Book Reviews
The Voting Booth After Dark: Despicable, Embarrassing, Repulsive
Vanessa Libertad Garcia has come up with an inventive way to tell us stories of disgruntled Latino youths trying to find a voice during the election of “change’ in 2008 with her book : The Voting Booth After Dark: Despicable, Embarrassing, Repulsive.
The Voting Booth After Dark: Despicable, Embarrassing, Repulsive
72 pp. Fiat Libertad
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Garcia, who besides writing fiction books is also an independent filmmaker, weaves the different genres of short stories, poems and instant messaging to tell her tale. As you read each chapter you slowly find out who these Latino youth are: disgruntled, struggling, gay and questioning. Each brief chapter is a story in itself, yet the chapters relate smoothly to each other in how they each give further illumination to this disenfranchised group.
Using brief and concise narrative with dark poetic phrasing you can sense the desperation of Garcia’s Latino youth from the fired T Mobile employee using his last check to get high to the Latino Lesbian that can’t wait to get drunk until her AA sponsor calls to the guy who makes purses from road kill.
And though the book can be about any young demographic the voices are clearly Latino: “When we realized we were neither the Natives nor the English colonialists of our history books. But we were somehow still Americans.”
In spite of their addictions and daily struggles they are affected by the political happenings of the time – an affirmation that even in small pockets of America the sounds of change were being heard. The election of 2008 made some of these Latino youth want to work on their future while the country was working on theirs: “The New World feels new again.” This point is brought home in the ‘Anguish’ chapter one of our favorite.
There’s even some witty political commentary, such as the bit about Sarah Palin sending “feminism 5 decades back.”
The 72 page-book is a quick and dark read with a unique literary style. If you want to take the Cliff Notes approach to finding out about disenfranchised Latino gay youth this is the book for you.
