{"product_id":"dispatches-from-puerto-nowhere-isbn-9781953387240","title":"Dispatches From Puerto Nowhere","description":"\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eThat I was born Puerto Rican was happenstance, but that I have no connection to what it means is no accident. My grandparents made conscious decisions and so did my father as part of the first generation born here in the States. And none of it bothered me until recently, which is probably why I can’t quite put my finger on any of this. I’m still grappling with what I’ve lost and how I can miss something I’ve never had.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRobert Lopez’s grandfather Sixto was born in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico, in 1904, immigrating to the United States in the 1920s, where he lived in a racially proportioned apartment complex in East New York, Brooklyn, until his death in 1987. The family’s efforts to assimilate within their new homeland led to the near complete erasure of their heritage, culture, and language within two generations.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Little is known of Sixto—he may have been a longshoreman, a painter, or a boxer, but was most likely a longshoreman—or why he originally decided to leave Puerto Rico, other than that he was a meticulously slow eater who played the standup keyboard and guitar, and enjoyed watching baseball. Through family recollection, the constant banter volleyed across nets within Brooklyn’s diverse tennis community, as well as an imagined fabulist history drawn from Sixto’s remembered traits, in \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eDispatches From Puerto Nowhere: An American Story of Assimilation and Erasure\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e, Robert Lopez paints a compassionate portrait of family that attempts to bridge the past to the present, and re-claim a heritage threatened by assimilation and erasure.\"[A] fascinating memoir about reckoning with the legacy of his Puerto Rico-born grandfather, and trying to rediscover the heritage that his family lost through two generations in the U.S.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Michael Schaub, Los Angeles Daily News\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Original and fearless... In this not-quite-a-memoir exploration of his life as an 'assimilated' Puerto Rican, Lopez uses dispatches—some hilarious, others heartbreaking—to explain and interrogate his life to an unknown recipient who could very well be himself. Imagine messages in a bottle written by an extremely talented and thoughtful explorer of a land called assimilation. This is a sharply written, incisive, and extremely engaging meditation on assimilation that will strike a painful chord with many who have suffered from the same erasure of their culture in this country.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Daniel A. Olivas, Latino Book Review\u003c\/b\u003e\"A masterpiece clear and honest and alive to the world and its contradictions. Dispatches From Puerto Nowhere will hit you where you live.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Justin Torres, author of We the Animals\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"In this memoir, a descendant of Puerto Rican migrants examines how migration and gentrification have shaped Brooklyn and reflects on the dearth of family history that has left him with 'permanent amnesia, local and global.'\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—New York Times\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"These dispatches correct each other, question each other, answer each other, and complete each other. What does Robert Lopez dispatch here? Any easy or romantic notion of kinship, ethnicity, and nationality. This book is an ode to what we don’t know about ourselves.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Eula Biss, author of Having and Being Had, On Immunity, and Notes From No Man's Land\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"How to resurrect a self from the ashes of family history? When there is so little to go on? If you are a storyteller like Lopez, you tell stories. You manifest ghosts. Some of the most vibrant of his dispatches are fabulist flashes of his grandfather, Sixto, a gifted musician, busking on the streets in Mayaguez in 1918, scraping together enough for a hot, meaty empanadilla in the afternoon sun.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Sara Lippmann, Chicago Review of Books\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Lopez’s nonfiction debut is simple in form but chock-full of complexity: his fragmented family history is sprinkled with loss and longing and parades and boxing bouts and tennis matches and myths and misquotes and vaporous memories. In telling his family’s story, Lopez is, in some sense, telling this nation’s story.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Alyssa Oursler, Electric Literature\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"A portrait of someone caught in a liminal space between cultures and identities. It’s a rich and soulful memoir about how much gets lost in assimilation, how to sit with unknowability, and how we define our character as we move through the world.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Emerson Malone, Buzzfeed\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Robert Lopez’s Dispatches From Puerto Nowhere is a stunningly powerful work of family recollection on his grandfather, Sixto, his immigration to the United States in the 1920s, and the effort to assimilate that nearly erased the family’s heritage, culture, and language in just two generations.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Michael Welch, Chicago Review of Books\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003eRobert Lopez\u003c\/b\u003e is the author of three novels, \u003ci\u003ePart of the World\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eKamby Bolongo Mean River\u003c\/i\u003e, named one of 25 important books of the decade by \u003ci\u003eHTML Giant\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eAll Back Full\u003c\/i\u003e; two story collections, \u003ci\u003eAsunder\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eGood People\u003c\/i\u003e, and a novel-in-stories titled \u003ci\u003eA Better Class of People\u003c\/i\u003e. His fiction, nonfiction, and poetry has appeared in dozens of publications, including \u003ci\u003eBomb\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Threepenny Review\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eVice Magazine\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eNew England Review\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Sun\u003c\/i\u003e, and the \u003ci\u003eNorton Anthology of Sudden Fiction – Latino\u003c\/i\u003e. He teaches at Stony Brook University and has previously taught at Columbia University, The New School, Pratt Institute, and Syracuse University. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.","brand":"Two Dollar Radio","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48233094807781,"sku":"NP9781953387240","price":26.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781953387240.jpg?v=1767725245","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/dispatches-from-puerto-nowhere-isbn-9781953387240","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}