Jose Manuel Venegas is a gun-toting, horse-breaking man raised on a hardscrabble ranch in the Mexican state of Zacatecas. He's also the father and unshakeable nemesis of Maria Venegas, whose memoir not only follows the many paths of her father's serendipitous life but also traces her own bootstrap upbringing, from her arrival in Chicago as a four-year-old Mexican immigrant to her professional career in theater and literature in New York City.
Bulletproof Vest is a story of contrasts. Rural Mexico is held up beside suburban Chicago, where Venegas grows up as the only Mexican in her grade at school--criticized for her accent and stereotyped. Her father, quick to anger, drunkenly kills a man in Chicago and jumps bail to hide at his family's mountain ranchero, La Peña, while she studies her way into college and a graduate program.
Venegas can't escape the ghosts of a father she hardly knew, a father who abandoned her twice. She comes to realize that she also ostracized him from her life, "assembling a shield, something that would protect me from ever being hurt again--my own bulletproof vest."
With the pace, character and plot of good fiction, her memoir is the pulsing saga of how she returns to Mexico to try to connect with him. Bulletproof Vest is Venegas's meandering ballad to her father as she comes to appreciate the struggles he faced amid the violence, superstition and poverty of his own upbringing. In sharing his life, Venegas discovers her family roots and reconciles the contrasts in her own life. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.