On the cover, a Mayan pyramid temple looms amid impenetrable trees. But the eye can see that beyond the trees and growing in even tighter formation right behind the trees is a cityscape of skyscrapers—a steel canopy that soars above the green.

Inside, Ray Gonzalez swings wildly from green jungle to gray jungle in brilliantly sequenced poetry that invites the reader to partake of the surrealistic mix of myth and machismo, tortillas and turtle shells, rosaries and weed—a weird cactus communion of ancient and modern, Chicano and American. 

Turtle Pictures is arranged around six chapters: First Shell, Chicano Tortuga Party, Second Shell, Tortuga Borders, Third Shell and Year of the Tortuga Egg. Each chapter encompasses prose and poetry—as if the reader has to go through the shell of the prose to get to the meat of the poetry. These prose shells are every bit as beautiful as the glossy shells of turtles—swirled in patterns of gold, green and brown, the colors of life, growth and decay. And in following these patterns the story is told of a personal journey and a communal journey.

In First Shell he says: I no longer wait for the sun. It comes up on its own. I forgot the axis of cottonwoods this year. I was busy searching for the fists of color bursting inside my hands. I wanted testimony and gave up the sun, wanted someone to tell me why I took the wheel of trust apart, set it in the fields of rain and dried years ago. Quiet things obey me. I compose sentences from the folding wings of dying butterflies, thoughts that embarrass me when I could say more, but I no longer step under the darkened thighs of trees.

He speaks of rivers and mud and shells and masks. Also from First Shell (an excerpt):

All I saw was the river.
The brown faces coming out of the water.

All I saw was the river.
My father standing on the other side.

All I saw was the river.
My mother’s hands dripping mud, trying to hold up the walls.

All I saw was the river.
Young boys running to take over the bridge.

All I saw was the river.
Young girls opening their legs to change the course and the tide.

All I saw was the river.
The bruja stealing the moon and giving it to me to lick and bite.

All I saw was the river…

Gonzalez not only uses repetition of words in his poems but he uses repetition of images and concepts throughout the book. This repetition has the effect of being chant-like in the poems and mantra-like in the book. The turtle image becomes something truly meaningful—loses all Aesopean associations.

In Chicano Tortuga Party you will find myths (The Smell of Oil) and recipes (Banana Nut Quesadilla—Gonzalez calls it “Latino Yuppie Food”, a recipe for a snack, 1996 Election Night TV Watching), illegal immigrants and black jalapenos, politics and partying. He prefaces Chicano Tortuga Party with this:

Were you invited to the party?

The Chicano Tortuga party is a mass gathering of people who don’t know each other, even though they come from the same families, the same strong tribes that have survived mass migration, illegal immigration and legal (though reluctant) assimilation. The brown people have gathered to look at one another and wonder what the hell they are doing as everybody starts thinking about the end of the century and the next one. The Age of the Hispanic? Who coined that phrase? The media? The party begins tonight, even though it has been going on for a very long time. Ask the homeboys on the street, or the Chicano poets on the soapbox. Ask the Texas politician who just got elected to the state house, marking the first time they let a brown face from the area represent anybody. The party is loud and quiet. It is mean and kind. It has to do with food, drink, dress, music, love and hate. It is a celebration of things all Chicanos have and the many things they have lost as they have been slowly taking over the country. The Chicano party extended invitations, yet no one was truly invited. It is a mass gate crashing event, the kind that will make outsiders say, “Yeah, look at those damn Mexicans! Those slick wetbacks. How about those Chuppies with money in their pockets?” The organizers of the party did not give an address. You really wont know where to go. They couldn’t rent a hall for the night. Every hall in America is taken, yet there are endless empty rooms in the barrios. Just pull the nailed boards off the windows and climb in.

In Second Shell you will meet Holy Garcia and look at graffiti claws, walk with the Barefoot Man and hear the moans of the River Woman. Tortuga Borders crosses more than physical borders and the crossing takes many forms including rape (of an illegal by a border patrol agent) and death.  The Third Shell trembles with killer bees (Everything is composed of unwanted fire like the young boy killed by the bees in the southern part of the state, their fury hurtling the boy toward the honeyed halls of family whispers where they speak of how he danced in death like a flower gaining speed from the addiction to the sing.), with an ithyphalic Goloxina and with the power of Mano Nova.

Year of the Tortuga Egg closes this book with miracles among the arroyos and the grief of broken eggs (A man inside his shell can’t go to his god). The Dark Brother whispers in words like incense.

The Mayan peoples developed a method of hieroglyphic notation and recorded mythology, history and rituals in inscriptions carved and painted on stone slabs or pillars, called stelae; on lintels and stairways; and on other monumental remains. Records were also painted in hieroglyphs and preserved in books of folded sheets of paper made from the maguey plant. These books are called codices.

Ray Gonzalez has done something like that—recorded mythology, history and rituals in this “codex” anteceded by stone and plant. I closed this book with brown fingers; my skin color transformed as Gonzalez honeycombed my thoughts.

Turtle Pictures is available from The University Press of Arizona.