Review: Dispatches From Puerto Nowhere by Robert Lopez

Reviewed by Vince Granata

Two Dollar Radio. 2023. 280 pages.

“Dispatch” suggests an expedited report, a concise official account from a far-flung correspondent. The dispatch is a mode associated with journalism, the facts, full stop.

To say that there’s immediate tension between our just the facts association with “dispatch” and Robert Lopez’s searching, meditative, Dispatches From Puerto Nowhere seems too obvious. Too obvious, perhaps, because the title immediately challenges what we generally accept about a dispatch: that it has a distinct origin, is sent from a place where a journalist has two feet on the ground. But Puerto Nowhere is vast, “is surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean and extends as far north as Canada and south to Chile. The eastern and western borders are boundless.” Lopez’s dispatches seem to originate from indeterminate locations, with each section titled “Dispatch from…” with locations including, “Almost Everywhere,” “If I Could I Surely Would,” and “I Could’ve Been a Contender.” Though not literal locations, these points of origin spark associations or speculations that serve the book’s kaleidoscopic collage.

Lopez announces his book’s inciting reflection in its first sentence: “What I don’t know about my family is almost everything.” Lopez knows that his paternal grandfather was born in Puerto Rico and then came to Brooklyn, but “nothing was passed down, not the language, not the food or music, or the family history.”

There are, of course, any number of ways that someone might reconstruct their roots. Multi-billion-dollar companies have monetized spitting in a vial as way to—among other things—pinpoint the precise parcel of the globe where one’s ancestors once lived. But what Lopez is after is substantially more complicated than locating the origin of a family tree. Part of these complications arise from the history of his paternal grandfather’s birthplace, a territory of the United States, that Lopez points out “has never really been part of the United States and no one thinks of Puerto Rico as part of the United States, so I think of my grandfather as an immigrant.”

Lopez’s book is not after certainty, does not try to pin down a ship’s manifest that might make his grandfather’s journey from Puerto Rico to Brooklyn concrete. He embraces one of our most beguiling three-word introductory phrases, “I don’t know…”

As part of Lopez’s project is a reconstruction, largely from scratch, of an ancestor’s past, where better to start than, “I don’t know..?” In reflecting on his grandfather Sixto’s life, Lopez writes, “I don’t know if he had any brothers or sisters. I don’t know anything about his parents, don’t know their names or what they did for a living or if they too were native to Puerto Rico.” “I don’t know” leaves so much space to fill.

Though “speculative” plus “nonfiction” is a relatively new pairing, and though I’d hesitate to level genre limitations on Lopez’s work, it may be useful to think about the speculative elements of Dispatches in the spirit of what Margo Jefferson has said of her own speculative work: “It’s true—we tell ourselves stories in order to live. But what about queries, quandaries, chains of thought and feeling that thwart a conventional story?” Stories that begin with “I don’t know…” may not be conventional stories, may be the result of queries and quandaries and chains of thought akin to those that wend their way through Lopez’s book. Though Lopez claims only “a few vaporous memories of my grandfather,” what he offers in place feels just as true.

In imagining into Sixto’s past, Lopez writes, “I don’t know if he had any romantic ideas as to what life might be like on the mainland.” The “I don’t know” opens space for speculation, for “Maybe he wanted to be a musician or a silent movie star. Maybe he wanted to make his way to Hollywood and be a Puerto Rican Rudolph Valentino.” Lopez’s “maybe…maybe” is an expansive imagining. In “maybe…maybe” there is longing, a type of spiritual work that has a greater impact than something presented as fact.

And what better form for longing than fragments, than the concise lyrical bursts that Lopez strings in associative chains? Many of his memories already take this form—“The memories I have of my grandfather are fractured and fragmented”—but also, in quoting Donald Barthelme, Lopez claims that “fragments are the only forms I trust.” Incompleteness, what can’t be fully known, often rings the truest.

Fragments that follow “I don’t know…” often reveal the book’s sharpest reflections, moments like when Lopez describes how “I can say I’m Puerto Rican and no one can refute it, but I don’t know what it’s like to feel Puerto Rican. I don’t know what it’s like to see the flag and feel something other than indifference. I don’t know what it’s like to feel a kinship with those who share the same heritage.” Imposing a paragraph’s order on these “I don’t know”s would limit their effect, how they stay with the reader.

In Dispatches, speculation and fragmentation extend to many other arenas of Lopez’s life. He revisits his youth on Long Island, reconstructs experiences of discrimination, reflects on his love of tennis, his relationship to writing, to teaching, to isolation, his grief over lost loved ones. Though wide ranging, the associative moves between fragments are organic to the book’s searching quandaries. Tennis is frequently returned to, a sort of loving anchor Lopez uses to ground his book’s movement. An observation about Rafael Nadal’s right-handedness leads to a memory of his grandfather coaxing Lopez’s sister to favor her nondominant right hand. Or, when thinking through the larger questions of the book, he reflects that the “back and forth with what I’ve lost through erasure and what I’ve gained by assimilation…is like a tennis rally and how different shots behave on the court.”

Midway through the book, Lopez turns to one of his tennis partners to consider what it means that he never learned Spanish. “I play tennis with a Chinese man who speaks Spanish and I am a Puerto Rican who doesn’t.” When faced with this fact, Lopez can’t decide “if this is absurd or beautiful or tragic.” But of course, like the book itself, this is all far more complex. Which is what Lopez aptly suggests, “Probably it’s all of it.”

Vince Granata is a writer from New Haven, Connecticut. He is the author of the memoir Everything Is Fine, which was published by Atria Books in 2021. His writing has recently appeared in Rolling Stone, Fourth Genre, The Massachusetts Review, Creative Nonfiction, and LitHub and has been recognized in Best American Essays 2018 and Best American Essays 2020. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in creative writing at the University of North Texas.