The Gospel According to Dagoberto Gilb!

Dagoberto Gilb at his home in Austin and his latest collection, New Testaments: Stories (2024)

Nearly two decades have passed since my last published conversation with Dagoberto Gilb appeared in Spilling the Beans in Chicanolandia (2006). That interview captured a writer at mid-career, already decorated with the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Whiting Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship—and always, siempre, as an outsider to the world of American letters.

Nothing—nada, ni madres—has stopped Dagoberto from his journey as one of our greatest living writers. After publishing The Flowers (2008), Before the End, After the Beginning (2011), and founding and directing Huizache: The Magazine of Latino Literature, after decades of teaching and mentoring generations of writers, Dagoberto has now in his mid-70s dropped two more bombs: New Testaments: Stories (City Lights, 2024), a collection of eleven stories that hit like a chingadazo, and A Passing West: Essays from the Borderlands (UNM Press, 2024)—winner of the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.

New Testaments reads like both summation and declaration—un grito to the lives that U.S. American literature too often overlooks. The ones the mainstream gatekeepers don’t want you to read.

The collection opens with "Gray Cloud on San Jacinto Plaza," establishing the architecture of memory, loss, and the unexplainable ruptures that shape working-class lives. How inexplicable events can haunt a family for generations—como un mal aire, like bad wind that never leaves. The narrator recalls a childhood memory from 1977 or 1978 when a mysterious gray cloud descended "silently" on San Jacinto Plaza in El Paso, enveloping his family in an experience that defied explanation. The cloud blocks all sound and sight, leaves the young narrator unable to breathe or see his Mom and Dad and sister Rosy.

The narrator's father later attributed the cloud to emissions from the Asarco copper smelter—esa pinche planta that poisoned El Paso for decades—though no official explanation satisfied the family. What makes this story powerful is how the unexplained incident becomes a lens through which the narrator views his entire family history. His mother's obsessive focus on the event—manifested in her planting of a flor del cielo in their dirt front yard and her increasingly spiritual worldview—suggests trauma seeking expression. The cloud's a turning point. The father's health deteriorated. The mother's behavior grew more erratic, eventually leading to her own death. Gilb leaves ambiguous whether the cloud was an environmental disaster, a spiritual event, or simply a family's way of processing dysfunction and loss. Quién sabe, right? Maybe all three at once.

What I consider the centerpiece story, "Answer," shifts to a coming of age in a workplace setting informed by young love and desire you can almost touch, smell, and taste. The protagonist works at an industrial laundry plant run by his uncle Jorge, where he becomes infatuated with Isela, who returns his love and desire—but who, as it turns out, is married. The story captures the texture of working-class life with precise detail: the early morning café from Rosa, the tacos from Herminio, the humidity and giant fans of the laundry facility.

Gilb excels at rendering the workplace dynamics and the coded language of attraction. The protagonist's coworkers Juanito and Gerónimo provide machista comic relief (can there be such a thing?), making crude jokes about sex and women—puro desmadre. The relationship between the protagonist and Isela develops through stolen glances and brief car rides, culminating in an intimate encounter in her modest casita. Gilb handles this scene with restraint, focusing on the emotional intensity rather than explicit detail.

The protagonist's discovery of a wedding photograph of Isela and her husband creates a moment of moral reckoning. The marriage portrait, hidden under layers of blouses, represents the reality he's been avoiding. What's particularly effective is how Gilb uses this forbidden relationship to explore questions of loyalty, desire, and self-knowledge. The protagonist's eventual confession—"I love you, too"—to Isela represents both a surrender to feeling and an acknowledgment of the impossibility of their situation.

In "Wilshire and Grand," Gilb crafts perhaps his most viscerally angry meditation on class, memory, and the ways masculine identity becomes entangled with labor and loss. This story is puro coraje—pure rage barely contained. The story centers on Carlos, a construction worker who returns to a job site at Wilshire and Grand in downtown Los Angeles—a building he worked on years earlier, a job that ended with his humiliating termination. But this return isn't voluntary. Nikki, a woman from his past—one who once wrote about him, romanticized him, made him into "some kind of movie-star charro on a white stallion prancing beneath her bedroom window"—has engineered this meeting. She wants to use him again, to mine his story one more time.

The story's power lies in how Gilb renders the psychic violence of class condescension through memory. Carlos recalls the job with bitter precision: how he and his partner Hector worked on a building at 3rd and Hope that "had leaned an inch and a half out of plumb by the ninth floor," how they had to correct it in the next two pours, how this was skilled work that kept him employed for three years. But that pride crumbled when he was partnered with "the nalgón who came out of the hall" with him—a man the foreman trusted sight unseen because of some unspoken workplace politics. Ya sabes cómo es—the bosses always think they know better. When Carlos finally complained, asking to work with different partners, he was fired. "I had a heavy-duty Milwaukee, used but not old, long industrial cord. I tossed it in my toolbox on my walk-off. Fuck them, fuck this job." The theft of the saw becomes a small act of defiance, a reclamation of dignity through the only means available—taking something back from those who took his livelihood.

Now, years later, Carlos finds himself in a Starbucks near that same building, summoned by Nikki under false pretenses. She's dressed in "business sexy skirt and blouse, her hair highlighted in the latest, her lipstick a subtle pink"—the armor of professional-class femininity. She speaks of him as a muse, explains that she's been writing about him, about "us." Qué "us" ni qué nada—there is no "us." She wrote a magazine piece called "A Chicano Climbs High" with a photo of him "hanging off about ten floors, a sledge in my hand." He got "one gig out of the hall that only lasted three weeks" from that piece while she reaped all the literary capital.

Gilb's rendering of their conversation crackles with Carlos's suppressed rage at being treated as ethnographic material, as colorful subject matter for someone else's career advancement. "Back then she saw me as some kind of movie-star charro on a white stallion prancing beneath her bedroom window. And I felt as strong, bigger than life, as heroic as what she saw in me, what she wrote about me. Now I was just a poor old Chicano, barely getting by." This is what happens when gente like Nikki decide our stories are theirs to mine for profit.

"Peking Ducks" works as a conclusion to New Testaments because it brings together so many of the collection's concerns. The story follows Javi, who travels to meet his largely absent father in West LA, only to find the reunion coinciding with the 1974 SLA shootout. As the violence unfolds on television and smoke rises visible through the restaurant window, Javi and his girlfriend Sherry sit with untouched food, suspended between disasters both personal and historical. Ni de aquí ni de allá.

When they finally leave, Javi gives his car keys to Sherry, announcing "I'm going back there." He will wait at the site, proving he won't abandon his father even if his father has essentially abandoned him. Qué terco, right? But that's what sons do. Sherry tries logic: "There? It's closed, Javi!" But logic doesn't apply to emotional need. She sees "a crescent moon on the horizon above him, the oddly beautiful light all around them seeming to come from behind it, though it wasn't."

This image—the crescent moon, the beautiful but sourceless light—gestures toward something transcendent, or perhaps just strange. The light seems to come from behind the moon "though it wasn't"—a perfect metaphor for Javi's relationship with his father, which seems to have emotional depth though it doesn't, seems to promise connection though it won't. Javi's final line—"Like you think you're going to Mexico"—spoken "more loudly" as he walks toward his car, suggests anger, frustration, resignation. The story's final sentence devastates in its finality: "He went. And he never did go back to West LA." Se acabó.

Gilb's prose style in New Testaments packs a punch that leaves you reeling. He writes with the precision of a journeyman carpenter, someone who knows that every board must be cut exactly right or the whole structure fails. His sentences are clean, direct, stripped of ornament but rich with implication. This is writing that comes from years of paying attention, of listening to how people actually talk—cómo habla la raza—of understanding that dignity doesn't require decoration.

What makes these stories particularly powerful is how they frame questions of class, memory, and masculine identity through relationships that should offer connection but instead reveal unbridgeable distances. Carlos and Nikki, Javi and his father—these are people who want to mean something to each other but find that economic structures, cultural differences, and personal histories make genuine connection nearly impossible.

Yet Gilb never treats his characters with condescension. Carlos isn't a victim, even when victimized. Javi isn't naive, even when hoping for connection. These are people making their way through structures not of their own making, maintaining dignity even when dignity is denied them. Con dignidad, always.

Reading New Testaments in the context of Gilb's termination from the University of Houston, Victoria adds another layer of meaning. Here is a writer who has spent his career insisting on the value and validity of working-class Chicano experience, who has mentored countless young writers, who has built institutions to support Latino literature—and who still found himself disposable when institutional priorities shifted. The irony is bitter: the university that didn't want to pay for his labor now faces a literary collection that reminds us why his work matters. Qué irónico, no?

But perhaps the real testament of New Testaments is this: Dagoberto Gilb doesn't need institutional validation. He never did. Nunca lo necesitó. His fiction speaks to and for a community that exists beyond the academy, beyond the narrow confines of what gets taught in MFA programs, beyond the approval of critics who still don't quite know what to make of a journeyman carpenter who writes better than most of their tenured faculty. They can keep their tenure. Dagoberto Gilb has something better: la verdad.

Dagoberto Gilb in his living room in Austin, Texas

At 75, Dagoberto Gilb remains what he has always been—a writer who tells the truth about lives that matter, in a voice that refuses to apologize for itself. Sin pedir perdón a nadie. New Testaments is a book for our moment, when the lies we tell ourselves about diversity and inclusion are being exposed, when the institutions we thought might save us reveal their limits. It's also a book for all time. It's the stories of working Chicanos who build the physical and cultural infrastructure of this country while being told they don't quite belong. Their stories will always matter. They will always need telling.

And Dagoberto Gilb, gracias to the writing gods he's still in the fight. We need him now more than ever.