07/16/2025
San Diego State University Press is excited to announce their latest book. Like many of our offerings it represents an exhilarated shout from the border, from the interstices, from the in-between. It is a smart, fast-paced package of memoir, poetry, photography, memory and more! Here's the scoop (and, not just by the way, the perfect border studies/border arts book to use in your community college and university classrooms; high school as well):
SDSU Press Permalink: http://sdsupress.sdsu.edu/newtitles.html
SDSU Press Amazon Link:
https://amzn.to/44yOdQN
Call Me Border is a book that doesn't behave. It doesn't sit politely in "fiction" or "memoir," and it sure as hell isn't here to explain the border to you. What it does do —- unapologetically -- is crack open the U.S./Mexico divide like a fruit left too long in the sun: overripe, dripping, alive with sweetness and decay. These fragments, dispatches, and ghost stories masquerading as prose come from the mind of Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz -- novelist, essayist, border whisperer. He writes like the border dreams: restless, bilingual, sensual, cracked with violence, and shot through with grace. The book jumps time and tone without asking permission. One moment you're in a cantina in Mexicali, the next in the backseat of a Border Patrol cruiser, or in the soft interior of a memory that feels stolen. There are meditations on disappearances. On language as bruise. On how hard it is to tell a love story when your country keeps moving the line between who gets to speak and who gets disappeared. Forget what you know about borders. Forget "immigration narratives." Call Me Border is a cipher, a cut-up, a whispered prayer you might overhear in a detention center or a nightclub bathroom stall. No maps. No moral. Just the pulse of the border itself-beating in Spanish and English, memory and myth, bruise and bloom. A book for those who know that stories can cross walls long after bodies can't.
Advance Word on CALL ME BORDER:
"Many see the border between the United States and Mexico as a scar, rupture, division, liminal space, and unforgiving passage between worlds. Gabriel Trujillo-Muñoz envisions his native territory through symmetries, dissonances, pain, beauty and resistance. In Trujillo-Muñoz's moving, wide-ranging Call Me Border, the U.S. southern border is seen through a powerful microscope to observe the grinding force of the American Empire and its neighbor in this poetic, gripping, fascinating and addictive tale of the fracture in space and time that we call la frontera.”
Naief Yehya
Mexican cultural critic & author of Drone Visions: A Brief Cyberpunk History of Killing Machines and Pornocultura: el espectro de la violencia
"Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz (b. Mexicali, Baja California, July 21, 1958) is a literary cartographer of the northern borderlands—a poet, novelist, essayist, and cultural excavator whose work disassembles the usual myths of Mexico's periphery and rewrites them with fever, finesse, and philosophical fire. From his earliest poems in the 1980s—Moridero, Mandrágora, Tras el espejismo—Trujillo Muñoz has written with a gaze that cuts in two directions: outward, toward the burning horizon of bordertowns and restless geographies; and inward, toward the tangled interior where memory collides with myth. His verse is not for the faint of heart—it bristles with urgency, intimacy, and the low thrum of mortality."
William Nericcio
Chicano Cultural Critic and author of Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the "Mexican" in America
San Diego State University Press
http://sdsupress.sdsu.edu
ISBN: 978-1-938537-58-5 | 2025
$24.95 USA | €20 EUR | $450 MXN | $32 CAD Keywords: Memoir, Border Studies, La frontera, Poetry, Biography, Photography, Literature
