How to Look Away: On American Cruelty and the Refusal to Disappear - Couverture rigide

Peña, Daniel

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0593596390 ISBN 13 : 9780593596395

Editeur : Random House Inc, 2026

Synopsis

A riveting, kaleidoscopic portrait of the American compulsion toward cruelty and our power to subvert it from an award-winning contributor to the Guardian and the New York Times.

In How to Look Away, Daniel Peña explores how fringe elements of his Texas childhood—AM radio, conspiracy theories, Post-Cold War paranoia—came to dominate the American political discourse and contributed to our extreme tolerance of human rights abuses against migrants from Latin America and elsewhere. He asks: What compels us to look away from these abuses? And how do we wake ourselves into action?

These evocative essays braid journalism, cultural criticism, and memoir, roaming from the vestigial Comanche War battlefields of his native Austin, to the black markets of Mexico City, to the home of a cartel hitman’s family doomed to live in the unglamorous aftermath of his crimes. Writing from both Mexico and the United States, Daniel Peña reflects on two childhood fears: demons and the death penalty. Or the answer to the question, “Do you ever really belong to yourself?” A question that serves as the looking glass through which Peña meditates on American citizenship and the kinds of people we are willing to disappear in the name of the American project. 

Channeling the swashbuckling criticism of Tom Wolfe and Anthony Bourdain and the poetic prose of Latin America's cronista movement, How to Look Away conjures hope even as it offers a haunting account of the strange bond between two nations, this American moment, and the land upon which our bodies stand.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Daniel Peña is a Pushcart Prize-winning writer and Associate professor of creative writing. Formerly, he was based out of the UNAM in Mexico City where he worked as a Fulbright-Garcia Robles Scholar. A graduate of Cornell University and a former Picador guest professor in Leipzig, Germany, his writing has appeared in Ploughshares, Texas Monthly, NBC News, and The New York Times Magazine, among other venues. He’s currently a regular contributor to The Guardian. He lives in Dallas.

Extrait. © Reproduit sur autorisation. Tous droits réservés.

Snapshots of a Life in Flight

South

Diego suggests we caffeinate before the satanic tour. Technically, it’s just an Airbnb tour, but he doesn’t really know what he’s doing yet. This morning he’ll host a group of German tourists who want to see the Mexico of their imaginations: a place distorted by movies and media, where the dark side eclipses reality. He’s only sure of the broad strokes right now. Cartel iconography, drugs, some alligators. “They love that shit,” says Diego, who knows he can sell them their own prejudices for a good price.

Even still, he laments the fact that it’s impossible for gringos to conjure up beautiful things about Mexico. Like the hills outside of his native Tulancingo that are slashed and burned in the winter for ash to fertilize the harvest. Blue smoke, burnt sky. Such images were just a feature of everyday life where he grew up as part of the Totonac indigenous people. These coffee beans were grown and roasted there along hillsides of radiation fog and streams full of fish. Abundance. “Beautiful, beautiful,” he says.

He pours boiling water into a French press. He places it on a table lacquered in wobbly layers of dusty red paint. This apartment is a far cry from his roots, but it’s home. A nondescript flat in the guts of the Centro Histórico in Mexico City.

The decor is a mix of Bauhaus and Mexican rasquache. Scattered pell-mell about the apartment are various alebrijes of jaguars and armadillos made of clay and wood. Next to the table, a large poster of an encuentro between the Black Panther Party and the Zapatistas. Next to that: some yellow curandero medicine man soap that is supposed to bring in money. On the wall above the bookshelf hangs a Käthe Kollwitz print.

Most of these things belong to his girlfriend. All he has to his name are his T-shirt-making business, this satanic tour, and this coffee, which he offers me with a childlike demeanor that belies his thirty-eight years and hardened persona.

He built this persona to survive life in Mexico City as a microbus driver back in his teen years. Diego was often targeted by police and robbers alike. And for that reason, he always decked out his buses in high Mexican gothic camp. Votive images next to Santa Muerte decals. A hard plastic doll’s head in place of a stick shift handle. The hard edges helped ward off bullshit and extortion. He maintained this persona even when his name changed in 1999. That’s the year he paid a coyote and found himself in the west end of San Antonio after a long, long car ride. There, a man gave him a new name and a Social Security number. He found work at carpet factories: in South Carolina first, then in Dalton, Georgia, where he fell in love and became the father of two kids—one theirs, the other hers. It all happened so fast.

Diego was deported in the last year of Barack Obama’s presidency. It was a roadblock on Old Dixie Highway in Dalton, near a former Civil War battle site, that did him in. He remembers asking the arresting officer not to handcuff him in front of his kids, which the officer honored.

Six months later, he was in Mexico City again. Mid-thirties. Separated from his kids, who were (are) as American as Dalton, Georgia. On the deportation flight back, Diego prayed for the plane to crash.

Diego insists they’re separated not by geography but by laws made up by people who get to decide who can and cannot be fathers anymore. And that’s what all of this is about. This satanic tour, this T-shirt company, these small-time freak show hustles for the white gaze: He needs enough money to be a dad again.

Coffee in hand, he leads me to his studio, which serves as part altar to his son. His image is everywhere.

My eye instantly goes to a photo of his son dressed as a Totonac warrior next to the words “The largest sacrifices always come with a massive jolt / That jolt is not the end of the world, but the beginning of a new one.”

Above the screen-printing exposure vacuum—a massive tool used to create sharp, detailed stencils—there are two photos on either side of an upside-down American flag. To the left, his son superimposed onto a chair with the Marvel character Deadpool. To the right, his son in a red jacket with a bike helmet on, studded with rubber spikes to create a mohawk effect.

Diego connects a 50-watt PA system to his phone. He blasts Paul Wall and sits on a bench.

There’s a seven-armed screen-printing press and dozens upon dozens of already-made screens scattered around the studio. Diego pulls one from the pile, says it’s for a collaboration. “With someone from Texas, like you,” he says. “She’s from San Antonio. She lives here in Mexico City and runs a shop called Vivienne. But her name is Aliana. Her dad is a big-time lawyer in Texas. You might know him.”

Diego is pinning his hopes on this collaboration, which might possibly pave the way to selling his shirts in the United States.

He inks shirt after shirt with his company’s logo emblazoned across the chest. White ink over black cotton.

f*ck la migra. f*ck la migra. f*ck la migra.


East

Today the objective is to ferry a group of Germans to an altar to Santa Muerte, Mexico’s patron saint of death: a human skeleton draped in a white shawl, à la the Virgen de Guadalupe, carrying a scythe and globe, a necklace of dollar bills and pesos around her neck. The folk saint has become particularly popular with those in the black market and illicit trades, as well as with tourists seeking Mexican macabre. Sugar skulls, marigold wreaths, Day of the Dead fare. Sometimes they lump Santa Muerte in too.

We find the Germans inside of Metro Pino Suárez. To our surprise, though they don’t know one another they’re somehow all dressed the same way. Saxon and Motörhead T-shirts, too many silver rings. The women sport green fishnet stockings. They look like a wizard clan, wielding too-expensive DSLR cameras that they are unconcerned about taking into a minor black market.

There are nine of them in total. Two from Frankfurt, three from Leipzig, another couple from Berlin and their friend from somewhere in Bavaria. There’s another guy who speaks no English or Spanish at all and says simply (in German) that he’s from Germany. Their eyes greet Diego. Diego’s eyes warm to them. Onlookers take notice. Like, What the f*** is going on?

Diego gets existential in moments like these, when he’s surrounded by people. There are few words between English or Spanish that can articulate the stone loneliness of the deportee. It is an insidious kind of loneliness that begins in the small cracks of light between moments. It’s there when he uncaps his toothpaste in the morning. When his hands graze the strange coins in his pocket. It hangs over him all day, like an infection. Always, for Diego, there’s a question: When exactly was it that you became erased?

That wondering starts in the lilt of your Spanish. The grasping for common slang. The knowledge (or lack thereof) about who won the Apertura or the Clausura in the Mexican league soccer final last year. Then it grows to encompass broader knowledge. The name of the last Juan Gabriel album ever. Or the fact that El Divo de Juárez is dead, but a really good impersonator tricks people in Plaza Garibaldi sometimes. Or the fact that they don’t call machacado (a kind of dried beef) machacado in Mexico City (it’s just called machaca). Menudo is pancita. Oh yeah, and you can make quesadillas without queso now (just huitlacoche).

Maybe you were Mexican in an alternate universe, but not anymore. Maybe you were never who you thought you were.

It’s in moments like these that Diego remembers the first time he walked into Vivienne. It was like walking into some semblance of normalcy. Something built from and for the Mexican American gaze. Or maybe the American Mexican one. For Diego, a literal comfort zone. The Mexico of his own imagination.

Aliana was important to Diego, a lifeline. One of those rare people who flitted easily between both identities. American at heart, but Mexican enough to avoid the disdain many bourgeois Mexicans have for the Mexican American—tourists, roots-seekers, and deportees alike. Americanized Mexicans. Pochos. Gabachos. Sellouts. Breakers of a rigid class (or caste) structure as old as colonialism, as recent as neoliberal economic capitalism.

It’s common for deportees to be discriminated against in Mexico. Unsure of how to reintegrate into their Mexican lives, many deportees continue their American ones. They apply for university jobs similar to the ones they held pre-deportation. They demand higher wages, more support from their work, more support for their work if, like Diego, they work for themselves. But bourgeois Mexico has little patience for the Americanized Mexican. Or for the lower rung trying to break into the middle class. Or for the indigenous person trying to do the same. Diego, of course, checks all these boxes.

How is it, they wonder, that the deportee can speak better English than the private-school-studied-abroad children of engineers and diplomats? Who gave them those marketable skills they seem to just have? How did these people that Mexico let go find a way?

For many bourgeois Mexicans, it doesn’t add up. That disdain for the familiar other rings loud in the Mexican psyche. Think Ayotzinapa. Think Acteal. Think of the genocide of the Yaqui people in Sonora during the Porfiriato, or the entire colonial era before then.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Random House Inc
• Date d'édition: 2026
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0593596390
• ISBN 13: 9780593596395
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 272
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: Purmerul LTD; https://strengholt.nl/en/; ; 22 Liuleburgaz Str., floor 4, app. 9; Plovdiv; Bulgarie