Come and stay a while at the Five-Star Hotel Juárez!
HOUSTON, TX February, 2014—Hotel Juárez: Stories, Rooms and Loops by Daniel Chacón has won first place in the Tejas Foco 2014 Fiction Awards by the National Association for Chicana/o Studies.
The Tejas Foco Fiction Awards recognize outstanding work of fiction or young adult fiction that best represents a significant topic related to Mexican American experience in Texas. The National Association for Chicana/o Studies (NACCS) is the academic organization that serves academic programs, departments and research centers that focus on issues pertaining to Mexican Americans, Chicana/os, and Latina/os. The Association was formed in 1972, during the height of the Chicana/o movement, and called for the development of a space where scholarship and Chicana/o students could develop their talents in higher education.
In this collection of short and flash fiction, misconceptions about people, the responsibility of the artist and conflicts about identity pepper stories that take place in the U.S. and abroad. In one story, a girl remembers her father, who taught her to love books and libraries. “A book can whisper at you, call at you from the shelves. Sometimes a book can find you. Seek you out and ask you to come and play,” he told her. Years later, she finds herself pulling an assortment from the shelves, randomly reading passages from different books and entering into the landscapes as if each book were a wormhole. In “Mais, Je Suis Chicano,” a Mexican American living in Paris identifies himself as Chicano, rather than American. “It’s not my fault I was born on the U.S. side of the border,” he tells a French Moroccan woman when she discovers that he really is American, a word she says “as if it could be replaced with murderer or child molester.”
According to NPR’s Alan Cheuse, “In seemingly effortless fashion, Chacón’s talent goes into play, his collection unfolding with sketches of life…sketches that [he] draws for us in unpretentious prose—all on the border between the U.S. and Mexico, all on the border between life and art.” Whether in Paris or Ciudad Juárez, Chacón reveals his characters at their most vulnerable in these powerful and rewarding stories, anti-stories and loops.
Daniel Chacon is the author of Unending Rooms (Black Lawrence Press, 2008), winner of the Hudson Prize; and the shadows took him (Washington Square Press, 2005) and Chicano Chicanery (Arte Público Press, 2000). His fiction has appeared in the anthologies Lengua Fresca: Latinos Writing on the Edge (Mariner Books, 2006), Caliente: The Best Erotic Writing in Latin American Fiction (Berkley Trade, 2002) and Best of the West 2009: New Stories from the West Side of the Missouri (University of Texas Press, 2009). He is co-editor of The Last Supper of Chicano Heroes: The Selected Works of José Antonio Burciaga (University of Arizona Press, 2008).
Arte Público Press is the nation’s largest and most established publisher of contemporary and recovered literature by U.S. Hispanic authors. Its imprint for children and young adults, Piñata Books, is dedicated to the realistic and authentic portrayal of the themes, languages, characters, and customs of Hispanic culture in the United States. Based at the University of Houston, Arte Público Press, Piñata Books and the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage project provide the most widely recognized and extensive showcase for Hispanic literary arts and creativity.