How to Look Away (On American Cruelty and the Refusal to Disappear)

A riveting, kaleidoscopic exploration of the American compulsion toward cruelty and its expression through rituals of degradation for citizen and immigrant alike—from an award-winning writer reporting from both sides of the U.S.–Mexico border

Having grown up in Texas, a border state where Mexican bodies are buried but not laid to rest, Pushcart Prize winner Daniel Peña examines America’s fraught relationship with its neighbor to the south through the tools it uses to enforce their separation: detention, deportation, disappearance, even death.

Through evocative essays that braid journalism, cultural criticism, and memoir, Peña roams from the vestigial Comanche War battlefields behind his childhood home in Austin, inhabited by the ghost of a lynched Mexican, to the black markets of Mexico City, where a tattooed deportee survives by hosting a Satanic Tour for white tourists, to the home of a cartel hitman’s family doomed to live in the unglamorous aftermath of his crimes. Peña circles back to the United States of today, where he is surrounded by ICE agents on the university campus where he teaches, in one of the signature “debasement rituals” of the Trump era. He also considers the cultural architecture of these cruelties: the AM radio conspiracy theorists of his youth, narco-novelas, Breaking Bad.

In How to Look Away, Peña argues that America’s worst impulses learned during its “War on Terror” have come home via the creation of extrajudicial black sites on U.S. soil and abroad under the guise of immigrant detention and security. And that the conflation of immigrant with terrorist in American political rhetoric has created a new definition of the country, decoupled from reality and history.

How to Look Away conjures dread and longing, but also clarity and hope as it offers a haunting account of the strange bond between two nations and their peoples forever intertwined.