Messages in a Small Town

In this collection of short stories and essays, Nancy Davies, the author The People Decide, steps away from the turmoil of the Oaxaca uprising of 2006 to meticulously evoke intimate human aspects of life in Mexico. As both journalist and poet, she describes the lives of Mexicans riding the stream of cultural change since the onset of the new millennium. Some stories, like "Messages in A Small Town", deal with universals: the unchanging aspects of love, marriage, and betrayal, presented by Davies with the soft humor of lovers using the technology of cell phones to surreptitiously communicate. In the story "The Dogs Were Barking", she explores the sadness and resentment of those left behind, in this case a solitary elderly widow, whose sons left for the United States in pursuit of a better life and were never heard from again. Finally she finds solace with the help of a mysterious boy who appears from the nearby hills and helps the old woman reconnect to her missing children through memories of each one as each appears transfigured, a permanent part of her beloved garden. In "The High Wall" and "The Woman Next Door", Davies approaches the difficulties of immigration from the point of view of the emigrants. A writer comes to Oaxaca to compose her first novel, but a feral cat routinely pees in her garden. The neighbors advise her to poison the cat, but this method is culturally unacceptable to the writer, and she looks for other solutions. In "The Woman Next Door", a middle-aged woman whose elderly husband does not try to integrate or acclimate to their new life, tries to connect with their enigmatic neighbor who is cordial at first, but later appears to be toying with her, an alien in an alien culture she can't quite decipher. Both stories offer intimate explorations of the outsider struggling to assimilate. The Story "Sleeping Beauty", on the other hand, explores the cultural change Mexicans confront in the face of globalization. In a sweet sequence of events, the story introduces us to a sleeping virgin in a coma, a man who travels to his father's village to build a dream bier for the virgin, and a university graduate who becomes his fiancée. In a masterful narrative, Davies leads us, like her characters, from one scene to another until we arrive at a new world-view by accepting the old. These stories and vignettes construct a panoramic view of the human experience via the intimate and mundane. "The universal manifesting in the personal is Davies' forte." -The Oaxaca Reader