What That Pig Said to Jesus


On the Uneasy Permanence of Immigrant Life

Philip Garrison says his book of essays is “in praise of mixed feelings,” particularly the mixed feelings he and his neighbors have toward the places they came from. His neighborhood is the Columbia Plateau, one of many North American nodes of immigration. Following a meandering, though purposeful trail, Garrison catches hillbillies and newer Mexican arrivals in ambiguous, wary encounters on a set four hundred years in the making, built on a foundation of Native American displacement. Garrison is the product of the earlier surge of new arrivals: from the 1930s to the 1970s, those he calls hillbillies left such mid-nation states as Arkansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Kansas, and the Dakotas for the West. The more recent wave, from 1990 to 2010, came mostly from the central plateau of Mexico. These are folks with whom Garrison communes in multiple ways. Anecdotes from sources as varied as pioneer diaries, railroad promotions, family Bibles, Wikipedia, and local gossip “portray the region's immigration as a kind of identity makeover, one that takes the form first of breakdown, then of reassembly, and finally of renewal.” Garrison’s mix of slangy memoir and anthropological field notes shines light on the human condition in today’s West. 


Philip Garrison is a bilingual writer and community organizer, retired after fifty years of teaching at universities in the western U.S. and Mexico. He has authored five volumes of poetry and four essay collections. 


Table of Contents:
Preface
 
PART ONE. Identity Theft
Life and Times
Testimonio 1
Before Long, in a While
Testimonio 2
Dear Tucker
Testimonio 3
Aguas
Testimonio 4
Somewhere Nobody Else Wanted to Live
Testimonio 5
 
PART TWO. What You Hear Secondhand
Testimonio 6
Hearsay
Testimonio 7
Anniversaries
Testimonio 8
Uncle Lou versus the Nineteenth Century
Testimonio 9
Fire and Elephants
Testimonio 10
 
PART THREE. What Emerges from the Husk
Testimonio 11
Letter from Manastash Creek
Testimonio 12
Casta
Testimonio 13
Everyone Agrees
Testimonio 14
Letter from Millpond Manor
Testimonio 15
El Chacuaco
 

Praise and Reviews:

“Garrison bears witness in vivid prose to the seemingly mundane, and in doing so he makes the mundane become provocative. This is a book I could read over and over and each time find new insights into the human condition.”
—Ken Lamberton, author of Wilderness and Razor Wire: A Naturalist’s Observations from Prison


"Garrison sets up vivid and powerful contrasts and comparisons, snapshots of farflung cultures, mexicano/hillbilly, fragmented, then cohering—or beginning to cohere—in novel ways. An important, deeply knowledgeable portrait of time and place.”
—C. M. Mayo, author of Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution