Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Bang
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://danielpena.me/
CITY: Houston
STATE: TX
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
dip22@cornell.edu
RESEARCHER NOTES:
| LC control no.: | n 2017044776 |
|---|---|
| LCCN Permalink: | https://lccn.loc.gov/n2017044776 |
| HEADING: | Peña, Daniel, 1988- |
| 000 | 00581cz a2200145n 450 |
| 001 | 10515469 |
| 005 | 20170728080201.0 |
| 008 | 170727n| azannaabn |a aaa |
| 010 | __ |a n 2017044776 |
| 040 | __ |a DLC |b eng |e rda |c DLC |
| 046 | __ |f 1988-02-09 |2 edtf |
| 100 | 1_ |a Peña, Daniel, |d 1988- |
| 400 | 1_ |a Peña, Daniel Inouye, |d 1988- |
| 670 | __ |a Bang, 2017: |b CIP t.p. (Daniel Peña) |
| 670 | __ |a e-mail 2017-07-27 fr.M.Tristan, Aarte Publico Press: |b (Daniel Inouye Peña; His date of birth is 2-9-1988; Peña has dual American/Mexican citizenship (American by birth, Mexican through his mom)) |
PERSONAL
Born February 9, 1988, in the United States.
EDUCATION:Cornell University, graduated.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and educator. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico (UNAM), Mexico City, journalist and book reviewer; University of Houston, Downtown, TX, assistant professor.
AWARDS:Fulbright-Garcia Robles Scholarship.
WRITINGS
Contributor of articles and stories to publications and websites, including Huizache, Callaloo, Kenyon Review Online, Rumpus, Ploughshares, and the London Guardian.
SIDELIGHTS
Daniel Peña is a writer and educator. He has served as an assistant professor at the University of Houston, Downtown.
In 2018, Peña released his first book, Bang. It finds brothers Rafa and Uli dealing with drug violence in Mexico after a plane crash leaves them stranded there. Their mother, Araceli, leaves the U.S. to help them.
In an interview with Rigoberto González, contributor to the NBC News website, Peña stated: “In the beginning, I only wanted to write a novel about dignity. If you dig enough, dignity is at the center of most geopolitical issues: transmigration, the drug wars, black markets, the rise of populism in North America, but arguably separatist movements in Europe too and various brands of extremism throughout the world. When systems fail people, they create their own systems. And I think that’s a major facet of the drug war in Mexico that hasn’t been articulated yet—the human element of it, the basic human need for dignity at all costs.” Peña added: “Writing from that intersection of dignity between immigration and the drug war, I found that the two are actually more symbiotic than not—they feed off each other. And that’s how I got to the current iteration of the novel, which is a long meditation on what happens to the people we shut out (or kick out) of America and the way those people are absorbed into the drug war in Mexico. In a microcosm, Bang is a novel about how American immigration policy directly feeds the black market machines we’re supposedly invested in ending.”
Bang received favorable assessments from critics. A writer in Kirkus Reviews described the book as “a piercing tale of lives broken by border violence.” “This is a notable and compassionate novel,” asserted a reviewer on the online version of Publishers Weekly. Juan R. Palomo, contributor to the Texas Observer Online, compared the novel to a bantamweight boxer, stating: “Lean and compact, it is packed with energy, ready to land blow after punch after jab on any reader who dares to underestimate it.” Mariah Hopkins, critic on the Hunger Mountain website, suggested: “Bang is an honest and sympathetic novel concerning a family that has been torn apart. There is not a moment as one reads where a character comes off as unsympathetic or they wish for some comeuppance to befall them for the lengths they have resorted in order to survive.” Hopkins also described the book as “exciting and thoughtful.” “Bang is a grim yet gripping debut that hinges on the desperate hope of its characters,” commented Sharyn Vane on the Austin Statesman Online.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, March 1, 2018, review of Bang.
ONLINE
Austin Statesman Online, https://www.statesman.com/ (April 17, 2018), Sharyn Vane, review of Bang.
Daniel Peña website, https://danielpena.me/ (July 5, 2018).
Houston Public Media Online, https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/ (March 8, 2018), Eric Ladau, author interview.
Hunger Mountain Online, http://hungermtn.org/ (April 14, 2018), Mariah Hopkins, review of Bang.
NBC News Online, https://www.nbcnews.com/ (October 24, 2017), Rigoberto González, author interview.
Publishers Weekly Online, https://www.publishersweekly.com/ (November 1, 2017), review of Bang.
Texas Observer Online, https://www.texasobserver.org/ (March 14, 2018), Juan R. Palomo, review of Bang.
Daniel Peña is a Pushcart Prize winning writer and Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Houston-Downtown. Formerly, he was based out of the UNAM in Mexico City where he worked as a writer, blogger, book reviewer and journalist. He is a Fulbright-Garcia Robles Scholar and a graduate of Cornell University. His fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, The Rumpus, the Kenyon Review Online, Callaloo, and Huizache among other venues. He’s currently a regular contributor to the Guardian and the Ploughshares blog and his novel, BANG, is forthcoming from Arte Publico Press. He lives in beautiful Houston, Texas.
QUOTED: "a piercing tale of lives broken by border violence."
Pena, Daniel: BANG
Kirkus Reviews.
(Mar. 1, 2018): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Pena, Daniel BANG Arte Publico (Adult Fiction) $17.95 1, 30 ISBN: 978-1-55885-856-5
A prop plane that crashes along the U.S.-Mexico border forces a family to confront the lawlessness and violence of life there in this debut novel.
Araceli, the matriarch at the center of this somber, gripping tale, lives by an orange grove in Harlingen, Texas, near the state's southern tip. Undocumented and born in Mexico, she's awaiting the return of her missing husband, as are her two sons, Uli and Cuauhtemoc. Cuauhtemoc invites Uli for a late-night flight in the farm's crop duster, which crashes on the Mexico side of the border. Both survive but with injuries that trap them on the Mexican side, and they're soon separated. Alternating narratives among the three family members, Pena provides a window into the struggles of immigrants on the border as well as the violent drug war fueling the migration. Cuauhtemoc is pressed into service as a pilot making drug deliveries for one of the cartels. Uli searches for his father but winds up entangled in a local dogfighting ring and collecting scrap metal for money. Araceli, hearing of the crash, crosses the border on a fruitless search for her sons and ends up putting her mechanical savvy to use working in a shop mass-producing marijuana blunts. Blood and damage abound here, in both human and animal form, sometimes to grotesque extremes. (All-purpose construction glue seems a bad way to repair a bad face laceration.) But Pena isn't being gratuitous, and though the narrative sometimes awkwardly gestures toward surrealism, it's marked more by the search for compassion and connection among the characters, most powerfully between Uli and June, the woman who takes him under her wing. Pena weaves in a few critiques about NAFTA and the United States' role in the drug war, but mainly he keeps the story at ground level, which makes for bracing if discomfiting storytelling.
A piercing tale of lives broken by border violence.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Pena, Daniel: BANG." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2018. Book Review Index Plus,
1 of 2 6/24/18, 3:22 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A528960018/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=77ae1b4a. Accessed 24 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A528960018
2 of 2 6/24/18, 3:22 PM
QUOTED: "This is a notable and compassionate novel."
Bang
Daniel Peña. Arte Público, $17.95 trade paper (244p) ISBN 978-1-55885-856-5
A family struggles to reunite after a plane crash leaves teenage brothers Rafa and Uli lost in Mexico in Peña’s harrowing debut. When the boys’ mother, Araceli, is notified, she leaves their home in a citrus grove in Harlingen, Tex., and crosses the border south to Matamoros in search of her children, knowing she may never be able to return to the U.S. due to her undocumented status. Araceli ventures further into the country she once knew as home, hoping to locate her sons. Uli becomes a prisoner of a cartel that forces him to become a drug mule. Rafa wakes in a hospital and then heads to his father’s home in San Miguel, only to discover the town ravaged by drug wars. As weeks pass, Araceli, Rafa, and Uli each experience profound violence while struggling to stay alive. The story depicts those caught among countries, armed conflicts, and shifting identities. The adroit characterizations and alternating points of view advance a memorable narrative about overlooked populations in America that are victimized by drug smuggling. Peña examines the symbiosis of the United States and Mexico and makes painfully clear the negative effects of international trade—legal and illegal. This is a notable and compassionate novel. (Nov.)
QUOTED: "Lean and compact, it is packed with energy, ready to land blow after punch after jab on any reader who dares to underestimate it."
‘BANG’ Offers a Dark Look at the Human Cost of Mexico’s Drug War
Daniel Peña is not sparing in his assessment of Texas, where farmworkers are poisoned by fertilizer and pesticide, and Mexico, where guessing who will be next to die in the drug wars has become a lottery game.
The border fence in Hidalgo County.
The border fence in Hidalgo County. Jen Reel
Daniel Peña’s debut novel reminds me of a bantamweight boxer. Lean and compact, it is packed with energy, ready to land blow after punch after jab on any reader who dares to underestimate it.
This story of modern-day Mexico (and, to a lesser extent, Texas) is told through the lives of a mother and her two teenage sons. They are undocumented immigrants who live in a citrus grove outside Harlingen until a plane crash sends them all back to Mexico, separated but with a common goal: finding each other. Each instinctively heads “home,” their hometown in Chihuahua, where they hope to reunite with each other and, perhaps, the head of the family, who was arrested and deported earlier.
BANG
By Daniel Peña
Arte Publico Press, Houston
$17.95; 239 pages
Peña, an Austin native who teaches at the University of Houston, offers no new or startling revelations about Mexico and its many layers of law enforcement. We’ve all heard about that. What we rarely force ourselves to think about is how drug trafficking and vast economic inequality alter the lives of even those who never see themselves as part of that crumbling and decomposing system.
They are people like Araceli, always “frustrated with the general situation of things.” Her situation is that she has been left alone with her two sons in a Rio Grande Valley grove, “where the air smells of nosebleeds” caused by fertilizers and pesticides. She fears deportation while hoping — expecting, even — to see her husband reappear at the same roadside location from which he was taken.
Then there’s Uli, her 16-year-old son, a high school track star. He is a maker of lists in his head: of his pains, of the possible fates of his brother, of the foods, bands and girls he loves, and of the things he needs to buy in order to get back to Texas.
Uli’s older brother, Cuauhtémoc, is forced to give up an athletic scholarship and drop out of school three months before graduating. He goes to work with the grove boss’ son, who teaches him to fly crop-dusting planes. Trapped in Mexico, he is forced to fly Texas-bound cartel planes filled with drugs.
Peña is not sparing in his assessment of Texas, where farmworkers are poisoned by fertilizer and pesticide, and Mexico, where guessing who will be next to die in the drug wars has become a lottery game, thriving because “the delinquents” are going to kill each other anyway, so somebody might as well make money out of it.
Peña is not sparing in his assessment of Texas.
Most of the novel is set in Mexico, but Peña uses very little Spanish. Other than an occasional Pos sí, ni modo, the dialogue is almost entirely in English, which is a good thing. The use of a single language, without the need to pause for translation, facilitates the fast pace of the narrative.
There is a sweet economy to Peña’s writing. A confident writer, he doesn’t try to impress the reader with intricate phrases and showy sentences. This is not to say you won’t find striking writing here. Describing the fated airplane’s takeoff, for instance, Peña writes, “The Pawnee gallops over the dirt as haughty and elegant as your average town drunk.”
He describes a cartel safe house this way: “Inside, there’s the too-sweet smell of perfume and sweat. There is the honeyed sound of women’s voices, soft like leather — the lilt of beauty queens or beautiful liars who say they’re beauty queens. There’s the knock-knock-knock of their heels against the tile, tiny women who seem almost weightless as they glide.”
When Cuauhtémoc has sex with these women, “He wonders how many dead men they’ve slept with already.”
Some of the fine writing is harrowing, as when Peña describes in excruciating detail how Uli administers dose after dose of heroin to a badly injured comrade, or when he depicts the collapse of a wall of a long-abandoned church, exposing the degeneracy of long-dead priests.
There is a sweet economy to Peña’s writing.
In a conversation that lays out today’s reality for many Mexicans in both countries, we hear one of Cuauhtémoc’s associates defend, or at least try to justify, cartel life.
“We’re still slaves. Even in Texas, Tucson, wherever,” he says. “We make El Norte run and we bring this country to its knees. But at least there’s some dignity to destruction. Some dignity in living here. It’s nice for a little while, don’t you think?”
The novel, from start to finish, makes it clear that the key phrase is, “for a little while.”
One passage remained with me, hauntingly. In it, Peña describes the scene around the corpse of a slain scrap dealer named Chente:
“Around the scrap yard, the sky is littered with moths that skitter about the light of every glowing thing, even Chente’s teeth, which glow with a hue all their own in the purple whirl of police lights burning bright against his green skin. The moths do not discriminate between the sources of light. They land, two or three of them, on the curl of Chente’s open lip. They gum their wings up in the blood of his mouth and stay there. They drink it. They die in it.”
Substitute “Mexico” for “Chente,” and you get the gist of what this book is about.
Juan R. Palomo worked for many years as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist for the Houston Post. He also covered religion for the Austin American-Statesman and wrote a column for USA Today.
Get the latest Texas Observer news, analysis and investigations via Facebook, Twitter and our weekly newsletter.
QUOTED: "Bang is an honest and sympathetic novel concerning a family that has been torn apart. There is not a moment as one reads where a character comes off as unsympathetic or they wish for some comeuppance to befall them for the lengths they have resorted in order to survive."
"exciting and thoughtful."
Book Reviews
Review: Bang by Daniel Peña
Mariah Hopkins
April 14, 2018
When the reader first meets Iván the hotel owner in Daniel Peña’s debut novel, Bang, he is ruminating on all the reasons why his mother seemed to never let him outside into the Mexican city of Matamoros as he was growing up. “At first it was sun-exposure (too much of it),” Iván thinks. “And as he grew into a teenager, it was the gang violence she saw on TV. And as he grew older still, it was the general violence of Matamoros, which could be escaped but couldn’t be denied…”. This closing thought, “could be escaped but couldn’t be denied”, sat with me for a long while after reading. It very much represents some of the novel’s philosophies, as well as my own personal feelings, about the ongoing drug war in Mexico.
Bang is the story of two undocumented brothers, Cuauhtémoc and Uli, whose late-night ride in a crop duster turns sour when their engine gives out and they crash land on the Mexican side of the border. Having been brought to the U.S. as children and separated after the crash, Cuauhtémoc and Uli have no choice but to face the unfamiliar and violent world of border-Mexico alone. Each brother does what they must to survive. Cuauhtémoc becomes a smuggler for a drug cartel and Uli finds himself scavenging for copper wire in San Miguel, a city near-destroyed by the effects of the drug war. Both boys are struggling to make their way home to Texas, unaware that their mother has crossed the border to search for them.
It’s these three characters that Bang follows, their individual plot lines each telling a story of an ordinary person doing incredible, sometimes haunting, things to survive. Peña does not spare any details when it comes to the nefarious actions of the cartels, the army purportedly fighting them, the autodefensas (vigilante groups), and those who are affected by the world drug trafficking has created. When certain details in the novel struck me as too gruesome to be true, I would remember Peña’s thoroughly conducted research (done through the National Autonomous University of Mexico) and I’d find myself second-guessing what I considered to be the limits of war and survival. The fact that Bang made me walk in between “trust the author” and “take everything with a grain of salt” speaks to my knowledge of the drug war and why Iván’s line about the undeniability of violence struck me so much. I have been studying Mexican history for ten years, our southern neighbor is my greatest passion, but the violence occuring there because of the drug war was something I’d been ignoring. I’ve been waving my hand at family members who would worry about my traveling there, saying, “it’s just like it is here: if you’re not involved in it you’re safe.” In a way that was my means of escaping a truth I wished I could deny: drug trafficking is real and it is heartless. And seeing as how the Mexican Drug War is a “low intensity” war, ongoing since 2006, I imagine Bang capable of igniting that same realization in the hearts of others who might have decided it acceptable to ignore.
“Could be escaped but couldn’t be denied” is a looming stormcloud which hangs over the heads of Bang’s characters and slowly grows larger and larger as they become more entrenched in the lives they’ve crafted in Mexico. In Texas, Cuauhtémoc was trying to run from the memory of a freak accident that his cartel life asks him to repeat. He knows it would be easy to run away from the cartel in the plane the entrusted him with, but doing so would mean a lifetime on the run as well as putting his family in danger. Stuck in the decaying city of San Miguel, Uli could leave, but not without some deceit and cruelty on his part. And in the search for her sons, Araceli is pulled back into a country she abandoned some fifteen years ago. Faced with the violence of Matamoros, “home”, the thing the characters are all seeking to return to, becomes that escapable, undeniable thing for her.
Despite the brutality and bleak inescapability I have been stressing, Bang is an honest and sympathetic novel concerning a family that has been torn apart. There is not a moment as one reads where a character comes off as unsympathetic or they wish for some comeuppance to befall them for the lengths they have resorted in order to survive. Exciting and thoughtful, I can’t deny that Bang is the most intriguing novel I have read so far in 2018.
Bang by Daniel Peña was published January 30th, 2018 and is available from Arte Público Press.
Mariah Hopkins
Mariah Hopkins is an author of historical fiction pursuing her master's degree in creative writing and publishing at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her home is in Rhode Island with the world's best bunny, Hodor.
Arte Público Press Author Interview: Daniel Peña
An undocumented family working the orange groves near Harlingen, Texas, a crashed crop dusting plane on the Mexico side of the border and a gut wrenching tale of survival against the drug cartels, the military and the Autodefensas.
Eric Ladau | Posted on March 6, 2018, 6:36 PM (Last Updated: March 8, 2018, 10:07 AM)
Daniel Peña - Author of Bang: A Novel
Daniel Peña
Daniel Peña – Author of Bang: A Novel
Listen
00:00 /32:34
To embed this piece of audio in your site, please use this code:
X
In his first novel BANG, Daniel Peña takes us to the orange groves just outside Harlingen, Texas. 39 year old Araceli’s husband has been deported. She and her two teenage sons are undocumented and forced to live a dangerous and precarious life as agricultural workers. Araceli’s older son Cuauhtémoc has been trained to fly crop duster planes – his undocumented status making him more “disposable”
Cuauhtémoc decides to take his younger brother Uli for a ride in the Piper Pawnee crop duster plane. A routine joy ride turns into disaster as the engine fails and the plane crashes on the Mexico side of the border. Cuauhtémoc is injured but tries to go for help and ends up being kidnapped by a ransom hunter for a drug cartel. Initially forced to fight other prisoners for his survival, Cuauhtémoc reveals that he is a pilot and is soon put to work flying dangerous drug delivery missions into the United States.
Uli is rescued and ends up in the hospital for several weeks. He escapes the hospital and manages to travel to his home town of San Miguel in Chihuahua. He finds that the town has been devastated by the drug cartels – his father’s house is now occupied by a resourceful but dangerous young woman.
Araceli is informed by a county sheriff that her sons have crashed a plane in Mexico and are now missing. Despite her poor health and lack of money, she feels that she must go back to Mexico in order to rescue or a least help them as well as she can.
All three encounter a frightening and confusing succession of treacherous people and unpredictable situations.
Houston Public Media’s Eric Ladau spoke with Daniel Peña.
More information available at www.artepublicopress.com
Tags
arte publico press
Bang: A Novel
Dr. Daniel Peña
The Great Houston Read
Related
Cover of Pablo! by John Rechy
Arte Publico Press Author Interview: John Rechy
Arte Público Press Author Interview: Gwendolyn Zepeda
Photo of Dr. José B. González - Author of When Love Was Reels
Arte Público Press Author Interview: Dr. José B. González
Arte Público Press Author Interview: Daniel Chacón
Most Viewed
Galveston Police Identified ‘Little Jacob;’ Mother And Her Girlfriend Arrested
What Houston Is Learning About Underground Tunnels To Mitigate Flooding
Buffalo Bayou Park Cistern Will Open Second Major Art Installation
WATCH: White Oak To Buffalo Downtown Trail Connection Now Open
ICE Carries Out Its Largest Immigration Raid In Recent History, Arresting 146
Eric Ladau
Eric Ladau
Announcer
NightClassics host and Station Tour Coordinator Eric Ladau graduated from Illinois State University in 1979 with a Bachelor's degree in Mass Communication. While in college, he worked at KFJM in Grand Forks North Dakota and WGLT in Bloomington, Illinois. He hosted jazz, classical, folk and blues music programs and even...
More Information
QUOTED: "Bang is a grim yet gripping debut that hinges on the desperate hope of its characters."
Daniel Peña’s debut novel tells grim tale mixed with desperate hope
April 17, 2018
By
Sharyn Vane, Special to the American-Statesman
...
More
Uli knows if they can make it to the highway, they’ll live.
With 25 feet to go before impact, he can’t even scream before the prop plane his brother is piloting crumples into the ground, the sound a “thundering crack of flesh on metal.”
Surviving the crash turns out to be the least of Uli’s worries, though, as Daniel Peña illuminates in his keenly observed debut novel “Bang” (Arte Público Press, $17.95). Peña, an Austin native and English professor at the University of Houston whose short fiction won the Pushcart Prize in 2016, will be at BookPeople on Friday.
Uli has grown up on the border in Harlingen and barely remembers the Mexico his family fled so long ago. But the crash happened on the Mexican side, and his older brother Cuauhtémoc is nowhere to be found.
Peña shows readers what Uli doesn’t yet know – that while Uli woke up in a Mexican hospital room, Cuauhtémoc shambled into town, collapsed on a bench and was snatched by a drug cartel worker. Cuauhtémoc’s skills as a pilot – until now used to fly crop-dusting planes – are leveraged to transport drugs across the border. Their mother, Araceli, marshals her strength to drive into Mexico to look for her boys, not wanting to lose them the way she lost her husband after he was deported.
In chapters that alternate between each of the trio’s perspectives, Peña uses his prodigious gift for detail to take us inside the horrors that befall this family as a result of the fateful flight that started as a dare between brothers.
Uli swaps his birthday cash for pesos and travels to his family’s former house in San Miguel, now occupied by a squatter who ekes out a living collecting scrap metal. The pair tiptoes through a field scattered with the remnants of a bomb that claimed the lives of a man and a woman, their rings still glittering in the sunshine and fair game for the scrappers.
“He is wearing a plaid shirt,” Peña writes. “She is wearing a navy blue dress. The clothes are the only way you can tell them apart, where one body starts and the other begins.”
Such bleak scenes shock but are emblematic of Peña’s abilities to evoke the merciless world of the border, from the airborne pesticides that cause Araceli’s nosebleeds to the money she makes selling her hand-rolled marijuana cigarettes to American tourists.
Informed by Peña’s years studying drug trafficking in Mexico on a Fulbright scholarship, “Bang” is a grim yet gripping debut that hinges on the desperate hope of its characters.
Contact Sharyn Vane at (512) 632-8347.
QUOTED: "In the beginning, I only wanted to write a novel about dignity. If you dig enough, dignity is at the center of most geopolitical issues: transmigration, the drug wars, black markets, the rise of populism in North America, but arguably separatist movements in Europe too and various brands of extremism throughout the world. When systems fail people, they create their own systems. And I think that’s a major facet of the drug war in Mexico that hasn’t been articulated yet—the human element of it, the basic human need for dignity at all costs."
"Writing from that intersection of dignity between immigration and the drug war, I found that the two are actually more symbiotic than not—they feed off each other. And that’s how I got to the current iteration of the novel, which is a long meditation on what happens to the people we shut out (or kick out) of America and the way those people are absorbed into the drug war in Mexico. In a microcosm, Bang is a novel about how American immigration policy directly feeds the black market machines we’re supposedly invested in ending."
Shut Out of America, Absorbed by Mexico's Drug Wars: Daniel Peña's 'Bang'
by Rigoberto González / Oct.24.2017 / 10:51 AM ET
Image: Daniel Pena
Courtesy of Arte Publico Press
Daniel Peña's chilling new novel Bang (Arte Público Press) dares to enter the landscape of drugs and violence that has besieged Mexico, particularly along border cities like Matamoros, where part of his novel is set.
Araceli and her sons Uli and Cuauhtémoc, are members of an undocumented family residing in Harlingen, Texas. A twist of fate sends them back to Mexico, not through deportation (as the mother always feared), but through an unusual set of circumstances. They become separated and suddenly they feel as invisible and vulnerable south of the border as they felt in the U.S. Each must struggle to survive a dangerous Mexico they no longer recognize, knowing all too well that the odds of a happy reunion are stacked strongly against them.
Peña is currently an assistant professor in the department of English at the University of Houston-Downtown. Formerly, he was based out of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) in Mexico City where he worked as a writer, blogger, book reviewer and journalist. He is a Fulbright-Garcia Robles Scholar and a graduate of Cornell University. Bang is his first book.
RG: Bang is such a timely novel that offers devastating insights into how communities adapt to severe shifts in culture and society. And yet encounters with the troubling “new normal” of contemporary Mexico gain fresh perspective through the harrowing experiences of Araceli and her two sons. What inspired you to write such a specific journey about three undocumented Mexicans in the U.S. finding themselves back in a country they once called home, but which has now become foreign to them?
Recommended
Trump's visit to Britain faces mass protest marches and a giant baby blimp
The end of memes? Campaigners dismayed at European internet ruling
DP: In the beginning, I only wanted to write a novel about dignity. If you dig enough, dignity is at the center of most geopolitical issues: transmigration, the drug wars, black markets, the rise of populism in North America, but arguably separatist movements in Europe too and various brands of extremism throughout the world.
When systems fail people, they create their own systems. And I think that’s a major facet of the drug war in Mexico that hasn’t been articulated yet—the human element of it, the basic human need for dignity at all costs.
Related: Immigrant Identity, Lesbian Sexuality Intersect in The Stories of Achy Obejas
Writing from that intersection of dignity between immigration and the drug war, I found that the two are actually more symbiotic than not—they feed off each other.
And that’s how I got to the current iteration of the novel, which is a long meditation on what happens to the people we shut out (or kick out) of America and the way those people are absorbed into the drug war in Mexico.
In a microcosm, Bang is a novel about how American immigration policy directly feeds the black market machines we’re supposedly invested in ending. And to that end I hope Bang raises a few questions: Is the drug war in Mexico failed by design or by accident? And if by accident, do we keep feeding that machine resources and brown bodies if only to destroy them, those people who would otherwise be absorbed into the American fabric? And what if failed by design? What does that say about us that we keep feeding it?
RG: Araceli’s journey is especially heartbreaking because so much sacrifice is demanded of her in service to her sons: she remains in the U.S. after her husband is deported, and then goes searching for them when they vanish across the border. In many ways, she’s the ultimate hero in the story because of the many trials she endures on her quest. How do you see the dimensions of Mexican motherhood and womanhood changed because of the current state of affairs in Mexico and the U.S.?
DP: I think women largely bear the brunt and burdens of the drug war in Mexico. Much has been written about the femicides and I write toward that a little with June’s sister in Bang, but I feel like the demands on Mexican motherhood and womanhood mirror those demands that were put on women in places like Chile during the Pinochet regime or Argentina during the dirty war.
When the state can’t provide closure, the burden falls on mothers and women to do that job for them.
Image: Daniel Pena
"Bang" is Daniel Pena's first novel.Courtesy of Arte Publico Press
We saw this with the Ayotzinapa killing of 43 students in 2014. We see it with the Juarez mothers’ searches that continue to this day. We see it in crime scenes all over Mexico in which women are consistently the ones demanding answers to questions surrounding their loved one’s death to facilitate that closure.
That expectation is there and I think it’s a troubling relationship that the Mexican state (and the United States by extension) cultivates with Mexican women. That labor is not free. Nor is it easy. And I really wanted to show this with Araceli who is very much the hero of Bang. She’s my favorite character in the novel.
Sara Uribe writes about this kind of labor in her incredible book, Antígona González, which chronicles a sister’s wait for her disappeared brother in Mexico. I highly recommend it.
RG: Uli and Cuauhtémoc have their respective adventures in Mexico—both storylines difficult to navigate because we see two young men, promising student athletes, become emotionally hardened by their new surroundings. In some ways, they represent people embroiled in the current political fray over DACA, whose uncertain future threatens to disrupt the lives of those undocumented immigrants who arrived from other countries as children. What messages do the brothers’ stories carry across the border about identity, belonging, and home?
DP: I think both Uli and Cuauhtémoc feel very American at heart. They’re huge San Antonio Spurs fans. They love Whataburger. They listen to Jay-Z. They’ve completely bought into the idea of America though they understand that America hasn’t completely bought into the idea of them yet and I think one of the great tragedies of the book is when they discover (in their own ways) that Mexico hasn’t bought into the idea of them either.
It’s ultimately the black markets (or underground economies) that find their talents useful.
Going back to the idea of dignity, the pursuit of dignity is the thing I think that drives people on both sides of the border. For a lot of people, immigrating to the US offers one path toward dignity. DACA was a huge step in the right direction for people like Uli and Cuauhtémoc who have so much to offer this country.
But for those shut out (or kicked out) of America, a cartel provides dignity too: if you need to feed your family, say, or if you’re recently deported and you can’t find a job - it’s the only means of survival possible.
Globally speaking, it’s a privilege to buy into the “right” kind of system, the legal way of doing things. Those that do would like to believe that the right system is the only system that matters, the only system that has any gravity. But we know that all systems (legal and not) have momentum and certain demands in exchange for dignity.
Ultimately Bang is about a family torn apart by those systems and the way systematic demands manifest and change their identities.
If there’s a message to be relayed by the brothers’ story it’s really a question: can you blame someone for pursuing their dignity? And if so, what about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?
RG: Bang is so skillfully plotted and every obstacle the three main characters confront is balanced by the alliances they make, moments of blind luck, and street smarts that suddenly kick in for all of them. Without giving away the ending—it’s quite powerful and earned, by the way—why did you choose such a bleak direction for the conclusion?
DP: Thank you! I’m so touched by these kind words. I was joking with a friend the other day that the French writers are the only ones who get to write a bleak ending and get away with it. But you know what? Mexican-American writers too!
I did worry about the ending quite a bit. A lot of people I really admire and respect asked me to change the ending, but I felt like it was important to look that trauma directly in the eye and to convey the severity of it with as much honesty and empathy as I could.
I haven’t mentioned this yet, but most of this book is based on real events—real things that have happened to real people. Most of it is ripped from research or the news. And in writing Bang I was very conscious of maintaining respect for that trauma, which also meant not shying away from it either.
I think there’s a lot of pressure, especially on writers of color, to provide the reader with some hope, some beacon of light from the trauma of their stories or even their personal lives. There’s an expectation that we give the reader something to feel good about. But I have none of that. And any other ending to the novel would have felt disingenuous.
RG: You are currently a resident of Houston, and it’s difficult to resist asking about how recent events and post-hurricane life has affected your vision as an artist. Where do you sense the muse taking you next?
DP: Living through Hurricane Harvey renewed my faith in the general goodness of people, which was a tall order in the wake of the 2016 election. I feel like something that hasn’t been written about Harvey yet is how many people saw it as a chance at redemption.
Like everywhere else, we saw in Houston, too, that so many people had bought into the animosity and vitriol of the election cycle. We retreated into our digital news bubbles or hermit kingdoms or whatever. But then the electricity went down—PUM! We had each other. And that was it. That was literally all we had. And our survival depended on whether we could trust each other and buy into in the general goodness of our neighbors. And we did. And the social fabric held.
Houston is a blue city, the most diverse city in the country, but it’s surrounded by red and many of those folks were impacted too. We were all in it together.
And everywhere you saw redemption stories. People risking everything to save people I’m sure they’d voted against in the general election, that deep desire to prove that we valued each other at all costs. And that was powerful. We bought out of everything for a few days and bought into each other. And we survived.
As an artist, I’d never thought about the deep need for redemption. I’m sure if you would have asked someone point blank why they’d risk their life for a complete stranger they would have said they were simply doing the right thing, but there was a certain urgency to it, a cathartic exculpation of shame—we’d been suspicious of each other not too long before the storm.
Houston felt like a divided city in the immediate aftermath of the election. This was our way of pushing beyond that quickly. It changed Houston forever, I’m convinced. And maybe that’s a sliver of hope for the American experiment at large—I don’t know yet.
I’ll write about the flood, but not now. It’s too close.
Follow NBC Latino on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.