Mind Picker: The Jaguar's Children

When those Greeks were hiding in that horse they wanted to attack the city, and when the terrorists were hiding in those planes they wanted to attack the country, but when Mexicanos hide in a truck, what do they want to do? They want to pick the lettuce. And cut your grass. *

While on vacation in Cancun, my husband and I went on an excursion to Chichén Itzá, and as we were walking along a shady path, two Mexican men approached us to display the hand carved items they were selling. I've always assumed that it's polite to use “Resort Spanish” when speaking with locals (No, gracias; Dos cervezas, por favor; ¿Dónde está el baño?) but it took me a couple of exchanges to understand that one of these men was rapidly and quietly replying “That is not our language” to every one of our hackneyed Spanish phrases – and I was suddenly confused and afraid that we had been offending them and we ended up buying a rather large wooden jaguar's head. After reading The Jaguar's Children, I realise just how ignorant I had been – I had no idea that there were indigenous Mexicans who have refused to learn the language of the Conquistadors for the past 500 years, and also didn't realise that the item I thought was the most aesthetically pleasing – the jaguar's head – was likely their most sacred item; just another stereotypically dumb tourist mistaking the hallowed for kitsch.

Author John Vaillant has made his mark as a nonfiction writer on social justice themes – I loved The Tiger because of all the disparate information he was able to weave into a cohesive and suspenseful narrative – but in this, his first novel, I think that it was precisely his past successes that have hobbled him: by trying to graft a bunch of social justice issues onto a credibility-stretching plot device, Vaillant has lost the straightforwardness of the nonfiction form while not quite succeeding in creating satisfying literature here. To be honest, The Jaguar's Children is a bit of a mess; just because there's suffering doesn't mean it's deep.

The credibility-stretching plot device: We immediately learn that the narrator Héctor, along with 11 other people, has been abandoned in the tank of a modified water truck that broke down just over the Mexican-American border. Although the “coyotes” who took the sum of their American money to return with a mechanic have been gone for only a few hours as the book begins, Héctor and the others are panicking and trying to reach friends and family on their cell phones. When Héctor realises that he can get only one bar of service on his friend César's cell (César was knocked unconscious when the truck abruptly stopped), Héctor begins recording a series of messages (detailing the entire history of his own family and his relationship to César), hoping that they will automatically send if service improves. As hours stretch to over four days, not only does César's phone battery never run out, but as people start dying of dehydration, Héctor has the voice and stamina to continue recording for hours at a time. This cellphone business was unnecessarily distracting.

The social justice issues: In describing three generations of Héctor's family, Vaillant seems to be advocating for Primitivism or the "Appeal to Nature" Fallacy, as though modernization has been nothing but the death of Mexico. Héctor's grandfather – with nothing more than a machete and a burro – was able to provide everything his family needed out of the earth alone. Turning his back on what he saw as a form of slavery, Héctor's father chose to move into town – happy with a concrete house after his father's dirty adobe, happy to pay off a pickup truck instead of spending his life staring at the rear end of a burro, happy to wear shoes instead of walking on bare feet as thick as truck tires, happy to put himself in debt to a gangster to scrabble his way up in the world – and he insisted on Héctor getting an education in order to someday make his way to el Norte. Although Vaillant mentions a couple of times that ever since NAFTA was implemented young Mexican men have had no choice but to sneak into the US, because it is a novel, he doesn't explain why this might be so. The issue of illegal Mexican immigration – and the desperate steps that some will take to make it across the border – is timely and worthy of examination, but in this book we never learn what circumstances turn people desperate; we only learn of Héctor's and César's motivations, and they're not typical. In another grafted on storyline, we learn that César was a biotech researcher who is on the run after trying to expose the evils of GMO corn (again, an appeal to nature fallacy as there is no science behind this anti-science storyline) and Héctor was simply swept up in the flight – neither of them ever wanted to go to America, so why are theirs the only stories we hear?

But what I know for sure is that the ritual of corn – the cycle of planting, harvesting, saving and planting again – that is the rosary of our existence, unbroken, every kernel a bead touched by someone's hand, and we are telling those beads, and they are telling us, who we are, over and over, season after season, year after year – not in a circle, Tito, but in a spiral, a double helix. Can you see that? One side is us and the other is the corn. In that DNA is the oldest manmade codex. I have read it myself and in every kernel is a message from the past to the future – the story of us, and that's what I'm trying to understand. **

Vaillant's writing is fine but crippled by an ineffectual structure. I understand that he spent a year in the Oaxaca setting where he put Héctor's family, and his affection for the region and its people is apparent. The Jaguar's Children might have worked better as two separate novels– one about how modernization is changing the lives of Indo-Mexicans who had successfully held back the influence of Cortés for half a millennium, and another about those Mexicans who risk their lives to cross the American border (parts set in the truck as people are suffering were really engaging but there was not enough time devoted to these people and their histories as we had to learn about how Héctor's grandparents met) – or Vaillant might have been better off sticking to the nonfiction format that he does so well. I'd rate this 2.5 stars and am feeling generous in rounding up.

*Talking about social justice, with the first quote above, should I be a bit offended that Héctor is arguing that Mexicans are just as courageous as the Greek army or the 9/11 terrorists? The next line in the book is: There are brave fighters in my country, I swear, but most of them are dead or working for the narcos. Draw your own conclusions about moral equivalence.

**Does the second quote – in which Héctor is relaying César's anti-GMO speech – sound like someone speaking into a cell phone's message recorder? Would someone switch points of view while relaying a conversation like this?

*****

I read The Jaguar's Children because it is a finalist for the 2015 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. I'm such a sucker for literary shortlists:

The 2015 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize nominees:

André Alexis - Fifteen Dogs

Elizabeth Hay - His Whole Life

Pamela Mordecai Red Jacket