A Tropical Place Like that: Stories of Mexico

Baker H. Morrow

yan, 2006 · UNM Press

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Poignant, humorous, and probing by turns, and set in the legendary Tarascan country of Michoacan in the 1960s, these eleven tales of Mexican villagers and wandering young Americans bring into sharp focus a rural Latin American world that has all but vanished with the enormous changes of the last few decades.

In "A Cathedral Half in Gray," the ghost of a church and its new residents create an eerie home that never should have been. Millers and goblins follow the spectral white tracks of a burro train into a remote river valley in "The Red Kite." A humble tire repairman and his wife want children too much, with disastrous consequences, in "The Flat." The bloody Mexican Revolution casts its long shadow over a New Mexican grandmother and her doting granddaughter in the delightfully named "Dancing Is to Walking as Singing Is to Talking."

"Middle Class" asks the pointed question: What do people think they are, and how do they go about making themselves what they need to be? Of Lou Becton, a boat-loving central fixture of these stories, Dona Eulalia says, "We can all see it clearly. How else would he do it? Senor Becton is middle-class."

"This gem . . . is hard to put down. You can taste the limes and hear the parrots."--Slim Randles, author ofOl' Max

"[Baker] Morrow's prose is spare, elliptical, lyrical. . . . His writing sweeps you up and carries you away to another place, another time."--Bonnie Lee Black, author ofSomewhere Child

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Baker H. Morrow, FASLA, is a landscape architect in Albuquerque and an associate professor at the University of New Mexico. He is the founding director of the master's program in landscape architecture at the University of New Mexico.