Jaime Cortez Reads from his Award-Winning Story Collection: Gordo

Please join us Saturday, September 9th from 5-6:30pm for a conversation with Jaime Cortez, author of Gordo and Carolyn Cooke.

What if David Sedaris and Richard Rodriguez were the same person? What if it was possible to tell stories about farmworkers and Latinx rural people with hilarity, queerness, tenderness, and poetic precision? What if Jaime Cortez existed and had a book coming out and you were lucky enough to read it in a few months’ time?

- Rebecca Solnit

About Gordo

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Shedding profound natural light on the inner lives of migrant workers, Jaime Cortez’s debut collection ushers in a new era of American literature that gives voice to a marginalized generation of migrant workers in the West.

The semi-autobiographical stories in Gordo are set in farm worker camps and farm towns near Watsonville, California in the 1970s.

In this hardscrabble environment, a young and probably gay boy called Gordo grows up. In one story, he dons a wrestler’s mask and throws fists with a boy in the neighborhood, fighting his own tears as he tries to grow into the idea of manhood so imposed on him. As he comes of age, Gordo learns about sex, watches the drunken brawls of his father and his friends, and discovers the distinctions between documented and undocumented immigrants.

These scenes from Steinbeck Country, seen so intimately from within, are full of humor, family drama, and a sweet frankness about serious matters – who belongs to America and how are they treated? Written with balance and poise, Cortez braids together elegant and inviting stories about life on a California farm worker camp, in essence redefining what all-American means.

About the Author

Jaime Cortez is a writer and visual artist based in Watsonville, California, and the San Francisco Bay Area. In addition to Gordo, his fiction, essays, and drawings have appeared in diverse publications that include "Kindergarde: Experimental Writing For Children" (edited 2013 by Dana Teen Lomax for Black Radish Press), "No Straight Lines," a 40-year compendium of LGBT comics (edited 2012 by Justin Hall for Fantagraphics Press), "Street Art San Francisco" (edited 2009 by Annice Jacoby for Abrams Press), and "Infinite Cities," an experimental atlas of San Francisco (edited 2010 by Rebecca Solnit for UC Berkeley Press). He wrote and illustrated the graphic novel "Sexile" for AIDS Project Los Angeles in 2003.

For more event info contact ccooke@ciis.edu.