![]() ![]() When I left the border for college some years ago, I dreamed of permanent escape and, like Domingo Martinez, I turned to song to process my feelings. In this latest offering, he once more combines deft literary skill with a cultivated ear, this time producing a grunge-era narrative for the 21st century: ironic, confessional, caffeinated. ![]() That’s why My Heart is a Drunken Compass, Domingo Martinez’s second memoir - a whiskey-soaked, musically eclectic narrative - so catches my ear.Ĭonfronting his whitewashed American aspirations, and countering mainstream news about the Valley, Martinez narrates his borderland boyhood and Seattle misadventures - and reclaims South Texas from afar - through a stellar soundtrack. These news headlines, spun in print, on television, or on the web, portray my homeland as nothing more than hot, dry, flat, mute, and passive. Most Americans only hear about it when there are a few too many brown-skinned children fighting their way across its defining river too many corrupt US narcotics officers running their own hustles too many people there suffering from obesity. I KNOW the Rio Grande Valley it’s the loud, booming, tumultuous, South Texas borderland where I lived the first 18 years of my life. ![]()
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