American Visa (32 page)

Alvarez's odyssey speaks powerfully to the global debate surrounding citizenship and immigration in our post-9/11 world of ever-hardening visa and border enforcement policies. Like millions of others, he'll stop at nothing to make it to
El Norte.
Ultimately he decides to take the game beyond mere forgery to pull off the fraud.

In Latin American letters,
American Visa
is a by-product of the '90s, a period of intense reaction to magical realism and its forgotten generals, clairvoyant prostitutes, and epidemics of insomnia. Those fashionable elements were showcased in Gabriel García Márquez's
One Hundred Years of Solitude
, published in 1967, and were inspired in part by William Faulkner's wrenching depiction, in his fictional Yoknapatawpha, of the deep American South after the Civil War. Juan de Recacoechea, along with an entire generation, became allergic to these stories, finding them too remote, too ethereal. Instead, he prefers the dirty urban landscape of La Paz, where the only thing magical is one's talent to make ends meet.

In his style—sharp, acerbic, pungent, expressionistic—he follows another gringo: the Hemingway of “The Killers.” Like the author of
Death in the Afternoon,
Recacoechea went from journalism to fiction. I would describe his style as “picaresque noir.” His closest regional model is probably
realismo sucio
, the hard-boiled technique of the Mexican writer Paco Ignacio Taibo II, who is responsible for the one-eyed detective Héctor Belascoarán Shayne. Yet American crime fiction is Recacoechea's prime stimulation. His prose makes frequent references to Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Chester Himes, and to the movies based on their oeuvre.

I came to
American Visa
circuitously in 2004, when Adrian Althoff, a student of mine at Amherst College, conducted an independent study on Bolivia. We stumbled upon the novel and were immediately enthralled. Althoff translated the first twenty pages as his final project. A year later, a film adaptation, close in spirit to Recacoechea's fast-paced plot, reached the screens, directed by Juan Carlos Valdivia, with Demián Bichir playing Mario Alvarez. It was a coproduction between Bolivia and Mexico that received an Ariel, the Mexican equivalent of an Oscar, for best adapted screenplay, as well as a nomination to Kate del Castillo for best female actress in the role of Blanca.

Althoff was involved in the movie and subsequently completed his translation, at once faithful and free-flowing, lucidly recreating Recacoechea's voice in English. The book's publication in the United States is welcome news, not least because Bolivian fiction in translation is a rarity. The nation's three official languages are Spanish, Quechua, and Aymara. Less than a dozen Bolivian novels composed in Spanish have been rendered into Shakespeare's tongue, including Renato Prado Oropeza's
The Breach
and some of Edmundo Paz Soldán's cyber-narratives.

Yet unlike in these other works, in Recacoechea's book
la men-talidad
del subdesarrollo
, the so-called “Third World frame of mind,” is put to a test. It provides an extraordinary window on the tensions at the heart of Bolivian society, while entertaining at the same time. The novel's quiet yet forceful critique of the United States gives it a sense of urgency. The scene at the consulate early in the novel, in which the bureaucracy treats the native population with condescension and disrespect, helps to illuminate the ambivalence many Hispanics throughout the hemisphere nurture toward Americans. Can't live with you! Can't live without you! But I surely can live in you, says Alvarez, if only I can get across. Why not? Bolivia offers little to him. Or does it? His romance with Blanca triggers unexpected emotions, complicating his endeavors even further.

In all his ambiguities, Alvarez is one of us,
uno de los nuestros,
an immigrant—even at home—relying on the magic of his imagination to overcome adversity.

Ilan Stavans
Amherst, Massachusetts
February 2007

Words alone cannot express the thanks I owe to my mother,
Maria Angela Leal, for her invaluable editorial contributions
and her tireless love and support.
—A.A. (translator)

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