Gringos by Charles Portis

First published: 1991

Type of plot: Adventure

Time of work: The early 1990’s, in the season of Christmas and the New Year

Locale: Mérida, the capital of the state of Yucatán, Mexico

Principal Characters:

• Jimmy Burns, a freelance teamster, tracer of lost persons, and onetime dealer in illicit Mayan artifacts
• Refugio Bautista Osorio, Jimmy’s stalwart friend and Mexican counterpart, a jack-of-all-trades
• Rudy Kurle, an investigator of extraterrestrial visitations
• Louise Kurle, Rudy’s wife and assistant, a helpful woman with a degree in human dynamics
• Dan, an overage hippie and leader of a dangerous band of outcasts
• Doc Richard Flandin, a self-styled expert on Mayan culture
• Frau Alma Kobold, the invalid widow of a talented but neglected photographer of Mayan temples

The Novel

Gringos is, as its title suggests, a novel about expatriate Americans in Mexico. It is an adventure story, as Portis’s novels sometimes are, and the account of a quest, as Portis’s novels almost always are.

The protagonist and narrator is Jimmy Burns, a native of Shreveport, Louisiana, a former Marine military policeman who is both a teamster and a tracer of lost persons. Jimmy resides in a small hotel, the Posada Fausto, in Mérida, in the Yucatán peninsula. Frau Alma Kobold, the wheelchair-ridden, chain-smoking widow of an archaeological photographer, is a fellow resident for whom Jimmy often acts as errand boy. Mérida has a large community of gringos (Americans) who comprise a comic gallery of soldiers of fortune, eccentrics, and misfits.

Jimmy gets what he believes to be a routine job hauling supplies to an archaeological site. While working on his truck in preparation for the trip, he is menaced by a gang of hippies calling themselves the Jumping Jacks. They are led by an aging biker, Dan, whose two lieutenants are toughs with shaved heads and vacant eyes. Other Jumping Jacks are Beany Girl, a tall woman who horrifies Jimmy by urinating in front of everyone, and Red, a girl hardly more than a child. Jimmy later learns that Red is LaJoye Mishell Teeter of Perry, Florida, a runaway for whose return a two thousand dollar reward has been offered. Jimmy faces the hippies down with a shotgun and disables their rattletrap station wagon, but they later escape. During the encounter, Jimmy has learned that the Jumping Jacks are on a quest: They are seeking the inaccessible City of Dawn and a mystical leader known as El Mago.

On his run to the archaeological site, Jimmy meets Rudy Kurle and allows the latter to tag along with him. Jimmy stops to conduct some business with Refugio Bautista Osorio, an old friend with whom he will later team up in a search to which the middle third of the novel is devoted. Rudy is also searching for the City of Dawn, which he believes to be a landing site for visitors from outer space. He takes voluminous notes, and although he is secretive about the information he possesses, he peppers Jimmy with pseudoscientific babble about flying-saucer landings around the world. The archaeological expedition breaks up when its leader, Dr. Henry Ritchie, unexpectedly dies of a fever. Jimmy finds two of Dr. Ritchie’s assistants, college students named Gail and Denise, suddenly on his hands. Rudy wanders off down the river and does not come back. At this point, the novel becomes the story of Jimmy’s quest for the City of Dawn, where he believes he may find both Rudy Kurle and LaJoye Mishell Teeter.

Doc Richard Flandin has studied Mayan ruins for many years and is writing a book which, he says, will put all the posturing university professors in their place. He announces that he is dying of prostate cancer and will accompany Jimmy and Refugio on their trip downriver as a kind of defiant final gesture. Denise returns to the United States, but Gail joins the new expedition and takes up with Doc Flandin, who immediately replaces the deceased Dr. Ritchie as her affectionate tutor. Ramos, a pugnacious dog, completes the company.

Along the way, the group discovers a shriveled body floating in the river; the corpse is that of a tiny, hairy old man with huge feet. Refugio calls him a chaneque, a small woodland creature of mysterious origin. Others in the party think he may be a howler monkey. The expedition discovers that the City of Dawn is Likín, a hilltop ruin across the river in Guatemala, and that hippies and flying-saucer seekers have gathered there from all over North America to await the appearance of El Mago. Jimmy, Refugio, and Ramos cross the river and eventually confront Dan and his two lieutenants atop a Mayan temple in a driving rainstorm. Dan refuses to give up the girl or a Mexican boy he has kidnapped since their previous encounter. In a brief but violent scene, Jimmy shoots Dan to death, and Refugio does the same to the henchmen. Rudy then reappears, unharmed and in high spirits.

The Mexican boy is returned to his relations and LaJoye Mishell Teeter to her father. Doc Flandin no longer speaks of dying. Instead, he returns to work on his book with Gail as his assistant and confidante. Rudy carries the pygmoid corpse away in a trombone case and embarks upon a lecture tour on which he represents the chaneque as an unfortunate visitor from the stars. Frau Kobold is dying, and Jimmy learns that she is responsible for the debacle at the City of Dawn. She wrote an anonymous letter to a flying-saucer newsletter prophesying the appearance of El Mago at Likín, which she and her husband had visited and photographed many years earlier. Emmett, an expatriate friend, dies and bequeaths his trailer, the Mobile Star, to Jimmy. Louise Kurle reveals that she is Rudy’s sister; Rudy had presented her as his wife because he wished to prevent unwanted advances by the gringos of Mérida. Louise nurses Jimmy through a siege of dengue fever, and they then get married. Finally, Eli Withering, an old temple-robbing colleague, pays a visit. Freda, his new live-in girlfriend, turns out to be Beany Girl, much cleaned up and made up. Gallantly, Jimmy does not expose her.

The Characters

Charles Portis’s protagonists are usually gentle, naïve fellows who drift artlessly through an absurd, often savage world. Since Portis’s fictional world is a comic one, the characters’ very innocence serves as their shield and as a comfort to the reader. Jimmy Burns, however, resembles Mattie Ross and Rooster Cogburn—the central characters in Portis’s second novel, True Grit (1968)—far more than he does the author’s other protagonists.

Jimmy is self-sufficient, competent (he can repair a clutch and perform other equally esoteric mechanical tasks), resourceful, brave, and loyal. He was a military policeman in the Marine Corps and saw combat in Korea. He is unaffected and approachable. He is extremely tolerant of others, but he does have his own code of conduct. For example, during his first encounter with the Jumping Jacks, he seems less offended by their insults and threats than by Beany Girl’s act of immodest urination. There are certain things, he thinks, that no decent woman will do, and that is one of them. Of course, Jimmy has his blind spots and shortcomings. It is so difficult for him to make a commitment to a member of the opposite sex that Louise Kurle, who experiences no such difficulties, finally transfers the matter of marriage from his to her own capable hands.

Although by no means one-dimensional, the other characters—as in Portis’s earlier fiction—are generally ruled by some particular obsession or eccentricity. Doc Flandin takes a perverse delight in the neglect with which the academic Mayanists treat his work and theories. Frau Kobold feeds upon her own bitterness and resentment. She and her late husband, Oskar, once appeared in a Fox Movietone Newsreel, but that was many years ago. She dislikes Doc Flandin because he considers himself a scorned outsider while, in her judgment, he lives like a king. Jimmy learns the depth of her bitterness only after her death. For many years, he has been receiving anonymous hate letters. It turns out that despite—or, perhaps, because of—his many kindnesses toward her, Frau Kobold was their author.

Rudy Kurle finds evidence of extraterrestrial visitation all around him, but he is loath to share his notes with any other investigator. His wife, Louise, is a social worker without portfolio; it is simply her nature to help people. Dan, an ex-convict, is a former member of a motorcycle gang and a white supremacist group; he represents the dangers of charisma in a time when emotion is too seldom leavened with thought. Jimmy characterizes Beany Girl and LaJoye Mishell Teeter (Red) as girls who too easily get into cars with strangers.

Refugio Bautista Osorio is the Latin personality, the explicit contrast to all the gringos of the book. He is the revered head of the family and has a fine son, Manolo, who is just approaching manhood. Refugio is a shrewd businessman who delights in haggling with Jimmy. He boasts that his name appears on many leaves of Doc Flandin’s book and that he will someday be famous. He fights bravely, and lethally, at Jimmy’s side in the battle against the murderous hippies. Thereafter, Refugio will date all occurrences as either before or after the time he and Jimmy killed the “pagans.”

Critical Context

Gringos, said one reviewer at the time of its publication, would be hard to categorize. Would it be found on the bookstore shelves under adventure, humor, or general fiction? Gringos is not the first Portis novel to resist classification. Norwood (1966) and The Dog of the South (1979) are clearly comic novels. The protagonists, Norwood Pratt and Ray Midge, are innocents. Like Don Quixote, each man inhabits a world of his own creation as he conducts his quest. True Grit, on the other hand, blurs the generic lines. It has been called a Western, and that designation was no doubt reinforced by the successful film adaptation starring John Wayne. Yet anyone reading True Grit immediately realizes that “Western” is too limited a term to describe the book. Masters of Atlantis (1985), Portis’s fourth and quirkiest novel, has been found shelved under the heading of science fiction. Yet whatever Masters of Atlantis is—and that is not easy to say—it is not science fiction.

Portis is a regional writer, in the sense that his novels are either set in the South or feature Southern protagonists (like Jimmy Burns in Gringos). He is a master of the dialect of the Arklatex, Jimmy’s native soil. His novels, however, have much more than a regional appeal. Portis is not an experimenter in fiction. He uses traditional forms, and although his plots are loosely constructed, his scenes are written with precision and economy. In Gringos, he once again proves that he is a major comic writer by displaying the wit, the unpretentious charm, and the affirmative qualities that have won him a loyal readership.

Bibliography

The Antioch Review XLIX, Spring, 1991, p. 309. A review of Gringos.

Booklist. LXXXVII, January 15, 1991, p. 1007. A review of Gringos.

Chicago Tribune. January 20, 1991, XIV, p. 8. A review of Gringos.

Houston, Robert. “Weirdos in a Strange Land.” The New York Times Book Review (January 20, 1991): 7, 9. Houston praises Gringos as a true depiction of Mexico and its American expatriates and states that the book is driven by Portis’s love for his characters and for Mexico. Even though his focus may occasionally blur and his plot wander, Portis always furnishes his reader with delight.

Jones, Malcolm, Jr. “Happy Motoring in Mexico: Charles Portis’s Wonderful High-Test Hi-Jinks.” Newsweek 17 (February 11, 1991): 60-61. Jones remarks on the literary establishment’s neglect of Portis’s work and the probable reasons for it. He discusses the deft alternation between aimlessness and purposefulness in the narrative. Finally, he asserts that this is the author’s most inward-turning book, one in which the comedy rests upon a bedrock of melancholy.

Kirkus Reviews. LVIII, November 1, 1990, p. 1490. A review of Gringos.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. January 6, 1991, p. 3. A review of Gringos.

Michaud, Charles. Review of Gringos, by Charles Portis. Library Journal 116 (January, 1991): 155. The reviewer notes, as have many others, that most of the book’s characters are on some kind of quest. The author spoofs these often ridiculous quests but also portrays a world that can turn suddenly deadly. The reviewer concludes that readers who delighted in True Grit and The Dog of the South will not be disappointed in Gringos.

Rosenbaum, Ron. “Our Least-Known Great Novelist.” Esquire 129 (January, 1998): 30-32. An admiring profile of Portis that discusses his stature in modern American literature, as well as some of his books. Useful as an introduction to Portis’s work.

Steinberg, Sybil. Review of Gringos, by Charles Portis. Publishers Weekly 237 (October 26, 1990): 56. Steinberg concentrates primarily upon identifying the book’s characters in this largely unfavorable review. She finds a tiresome sameness to Portis’s uprooted Americans. Further, Steinberg argues that the story does not really go anywhere.

The Washington Post Book World. XXI, February 10, 1991, p. 6. A review of Gringos.

Wolfe, Tom. The New Journalism. New York: Harper and Row, 1973. In 1960, Portis joined the New York Herald Tribune, where he worked with Jimmy Breslin, Dick Schaap, and Wolfe, practitioners of the “new journalism.” Portis eventually was named London correspondent, one of the paper’s choicest assignments. Wolfe comments upon Portis’s days at the newspaper in the early pages of his book.