"The Daniels: Part Two" by Matthew Frye Castillo
Read Part One — about the writers Daniel Chacón and Daniel Olivas — here!
Part 3: Daniel Alarcón
While Chicanos Daniel Chacón and Daniel Olivas were born in California, Daniel Alarcón was born in Lima. His family fled Peru when he was two, and he grew up in Alabama before studying anthropology at Columbia University and fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His stories often portray the muted violence of everyday life: the joy and entrapments of intimate relations, the gradual self-betrayals and unexpected last stands.
Alarcón’s first collection of stories, War by Candlelight (2005) was recognized with a Whiting Award. His novels have also received wide-spread acclaim: Lost City Radio (2007), about a radio program for disappeared people during a civil war, and At Night We Walk in Circles (2013), about a traveling circus troupe performing for countryside peasants.
Alarcón is also a radio producer and a frequent contributor to The New Yorker. In 2012, he co-founded Radio Ambulante, a Spanish-language podcast distributed by NPR. In 2020, he became the executive producer for El Hilo, a popular weekly news podcast that sees downloads in the millions for its stories from around Latin America. Alarcón received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2021.
Studying any of Alarcón’s short stories tells you why his work has been so lauded. Take “Abraham Lincoln Has Been Shot,” a relatively slender story of eleven pages from his most recent collection, The King Is Always Above the People (2017). This story follows the breakup of a middle-aged gay couple, Manuel and Hank, after they’re fired from their jobs at a call center. Hank – conniving, wayward, passive aggressive – tries to hurt Manuel by referencing his first great love: Abraham Lincoln. The story then toggles between Manuel remembering his utopic relationship with the 16th President of the United States and Hank and Manuel driving toward an unspecified location.
This anachronistic flight of fancy works for several reasons. Alarcón grounds the reader in the present: televisions provide faint light in dark corners; Manuel and Hank drive through the Southwest desert in a jalopy; Lincoln smokes cigarettes instead of pipes and rides a fixed-gear bike (not popular until the early 1900s). There are hardly any 19th century references, with the exception of Ford’s Theater. Manuel says that “For the duration of the war I had wandered around the country, looking for work.” But the exact war is nameless. Half of the story is set in a bar. As Manuel is tipsy — and Hank is definitively sauced — one wonders what is real and what is a dream. Is Lincoln what Hank used to be in younger years? Are the lovers actually the same person? To what extent is Manuel incorrectly or unfairly reading Hank’s expressions? Manuel is searching for the truth of his relationship with Hank, and our narrator’s bleariness at a bar reflects the layered opacities in assessing any profound and complicated relationship.
Alarcón’s descriptions and the gestures he chooses for his characters apply to the 1850s as well as the 2020s. Manuel recalls a morning where Lincoln said he was really a poet, but he had to make a living somehow so statesmen would have to do:
“[Lincoln] was sitting naked in a chair in my room when he said it, smoking a cigarette and cleaning the dust from his top hat with a wooden toothbrush. And he was fragile: his ribs showed even then. We were together almost a year. In the mornings, I would comb out his beard for him, softly, always softly, and Lincoln would purr like a cat.”
This scene could happen to any happy hipster couple in present-day Brooklyn: lovers talking about employment versus passion; sitting around intimately and caring for each other. It never feels like we’re reading about a character from the 19th century. At the same time, it’s difficult to dislodge the knowledge that the title character is, in fact, a historical figure. The result is a pleasantly discordant feeling where readers have to ask themselves what to make of this couple who is contemporary but not, and whether, in encountering fictional personas, one’s sense of history changes.
“Abraham Lincoln Has Been Shot” is unique among Alarcón’s work. Alarcón has published both realistic stories (“Third Avenue Suicide,” “Lima, Peru, July 28, 1979”) and surreal stories (“The Auroras,” “City of Clowns”) but “Abraham Lincoln…” is his only story to focus on queer characters, to feature a historical figure, and to bend time and history in truly fantastical ways. While a departure from most of his stories, “Abraham Lincoln…” demonstrates Alarcón’s sheer range and formidable gifts. It also returns to many of the themes that haunt him: the contrasting needs of time and memory, psychosocial violence, bravery and cowardice.
Each of these themes are present in “Abraham Lincoln.” You can see them with the motif of wheels. Near the beginning of the story, Hank says: “Together, we’re a mess. And now the wheels have come off, Manuel.” He believes that once the beauty of something has been enjoyed, it must be abandoned. Hank adds that this is a “law” he cannot be blamed for following. Manuel infers that Hank is trying to break up, but is too cowardly to say so.
Hank is a frustrating character. He doesn’t know himself and resents any demand to take a position. He often puts himself in scenarios where he has to apologize. He likes being the center of attention and ignores when his jokes grate on others. He is a “beautiful man,” Manuel allows, but with “veiny and worn hands.” Hank claims that he was great company at the call center, so it was totally fine for him to transfer all of the irate customer calls to Manuel for several months. Ultimately, Hank is self-obsessed, careless, and unwilling to stand on his own or make sacrifices for others.
In contrast, Lincoln is honorable, decisive, and trustworthy. Lincoln clearly loves Manuel, while the terrain with Hank is always uncertain. How each lover handled “the graceless passage of time” says everything about their character. Hank is a reactionary clinger-on; Lincoln makes his own decisions, however difficult.
Near the end of the story, Manuel remembers where he was when he learned that Lincoln was shot: in Miami, draining land for a White landowner and former enslaver. The woman – who fancies herself enlightened but is actually a malevolent benefactor – fires Manuel one day for observing that her project of building on a bog is impossible. His Black former co-worker drives him to the train station when they hear the news. His peer had worked so hard because he was going to inherit some land after the war. Now with Lincoln dead and the rise of Jim Crow, all of those promises are dashed. Suddenly, the political and personal ramifications of Lincoln poignantly cohere. You feel the heavy truth of that old saying, “The wheels of justice turn slowly, but grind exceedingly fine.”
Alarcón also taps into a trope of queer literature: the utopic, private space where a gay relationship can flourish within a heteronormative world. Nightwood, Giovanni’s Room, Maurice, Kiss of the Spiderwoman, Rubyfruit Jungle — in each of these works, queer people have a private space where they can live freely in their own kind of heaven. Manuel had that with Lincoln when they met over the summer as young men. They spent most of their time in the unpeopled woods where their relationship could flourish. The end of their relationship coincides with the destruction of those woods. Manuel recalls when Lincoln told him he was to marry Mary Todd:
We were an hour outside of Chicago, in a forest being encroached upon by subdivisions. Everywhere we walked that day there were trees adorned with bright orange flags: trees with death certificates, land marked for clearing, to be crisscrossed by roads and driveways, dotted with the homes of upright American yeomen.
Yeomen is an intriguing word to use. Its origin refers to young commoners who curated land, but by the 17th century, it largely referred to petty officers. Thus, the forest that nourished a queer relationship will be increasingly watched by officers whose job is to report any “amoral” behavior.
Alarcón stories often show the desecration of beauty for the sake of personal profit or the execution of a rigid ideology. In “Abraham Lincoln…,” these encroachments on innocent states all fall under the guise of enlightened thinking: Lincoln tells himself it’s more noble to be straight; Hank tells himself he can only empower others by always putting himself first.
Because of Manuel’s intimate re-living of his time with Abraham Lincoln, it’s not a historical figure we’re reading about. By the end, we mourn a person, not a persona. And that intimate knowledge, that insistence on rendering humans in politically fraught times, is part of what makes Alarcón’s work so powerful.
Part 4: Daniel Orozco
Daniel Orozco grew up with Nicaraguan parents who wanted him to focus on becoming “American.” This meant excelling at school and maintaining few cultural traditions outside of the home. Orozco would fulfill his parents’ dreams by studying at Stanford, earning an MFA from the University of Washington, and teaching creative writing at the University of Idaho. Along the way, he worked a string of dead-end, often demeaning jobs, which turned out to be the perfect fodder for his masterful collection of stories, Orientation (2011).
Compiling stories from 1994 to 2006, the tales here are mostly set at work: a construction worker witnesses a suicide; two officers fall in love on patrol; a biotech nerd is murdered following an invitation to a party by a coworker, who uses him to incite jealousy in her actual love interest. Orozco, known for spending months on a few paragraphs, creates fantastically real stories. In “Somoza’s Dream” – the only story set outside of an office – Orozco imagines Anastasio "Tachito" Somoza Debayle’s final moments in exile in Paraguay after a dissident fires a rocket launcher at his car: “In the backseat of the Mercedes, the Presidente-in-Exile looks up from his paper. The newspaper in his hands disappears, goes poof! like a magician’s trick. His hands smoke and glow and burst into flames. The suit he is wearing vaporizes. His eyeballs explode, and his mouth fills with gasoline. The backseat of the Mercedes becomes an arena of transformation, the effulgent white-hot heart of a flame brighter than a hundred suns, a whirlpool of shrapnel and fire taking its passenger apart.” The images in Orientation are so sharp, it’s hard to leave them as the same person.
Orozco often depicts the lunatic underpinnings of corporate life. In the title story “Orientation,” a middle manager gives a routine walkaround the office before informing the newcomer: “Kevin Howard sits in that cubicle over there. He is a serial killer, the one they call the Carpet Cutter, responsible for mutilations across town. We’re not supposed to know that, so do not let on. Don’t worry. His compulsion inflicts itself on strangers only, and the routine established is elaborate and unwavering.” It’s a funny disjuncture: corporate life and a serial killer named Kevin peacefully coexisting together. Like Alarcón, Orozco’s observations unmute an everyday violence.
Orozco’s characters struggle for meaning in a world whose main motive is profit. They are often left speechless, maimed of their own willpower and consciousness, lacking the words or agency to reclaim themselves. In “I Run Every Day,” a frustrated young man turns shockingly violent. In “Hunger Tales,” a morbidly obese man cannot leave his house and a slightly plump woman cannot accept her body. Orozco’s characters are moored into a situation they cannot express, yet alone understand. Nearly every story ends with a poignantly unresolved dissonance.
Take the “Temporary Stories” near the end of this lean collection. Clarissa Snow begins at a place called The Agency. Told in third-person, her full name is always stated, as if doing so will unfurl her whole being into a three-dimensional, non-fungible person; at the same time, calling her by her full name stymies the intimacy that is possible by moving to a first-name basis and deepens her alienation. One of Clarissa’s first assignments is as a Human Resources receptionist at a county hospital. She is a temp worker for another temp agency. The job is horrendous. Candidates cycle through every few months. The Placement Counselor, Mrs. Delahanty, cheerfully claims that Clarissa can just say no. But Clarissa knows that declining even one temporary job means that she will never have the opportunity to work (temporarily) for The Agency ever again.
At the hospital, Clarissa is assigned to an older, extremely competent receptionist. “She was like a twister in reverse, gliding cows into their pastures and floating roofs down upon houses.” There are hundreds of calls to handle, all from people desperate for work — any work. “The intimate muck of their lives” bothers Clarissa – she wants to help, but cannot, and becomes physically ill. The other receptionist can manage this job because she thinks of it as a “mission,” the “last resort” people turn to in their hour of need. Clarissa marvels at how the senior receptionist reacts to human misery by responding with a catalog of cheerful platitudes and vague career advice. This gives the appearance of help while fundamentally doing nothing to help the lives of others (a prime example of what David Graeber calls Bullshit Jobs). This “mission-driven” thinking glosses over what HR is fundamentally doing, and Clarissa learns to be content within the confines of being a “professional.”
Clarissa starts to perform as expected and earns praise from the other receptionist. Still, something about hearing all of the sad stories of temp hopefuls depresses Clarissa. By the end of the first week, “She was popping aspirin like breath mints. Her hands would not stop shaking.” She calls Mrs. Delahanty (or Mrs. D, as she calls her now) to float the possibility of re-assignment. Mrs. D suggests she power through. “She was their best girl, Mrs. D said, their cream of the cream, and what would it look like if their cream of the cream curdled on assignment? Then she wouldn't be their best girl anymore, would she?” Clarissa thanks Mrs. D for “the pep talk” and returns to work, eager to gain the skills that will enable her to adapt to a fundamental social sickness where institutions are geared to bolstering profits rather than people.
The hospital as an institution has a sharper purpose than Clarissa; it is the scalpel that sculpts Clarissa into the most economical shape. “The [receptionists] worked in the Human Resources lobby within a circular counter situated in the middle of a low-ceilinged, windowless room with recessed fluorescent lighting, dusty potted plants, and the oil portraits of hospital benefactors bolted to its walls.” Clarissa is not only at the center of a panopticon, like a prisoner, but she is also the guard whose mission is to constantly monitor and flag any suspicious activity. The oil paintings of the donors have greater permanence than she does. They are “bolted” to the door while she must struggle for precarious security as a temp. Orozco describes the portraits' features; Clarissa Snow is never described. When Clarissa performs well, the portraits seem to smile at her. When she considers quitting, “the hospital benefactors regarded her from their ornate, theft-proof frames with undisguised pity.” The hospital founders know well that Clarissa lacks the power to say no. Even if she does rise up, their images are bolted in frames that can never be removed, while she seems destined to be dispensable. Even her last name, Snow, implies that she’s designed to one day melt away.
Clarissa does make a rebellion at her next assignment, a month-long term at an insurance company. She is to type and proofread a “Secret Report from the Executive Vice President.” She works on the same floor as a Claims Unit, which has been told to never speak to her. But no one listens and everyone extends their friendliness to Clarissa, inviting her to lunch, baby showers, birthday parties. By the final week, Clarissa learns that Secret Report is a proposal to terminate everyone from the Claims Unit in two months and replace their cubicles with storage space. Furious, she messes with the “Secret Report.” She turns the name of the Executive Vice President to “Dickhead,” then other senior executives to “pig-bitch” and “bunghole.” “Remuneration” becomes “masturbation” and “capital outlays” becomes “steaming piles of shit.” She reads this aloud, expecting to feel better. Instead, she feels nothing, perhaps already knowing that she will not go through with the crass (and hilarious) edits. The protest she chooses is pointless and ineffective: Clarissa pours soda into old records from the 1930s and shakes the bin so the old papers are no longer legible.
By the end of the year, Clarissa Snow has proven herself the perfect temporary employee. “She had moved into an echelon of temporary service attained by few, which conferred upon her the Agency’s most coveted emblems of appreciation: the Exceptional Performance Pin and the assurance of permanent temporary employment.” She has been molded into someone who has interests but no passions. She prefers action over thinking. She is friendly to others and a friend to no one. She is the ideal employee, who can be used as a tool to be plugged into any situation. She is a consummate “professional” without a modicum of agency.
“Temporary Stories” records the inhumanity of capitalism. It is a slow illustration of how capitalism seeps into and distorts Clarissa’s psyche like a blood clot in the brain. Clarissa once had an interest in learning and traveling before joining The Agency. But now, she has taught herself to be more of a professional than a person. She has accepted the fact that it is more fiscally advantageous to never say no. She has also come to believe that it is always safer to experience human desires vicariously.
The story ends with Clarissa on a bus, feeling connected to others but at a safe, impersonal distance. “She stood swaying blissfully against her fellow commuters and closed her eyes to the light that strobed in the windows all around her — sheets of light flipping, flipping like the pages of a dozen golden books that she would never read.”
And so we come to the end of our journey with The Daniels. No doubt, there are many Latino authors named Daniel that I have missed — Daniel Saldaña París, Daniel Venegas, Daniel José Older and many more I hope to one day read. It’s a silly exercise to group authors based on their first name, but I think it gives us several liberating ways to explore literature.
One, you have to start somewhere, and in approaching a canon I was never taught in school, I had to make the autodictact’s amateurish attempt at codification. Second, this somewhat arbitrary grouping reflects the humor and good nature of literature typified in the short stories here, from the pointed and at times slapstick humor of Chicano authors like Chacón and Olivas, to the wit and subtle social critique of Latine authors like Alarcón and Orozco. Finally, the fun I’ve had challenges the more Anglo model of canon formation, which tends to be top-down. No doubt, Harold Bloom would take issue with my methods.
The Daniels offer a model of literature that values joy, community, and healing. By critiquing whose stories are shared and asserting themselves as storytellers, they question and complicate a Western canon, which, like Carl Linnaeus’ system of classification, creates and reinforces an “imperialist-white-supremacist-capitalist-patriarchy.” Their work is vital because they each add a necessary extension to what it means to be human. And when grouped together, The Daniels offer a clear retort to that well-intentioned if ill-informed statement: “A lot of people of color don’t know their family history.” Ultimately, people of color do know their families, especially if we continue to find and share the writers who make us come alive.
Matthew Frye-Castillo (he/him) is the author of One Headlight: a Memoir and teaches writing and literature at Lehman College.
