Overview

They gather in an abandoned church in Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood on the city's South Side, a space that echoes with loud music, conversation about film and art, politics, and the journeys that brought these friends together. ""Almost everybody had come from Latin America, lived in Pilsen, watched movies until the early morning, and were readers of Zorros y erizos,"" narrator Jacobo tells us early on, referencing an early 2000s Chicago literary journal. Piotri, a filmmaker from Kraków, has improvised some electrical supply for the church and piped in water from an alley. Xul, a painter and installation artist from Mexico City, finds shelter and inspiration in the ruin, whose old wooden pews were once occupied by worshipers from Central Europe. Both Piotri and witty Condolesa-activist, cinephile and owner of a scandalous laugh-like to say they are in Chicago as a protest against a life dedicated to business but never to pleasure. Mortality on his mind, Xul dreams of buying a little plot of land in a cemetery adjacent to a nearby expressway so the city's Latino immigrants might have a final resting place north of the border. An intuition tells him death may be coming for one of the group's members, bohemians all. This exhilarating, soulful, funny, vivid, and beautifully written novel, with moments of heartache and wonder, follows the characters that make up la fraternidad, as Jacobo calls the group, its ranks also including Tomás the sound artist, Silverio the poet and Mauricio, community college Spanish teacher and autodidactic intellectual. In this superb translation of a novel originally published in Spanish, we also get to know Pilsen, an immigrant neighborhood of taquerias and street art, bars and music clubs, galleries and low-slung apartment buildings. ""Pilsen, My Pilsen!"" can take its place among our very finest novelistic portraits of a city.

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