A lost gem of outlaw literature
Found in the Sonoran Desert.
In 2021, The Nation sent me to northern Mexico to meet the artist Miguel Fernández de Castro in his hometown of Altar, Sonora—a crucial waypoint for US-bound migrants. Miguel’s work in video and installation offers a view of border life that is both poetic and matter-of-fact. I hoped to understand the so-called border crisis through his eyes, and maybe gain the kinds of insights art can offer where other forms of representation fall short.
For several days, I shadowed him from his home to his family’s cattle ranch to the Pinacate Nature Reserve, a vast desert of dead volcanoes where he was filming drone footage for an exhibition. We talked about many things in the ten or so hours of tape I recorded—but in particular, two books stuck with me.
One was the Atlas of Sonora, compiled in the early ’90s by the Chilean archaeologist and historian Julio César Montané Martí. Too big for most coffee tables, it consists of 47 luxuriously illustrated maps detailing everything from the state's precolonial history to its many species of cacti and its various wars and revolts.
Notably, it's what Roberto Bolaño used as source material when writing his desert scenes in both The Savage Detectives—when the search for a reclusive poet leads its protagonists there—and 2666, whose sprawling plot encircles and then homes in on a spate of femicides in a fictional border city. (Bolaño never actually set foot in Sonora.)
Part literary, part scientific, the Atlas of Sonora—all leather-bound with gilt lettering—is one of the most majestic objects I've ever held in my hands. While it's available digitally, I recommend buying a copy if you come across one for under 200 bucks.
Then there’s the other book, the one Miguel sent me home with: Gerardo Cornejo’s untranslated Oficio de Alas—literally Vocation of Wings, though I’d venture something more artful like Higher Purpose or What Goes Up. Published in 2004 by Conaculta, the state-run Mexican imprint, it's a collection of crónicas—that distinctly Latin American genre that flouts the fiction/non-fiction binary—about Sonoran airplane pilots and their legendary escapades dating back to the dawn of aviation. Reading it feels like uncovering traces of a lost world, and of a deceased writer whose name, even in Mexico, remains unknown.
Much of Sonora is dominated by the Sierra Madre: a Paleolithic landscape of canyons and valleys where terrestrial travel is slow to downright impossible. To this day, some villages can only be reached by plane or helicopter, often in flying conditions that require balls of steel. This accounts for the heroic standing of Sonoran pilots—and the almost comically romantic treatment Cornejo gives them in his introduction:
And so the yarn unfurled before me—the countless tales I’ve harvested from those who traced the Sierra’s celestial paths, who, for more than half a century, have crossed its chevron summits in all directions, in all climates, many of whom succumbed, struck down by the elements, by some technical mishap, by their own defiant audacity or simply by the whims of destiny. (My translation.)
Most of the writing isn’t this... lofty (ha ha). Much like Fernanda Melchor, 20 years later, Cornejo’s strong suit is capturing that unmistakable, slang-inflected orality of dudes holding forth down at the cantina. One of my favorite stories, “La Calidad del Queso” (The Quality of Cheese), is told by a dairy farmer who sells a cheese of such renown that the orders overwhelm his usual methods of delivery. To keep up with demand, he buys an old plane that is still decently airworthy, learns how to fly, and starts airlifting orders to customers as far afield as Arizona.
Success can be ruinous, and the airborne cheesemonger gets greedy. Straining to keep aloft an overloaded cargo the engine catches fire mid-flight. He’s on course to collide with a “rocky, godforsaken mountaintop” when suddenly the blocks of melting cheese start oozing out of the hold in thick, goopy strings. The plane’s weight stabilizes and he lands safely on the sand. “I bring this up for one reason and one reason only,” the pilot concludes. “To remind you how damn good our cheese is out in Ures.”
There are many ways to make a buck with a plane ‘round these parts—not all of them strictly legal. In the story “Servicio a Domicilio” (Home Delivery), a pilot makes a run to a far-flung mining town and realizes there’s not a woman in sight. Jackpot. He and a partner start flying in plane loads of girls from the city, and business booms to the point that they expand to other settlements of “solitary maniacs, anxious singles, husbands cut loose, and family fugitives that would pay anything for a bit of feminine company.”
But the pair are eventually outsmarted when the girls cut them out of the deal, chase them down the runway at gunpoint, and run them out of town for good. The narrator retires and his partner goes to work for the narcos. The last thing anyone would hear from him is a radio report from somewhere over the Chihuahua border.
What makes Vocation of Wings so compelling is its vernacular dynamism, and of course the characters, with their outlaw lore. But it’s also fascinating as an exploded view—an atlas, if you will—of the intersecting systems that sustain life here: the human and economic, of course, but also the technological, meteorological, geological, and migratory. Kind of like a Frederick Wiseman documentary, which shows the inner choreography of complex institutions.
In my piece about Miguel Fernández de Castro, I argued that his work’s strength lies in its distinctly un-sentimental gaze. “By cutting through the melodramatic or moralizing attitudes that prop up clichés about the border region,” I wrote, “he forces viewers to question the story lines imposed on it by people who don’t live there.” I’d say the same about Vocation of Wings, a gloriously full picture that leaves out nothing for the sake of expediency.
Revisit my trip to Sonora here.
Oficio de Alas by Gerardo Cornejo
Untranslated
Conaculta, México
2004