Border story
Local professor’s fiction wins Pushcart Prize
WHEN Daniel Peña’s short story was published in Ploughshares last year, he was thrilled to see his work next to that of writers he admired: “That issue was star-packed with people who overshadowed me,” said Peña, a 28-year-old assistant professor at the University of Houston-Downtown.
He didn’t know the literary journal was submitting his piece for the prestigious Pushcart Prize. When he received an email telling him he’d won, Peña was stunned.
“I was in the library,” he recalls. “I remember my face going numb. It was a very scary feeling.”
The Pushcart Prize is awarded each year to the best short fiction, essays, poetry and other work published by small presses. Winning works are republished in an anthology; last year’s collection included work by Zadie Smith, Colum McCann, Anthony Doerr and Tony Hoagland. Peña’s story, “Safe Home,” will appear in the 2017 anthology.
“Safe Home” opens with a pilot named Cuauh landing an M20J in a drug-ruined neighborhood near the TexasMexico border. He glides the plane right onto an abandoned residential street, dodging power lines and empty houses in a crumbling section of Juarez, where a driver waits to take him to a safe house.
Cuauh was a crop duster in Texas before he was deported. He was kidnapped by a drug cartel as soon as he got to Mexico, and now he uses his pilot skills to smuggle drugs across the border. He longs to go home to Harlingen, “to go back to his old farm in the orange groves and dust the crops until he bled black in the nose,” and he thinks of nothing but how to escape the cartel — even if it means he has to kill to survive.
Peña, an Austin native, got the idea for “Safe Home” several years ago when he was training to be a pilot. At small rural airports across Texas, he’d frequently see abandoned planes with Mexican tail numbers. “I didn’t know where they were coming from,” he said. So he asked around about them, and started learning about drug cartels and the pilots who fly drugs across the border.
Peña began researching and writing about drug trafficking in graduate school at Cornell University. Then in 2014, he studied in Mexico City as a Fulbright scholar, researching America’s drug war and its impact in Mexico. Much of his research was library work, he says, "but a lot of it was just sort of living there — just the texture of the environment. Obviously, it's in the news every day."
Peña taught at Cornell and at Louisiana State University before arriving at UH-Downtown this year. He teaches fiction and creative writing courses to undergraduates.
Details are what make “Safe Home” come alive: Peña’s characters wear Tres Flores pomade, chew spearmint gum, eat Sabritas potato chips. When Cuauh — the pilot — recalls his childhood in Texas, it’s with squirm-inducing specificity. He and his brother used to clip the wings of cicadas “and set them off against each other in a dirt ring like oversize ants,” Cuauh recalls, watching as they turned hostile and desperate.
“He remembers how placidly his little brother watched as one cicada would split the other open, the broken one’s exoskeleton sloughing off like flaking bits of fish food. And they’d talk over it just like teenage boys might talk over cigarettes or old men might talk over dialysis at the Harlingen Scott & White down the road — what is the worst way someone can die?”
Peña’s career as a pilot was short, but his career as a writer seems inevitable. When he was a teenager, he read Rudolfo Anaya’s novel “Bless Me, Ultima,” and “it opened up a whole new world: Oh, Latinos can write about themselves.”
In his undergraduate years at Texas A&MUniversity, Peña planned to go to law school, but then he studied under National Book Award-winning author Larry Heinemann (“Paco’s Story”). “He said, ‘Hey, you can write. You should write,’” Peña recalled.
Besides fiction, Peña writes about Latin American writers and cultural issues for the Ploughshares website. He also contributes to The Rumpus and writes opinion pieces about Mexico for The Guardian.
Peña’s extended family lives in northern Mexico, and he remembers visiting them often when he was a kid. In fact, he has dual citizenship in the United States and Mexico, and he’s hyper-aware of drug trafficking’s impact on both places.
“Especially in Houston, it’s a story that’s all around us,” he said. “I feel like I can write about other things, but this is the thing that’s always knocking on my door. It’s everywhere.” alyson.ward@chron.com twitter.com/alysonward