Aura Xilonen, The Gringo Champion, Trans. by Andrea Rosenberg, Europa Editions; Reprint edition, 2017.
Read an excerpt here at Words without Borders
The award-winning debut novel by young Mexican author Aura Xilonen, The Gringo Champion is a thrillingly inventive story about crossing borders that the Los Angeles Review of Books called "one of the must-read books of 2017."
Liborio has to leave Mexico, a land that has taught him little more than a keen instinct for survival. He crosses the Rio Bravo, like so many others, to reach "the promised land." And in a barrio like any other, in some gringo city, this illegal immigrant tells his story.
As Liborio narrates his memories we discover a childhood scarred by malnutrition and abandonment, an adolescence lived with a sense of having nothing to lose. In his new home, he finds a job at a bookstore. He falls in love with a woman so intensely that his fantasies of her verge on obsession. And, finally, he finds himself on a path that just might save him: he becomes a boxer.
This is a migrant's story of deracination, loneliness, fear, and finally, love told in a sparkling, innovative prose. It's Million Dollar Baby meets The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and a story of migration and hope that is as topical as it is timeless.
Highbrow lowbrow; sweet spot, too. El Sur said in a review that Xilonen brilliantly transforms the vulgar into art and in cultured diction, with which I heartily concur––though I’m personally less concerned with elitism in language than with finding the beautiful in the ugly and speaking truth to power (shazam!). A migration story for the current moment, large, intense, honest, and somehow still hopeful. - M. Bartley Seigel
Punches, profanity and streams of offbeat argot fly from the first page of this idiosyncratic debut novel about a Mexican immigrant living on the edge of survival in an unnamed American city. Maybe 17 and “skinny as a shoelace,” Liborio has suffered enough hardship for several lifetimes, including a near-fatal border crossing, a brutal cotton-picking job and a raid by a band of “migrant-hunting gringos.” When the novel opens, he’s working in a bookstore for a boss with a penchant for vulgar verbal abuse and is madly in love with the girl next door.
Xilonen, a novelist and filmmaker from Mexico, was 19 when she wrote the book, and the prose, with all its madcap neologisms, has a youthful wildness, rather like Liborio when his blood’s running hot in a street fight. And it’s his talent for dishing out and taking beatings that ultimately offers him salvation, and a little bit of fame, via the boxing ring.
The novel’s language can be distracting (“passiflorally” speaking, but not in a “wlobalicidal” way) and the profanity wearing, but this book won’t be shelved among the “dull novels” frequently excoriated by Liborio, who is reading his way through the bookstore and has strong opinions about literature — opinions that one suspects hew closely to those of his creator. Those dull books “were fettered by the superficial task of effectuating sentence after sentence, soulless, lifeless, simply tossing out pretty words right and left. That’s how I imagined writers thread their novels together, wormy, airless, disemvoweled.” - Alison McCulloch
Those familiar with Campeon gabacho in Aura Xilonen's original Spanish note its baroque style: Liborio, the teenage street-fighter narrator who at the novel's beginning works in a Spanish-language bookshop, eats a dictionary to understand poetry and spits out his words most often to cuss. Andrea Rosenberg's translation should be praised for rising to the challenge of invention: The Gringo Champion is, too, a Jabberwocky creation of slang, nonce and portmanteaux – meaning derived from words' mouthfeel as much as anything else. The scrappy vernacular is to match Liborio's story: an undocumented immigrant fleeing violence and abuse in Mexico, his short life thus far has been a series of beatings and scrapes, his time in the United States navigated between xenophobia and exploitation, hunted by immigration officers. Translated two years after its original publication in Mexico, The Gringo Champion arrives when it is urgently needed, its central question – whether Liborio can find stability amid circumstances that force him into perpetual fight or flight – of pressing political concern. -
IN A TIME WHEN the US president got elected in part by the success of his claim that Mexicans are criminals and rapists, the long-running tradition of Mexico-bashing and stereotyping has acquired a new political urgency. Even though Mexico is the United States’s neighbor to the south, the source of its largest immigrant community, one of its top trade partners, the home of nearly two million US citizens, and a place with profound historical, intellectual, economic and political ties to the United States, Americans of all stripes — including its intellectual elite — possess an astonishing level of ignorance regarding the country. A significant contributing factor regarding this ignorance is the near total unavailability of cultural products from Mexico. As someone who teaches about Mexico in an elite institution of higher education, I can tell you stories about the insurmountable difficulties to find Mexican-created history books, literature, and cinema available in English translation. It is true that, in academia, I have the privilege to belong to a wonderful community of specialists in Mexican culture, literature, and history, but even these specialists’ works have a hard time reaching a readership outside our own circle. The xenophobic bashing of Mexico and Mexicans by the current US administration — including threats of mass deportation and military invasion, labels like “bad hombres,” and Mexico demonized as a country that cheats the United States in trade relations — has amounted to a longstanding ignorance that is no longer acceptable, either politically or ethically. The absence of Mexico’s perspective in the United States is not just a matter of run-of-the-mill American provincialism, but truly a political question when racist hate speech toward Mexico is allowed to exist without any significant counterpoint.
Literature is no exception to this trend. In the already dismal world of literary translation in the United States, Mexico has been historically nonexistent. Many classical works of Mexican literature are either out of print since the 1970s (the seminal novels of Rosario Castellanos and Elena Garro), untranslated (pretty much any poet after Octavio Paz), or published in English two or three decades after their original publications (the works of Sergio Pitol and Fernando del Paso). There are various reasons behind this phenomenon. One is mere disinterest: elite cultural consumers are generally interested in reading and watching a high percentage of American cultural products peppered with the world-literary author du jour (some people have even responded to my reproach claiming that they read Roberto Bolaño, who is Chilean). Another reason is a pervasive form of cultural supremacy. Global South writers in general are expected to provide northern readers with experiences of cultural authenticity or difference, and the fact is that most Mexican writers are cosmopolitan and steadfastly refuse to participate in the exoticist role that the world literary system seeks to attribute to them. Yet another reason is cultural conflation: many publishers and readers do not understand that, while related in genealogy and in political solidarity, Mexican literature is not the same as Chicano or Mexican-American literature. Indeed, one thing to reproach my fellow Mexicans for is their equally astonishing and unacceptable ignorance of our brothers and sisters in the Mexican-American community and the dismal circulation of Chicano literature in Mexico. Nevertheless, on the United States’s side, since a lot of Mexican-American literature is written in English, it is quite easy for publishers to simply not attempt translation of works written in Spanish. They feel that the market niche is satisfied with the works of Anglophone writers.
Because of all of these reasons, the publication of Aura Xilonen’s The Gringo Champion in Europa Editions should be praised and celebrated, as it is one of very few books from Mexico that has been able to break the symbolic wall of disinterest and cultural supremacy that keeps Mexican writers out of American mainstream literary publication. In recent years, many key works by contemporary Mexican writers have reached American shores thanks to the heroic efforts of translators like Lisa Dillman, George Henson, and Christina MacSweeney, as well as presses like Deep Vellum, And Other Stories, and Coffee House. American readers can begin to access timely works like Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World, one of the best novels out there about crossing the border, as well as classics like Sergio Pitol’s The Art of Flight, a collection of cosmopolitan memoir-essays that many consider the most significant work of Mexican literature from the 1990s. Indeed, there are some grains of salt to this phenomenon. Many books are released in the limited circulation afforded to independent presses. It is also true that many works (like Valeria Luiselli’s celebrated fiction or Álvaro Enrigue’s Sudden Death) are worthwhile literary products, and their translations are important events, but they belong to Mexican literature’s tendency to resist political imperatives in fiction.
The Gringo Champion is a remarkable cultural object not only because it was published by a mainstream literary press (the same one that has become ubiquitous in bookstores thanks to the success of their translations of Elena Ferrante), but also because it happens to be a novel about a lower-class Mexican immigrant published at a time when stories of immigration have acquired new political urgency. Originally titled Campeón gabacho (“gabacho” is a slang word used as a derogatory term for the French during their invasion of Mexico in the 1860s, which then evolved to be used by Northern Mexicans and Chicanos as a derogatory term for white Americans), the novel tells the story of Liborio, an impoverished Mexican migrant with a harrowing childhood, who begins his ventures in the United States working in a bookstore. Eventually, Liborio becomes a successful boxer as he pursues the love of a reluctant woman. Yet the most notable feature of the book is not its plot, which could be regarded as a somewhat predictable story, but its literary form. Aura Xilonen possesses one of the most original and plastic literary voices from Mexican literature I have read. She writes in a mixture of vernacular words from different Mexican regions and Chicano Spanglish, peppered with words and expressions from popular genres of literatures from the 16th and 17th century.
Her Mexican publisher describes Xilonen’s style as “ingleñol,” as a sort of Mexican inversion of Spanglish, but in my view the term does not do justice to Xilonen’s uncanny talent for linguistic hybridity. I think that the best way to describe her language is through the term “neobaroque.” The book more properly belongs to a tradition of writing about marginalized subjects in Spanish-language fiction that appeals to baroque mixtures of learned and vernacular prose in order to account for the subjectivity of subalternized subjects. The origins of this tradition are in Spanish Golden Age picaresque narratives like Lazarillo de Tormes, but it also has a very strong lineage in Mexican literature of the last few decades. Variations of this literary operation can be found in genres such as the urban chronicle (where Carlos Monsiváis created a genre of his own through his baroque linguistic engagement with everyday life, media, and high culture), in landmark books representing sexual marginalization (like Luis Zapata’s novel El vampiro de la Colonia Roma, translated as Adonis García, which is narrated as tape recordings of the testimonial of a gay male prostitute from Mexico City) and the various social subjectivities of Mexico’s northern states (including the aforementioned book by Yuri Herrera or Daniel Sada’s magnificent oeuvre, the most complex works linguistically speaking in contemporary Mexican fiction). In Spanish, Campeón gabacho (I keep the Mexican title to distinguish it from its translation) is a very worthy entry in this tradition, and Liborio’s fictionalized speech escapes the sort of ethnographic artificiality that plagues social fiction precisely by opting for the joyful, self-deprecating, and highly textured style of the Latin-American neobaroque.
The story of the novel’s publication and of Aura Xilonen are remarkable in themselves. The novel was the winner of the first “Premio Mauricio Achar,” organized by Librerías Gandhi, Mexico’s largest chain of bookstores, and Literatura Random House, the literary arm of Mexico’s Penguin Random House subsidiary. The novel was submitted with a pseudonym (“Cleopatra”) and was chosen among 392 submissions. According to an editor at Random House, Maria Fernanda Álvarez, from whom I heard this story, the jury assumed that the writer was in his late 30s and early 40s, due to the quality of the prose, and was likely male, on the basis of the marks of identity in the book. When they opened the envelope with the author’s identification, they found out that the author was a 19-year-old woman, whose main aspiration is to become a filmmaker. In various interviews and public events, Xilonen has said that she wrote the novel, beginning at age 16, inspired by stories from her grandfather — who was a boxer, a photographer, and an immigrant — and by some books and films meaningful to her. The book received significant press coverage, but was snubbed by professional literary criticism, probably due to the stigma of the award’s commercial nature vis-à-vis Mexico’s elitist literary world, as well as Xilonen’s lack of the literary cultural capital necessary to attain reviews in magazines and supplements. This lack of critical attention is a mistake. The novel surely has some marks of Xilonen’s youth — a naïf account of love within a plot that could use more economy and tension — but its linguistic inventiveness, its joyful storytelling, the beauty of its characters, and its empathy to the experience of economic marginalization and migration make it, in my view, one of the most significant and worthwhile novels of 21st-century Mexican literature. The book is not written to satisfy the demands of the literary world, but rather to tell a story of great personal meaning and to do so with the enthusiasm and verbal prowess of a truly talented writer. Xilonen has a more inventive and original literary style than many writers three or four decades her senior, and I think that, if she decides to pursue literary writing further, she could become one of the key writers of Latin-American literature. The fact that this book does not accommodate the prejudices of Mexican literary critics (many of whom use words like “transparent” and “pure” as positive qualifiers) is, in my view, positive. Campeón gabacho is the kind of bold, unapologetic, and emotive work one rarely sees in Mexican fiction. It chooses to engage with its present and its history in a direct and politically relevant way. There are only a handful of authors in Mexican literature about whom this could be said. I would highlight the aforementioned narrative of Yuri Herrera; Antonio Ortuño’s bold La fila india, a timely novel about the killing of Central-American migrants yet to find English translation; María Rivera’s forceful poem “Los muertos”; Cristina Rivera Garza’s essays on necropolitics and writing; and Heriberto Yépez’s forceful and controversial post-poetry and critical essays as some of the other instances of Mexican writers seeking to engage the present. The fact that a lot of these writings are unavailable to American readers speaks volumes about the absence of the Mexican literary voice as a counter to current anti-Mexican rhetoric.
One should always be wary of the machinations of corporate publishers in pushing their authors onto the worldwide stage, and certainly one should also resist the role that these publishers have in creating what we now call “world literature.” Yet, in the case of Campeón gabacho, Random House’s institutional power is allowing for a truly remarkable work of fiction to become available in various languages. At the time of this writing, besides the English translation, the French translation has appeared and I believe editions in Italian and Dutch are forthcoming. One cannot begin to imagine the enormous difficulty of translating a prose like Xilonen’s, full of wordplay, idiomatic expressions, and anachronisms, with an almost musical verbal flow that relies on the Spanish language’s natural syllabic metrics. Andrea Rosenberg’s translation is notably intrepid. Some of the idiomatic plasticity of the original is lost — even in the title they had to opt for “gringo” which does not have the same connotations as “gabacho” — but generally speaking Rosenberg successfully conveys the strength of the original prose. Just to give an example, the novel’s first phrase in Spanish reads as follows: “Y entonces se me ocurre, mientras los camejanes persiguen a la chivata hermosa para bulearla y chiflarle cosas sucias, que yo puedo alcanzar otra vida al putearme a todos esos foquin meridianos.” Rosenberg renders it: “And then it hits me, as the scruffs trail the gorgeous chickadee, hooting at her and talking dirty, that I can get myself another life by beating these pinches australs up.” There are many fortunate choices here that illustrate Rosenberg’s talent as a translator. “Cameján” is a rare anachronistic term referring to lower-class boy that would be difficult to gather as a Spanish speaker, and the expression “scruff” communicates the unkempt nature of the characters. Rosenberg resists translating the Anglicism “bulear” into the common word “bullying,” from which the Spanish slang term is derived, to keep from betraying the informality of the word. She opts for “hooting” instead, which does not have the strong overtones the word “bullying” carries in English. And instead of translating the Anglicism “foquin” into its English direct equivalent, “fucking,” Rosenberg uses “pinche,” the common Spanish expression one would use in this context. The result of Rosenberg’s titanic efforts is that The Gringo Champion carries into English nearly all of the grace, beauty, and force of Campeón gabacho, and Xilonen’s remarkable style is offered a fair rendering in English that should allow Anglophone readers an opportunity to appreciate its brilliance and strength. The centrality of language in the novel is expressed in the book’s epigraph, attributed to Liborio, the protagonist: “Words, like ideas, are barbaric men’s inventions.” One could hardly encapsulate in a better expression the ethos that underlies Xilonen’s powerful novel.
I could speak more about the formal wonders of both Xilonen and her translator, but the final point to be made is that the arrival of The Gringo Champion to the United States in the early days of the Trump presidency is both timely and political. Xilonen dedicates her novel “[t]o all the world’s migrants, which, if we go back to our origins, is all of us.” The novel can be read as a meaningful attempt to imagine the lived experience of the Mexican migrant to the United States. Behind Xilonen’s baroque sense of humor, Liborio’s story is profoundly tragic. The novel captures the enormous violence of the migrant experience (Liborio is consistently beaten and his body is routinely subject to physical violence inflicted by the police, by boxers, and by others); the perils of racialization (American characters frequently point to Liborio’s purported “ugliness” and his love story is in part marked by the characterization of working-class Mexican bodies as undesirable); and the struggle for class mobility with the imagined possibility of the American dream for subjects barred from first-world privilege. This is the story of a Mexican immigrant who could easily be branded as a criminal and a rapist by the voices of white supremacy. In its verbal richness, its humanity, its loving empathy, and its unapologetic depiction of the everyday violence to which migrants are subject, The Gringo Champion is probably one of the most significant novels in translation published in the United States in recent years. Aura Xilonen is an emergent Mexican voice with many things to tell Americans about their neighbors to the south, and with an uncanny talent to narrate the story of her migrant heritage. Few works, I think, are a better response to anti-Mexican sentiments from a Mexican perspective. It is, as such, one of the must-read novels of 2017 and the exciting debut of a young woman who will, I hope, become one of the leading artists of her generation. - Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/neobaroque-immigrant-aura-xilonens-campeon-gabacho-gringo-champion/
As the President of the United States employs the phrase, “illegal immigrant” to invoke fear, criminality and imply the crumbling of a once great America, Aura Xilonen’s debut novel The Gringo Champion is a fierce—if unintentional—rejoinder to the increasingly ugly narrative surrounding undocumented workers. Xilonen’s novel follows Liborio, a young man who, after a childhood of abuse, decides to leave Mexico for the United States. He crosses the Rio Grande and stumbles through the desert, a traumatic crossing story that Xilonen tells intermittently as flashbacks, as memories prompted by Liborio’s attempts to build a new life in an unnamed border town. Liborio finds work a bookstore where he reads novels and learns English, giving the book its literary feel, but the violence of his childhood follows him, ironically leading him to boxing, where he’ll eventually find success and love.
Regardless of the circumstances of its publication or Xilonen’s age, The Gringo Champion is a compelling novel, rich with description and empathetic in its depiction of a migrant worker. Europa Editions, Xilonen’s American publisher, has translated and published some of the most compelling novels in the last few years (including Elena Ferrante’s work) and The Gringo Champion is a perfect fit for the publishing house. Like Ferrante, Xilonen’s novel is unflinching and occupies a clearly political point of view without being a political book. - Stassa Edwards
— Jezbel
The novel is skilfully translated from Spanish by Andrea Rosenburg. The words that she and young Mexican author, Aura Xilonen, pour out of the mouth of the narrator, Liborio, are an energetic torrent! Reading it is exhausting but addictive. The words are versions of actual words, and in reading them the brain is engaged in an interpretative workout.
Liborio’s language comes from a series of foul-mouthed ‘carers’ and ‘employers’ from whom he receives scant food and no wages. Whilst slaving in a bookstore he teaches himself to read, starting with The Golden Age of Spanish Poetry. By the time the action begins he has read ‘Virgil and Dante, Catullus and Bécquer, Boccaccio and Balzac, Homer and Tolstoy, Cervantes and Dickens, Austen and Borges, Pylorus and Aesop.’ His idiolect ranges from high culture to the lowest but lacks the normal register that most of us use to communicate.
It’s a crazy read. The language is wild, there are no chapters and the narrative is fragmented. Sometimes, in italics, there are flashbacks to Liborio’s childhood in Mexico and his swim across the Rio Grande into the US. In the ‘present’ Liborio lives a perilous existence threatened by street gangs, immigration cops, imminent starvation and worms.
In a way, it’s exactly the sort of novel that I do not like. I particularly hate reading about violence. In the early pages, Liborio, 17, gets beaten up at least once a day. If he’s not being physically assaulted he’s being chased or cursed. It’s horrible. ‘They raise their crushing clubs and give me a few tastes, one after another, on my back, shoulders, and braincase. One precise blow on the back of the scullery knocks me out.’ But then it segues into another type of tale that I would not choose: the unlikely and soppily sentimental sort of Rocky Balboa rags-to-riches boxing story.
I hate boxing too. This is because it requires people to hit other people in the head, sending the brain in its fluid slapping into the inside of the skull. Result? Serious lesions. ‘The scruff leaps at me in a rage — I can smell his tense, jumbled musculature, scented with incendiary, malodorous, murderous perspirations — but before he can tear me to shreds, I see him coming at me and just like that, palindromed, I leap to one side and bring my fist down on his right temple.’
To top all this organised, and disorganised, violence there is romance. Boy meets girl, things go wrong, can they be overcome? ‘Without saying anything, just like that, out of the blue, I plant a kiss on her sleepy lips. Like that, swift, adolescent. Taking her face in my hands.’
The Gringo Champion is probably aimed at the young adult market, although I am not sure how many teenagers have the necessary vocabulary. Their parents, furthermore, might not like them to have access to so many swearwords; the language is extremely coarse, as well as poetic.
In spite of these caveats it is a charming book, centred on a charismatic, if unreliable, narrator. - Josephine Fenton
A Language In Constant Rebellion: Talking with Aura Xilonen
— The Rumpus
An award-winning Mexican novel honors the American dream
— The Dallas Morning News
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