Heritage, Volume 12, Number 1, Winter 1994 Page: 22

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The Magic of Blood
Dagoberto Gilb, University of New Mexico
Press, Albuquerque.
Reviewed by John Peterson, Book Review
Editor, HERITAGE
Aficionados of border fiction have
recently enjoyed a number of talented
writers. Following in the tradition established
by Americo Paredes, Rudolfo
Anaya, Hinojosa-Smith, and Tomas
Rivera, the newest crop maintain the
deep Hispanic character and lore that
illuminated generations of writers from
Mexico-America. Most, like Sandra
Cisneros and Ben Saenz, are keenly aware
of their Hispanic roots and display them
like the corona of Our Lady of Guadalupe
in the Juan Diego vision. Others, like
Dagoberto Gilb, belong to many communities,
and draw from their diverse
experiences to find fresh sources for their
writing.
These stories evoke the
Southwest, from the noble
landscape to the gritty
social tableaux. They are
powerful and empathic
and diverse in their
experience and setting.
"The Magic of Blood" is a collection of
stories that have emerged from Gilb's
eclectic background as a construction
worker, itinerant musician, laborer, and
visitor of the Greater Southwest from El
Paso to Los Angeles. He also has a distinguished
career as a writer and has won the
James D. Phelan Award in literature, the

Dobie-Paisano Fellowship from the Texas
Institute of Letters, as well as the National
Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing
Fellowship.
The people of Gilb's story are working
class, ard the stories that he tells are crafted
with their language and their values. He
writes of the tenuousness of life as a laborer,
of the families supported, the calloused
attitude of management, and at the same
time of the pride of workmanship and of
the commitment to completing the job. In
the "Churchgoers," a superintendent
known by his initials, O.K., is portrayed as
a gruff character with no sense of sentimentality
or empathy for his crew. The workers
live from job to job and from day to day
with the threat of layoff as a fact of their
lives.
O.K. is seen by the other workers as an
authoritarian and one-dimensional machine
acting out the insensible and insensitive
role of management. His wife
and son visit the job site one day to see
what he did in his work. He snapped at
them...
"What're you doing here? Whaddya
want?"...The boy moved closer to his
mother's skirt, and she backed up a little
bit from the job site too. "We wanted to
visit," Mrs. O.K. said, disappointed, realizing
that she had made a mistake. "We
came to see your building." O.K. was a
stocky, thick man of medium height. His
arms raised a crop of long, colorless hairs,
and because of that it was hard to tell if
those stumps were muscular or plump. He
had a puffy face with meaty cheeks and a
bulbous, sunburned nose, its complexion
about as shaded as noon glare. Upset, he
squeezed in both his face and his arms into
their bones. It was all he could do to stand
still, to maintain a respectful distance
from his wife. He hadn't yet acknowledged
his son. "What are you doing down
here anyway ?" he said after a considerable
silence.
Confronted by the threat of violence
from a new laborer, a black named Smooth,
management closed ranks and presented a
faceless front. The police came to assist,
and the layoff checks were delivered despite
the threats. In an act of piety, or

perhaps an expression of desolate loneliness,
O.K. walked out to join the crew in an
after-work beer under a bridge near the job
site. The men talked awkwardly about the
incident, but none were comfortable
throughout the rapprochement.
None of us worked construction because
we were rich, but neither did any let
his body get this aching and exhausted and
dirty only for love of money. It was a need,
and what we learned, physically and mentally,
was that not just anybody could do
it, not week after week, month after month,
year in and out. Our job was our pride,
who we were around our families and
neighbors, what we spent in doctor's and
lawyer's and dentist's offices, what we
carried camping and fishing and to ball
games, what we sat back with, tired, at
the bar or in an easy chair facing the tube.
It was the sex the women liked about us,
the muscles our children admired. Employed,
it was what we were never ashamed
of.
And so, despite the moment of awkward
communion, no man sitting there under
the bridge could accept the humanity of
O.K., who sat there "friendless among these
men, his men" without forever linking him
in their thoughts with Smooth and his
crazy violence that had served notice on
management about the value of "a man's
working life."
The stories are sometimes epiphanies of
small moments in someone's life, like the
story of "Romero's Shirt." Juan Romero
lives in a modest home in El Paso; he has
worked through a lifetime of odd jobs
from picking chile to painting houses. His
own house is like an archetype from El
Paso's neighborhoods. Adobe style made
of rock, with a yard full of ocotillo and
nopal and agave, the only bright plant, a
juniper near the front porch slab. The
story is simple but full of empathic detail
of Romero's life, in the life of one day, and
of a favorite wool shirt that he hangs out
on the shrub and that is later stolen. For
Juan Romero, the loss is emblematic of his
life, and in his remorse he reflected on his
condition, looking from his front slab
across to Juarez, Mexico, hearing the
"metal rhythm" of a train approaching,

22 HERITAGE * WINTER 1994