Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they like. This week, Brooke Shaffner writes about Country of Under from Split/Lip Press.
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A Book that Straddles Borders
Country of Under is my first published book, but the first book I worked on, in different forms for seven years, was a memoir. That memoir revolved around my relationship with my father, a pilot who became a quadriplegic in an accident when I was ten, a year after my parents divorced, and his years of anger afterwards. It was the story of how I walked away from his anger. I’m now writing a memoir rooted in healing and love, but that wasn’t a memoir that I could write in my twenties. That first book was a story about the deeply isolating aspects of patriarchy. Writing it was like walking alone through a long, dark tunnel—my flashlight occasionally illuminating beautiful graffiti.
Which is perhaps why, when my agent didn’t sell it, and I was freed to write fiction, I began to build a novel—a Country of Under—around tunnels. I became obsessed with the artist Julia Solis, who photographed tunnels under New York, Paris, Rome, and Berlin. After interviewing Solis for BOMB, I walked the Freedom Tunnel, a 3-mile train tunnel under Manhattan’s Riverside Park that once served as an underground gallery for New York’s greatest graffiti artists. Julia Solis and the Freedom Tunnel became important to the story.
I was interested in a dark passage through a tunnel, and in the world waiting at its end. Though the character, Pilar’s, life is largely invented, her journey from isolation into community was my journey in walking out of the isolation of writing a memoir, into a socially conscious novel that was, sometimes overwhelmingly, in dialogue with the world. I reached back to the community that enveloped my mom, sister, and me a year after my father’s accident. When I was eleven, my mom married a Mexican-American man named Ben Garza and we moved to his small Texas-Mexico border town in the Rio Grande Valley. My Garza grandfather was an undocumented immigrant from Mexico who had nine children. Growing up in a large, tightknit, joyful Mexican-American family, and an immigrant community that emphasized the collective over the individual, made me care deeply about the injustices that immigrants face.
The Rio Grande Valley, in the southern tip of Texas, is where Country of Under begins. The novel chronicles the intertwined coming-of-age stories of two intelligent, misfit young people carving out their place in the world: Pilar Reinfeld, raised by her undocumented father, a descendent of Bolivian Mennonites, in a Mexican-American community; and Carlos/Carla/Río Gomez, a gender fluid DREAMer raised by their grandmother in the same Texican border town. Pilar, passionate and empathetic but painfully shy, and Río, bold and charismatic, become each other’s family of choice. They leave the Valley for college on opposite coasts—Carlos in New York City and Pilar in LA—and their lives diverge and converge as they search for community, expression, freedom, and meaning.
It would take time to find my way inside my Garza family’s big, loud joy. In high school, I found that freedom and joy in my town’s only gay bar, 10th Avenue, where I cheered on my friend Kara Juarez/Kara Foxx-Paris, who was brave enough to perform drag in our small, heavily machismo, predominantly Catholic town in the 90s. Witnessing the transfiguration of drag, I understood what it was to be an artist—to throw open the borders of the known world.
Pilar and Carlos/Carla’s friendship begins when Pilar convinces Carla to compete in a drag pageant at 10th Avenue. While writing Country of Under, I began dating women, so felt close to Carlos’ questions about queer identity. But I could not have written Carlos/Carla/Río, who goes on to perform drag in New York City, without my NYC drag consultant Marcelle LaBrecque/Marilyn Monhoe, or my Edinburg High School friend Kara Juarez, who shared generously with me about Texas drag as she’s experienced it.
I began writing Country of Under in 2011 and worked on it for ten years. Throughout that time, I worked with immigrant students from the Rio Grande Valley on college essays, their stories both hopeful and heartbreaking. One of my students, with whom I stayed in touch and interviewed for the novel, was undocumented and the valedictorian of his high school. When he returned to the Valley from visiting colleges in 2012, he was hauled into an underground ICE compound. If his teachers hadn’t rallied in his defense, the judge would have deported him. He attended Stanford on scholarship and what he shared with me was important to telling Carlos’ story.
I interviewed many people—my Garza family, undocumented friends and students, immigration lawyers, an immigration judge, drag performers, subterranean explorers, activists, artists, priests, and my prima Claris Garza, a former nun—to write a book that straddles borders, bringing together drag queens, nuns, activists, artists, and healers.
While in college, Pilar teaches writing workshops for immigrant children at a convent. She helps the mother of one of her students, a refugee of the Guatemalan genocide who enters Sanctuary after ICE raids her workplace, apply for asylum. Volunteering with the New Sanctuary Coalition, particularly accompanying immigrant families to court, was integral to writing that story.
Pilar later organizes a controversial artivist event with a group of youth activists. In 2014, I discussed, with activists, the possibility of enacting this idea, but ultimately decided on something tamer with the same intention. With two CUNY DREAMers and professor Dr. Shirley Leyro, I co-organized an artivist event focused on immigrant justice at the Brooklyn Public Library. Collaborating with DREAMers, Make the Road youth activists, and immigrant student groups inspired the novel’s organizing scenes.
Ten years later, DACA is blocked, we’re pouring more resources into militarizing the border and criminalizing refugees, 500 anti-trans bills have been introduced this year, and the US is again backing a genocide, only unlike the Guatemalan genocide, this one is being livestreamed into our living rooms. I hope that Country of Under inspires readers to find their own ways to engage.
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Brooke Shaffner’s novel Country of Under won a Next Generation Indie Book Award Grand Prize for Fiction and the 1729 Book Prize. The novel was the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction runner-up. Brooke’s work has appeared in Scoundrel Time, The Rumpus, The Hudson Review, Marie Claire, BOMB, Litmosphere, Lost and Found: Stories from New York, and Big Indie Books. She has received grants from the Arts & Science Council, United States Artists, and the Saltonstall Foundation and residencies from MacDowell, Ucross, Saltonstall, the Edward Albee Foundation, Jentel, I-Park, and VCCA. Brooke is bisexual and grew up part Garza, part Shaffner in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley. Her Garza grandfather was an undocumented immigrant from Mexico; her Shaffner grandfather was raised Mennonite. Brooke founded Freedom Tunnel Press with her partner Niteesh Elias to publish artivist books that straddle borders. An excerpt of her memoir-in-progress won the Lit/South Award and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Find more at brookeshaffner.com.