Luis Aguilera was starting to get upset reading a review of his memoir, Gabriel’s Fire, in Publishers Weekly. For one thing, the review said Aguilera was once a gang member, when in fact a central theme of the book is his opposition to gangs and his disappointment when they started recruiting in the electronic “hip-house” music scene that was a mainstay of his late-80s youth.
In his case, he says, that category was barrio literature, which generally includes gritty tales of street life in the Mexican-American neighborhoods of New York, Chicago, and East LA. While the book-jacket copy asserts that “Gabriel’s Fire counters mainstream mass-mediated images of the inner city, Hispanic culture, and troubled youth,” those words would seem to place the work in the very territory they claim it transcends. It probably didn’t help that Aguilera obtained cover blurbs from Piri Thomas and fellow Chicagoan Luis Rodriguez, the standard-bearers of barrio lit.
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“When I read the book I saw it was written by someone with an extremely strong personality, almost to the point of vast overestimation of his worth,” Brent says. “There’s a certain cockiness and bravado, you could even say machismo, that comes through. But then that machismo transforms itself into something else in the course of the book, a kind of self-awareness of his own individuality and refusal to go along with the crowd.”
The epistolary format may work better for critics like the Publishers Weekly writer, who saw promise in Aguilera’s first book but disliked his heavy use of dialogue. Aguilera says the idea has been percolating in his brain for some time, and cites as influences John Locke’s “A Letter Concerning Toleration,” a 1689 treatise urging conscience and freedom of religion, and Paul’s biblical letters to the Corinthians and the Philippians.
