A Virgin’s Guide To Mexico
Eric Martin
“I read “A Virgin’s Guide to Mexico” because I’ve been spending a lot of time in Mexico lately and just kind of wanted to get a better sense of the heart of the country. I thought that Eric Martin did a wonderful job of portraying kind of young, hip Mexico. Eric is a San Franciscan. And he got a Fulbright Scholarship to Mexico for a year. And you can tell that he just really absorbed the music, the scene, the history.
In “A Virgin’s Guide to Mexico,” it’s a story of Alma who lives in Texas, and her mother is Mexican. And Alma is sort of a kind of unattractive, high school senior who doesn’t really fit in under anywhere. And she’s a bit rebellious. Her mother on the other hand is this, sort of perfectly great housewife who married very well, and is always wanting Alma to do you know just the right thing. Alma sort of, instead of going to Harvard takes off for Mexico in search of her mother’s roots and you know essentially, what it means to be a Mexican-American.
She, in order to sort of get by cuts her hair, puts on men’s clothes and is able to sort of become assimilated into the culture and able to travel freely, as a woman by dressing as a man because it’s really hard in Mexico to go around by yourself as a woman. Meanwhile, her mother and her father are trying to sort of track her down. And so, it’s kind of an on the road book and very much a book about Mexico.”
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