoyd Childress, Auburn Univ. Lib., AL
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Beautifully written account of the Chicano experience.
Santos eloquently and humbly unfolds his story, his family's story, our story. Like the millions of Mexican-American families who repeatedly cross the border in order to sustain their lives and history, Santos crosses back and forth with tender testimonials, giving life to the varied and vigorous communities on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. It is a splendid memoir filled with universal themes of strong family bonds and appreciation for remembering the past. The author is subtle but powerful in his writing.

I won't be a homemaker until I finish. I can't put down.
As a Environmental Professional whose hobby is Homemaking, this book is ruining my week. Until I finish reading it, I am not joining the working world. Why is it that someone in another city and family network can stir one's own similar memories. Is this what we mean by culture, our history of the mexican american peoples of the U.S? If my job, house and family can afford it, I will read again. This time I plan to mark up the pages for the vibrant vocabulary not yet part of mine. Not since I was a philosophy major have I read a book which contained such rich prose.

An extraordinary book written by a true poet
An amazingly eloquent book. The book reads like poetry, and has a language rarely seen in today's writing. Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation is truly one of the most beautifully written books of 1999. It is not your typical book written for a limited reader. The prose are prolific and wrought with amazing imagery. It is so refreshing to read a book written by someone with such a gift for language. Places Left Unfinished paints a very interesting and accurate story of a culture in transition, through the story of a family in touch with its past and exploring its future. This is truly a book lover's book!