They Call You Back: A Lost History, a Search, a Memoir by Tim Z. Hernandez (review)

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Reviewed by:

• They Call You Back: A Lost History, a Search, a Memoir by Tim Z. Hernandez
• Gary Paul Nabhan (bio)

They Call You Back: A Lost History, a Search, a Memoir By Tim Z. Hernandez 2024, 272 pages University of Arizona Press, Tucson ISBN 978-0-8165-5361-7

Poet, oral historian, and storyteller Tim Z. Hernandez was honored in 2014 with an International Latino Book Award in historical fiction for Mañana Means Heaven and a Colorado Book Award for his poetry collection Natural Takeover of Small Things, but his searingly sad and beautiful nonfiction narrative They Call You Back is sure to remain in the cultural memory of the U.S./Mexico borderlands for many more decades, perhaps centuries. Its lasting value is because Hernandez has palpably felt and stared collective intergenerational grief right in the eyes and survived its debilitating trance.

What superficially appears to be a sequel to his widely acclaimed 2017 book All They Will Call You—about the aftermath of the 1948 plane wreck at Los Gatos Canyon that songster Woody Guthrie made famous—is, and will remain, much more than that. Although the book seems to use the 2013 memorial for the victims of the worst plane wreck in California as its point of departure, the narrative weaves back and forth in space and time. It not only weaves in the story of Bea Franco, Jack Kerouac's Chicana lover who was the inspiration for Terry in On the Road, and that of the 2019 racially motivated mass killing at a Walmart in East El Paso, it also tells of trauma in the Hernandez family over four generations.

Tim's own story blurs and bleeds into the others he has researched for two decades, as he absorbs the traumas of others, as many healers have done over the ages, before he spits them out onto the pages of his [End Page 285] skillfully integrated narrative. Although the short vignettes at first seem unrelated, they morph into a stunning whole that is so obviously greater than the sum of its parts.

In this manner, what initially may seem to be chance encounters, uncanny coincidences, and bizarre convergences become a larger, more cohesive explanation of the Latinx experience in western North America. Rather than coldly analyzing the "dysfunctions" that emerge from intergenerational traumas, he guides you inside them, and you see what author Gregory Boyle calls "tattoos on the heart." You might say they are not dysfunctions at all, but part and parcel of adaptations that many among us have desperately relied upon merely to survive in a hostile environment.

There is something both raw and tender in many of the parables in this book. Yes, there is also anger, disillusionment, and loss, but hope crawls up out of the cauldron of despair and becomes sacramental among those whom Hernandez has come to know and love as family on both sides of the border.

If any storyteller of his generation deserves the moniker of national treasure, Tim Z. Hernandez has earned that distinction by helping countless descendants of those who died in the Los Gato plane crash to heal after three-quarters of a century of estrangement from those dumped unnamed in the largest mass grave in the U.S. in the post–World War II era.

I am humbled, awed, and grateful for the difficult work he has undertaken on behalf of the untold number of families who live within the Borderlands. [End Page 286]

Gary Paul Nabhan

Gary Paul Nabhan is Research Social Scientist Emeritus in the Southwest Center, University of Arizona, Tucson.

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