Faultline

Taylor, Sheila Ortiz

Reference

NAIAD PRESS INC *

Imaginary Parents

Book by Taylor, Sheila Ortiz, Taylor, Sandra Ortiz

Biographies & Memoirs

Taylor, Sandra Ortiz

Arts & Literature

Univ of New Mexico Pr

In this uniquely fashioned memoir, one sister uses words, the other installations to re-create a childhood filled with adventure, tragedy, and the two most glamorous and mysterious people in their young lives: their parents. 
The setting is Los Angeles during and after World War Two. Hollywood is defining. Cigarettes ubiquitous. A meal is not a meal without meat or eggs. Red lips, toenails, and fingernails match red cotton blouses festooned with yellow sombreros. 
Taking on the voices of her mother, father and sister--as well as speaking for herself--Sheila Ortiz Taylor, the writerly daughter of an Anglo vaudevillian-lawyer and a Chicana movie star manqué, strings together well-crafted vignettes that read like film clips. One scene leads to another, fractures into another until a rich family drama and a remarkably clear child perspective emerge through the silences and substance. 
Sandra, the elder, artistic sister, offers 3-D collages in a simultaneous yet slightly shifted narrative of life under their father's red-tiled roof. 
Mirrors, tortillas, calaveras, Mexico, horses, books, boats and guns are the curios of the Ortiz Taylor family cabinet. Readers will set to recollecting their own pocadillas after relishing this funny, touching portrait of a regular yet anything but common American family.

Ortiz Taylor, Sandra

Community & Culture

University of New Mexico Press

It's 1983 in Coachella Valley and Yolanda Ramírez, a lowly phlebotomist at the Palm Springs hospital, has a hunch. Gay men, hemophiliacs, and women scarred by cosmetic surgery are dying. Safe blood, like the water keeping this desert green, is a lie.In the nearby trailer, Isabel Ochoa Dreyfus disappears into a new identity: Marina Lomas. Somewhere in Iowa her businessman husband sits in the dark, staring at his drink, promising never to hit her again, if only he can track her down.Despite herself, Marina finds companionship at Mac and Gil's annual Casa Diva fashion show. As glamorous men stride up and down a poolside runway, Yo awakens Marina's sleeping desire.Elsewhere in Coachella, Yo's father Crescencio, a gardener, soothes Eliana Townsend, his secret love, by coaxing life from the earth outside her window. She is dying, most likely from AIDS, but no one will tell her the truth. And through it all Crescencio's sister, Tía Josie, keeps the family steady with wisdom from the Rockford Files and her dead Cahuilla husband.Truths surge to the surface in this community of false fronts and deep roots as readers are whisked toward the deafening conclusion of Coachella, the latest from one of Chicano literature's finest writers.

Coachella

Literature & Fiction

United States

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Naiad Pr

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Books by Taylor, Sheila Ortiz