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This article is from the August 2001 - September 2001 The Mexico File newsletter.
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Book Review
Loving Pedro Infante

by Denise Chavez Farrar

Straus & Giroux, $24.00; 272 pages; ISBN 0374194114

Reviewed by Gale Randall

Gale Randall, from Palo Alto, California, is a frequent Mexico File book reviewer. In the opening pages of New Mexico writer Denise Chavez's highly original and hilarious new novel, Loving Pedro Infante, Tere Avila, her best friend, Irma "La Wirms" Granado, and Irma's mother, Nyvia Ester, are watching the Pedro Infante movie classic, “La Vida No Vale Nada,” in an El Paso theater. All three women are members of the Pedro Infante Fan Club of nearby Cabritoville, New Mexico. Tere, the heroine and narrator of Loving Pedro Infante, is commenting on a fellow moviegoer: “The woman who likes to talk out loud to Pedro is starting up again. Nyvia Ester has tried to stare her down with those dark bulldog eyes of hers, and even made growling noises that only a pissed-off Mejicana can make, but the woman just isn't getting it. I don't have a problem with her loving the movie, but how can I be in the dark all anonymous when she's in the dark all noisy?”

Haven't we all at some point been super irritated by a noisy person in a movie audience? The members of the Pedro Infante Club de Admiradores Norteamericano #256, though, are dead serious in their devotion to and admiration for the Mexican film icon, Pedro Infante. At cozy and regularly scheduled meetings in their homes ("Pedro-athons") the club members watch and analyze his movies, even planning field trips to his gravesite in Mexico City. Before catapulting to fame on the Mexican celluloid screen of the 40's and 50's, the handsome and charismatic Pedro Infante was a carpenter and native of Mazatlan, Sinaloa. Starring in some 59 films in his short-lived career and acknowledged as Mexico's greatest film star of all time, he died tragically at age 40 in a plane crash near Merida, Yucatan, in 1957. According to Loving Pedro Infante's narrator, Tere, Pedro had it all: “He was incredibly handsome in that way only Mejicanos can be,” but also sexy. He could play a devoted best friend, caring father or son, or a reluctant Don Juan – and somehow always get away with it. A major obstacle to happiness facing single members of the Pedro Infante Fan Club is their inability to find a man who comes anywhere near measuring up to their Pedro. Narrator Tere Avila (named,

incidentally, for Santa Teresa de Avila) is a divorced thirtysomething teacher's aide in a Cabritoville elementary school. When not attending fan club meetings, she and her sidekick Irma hang out at the local La Tempestad bar, wistfully hoping Pedro Infante will any day wander through the door and rescue them from their mundane lives in dusty little Cabritoville(there’s a theory among fan club members that Pedro is actually still alive). At La Tempestad Tere meets up and is smitten with Lucio, a two-timing ne’er-do-well who will never leave his wife and daughter. The ups and downs of their ensuing ill-starred romance read like a Pedro Infante screenplay. But a chance encounter with an old boyfriend at a border-town truck stop leads Tere to reevaluate her romantic entanglements. Her friend Irma is more successful in this

department, eventually giving up entirely on Chicano men and settling for the older Anglo owner of a local motel. A subplot to the novel is the disappearance of Ubaldo Miranda, the gay and only male member of the Cabritoville fan club – he too is searching for his Pedro Infante soulmate. As well as being a great read,

Loving Pedro Infante would serve well as a guide to Mexican and Chicano culture. The novel is so full of Spanish phrases and Mexicanisms that it would be useful to have a dictionary of Mexican slang as you go along. Denise Chavez has also written The Last of the Menu Girls and Face of an Angel, for which she won the American Book Award. I got such a kick out of reading Loving Pedro Infante that I’m ready to start the Palo Alto branch of the Pedro Infante Fan Club.