La Perdida

AUTHOR: Abel, Jessica

ARTIST: Jessica Abel (illustrator)

PUBLISHER: Pantheon Books

FIRST SERIAL PUBLICATION: 2001-2005

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 2006

Publication History

La Perdida was originally published in five volumes, titled La Perdida Part One through La Perdida Part Five, by Fantagraphics Books from 2001 to 2005. In 2006, after numerous small revisions, La Perdida was published in hardcover book form in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, using the original cover art from Part One of the serial. Later that year, Pantheon published the paperback version. Only the cover art of the first volume has been reprinted, thus helping maintain a market for the original serials, which are sold out from the publisher as of 2011. Several foreign editions of La Perdida were published: In 2006, the novel was published in Canada by Random House of Canada, in Spain by Astiberri Ediciones, and in France by Éditions Delcourt. An Italian version was published by Black Velvet Editrice in 2007. La Perdida was also anthologized in the first volume of the Best American Comics series published in 2006. Author/illustrator Jessica Abel and her husband, cartoonist Matt Madden, edited the 2009 and 2010 volumes of Best American Comics. Before La Perdida, Abel was best known for her comic book series Artbabe (1992-1999). Abel and Madden have combined their talents to co-author a comics how-to text, Drawing Words and Writing Pictures (2008).

Plot

La Perdida is the story of Carla, a Mexican American woman who, estranged from her Mexican father, travels to Mexico City in order to connect with and explore her Mexican identity. Upon arrival, she stays with Harry, her privileged former boyfriend (in the mold of William S. Burroughs or Jack Kerouac) who aspires to be a journalist but does more drinking than writing. Carla’s involvement with a sketchy crowd of people and her questionable decision making and naïve outlook lead to Harry’s kidnapping and ultimately to her deportation back to the United States.

The prefatory chapter is set in present-day Chicago, where Carla enters a Mexican restaurant and orders a meal that triggers the memory of her time in Mexico, now two years in the past. Brief flashbacks focus on a moment when she was unable to order a single taco in Mexico without being ridiculed.

The first chapter flashes back to Carla’s arrival in Mexico City and her reunion with Harry, with whom she stays. Although he has no problem sleeping with her, two weeks into Carla’s stay, Harry pressures her to decide on a departure date. Carla’s lack of interest in returning home becomes an increasing point of tension between the two.

Carla meets Harry’s friends, who are all expatriate journalists. One of them invites her to a photojournalism exhibition, where she meets Memo, a radical Mexican intellectual who introduces her to Ricardo and Oscar, whom she later discovers are drug dealers. Ricardo is the nephew of El Gordo, a major drug don. Oscar becomes enamored with Carla, competing with Memo for her attention. Although she can barely communicate with him, she finds Oscar compelling.

Harry and Memo immediately cultivate a mutual hatred of one another, engaging in heated political arguments. Harry throws out Carla shortly after she tells him that she plans to stay in Mexico indefinitely. Carla finds an apartment and a roommate, Liana, who moves out three months later. Oscar then moves in. Now obsessed with becoming a disc jockey, he spends his money on records instead of rent and is constantly pestering Carla for her cash.

Shortly thereafter, Rod, Carla’s brother, visits Mexico City, signaling a major shift in the narrative, as his facility with the language and upbeat presence encourage Carla to explore new places and meet his friends. Before he returns to the United States, Rod warns Carla to be careful of both Memo and Oscar.

After a Day of the Dead party gone awry, Ricardo pumps Carla for information about Harry. When she reads about Harry’s kidnapping in the newspaper, she fails to make the connection. It is not until New Year’s Eve, when she is confronted with the battered Harry, that she realizes what has happened. Carla and Harry are eventually rescued, and a month later, she is deported. La Perdida ends with a shift back to the present as Carla contemplates her final moments in Mexico and laments a kind of loss of innocence and naïve hope.

Characters

•Carla Olivares, the protagonist, is a twenty-something, slim, light-skinned Mexican American woman who travels to Mexico in search of an authentic experience of her cultural heritage. A naïve and often myopic college dropout with good intentions, she has a blind spot for people’s negative qualities, which inevitably furnishes them with the opportunity to mistreat her. She is so caught up in her quest to fit in and connect with her Mexican identity that she unwittingly facilitates the kidnapping of her former boyfriend.

•Harry is Carla’s former boyfriend, an Anglo-American journalist who lives in Mexico City. An upper-middle-class expatriate obsessed with emulating his heroes, Burroughs and Kerouac, he only interacts with other expatriates. He is kidnapped by Carla’s “friends.”

•Memo is a tall, lanky, thirty-five-year-old Mexican man. He is a standoffish pseudo-intellectual who immediately challenges Carla’s perspective on everything from art to her own identity. An opinionated womanizer who is initially fascinated by Carla, he mocks her relentlessly. He often engages Harry (and others) in heated political arguments.

•Oscar is Memo’s twenty-year-old, pretty-boy, drug-dealing friend. Handsome and charming, but uneducated and dull, he becomes Carla’s live-in boyfriend. Obsessed with becoming a disc jockey, though he has no talent or money for it, he is always broke and constantly pestering Carla for cash.

•Ricardo is a minor drug dealer with a mean streak. He strikes Carla at one point in order to silence her and express his power. His uncle is the major drug don El Gordo. He is responsible for gathering information on Harry in order to kidnap him.

•El Gordo is Ricardo’s uncle and a drug don. Unsavory and always carrying drugs, he offers Carla cocaine at parties and seems interested in her. He is often shadowed by Ray, an expatriate who dislikes Carla.

•Rod Olivares is Carla’s younger brother. Having lived with their father for several years, he is more familiar with Mexican culture and language than she is. A young skateboarder whose business is going well, he has made many Mexican friends over the Internet. His visit is a major turning point in the novel and is what leads to Carla’s rescue in the penultimate chapter.

Artistic Style

La Perdida is drawn and lettered in black-and-white ink and brush, creating loose, flowing bold lines that focus on character and social interactions rather than extensive background details. Abel used reference photos from her two-year stay in Mexico (1998-2000) as anchor points for drawing backgrounds, simplifying the details in order to maintain the reader’s focus on the characters. This style represents a shift from the tighter, more realistic style of Abel’s Artbabe work. She uses sentence-case idiosyncratic lettering, telling the story entirely in first person, which gives the book a diary feel. Whispered dialogue, most prominently featured near the end of the novel, is set in smaller type, with dashed lines constructing the speech balloons. There are no thought balloons, but emphasized words are written in cursive—there are many of these in the chapter when Rod visits—punctuating Carla’s more animated speech.

Early flashbacks are bordered with rough edges, making them distinctive. While the pages often feel slightly crowded, this does not detract from the novel. Instead, these pages mirror Carla’s overwhelming experience of taking in her new surroundings. While the characters are drawn simply yet distinctively, there are panels in which Carla’s face appears much more detailed and realistic. These are generally during moments of reflection or angst.

The author creates distinctive facial and wardrobe characteristics that convey ethnic identity, but there are no distinctions of skin tone among the characters. While this equalizes the characters visually, it also dismisses important racial characteristics that play into the story textually but not visually.

There is a significant linguistic shift in La Perdida from bilingual to principally monolingual material. The novel begins with a signpost in Spanish, and the dialogue in the first quarter of the book is in both Spanish and English. The Spanish dialogue is translated at the bottom of each panel. In the chapter in which Carla moves out on her own, Abel presents Spanish dialogue in English, with actual spoken English dialogue indicated with arrow brackets. While the reasons for this decision are not clear—perhaps the translation process was too labor intensive—the flavor of the narrative changes here.

Themes

La Perdida executes the story of the American in search of an authentic cultural experience. The search is complicated by the desire to connect with an ethnic heritage that is at once foreign and fascinating.

The book enacts both class interaction and class critique throughout the novel. Numerous characters engage in political debates, most notably Harry and Memo, as well as Memo and Carla. These debates center on fundamental questions of capitalism and Marxism. None of these characters can resist assuming the moral high ground and thus each person treats the others condescendingly at every opportunity.

Centrally, the book addresses Carla’s slipshod attempt to connect with her ethnic identity. Questions of identity and authenticity permeate La Perdida, but none of the characters fits the unquestionable role of the authentic subject. Even Memo, the self-proclaimed radical, reveals the flaws in his thinking when he expresses his “authenticity” by constantly putting Carla down. His participation in Harry’s kidnapping also complicates his own claim to both authenticity and ethnic pride.

The book’s facile treatment of Mexican drug culture works as an illustration of Carla’s lack of awareness, but still poses a problematic snapshot. Most of the characters in La Perdida are involved in drugs on some level, and of those characters, the majority are Mexican.

The book also addresses questions of belonging and nationalism. Harry’s friends are exclusively expatriates, and Carla is the only Mexican American. Contrary to Carla’s notion of immersion, Harry insists that only by distancing himself from Mexicans can he write an authentic piece about them. This contradiction is utterly lost on Harry. A self-proclaimed “crunchy ethnic wannabe,” Carla is constantly referred to as a tourist by Memo, further contributing to her sense of alienation as she struggles to belong.

Impact

La Perdida, which translates as the “the lost one,” is notable for having a Mexican American female protagonist, putting it in limited company. Outside the work of the Hernandez brothers (who are best known for Love and Rockets, 1982-1996), Latina characters are few and far between even in twenty-first-century comics. As flawed as Carla is as a character, her very appearance is encouraging. As Carla travels outside the United States, she pushes against the boundaries of traditional gender roles, portraying the quintessential transnational subject.

La Perdida is also notable for its use of both English and Spanish dialogue throughout the first quarter of the novel, as well as its extensive glossary of Spanish words. Rather than requiring the reader to flip back and forth to the glossary, Abel provides immediate extensive translations of these panels, increasing the book’s accessibility for English-language readers. One critique of the book is that it would have developed a greater degree of authenticity, particularly to Spanish-language readers, had the author maintained this technique throughout the book.

Critical reception of the book has been generally positive, though it is frequently critiqued for its perceived portrayal of Mexico as a beautiful but flawed land of drug dealers and kidnappers. Additionally, critics and scholars point out that while the novel seems poised as a bildungs-roman, Carla does not achieve the necessary maturity to complete the journey. This critique, however, is tempered by the author’s contention that both Carla and her journey are intentionally complex and flawed.

Additionally, La Perdida is often taken for an autobiographical account of its creator’s two years of living in Mexico. Abel herself points out that this is not possible (she is a Caucasian artist), but it does put to rest questions of whether such an author can create a convincing portrayal of an ethnic-identified experience. Many readers of La Perdida were initially certain that Abel was indeed a Mexican American artist.

Further Reading

Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006).

Clowes, Daniel. Ghost World (1998).

Marchetto, Marisa Acocella. Cancer Vixen (2006).

Satrapi, Marjane. The Complete Persepolis (2007).

Bibliography

Abel, Jessica. “The Jessica Abel Interview.” Interviewed by Greg Stump. The Comics Journal 270 (August, 2005): 68-106.

Hamilton, Patrick. “Lost in Translation: Jessica Abel’s La Perdida, the Bildungsroman, and ‘That “Mexican” Feel.’” In Multicultural Comics: From Zap to Blue Beetle. Edited by Frederick Luis Aldama. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010.