by Luis J. Rodriguez

Luis J. Rodriguez's The Republic of East L.A. showcases the lives of drifters, gangbangers, the homeless, and other hard-luck residents. The characters in these stories often commit crimes or suffer hardships without taking responsibility for their actions, or the author leaves the consequences unexplored (after a murder at the end of one story, the characters simply drive off). What we are left with are people to whom at the outset we sense bad things will happen, and they usually do. There are touching stories in here, however, where people endure the blight of urban poverty, making the most of it and/or escaping through fantasies of a better life. Rodriguez sums up East L.A. in 'Boom, Bot, Boom':

There are hundreds of midnight images: black-uniformed officers with taped nightsticks, scrawled bus stops, spasms of gunfire, crowded jail cells, whirling helicopter blades, sidewalk Romeos and red-toed Juliets.... But for Raul and Stick, there was only this--a sad, silly, and sometimes deadening symmetry called suburbia. And they thrived on it.

Rodriguez covers fertile ground, but does so in a rather bland and predictable manner. Perhaps the author is right that the people of East L.A. simply endure what comes their way, but without giving us more engagement between the subjects and their action, The Republic of East L.A. seems inhabited less by people than by characters. --Michael Ferch