From Here to There and Back by Jesse Mancíaz/Xam’le Kuiz

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ISBN: 978-0-9905779-6-6 * $15 * 60 pages * Trade Paperback * Publication: August 2024

Jesse Mancíaz/Xam’le Kuiz (Red Feather) is an Esto’k Gna/Carrizo Comecrudo Indian from the Texas Panhandle city of Plainview. As a young child raised by his grandparents (his grandfather was a vaquero and his grandmother was a revered medicine woman and midwife), he learned the value of hard work by toiling in the cotton fields of North Texas. He dropped out of high school and joined a caravan of migrant workers that followed crops across the country. In 1966, when he was 18 years old, he joined the Marine Corps at the height of the Vietnam War, and was a fire-team leader responsible for the battlefield performance of a six-man unit in Vietnam. Wounded in combat on two separate occasions, each time he was patched up, pinned with a Purple Heart medal, and returned to the carnage that war is known for.

The inaugural publication of Yanaguana Press, an imprint of Aztlan Libre Press, From Here To There And Back/Three Short Stories & A Poem by Jesse Mancíaz/Xam’le Kuiz is powerful, political and poignant. As an Esto’k Gna, American Indian/Native of Texas writer, Jesse might be Native American Indian Literature’s best kept secret. He’s a gifted and crafted wordsmith that puts you in the middle of the scene and sublimely shocks you into viscerally feeling what you are reading. While he is considered a respected elder and has been writing for many years, this is his first book publication.

You might call the general genre of Jesse’s writings in this collection (besides short story and poetry), Fictional Memoir, because Jesse draws from his own personal life experiences and recollections as a young cotton-picker and migrant field worker, and an 18-year-old Indio Tejano Marine in Vietnam, to fuel his writings that have been fictionalized to a certain extent.

While these stories confront you with some of the horrors of war, and the post-traumatic-stress-disorder that will continue to plague the service men and women and their families for the rest of their lives; as well as the racism, discrimination, exploitation, and other injustices that the Indigenous, Mexican, Central and South American people have to face here in Texas and the U.S., there’s a ray of hope in these writings. They are a cry against war. A cry for a true justicia y libertad for all. A cry for healing. Un grito de amor y paz.