José Skinner’s father was a carpetbagging scoundrel from Mississippi who raised and moved his family all over Latin America before settling in Mexico City for the first 12 years of Skinner’s life.
Then the patriarch doublecrossed his business partners and ran off to the Caribbean to work for an infamous con man.
Meanwhile, his mom fled to Tijuana with her four kids – none U.S. citizens at the time – to sneak across the border. “It was easy enough,” Skinner says in his characteristically wry tone, “since we were the right color and spoke English.”
Back then, if you could say “U.S. citizen” without looking or sounding too Mexican, the border agents would usually wave you through. And Skinner’s Anglo identity and accent – albeit with strong dashes of Mexican and Chicano – is good enough to pass on both sides, much like the heroine of his new book, The Search Committee.
The author and Alienated Majesty Books co-owner’s first novel is a biting borderland satire that starts in South Texas, where faculty at the fictional Bravo University try to vet Minerva Mondragón, a young, headstrong Chicana, for a tenure track position in the ever-austere humanities. Her specialty: cross-cultural border studies.
It’s a world the author knows all too well, having spent 12 years developing the bilingual MFA program at the University of Texas-Pan American (now UT Rio Grande Valley). He was approached by La Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León in northern Mexico in the early Aughts to create an exchange program for writers, but in 2006, Felipe Calderón won the presidency and imported the United States’ War on Drugs, kickstarting the brutally murderous narco wars.
Subsequent safety concerns canceled any such considerations, but also spawned the germ of Skinner’s book, set sometime between 2006 and 2019, “where the richest country in the world butted up against the developing world, with all the cultural hybridity you’d expect,” he writes.
“Minnie” is also held back by the men in her life – from her violent ex to her academic mentor to the lonely assistant professor who tries to impress her for both professional and hopefully romantic reasons. She’s surrounded by a bunch of grabby dudes who see her only as a means to their self-centered ends, sorely underestimating her powers, mental and otherwise.
“Yes, the patriarchy is alive and well, I’m afraid,” Skinner admits. “But the Minervas [of the world] know how to punch back.”
At heart, Minerva is an underdog, and like most people, Skinner roots for the underdog. Unlike most, he actually puts skin in the game. He tried to teach the Sandinistas sustainable farming in Nicaragua after college before they suggested he report on their revolution and help organize the political resistance on this side of the border. Then he helped borderland migrants and minorities as a translator in Albuquerque courtrooms. And more recently, he and his better half, Melynda Nuss, stepped in to rescue and revive a much loved, independent book store and infused it with their revolutionary spirit. They dubbed the shop, formerly Malvern Books, Alienated Majesty, from a quote by one of Skinner’s favorite American thinkers, Ralph Waldo Emerson.
“If the authoritarians are going to start cracking down on universities, and they’re going to try to squelch actual thinking, then we want to have a place [for it],” Skinner declares. “If our institutions are just going to crumble or roll over – firing pro-Palestinian professors and locking up foreign students and deporting whoever they want. We are not going to take down our Palestinian books. Or our queer books. Sorry, they’re staying. We’ll get more!”Skinner will discuss The Search Committee at the South Texas Book Festival in McAllen in October. After that, he says he really should finish a memoir where his loco dad would definitely be “bizarre exhibit #1.” I, for one, cannot wait.