The book is well titled, set as it is at the US-Mexico border, depicting the lives of the Lopez family whose circumstances and opportunities are determined by the border to no little extent. We first meet our protagonist, Ramon, as a child, following his father from Brownsville, USA, across the border to Mexico where they visit the family ranch. Grand as this sounds, all through Ramon’s childhood, he is aware his father is just scraping by, “Usually, his conversations revolved around selling tires and scraping together enough money to make the house payments or keep the lights turned on at the ranch” (p5). Already in this first scene, we realise Ramon’s father is a generous man, he buys a box of donuts when he visits the ranch where his cousin, Primo Fernandez, looks after the ranch in exchange for free housing for his family and brood of many children. And already, although Ramon does not realise it properly through a child’s eyes, his father is an unsung hero, because he smuggles Fernandez’s wife and very sick baby illegally through to the USA where they can access medical facilities that saves baby Emilia’s life.
Ramon’s father makes a living from capping tires he buys cheap in Mexico and transporting them across the border to sell in USA.
Sometimes, my dad knew the agent. He’d been crossing back and forth his whole life, ferrying tires across for years. He’d gone to high school with some of them, their parents knew each other (p11)
Ramon and his father are both American citizens, but many of their relatives are not, and live on the Mexican side of the border. Ramon also makes a small business at school, selling packets of chile powder children like to eat in his expensive private school, which he buys in bulk when he is on one of the across-the-border trips with his father. It is clear that the border provides a livelihood to many who live around it.
Their identities are also equally dual, both Mexican and American, speaking both English and Spanish easily, much as I imagine is also true of the author, who is himself “a bi-lingual native of the US-Mexico border”, the blurb tells us. When things go wrong, as they did for Ramon’s dad, and his house in US was foreclosed, Mexico provides the backup plan. Ramon’s father moves his family back across the border to Mexico, where he said things are cheaper, in order to rebuild his business and to start a new business. Ramon protests
“But we’re American.” They stared at me as if I’d just descended from the moon with Neil Armstrong’s star-spangled banner in hand. “We were Mexican first,” He schooled me. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. We’re Mexican American. We’re both. We can live here. We can live there. It doesn’t change who we are” (p78).
To teenaged Ramon, this move back to Mexico was unthinkable, and he insisted on staying on the US side, living with his paternal grandmother, while his dad, mum, and baby brother moved back close to Abuelita Carmel, his maternal grandmother. In this story, it is clear how important family ties are to this community: there are 5 Lopez brothers, and as the eldest, Ramon’s father tries to look after all the rest, even allowing his baby brother, Bobby, to swindle him of a lot of money, bankrupt him, and all without so much as reproach. Ramon’s dad also functions culturally as Mexican, while believing in the American dream:
“My dad adhered to his own warped perception of the American financial system. He believed as long as the bill was paid then the debtor’s honor was preserved. The timeline for such payment was irrelevant” (p65).
The gender divide in this community still seems very archaic, and the macho culture very much in evident. When Ramon’s father’s new business in limes fails, his mum and wife step in to use the unsold and not-yet-rotted limes to make key lime pies for sale,
“Who would have thought? After all of the misguided entrepreneurial efforts of the Lopez men – including my own brief stint as a chile powder dealer – it took the ladies to get it right” (p193)
Likewise, Ramon thinks of his Grandma Fina in terms of her gendered roles only: She
“was afterall…a full fledged abuela, a Mexican grandmother, a woman who’d proven her mettle by raising no just her own children, but also a grandchild or two for good measure” (p77)
Even as he recognises her strength and leans into her for protection and for a roof over his head, he acknowledges
“No descendants of hers would ever find themselves without a place to call home, without a patch of dirt to pledge allegiance” (p92)
but still sees her in her grandmother role. It takes an outsider, like his girlfriend from New York, to point out how much the womenfolk of his family do: she tells Ramon’s long-suffering mother,
“You’re a special needs caregiver, a homemaker, a wife, and a businesswoman with a blossoming catering company. Most importantly, you’re a mother, and a good one at that, from everything Ramon has told me” (p179)
Ramon is instantly worried how his father would react to such praise for his mother.
“All eyes turned to him. The Lopez men were notoriously mercurial. Would his macho side lash out at all his praise being heaped on his typically under-the-radar wife? Or would he manage to get through the moment without embarrassing us all in front of our honoured guest from New York?” (P179)
We soon find out that Ramon consistently underestimates and undervalues his father.
“Slowly, my father rose from is seat at the far end of the table, resolutely knit his eyebrows together, and glowered at us all. “Este mujer, this woman…” he motioned with his beer bottle in my mother’s direction, “…is a saint. My sons and I have been blessed by her. !Salud!” He raised the beer in my mother’s honor” (p180)
Ramon is a gifted student and artist and wins an art scholarship that takes him out of his poverty and into a charmed life in New York. It is not until he returns to Brownsville that he realises all his father had been and had done, and learns anew just what an unsung hero he had been, even in such destitution, despair, and poverty.
Ramon’s father comes across strongly at the end of the novel, not just as a man who is destined to endless business failure after failure and always being over optimistic and poor judging, but as a man of immense dignity, resources, self-confidence, and man who sticks to his principles and does not ask the cost of it. Ramon realises
“My whole life, all I had obsessed about – and focused on accomplishing – were my selfish, materialistic goals. All I had yearend for – and strived for – was a superficial American Dream wrapped up in financial success and public recognition. I had mistakenly believed that my father was fixated on the same kind of shallow objectives, but suddenly […] I understood that my father had worked relentlessly not for himself, but for those who depended on him. His life had not been devoted to creating personal glory, but to serving those he loved, as well as those who had no means to produce on their own account” (p233)
These ringing words of course are part of the bildungsroman of the novel, the protagonist who goes on a journey and learns about himself. And the novel ends on a happily ever after note, with Ramon miraculously bringing success out of ruin, and becoming selfless in the footsteps of his father.
Despite the book not being particularly surprising or unusual, it is so well written that it effortlessly engages the reader from page 1, and one is drawn into Ramon’s life and reality, given such good glimpses of how things function in the school, outside school, in the family, in the landscape of a border person. A charming read, and I hope to encounter many more of Ruiz’s novels in future.
The Border Between Us
Rudy Ruiz
Blackstone Publishing, 2024
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