Growing Up in the Gutter: Diaspora and Comics

Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo. Univ. of Arizona, $26.95 trade paper (192p) ISBN 978-0-8165-5331-0

In this dry monograph, Quintana-Vallejo (Children of Globalization), an English professor at Rhode Island College, argues that coming-of-age graphic novels are uniquely able to “explain what it means to negotiate adulthood in communities of color.” He contrasts the linear approach of such classic European bildungsromans as Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship to the fragmented flashbacks and fast-forwards in Thi Bui’s 2017 graphic memoir, The Best We Could Do, in which Bui depicts her family’s adjustment to life in California after fleeing Vietnam in the 1970s, contending that Bui’s approach attests to the complex ways in which the past shapes the present. Examining Elisa Amado and Abraham Urias’s 2019 graphic novel, Manuelito, which follows a young Guatemalan refugee who encounters violent border police while trying to reach the U.S., QuintanaVallejo suggests that Urias’s illustrations depict the eponymous protagonist as indistinct to suggest he serves as an everyman for countless unaccompanied minors caught up in America’s immigration detention system. Unfortunately, the analysis is at times superficial (“These novels evidence that becoming an adult is not easy for a displaced individual”), and general readers’ eyes will glaze over during densely academic discussions of the “polysemantic possibilities” of the graphic narrative form and the “heterodiegetic narrator” of Areli Morales and Luisa Uribe’s Areli Is a Dreamer. This is unlikely to hold appeal beyond the walls of academia. (May)