I had hoped a queer coming-of-age story from a Latin American immigrant's perspective would be more enlightening than Hombrecito turned out to be. The first part of the book, which takes place in Ibague, a Columbian city of about half a million people, does offer an uncommon perspective, as the narrator, who shares the author's first name, describes his mother's temporary disappearance and his older half-brother's haphazard caretaking. Ransom-based kidnappings, after all, don't pose a threat for most American kids. Santiago Jose Sanchez also captures the trauma of the family's abrupt move to Miami and convincingly uses a camping trip in the Florida's Everglades to illustrate what only can be his alter-ego's desperate search for a paternal figure.
But once Santiago reaches adolescence and consummates his relationship with Leo, his Venezuelan boyfriend, the book becomes an exercise in self-pity that could have written by anyone who grew up online. Sanchez includes this jarring fast forward about the mostly virtual relationship between the very different young men as their paths diverge, with Santiago ending up in New York City as a young man:
This was before I knew how far into his life I would sink; before I knew the darkness in his heart, his explosive immigrant rage; before our first breakup; before the years of fucking each other’s boyfriends as if for sport; before the clubs and the beaches; before the times between cars and under highways; before I was no stranger to his mother’s unfurnished apartment, to her habit of locking herself in her bedroom with Venezuelan calling cards while Leo and I snuck boys, friends, and drugs in through the front door; before the summer I came back from a visit to Colombia with a nose job; before I left Miami and visited to find he had a new best friend every few months; before Leo visited me at college with a new nose of his own, and then in New York City; before I lost him in a bathhouse one night and didn’t find him until the next day, all the good parts of him burnt up; before I ended up trying meth with him one night to see why he loved it; and before we only talked about being horny, desperate faggots, too afraid to talk about anything besides the holes in our lives because we both knew that only in our loneliness and want we were still alike.
Santiago fares much better than Leo, at least from an educational perspective, although Sanchez completely ignores Santiago's years in the Ivy League, arguably when his character's immigrant background would have been thrown into greatest relief. We do learn that Santiago met his current roommate at Yale but Anais, woefully underwritten, exists only for the contrast she provides with Leo who identifies her as a "chinita."
It annoyed me how quick he was to dismiss her, but I also knew what he meant: Anais had gone to a Montessori, then private school, then Yale; her life had always been on the right track, both her parents guiding her toward the success they had already found in America. This was the difference between us I tried to ignore, because it was easier to focus on how we were similar, to get closer to her, to become her family. That was exactly how she loved me, like family, I said to Leo, feeling like I was drawing some line in the ground between him and Anais. I had come to depend on being in proximity of a life that seemed, at least from the outside, a little easier than mine. College had taught me to do that.
What Yale didn't teach Santiago how to do is support himself after graduation. Instead, he repeats a pattern established by his mother, a well-educated woman forced to wait tables in order to feed her children after she arrives in America. Their life only improves once she becomes a paid companion to a rich white woman with cancer but neither job leaves her any time to spend with her sons. Santiago becomes a waiter, too, but also turns to prostitution for reasons that are as much pathological as economic.
He frowned at his hand on my chest. He was like any white man. He thought he could see me and understand me because there was never anything in front of him that was outside of his understanding. But what he couldn’t see was himself; and he wouldn’t be able to, I thought, not until he could see the way I saw him—something he would never be able to do. He was telling himself he wanted to take care of me. That he was a good man for wanting to love me. It made me miss my mother; it made me want to hurt him.
By now, it has become clear to the (white) reader that Hombrecito is less about the immigrant experience than Sanchez's exploration of how the absence of Santiago's parents during childhood wounded his psyche, seen through the passive aggressive lens of identity politics. Santiago, after all, can't even correct the men when they pronounce his name San Diego; how can he ever expect them to see him when he refuses to stand up for himself?
In the end, Hombrecito, becomes the story of just another momma's boy, one that has been told many, many times before.
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