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Borders Of The Self In Alfredo Véa's The Silver Cloud Café , Roberto Cantú

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

I am proposing an analysis of a novel by Alfredo Véra, Jr., The Silver Cloud Café (1996). As the author of a narrative trilogy that includes La Maravilla (1993), and Gods Go Begging (1999), Véa has produced, in The Silver Cloud Café, a novel that is central to the trilogy's interpretation. In my analysis, I discuss how Véa's novels question borders of the self—understood as ethnic or racial—through notions of a personal education (in La Maravilla, Alberto's; in The Silver Cloud Café, Zeferino's) in which characters count on the pedagogical guidance of Yaqui shamans, manongs from the …