A Visceral Coming-of-Age in Santiago Jose Sanchez’s Debut Novel, “Hombrecito” https://ift.tt/YXBACrc
In Hombrecito, the debut novel from Santiago Jose Sanchez, the Colombian American author shares their first name with the narrator of their text. The book captures Colombia, Miami and its suburbs, the wilds of South Florida, and the claustrophobia and loneliness of New York City. It is a text about being an immigrant, of queerness, a book of being split between identities, attempting to inhabit some middle space in traditionally dichotomous zones. It is also a story of how we are shaped, how we blur into and pull apart from the people and places around us.
The book begins in Ibague, Colombia, where a young boy is waiting for his mother to pick him up from school. But she will not come, as once again, the mother “forgot she was a mother”. Instead, it is his half-brother who must rescue him, both from walking home alone and also the sadness of being forgotten. In this first section, we watch this unnamed boy (who we will later learn is Santiago, the narrator of our text, when the narrative switches from the third to first-person) attempt to dictate order, control, over situations beyond his reach: “He thinks hard, because he has to, he has to picture her face—imagine her there, will her to his side—then she’ll appear. He begins with her eyes and nose, which are identical to his, before he reaches a deep, glowing blank, unable to remember the parts of her that aren’t his.”
The young boy is thoughtful, imbued with a sense of responsibility for the happiness, safety of those around him. As he waits for his mother, he watches the other children on the playground, willing them to stay safe. “From his perch, forehead pressed to the cold windowpane, he can concentrate on holding the world together. He tracks his classmates running across the courtyard, imagining himself in their limbs, in their heads—he lives between the world and his own mind, is what his teachers say to the mother. …It’s his sacrifice, keeping the world in order.”
It is tempting to litter this review with block quotes as the prose is so enjoyable, specific, rhythmic that it seems best to let it speak for itself. The story is a bildungsroman, a boy growing into an adult, a story of the people who come in and out of that life and shape it. It is also the story of a boy and his mother. Eventually, the mother comes home, having searched for the boy’s father, only to give up on him coming home and being a father. In the next chapter, the boy, his half-brother, and his mother move to Florida, where they must adjust to new language, new routines, and his mother’s career changing from “la Doctora” to a waitress. In Part II, we switch to the first person as Santiago begins to wrestle with performances of American masculinity and the sense that his distance from others is due to more than his immigrant status.
As a young teen in Miami, Santiago explores his blossoming queerness with the help of the internet and chatrooms. It is through these chatrooms that Santiago meets Leo, a young boy originally from Venezuela who becomes Santiago’s first boyfriend, and then a life-long friend and agent of chaos blurring the lines between friendship and romance. The first official date with Leo is a meeting at a mall in the suburbs of South Florida, something so mundane, but imbued with the competing desires for bodily exploration (culminating at one point in a failed foray into sex in a breast-pumping room) and for them to not be perceived as lovers by the others at the mall.
Hombrecito is a visceral, bodily text. As Santiago moves to New Haven to attend Yale, then New York City, with a trip back to Ibague as we approach the novel’s end, the desire for physical connection remains. Perhaps most obviously, this is enacted in self-exploration, and exploration of boys and men, in the work of defining Santiago’s sexual and gender identity. But the bodily writings I think of most are those between Santiago and his parents, his half-brother, though most of all his mother. The first time Santiago lets a man offer to pay him on Grindr, the description we are given of him in Santiago’s bedroom centers on a huge photograph tacked to the wall. It is of Santiago and his mother, one face superimposed over the other, their features so similar that at times it seems like a double exposure of one. This is a story of Santiago coming to understand his mother, and how that, perhaps, adds to our understandings of self. Even during these periods of sexual exploration that mark the text with their detail, their specificity of bodies in action, of sensation, the interactions are never truly about just the two (or three) bodies physically enmeshed in a moment.
As writers, readers, we tend to prize language, and of course, these bodies, the desire to be touched, physically comforted (like the ways that Santiago can most connect with his father when he can physically touch him); all of these are mediated to us through the lush language of our author. But the body can do what language cannot. If it does not solve, it at least ameliorates the struggles to express ourselves in words, of being caught between languages when the ones you love do not feel at home in the same words. In a world where binary language fails to capture the in-between, or the gaps that happen when we speak to beloveds with a native tongue different from ours, touch becomes the way to telegraph care, affection, need. Through Hombrecito, we are reminded that to become one with ourselves, it is not enough to inhabit the self in the mind, but to fully inhabit our bodies.
FICTION HOMBRECITO By Santiago Jose Sanchez
Riverhead Books
Published June 25, 2024
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