Dallas author Mike Soto pens a surreal journey through a fictional border town

Dallas author Mike Soto remembers a story from his youth. He was at a family friend’s home in Michoacán, Mexico, for dinner. Seated at the table, he heard the wind rattling through a field of maize outside.

He recalls feeling trapped, and he was maybe thinking about a girl back in Dallas.

At one point, his mom turned to him and asked him what was wrong. He said, “Me estoy muriendo de amor (I’m dying of love).”

“It’s something a child would say,” says Soto, now 42, in a video call. He sports a thick beard, and his voice is a rich baritone.

“Everyone laughed at me.”

Soto used this tale in a poem for his debut collection, A Grave Is Given Supper. A surreal exploration of the Mexican drug war written in free verse, the book will be issued by Deep Vellum Publishing on July 28. The same company released Soto’s chapbook, called Dallas Spleen, which imagines a post-apocalyptic version of Dallas, last August.

Cover art by Daniel Gonzalez.(Deep Vellum Publishing)

A life of contrasts

Soto comes from two different worlds. Born in East Dallas to Mexican immigrants, he grew up in the Mount Auburn neighborhood. He also spent several summers in Michoacán as a kid.

“My family’s from rural Michoacán. It’s really idyllic, a lot of farmland,” he says. When he would return to Dallas, which he considers “super urban and new,” he found the contrast “almost cartoonish.”

Soto graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School in 1996. He later completed an undergraduate degree at the University of North Texas and an M.F.A. in poetry at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y.

Nowadays, he works 10-hour shifts helping manage his family’s panaderia, La Nueva, in Pleasant Grove. He says he writes whenever he can find the time.

Debut collection

Set in the fictional border town of El Sumidero (literally, the sink), A Grave Is Given Supper zeroes in on the relationship between two protagonists — Consuela and Topito — caught in the middle of a drug war.

“Writing anything about the drug war in Mexico,” Soto says, “you get violence and drug lords, but very often the saddest part for me is feeling that so many talented, capable individuals, their youth, their lives get tamped down.”

Soto places his work in the same lineage as Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1970 film, El Topo. The movie epitomizes the Acid Western, a subgenre mixing influences from the Spaghetti Western and the counterculture movement of the 1960s.

El Topo recounts the quest of a black-clad horseman, played by the director himself, traveling through a desert to defeat four gunmen. And it’s littered with strange images, including a man with no arms carrying a man without legs on his shoulders, as well as a landscape strewn with dead rabbits.

Soto says he feels a “kinship” with such imagery. “It’s surreal, but it’s also really visceral,” he says, adding the film gave him permission to weave in gore and mystical symbols.

‘I know these people’

Like El Topo, Soto’s collection depicts bizarre events. In one entry, a dung beetle climbs out of a dead man’s mouth; a jellyfish floats between buildings in another.

Author Mike Soto outside of his home in Dallas, July 20, 2020. (Ben Torres / Special Contributor)

While many poems traverse this dreamlike terrain, they’re also sometimes grounded in reality. This is where the book is most gripping and provocative. In “The Dead Women” for example, the narrator discusses the murder and disappearance of female workers near the border.

“A body appears along a highway, no one discusses it. Then a chicken farmer finds 17. It takes a number to shock people now,” Soto writes, calling to mind the record rates at which women in Mexico are being killed, and violence against women in cities such as Ciudad Juárez.

In fact, Soto was moved to write this poem after reading journalist Sam Quinones’s True Tales From Another Mexico, which contains a chapter on the femicides in Juárez. “You can’t tell a story about the border without talking about the femicides,” Soto says. “Stories like that really pull at my heart because I feel like I know these people.”

An incessant force

The border wall looms over Soto’s collection. One poem describes it as the “blunt reminder of the difference between this life & the one in El Norte,” while also mentioning that many in the worst parts of El Sumidero use it as the fourth wall of their homes.

“I wanted it to be a character that can stand on its own,” Soto says, “something that’s incessant, always in the background.”

“I think that’s what it merits for our day.”

The wall also appears in several illustrations scattered throughout the book. In these pictures, which each take up two pages and fall between poems, an armed guard is on patrol. Los Angeles-based artist Daniel Gonzalez created these images, which Soto says prompt audiences for what they’re reading and bring the collection alive.

“In between the pages you see those images of the wind, those swirls,” Soto says, “and you just get lost.”