Gordo
​Jaime Cortez

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In this linked collection that is searing, poignant, and hysterical, Jaime Cortez brilliantly juggles the theme of competing otherness as a young boy in California comes of age queer and brown. 

The first few stories are set in a migrant workers camp in rural California in the 1970s. The families are primarily immigrants or Latinx, and everybody knows one another's business. Gordo has grade school growing pains and curiosity. When one person moves out of a laborer home, he and a friend sneak in and find adult magazines, but then get in a fight over having to share them. 

Later, Gordo and his family move to a small town. In one tale, one of their neighbors is a trans man that starts off helping a Central American refugee he met at work, but then his jealousy places the young woman and love interest in a trap. Gordo and his mother help the woman escape, but Gordo learns to fear the evil eye.

In the last story, Gordo and his family take a long road trip to Mexicali for a funeral. The landscape is richly detailed as well as the characters and circumstances. They have to drive at night to not overheat the car in the desert and arrive at a smallish town where Gordo struggles to fit in. If he was not white enough or American enough in California, he is too much of those things in Mexicali.

A moving and comical series of coming of age tales you will read with a smile on your face.
Jaime Cortez is a writer and visual artist based in Watsonville, California, and the San Francisco Bay Area. His fiction, essays, and drawings have appeared in diverse publications that include "Kindergarde: Experimental Writing For Children" (edited 2013 by Dana Teen Lomax for Black Radish Press), "No Straight Lines," a 40-year compendium of LGBT comics (edited 2012 by Justin Hall for Fantagraphics Press), "Street Art San Francisco" (edited 2009 by Annice Jacoby for Abrams Press), and "Infinite Cities," an experimental atlas of San Francisco (edited 2010 by Rebecca Solnit for UC Berkeley Press). He wrote and illustrated the graphic novel "Sexile" for AIDS Project Los Angeles in 2003.
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Gordo is a publication by Grove Atlantic.
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Reviewed by
Elliott Turner​
​3/14/2022
Elliott Turner's fiction has appeared in Apogee Journal, Transect Mag, Vol. 1: Brooklyn, Azahares, Barren Magazine, & countless others. His debut novel, The Night of the Virgin, was an Int'l Latino Book Award finalist. He is a contributing editor at Latino Book Review and lives in Texas.
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