Gonzalez & Daughter Trucking Co.
Maria Amparo Escandon, 2005
Crown Publishing
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781400097357
Summary
Serving a sentence in a prison in Mexico, Libertad Gonzalez finds a clever way to pass the time with the weekly Library Club, reading to her fellow inmates from whatever books she can find in the prison’s meager supply.
The story that emerges, though, has nothing to do with the words printed on the pages. She tells of a former literature professor and fugitive of the Mexican government who reinvents himself as a trucker in the United States. There he falls in love with a wild woman with whom he shares his truck and his life—that is until Joaquin Gonzalez unexpectedly finds himself alone on the road with a baby girl and Gonzalez & Daughter Trucking Co. is born.
Joaquin and his daughter make the cab of an 18-wheeler their home, sharing everything—adventures, books, truck-stop chow, and memories of the girl’s mother—until one day the girl grows into a woman, and a chance encounter with one man causes her to rebel against another.
With her stories, Libertad enthralls a group of female prisoners every bit as eccentric as the tales she tells. In Gonzalez and Daughter Trucking Co., bestselling author Maria Amparo Escandon seamlessly blends together these elements into one compelling and unexpected conclusion that will have you cheering for Libertad and filled with joy. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—June 19, 1957
• Where—Mexico City, Mexico
• Education—N/A
• Awards—Film awards for Santitos (see below)
• Currently—lives in Los Angeles, California, USA
Maria Amparo Escandon is a Mexican born, US resident, best-selling bilingual novelist, short story writer, screenwriter, and film producer. Her award-winning work is known for addressing bicultural themes that deal with the immigration experience of Mexicans crossing over to the United States.
Her stories concentrate on family relationships, loss, forgiveness, faith, and self-discovery. A linguist with a sharp ear for dialogue, she explores the dynamics of language in border sub-cultures and the evolution of Spanglish. Her innovative style of multiple voice narrations and her cleverly humorous, quirky, and compassionate stories with a feminine angle capture the magical reality of everyday life and place her among the top Latin American female writers. Her work has been translated into over 21 languages and is currently read in more than 85 countries.
Short Stories
Maria Amparo Escandon developed her career in the early 1970s during the Latin American Boom. Her first published short story appeared in the Mexican literary journal Plural in 1973 when she was sixteen. The works of masters Julio Cortazar, Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes, Juan Rulfo, Pablo Neruda, Mario Benedetti, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Alejo Carpentier, and others influenced her work. Convinced that men had better opportunities to succeed as writers than women, she wrote her first short stories from the male perspective. It was until she moved to Los Angeles in 1983 when she discovered women writers like Toni Morrison and Sandra Cisneros that she shifted her perspective and focused on women's issues and the Mexican American experience in the US.
Novels
Living in California, Escandon began to view her culture of origin from an expatriate distance that provided her a deeper analysis of ingrained traditions, like the Mexicans' unique practice of Catholicism influenced by Pre-Columbian beliefs, women's position in society, female identity, illegal immigration, US-Mexico relations, and government corruption, all topics that she later drew on to write her novels and non-fiction work.
Her first novel published in 1999, Esperanza's Box of Saints (Santitos—Spanish version), deals with the universal fear of losing a child, with a woman's search for identity and a journey—both geographical and spiritual—that take Esperanza, the lead character, through sordid brothels throughout Mexico and into Los Angeles. Escandon's novel achieved the number one spot on the Los Angeles Times best sellers list. Both Newsweek (1999) and Los Angeles Times (2000) named her the writer to watch.
Gonzalez & Daughter Trucking Co., (Transportes Gonzalez e Hija—Spanish version) her second novel, was published in 2005. It is set in a Mexican prison and the roads of America. It deals with women's relationships, guilt, crime, passion, corruption and forgiveness in a context of a hybrid border culture. In this novel Escandon approaches her personal relationship with her own father who died of a heart attack three days after she finished writing her manuscript. She addresses paternal possessiveness and gender double standards in the Mexican society. The novel also reflects a linguistic reality in bicultural California exploring the vernacular merge of Spanish and English (Spanglish), as well as different sub-culture lingoes.
Aside from teaching Creative Writing at UCLA Extension, Escandon has been an advisor at the Sundance Screenwriters Labs in Mexico and Brazil, as well as at the Fundacion Contenidos de Creacion Fiction Workshops in Barcelona, and participates as a mentor for young upcoming minority writers at the PEN Center's Emerging Voices Program. Additionally, she is one of the original members of Frijolywood, the official Mexican Filmmakers' association in Hollywood.
Film career
Escandon wrote the screenplay Santitos, based on her novel Esperanza’s Box of Saints at the Sundance Screenwriters Lab. The film was produced by John Sayles and directed in Mexico by Alejandro Springall. The film was the third largest grossing Mexican film in Mexico in 1999 and was successfully released in Spain and Latin America in January 2000.
To date, the film has received awards in 14 film festivals around the world, such as the Latin Cinema Award at the Sundance Film Festival, Best Film at the Guadalajara Film Festival, Best Actress at the Latin American Film Festival in Lima, Peru, Best Film at the Los Angeles Latino Film Festival, Best Actress at the Festival International du Film d'Amiens, Best Film at the Santa Fe International Film Festival, Grand Jury Award at the Cartagena International Film Festival, Best Opera Prima at the Heraldos Awards in Mexico, Special Jury Award at the Rencontres Cinemas de Toulouse, and Best Opera Prima by the Critique Francaise (Decouverte de la Critique Francaise).
Escandon has recently completed the screenplay based on her novel Gonzalez & Daughter Trucking Co. and the film is currently in active development at her own production company, The Other Truth Productions.
Wings for the Soul
In addition to her writing career, Escandon launched the first-ever prison book club and author series in 2005, Wings for the Soul, at the California Institution for Women in Corona, CA, made possible by the Women and Criminal Justice Network. Wings for the Soul gave inmates the opportunity to meet four times a year to read and discuss a particular book with the author. The books were primarily written by and about women. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
(This work has few mainstream press reviews online. See Amazon or Barnes & Noble for helpful customer reviews.)
[A] semi-surreal tale of Libertad Gonzalez, imprisoned in the Mexicali Penal Institute for Women...[who] decides to start a book club.... This highly readable novel is a paean both to storytelling and to freedom. —Joanne Wilkinson
Booklist
Discussion Questions
1. Warden Guzmán takes advantage of her position for her own gain and is sometimes motivated by her desire for money rather than her strict responsibilities as a warden,but she also displays an understanding of her prisoners that leads her to recognize Chapopota’s rehabilitation and at times, also kindness. How much do you think the warden cares about the women under her watch? Is her system, such as it is, effective in promoting the inmates’ welfare?
2. When Libertad is greeted at the prison gates by her father and Martin, the inmates remark that Martin is not handsome enough to be the man in the story—revealing that Libertad’s account of her past in Library Club is perhaps not the strictest truth. Are there any other parts of her story you would doubt? Is there anything you suspect she’s left out?
3. What portion of the Library Club do you think believes that Libertad’s story is a work of fiction? Are those that believe she is truly reading from books written by others gullible to believe this, or is this a willful delusion?
4. The book begins with Libertad’s wish that she could bring back all the people she killed. What was your initial impression of her crime? How did our suspicions evolve over the course of the book?
5. Was Libertad’s arranging to have her father beaten an act of kindness, or was there some malice involved? Do you think she forgave him for his mistakes?
6. Many of the women in the prison seem to have invented names to use in prison. What does this say about the culture in the prison? What do the inmates’ names—Matriarca, Maciza, Diva, Libertad—say about the women themselves?
7. How do you envision Libertad’s life after her release? Will her relationship with Martin be happy? Will she continue on the road? How do you think her relationship with her father will change?
8. Do you think Maciza will be a good mother to her son, Pollito? Why or why not?
9. When the Vietnamese prisoners ask to stay in prison rather than go free, the warden is unsurprised. In fact, this is not the first time in the course of the book that a woman has made such a request. Why would they want to remain incarcerated? What do they—and what do you—find appealing about the prison?
10. When Libertad saw high heels in Martin’s tidied-up house, what do you think the real story was? Was there another woman? Is that, as Libertad explains it, only natural given her own long absence and silence, or is there a more innocuous explanation?
(Questions issued by publisher.)