maria, maria (marytza k rubio)

Rubio’s collection of short stories dabbles with the dark side. One particularly engrossing tale, Tijuca, deals with a woman taking her decapitated lover’s head and burying it in the jungle, according to his instructions. There’s a gothic beauty to this and other tales, many of which seem to emerge from the twisted soil of Calexico. Because these are tales from a lost land, the Mexican North America, a Chicano vision which folds the Yankee psyche into the stranger pulse from across the border, stretching down from the isthmus to the jungles of the Amazon. There was a time when the southern states of the USA belonged to a different consciousness, and in Rubio’s stories we get a glimpse of what that might have been.