Throughout his fiction, Rubén Degollado devotes himself to one American family, the Izquierdos of the Rio Grande Valley on the Texas-Mexico border. In the valley, and in this family, a microcosmic clash of ancient and modern world views takes place: old world Catholicism and Evangelical Christianity, fast food, pick-up trucks, healers, curses, television wrestling, and humankind’s old demons of alcohol, ambition, vengeance, and lust. Think Friday Night Lights meets Macbeth. Degollado’s dialogue and his first-person narrators show an exuberant joy in language, unselfconsciously moving back and forth between English and Spanish, colloquial and lyrical modes (or sometimes using all four at once), reveling in the sprung rhythms, stretching English to its extreme southern borders and finding cognates and variations as rich as anything in Elizabethan drama. It’s easy to see why Degollado is content to keep writing about this one group of people: the family canvas is large enough for humor, theology, heartbreak, and quiet revelation, and Degollado skillfully mines their collective history through brisk, emotive storytelling. The loveable, rambunctious, doomed Izquierdos are irresistible—and universal in their travails and tragedies. They exemplify what Richard Rodriguez calls the browning of America: they remind us of the truth that we are all of us mixed, one way or another, and that “only more confusion can save us.”

Some of Degollado’s work is featured in Image issue 70. Read an excerpt by Degollado here.

Learn more about Ruben at www.rubendegollado.com.

Biography

Rubén Degollado was born in Kokomo, Indiana, but is from McAllen, Texas, where the majority of his family has lived for generations. He graduated with a BA in English from the University of Texas Pan American, and a Masters in Educational Administration from Lewis and Clark College. While he was an undergraduate, his first story appeared in Bilingual Review/Revista Bilingüe. He went on to be published in Beloit Fiction Journal, Gulf Coast, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Image, Relief, and the anthologies, Texas Short Stories, Fantasmas and Bearing the Mystery. Recently he was a finalist in American Short Fiction’s annual contest, Glimmer Train’s Family Matters Contest, and Bellingham Review’s 2010 Tobias Wolff Award. Aside from writing, Rubén has been an educator for the last fifteen years, serving as a tutor, teacher, assistant principal and principal. He has advocated for youth as a Youth Director with Trinity Project, a board member of The Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory, and as a founding member of the Oregon Association of Latino Administrators. Recently, he and his wife Julie and their two sons Elijah and Miqueas moved back to Texas. They run Bethel Missions, a ministry dedicated to serving the needs of missionaries traveling to Mexico and Central America. They are also active with Logos Community, a local expression of the Church which exists to disciple people and equip the saints to share the gospel with others who don’t know Jesus.

Current Projects
April 2012

My current projects are a novel, Throw, and a collection of inter-related short stories. Aside from a few short stories set in Oregon, my work has always been set in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. The characters in all of my work are all members of the Izquierdo family, the fictional version of the Degollados. When I first read Joyce’s Dubliners, I was struck by how the city itself was the connection between each narrative. I wrote my fiction thinking that the Rio Grande Valley was my Dublin (“Host” is my homage to Joyce’s “The Dead”), but what I soon discovered was that the Izquierdo family itself was binding my work. Throw tells the story of Cirilo Izquierdo, one of the characters in “Host,” which was published in Image 22 and Bearing the Mystery. When Cirilo first appeared in “Host” as a teen graduating from high school, there was a sadness and maturity in him I had not initially intended. To learn more about Cirilo’s past, I began to write a short story about him, and as he kept telling me more of his narrative, I discovered that I was working on a novel. Throw is not necessarily a Young Adult novel, but has a young Chicano adult as its narrator, a sixteen year old coming to terms with loss: of his youth, his friends to gang and domestic violence, and his absent parents. My other project is a collection of stories I have written over the years about the Izquierdos and others in their lives. The stories of “Host” and “Padre Nuestro” are the first and last stories in this collection, respectively. They are the most personal to me because the grandparents are more central to the story. These two characters are the closest to my own grandparents, Evaristo Degollado and Guadalupe Leija Degollado. I usually begin a story with a single unifying image guiding me: a vision of heaven on a ceiling, a ring of family members praying over their patriarch, dogs in a neighborhood howling because they see evil spirits. I then write the story to discover what the Holy Spirit wants to reveal.