Reviewed by Sona Pai

No writer lives an unexamined life. Whether we write nonfiction or fiction, poetry or prose, we are at the same time, and at all times, privately writing about ourselves. We see metaphors everywhere – in a crack in the sidewalk, or a suddenly sunny day, or a barn. We draw connections through time and space. We feel flashes of irony from a song on the radio or a passing comment from the guy at the coffee shop. We can hear the words that form our personal narrative even as the action is happening.

In Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa, poet and novelist Rigoberto González assembles pieces of that mental narrative into written memoir. González grew up among an extended family of migrant farm workers who moved between California and the city of Zacapu in Michoacán, Mexico. The book begins in 1990 with González, a sophomore at the University of California-Riverside, leaving a violent relationship with his older lover to embark on a bus trip to Zacapu with his father. As he avoids conversation with his talkative father, González uses the bumpy, meandering, second-class bus trip to review the narrative of the life he’s lived so far.

He tells himself stories of disruption and dysfunction, hunger and hard work, learning to love the sounds of English poetry and learning to live the hidden life of a gay Mexican man. As he revisits key moments in his life, he reveals that he is at once estranged from and tied to his Mexican ancestry, his illiterate grandparents, his father who abandoned him, his mother who died too young and his abusive lover. Like the monarch mariposa that he loves so much (mariposa means butterfly and is also a slang term for a gay man), his story, as he tells it, is an ongoing cycle of migration — from California to Mexico, and also from alienation to escape. González is young when he writes (he was born in 1970), so the story doesn’t so much end as it just stops somewhere in that cycle.

The jacket of the book categorizes it as “Memoir/Latino Interest/Gay Interest,” and a “coming out and coming-of-age story,” but none of these descriptors quite captures it. González doesn’t just tell the story of what it’s like to be gay or Chicano or a migrant worker. He connects past and present, memory and emotion the way a writer does, in bits and pieces, and with powerfully charged images, sounds, smells and tastes. He offers the narrative of his life as he sees it — as he has lived it — with both beauty and flaw, and with some ends left loose and frayed.