Benjamin Alire Sáenz

The night before I started this paper, I went to see the newest marvel movie. I stayed up late and woke with a certainty that I was going to have to struggle through a paper about an author who writes in completely a different genre and how could I possibly do it well when I was drowning in superheros? ― but ultimately I realized that I loved the novels of Benjamin Alire Sáenz because I wasn’t reading about heroes who have impossible abilities and save the world while destroying half a city or an entire fictional country. Sáenz’s characters are human and relatable and have occasionally complicated relationships with their families; they are something that we as readers could be, rather than what we dream to be. Ari from Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, and Ramiro from He Forgot to Say Goodbye, both of them are characters that readers can relate to without developing a superpower or becoming a billionaire.

August 1954, in a small farming village outside of Las Cruces, New Mexico, Benjamin Alire Sáenz was born the fourth of seven children in a traditional mexican-american family. He was ordained as a catholic priest after attending the St. Thomas Seminary in Denver, Colorado and the University of Louvain in Belgium but left the priesthood after three and a half years (Cinco Puntos; UTEP). As well as writing poetry and novels for children and young adults, Sáenz teaches in the University of Texas at El Paso’s bilingual MFA program for creative writing. Sáenz writes through the main characters’ thoughts, so you only know as much as they do, and his novels are often sectioned off into different parts, each with a varying number of short and long chapters.

In Sáenz’s 2012 novel, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, Aristotle Mendoza is a fifteen year old mexican-american boy who lives in El Paso in the 1980’s. He’s full of self-doubt and constantly thinks about his older brother who’s become a sort of taboo in the household even after he befriends Dante, a boy who doesn't like wearing shoes and tries to save injured birds in the middle of the road. Throughout the book Ari struggles to deal with everything going on around him, and his mother, who like most mothers, “can’t stand watching all of that loneliness that lives inside of [him]” (Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante, 349). Ari’s mother tells him as much during a family meeting where the she and Ari’s father discus Ari’s relationship with Dante with him. Sáenz’s relationship with his mother was similar, he was never the type of boy who could sit with his father and that only served to make his mother love him even more (Ballí).

Ramiro Lopez, from the 2010 novel He Forgot to Say Goodbye, is a fifteen year old mexican-american living in El Paso with his mother and his younger brother, Tito. the story is told through alternating points of view between Ramiro and Jake Upthegrove, who are on opposite end of society. Jake is a rich white boy who attends private school and can’t stand his mother or stepfather; and Ramiro is poor and trying keep his family together after Tito doesn’t come home one night. Ramiro later finds his brother and one of his brother’s friends, in the friend’s ill-kept house, unconscious. The cop who had been called to the scene along with the ambulance informed Ramiro and Tito’s mother that the boys had “been doing some serious drugs” (Sáenz, He Forgot, 114) but that they were alive. Sáenz struggled with drugs during his adulthood; sobering up for a short period to be there for his mother in her final days before relapsing