Sam Hawken: Five Things I Learned Writing Tequila Sunset

El Paso and Ciudad Juárez sit across the Texas / Mexico border from each other. They share streets, share industry, share crime. One gang claims territory in both: Barrio Azteca. This single criminal organization is responsible for most of the homicides committed in Juárez, and Felipe Morales is one of them. Recruited in prison, and now on the streets of El Paso, “Flip” has no choice but to step further into that world, but he has a secret that threatens his life. A witness to murder and intimidation, he tries playing both the cops and the outlaws in a bid to escape. On the American side, El Paso detective Cristina Salas struggles to balance the needs of single motherhood with those of life in the city’s anti-gang unit. When her path crosses with Flip, their relationship will spell the difference between a life behind bars for the young gang member, a grisly death or freedom. Meanwhile, Mexican federal agent, Matías Segura, must contend with the scourge of Los Aztecas while coordinating a long-term operation with the American authorities. The Aztecas, north and south, stand in the way of three lives. They have no qualms about crossing the line, about killing, about moving their deadly product, and it all comes together in a confrontation where the stakes are, truly, a matter of life and death.

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Black is not the only shade.

When The Dead Women of Juárez, my debut novel, came out it was pretty much agreed by all who read it that it was dark, dark, dark.  And then there was more dark added to that dark.  I don’t think there’s a single moment of levity in the entire book.  Maybe this is appropriate given the subject of systematized female rape, torture and murder, but I couldn’t help but think that maybe the book’s darkness limited it somewhat.

Fast forward to Tequila Sunset, which tackles Mexico’s almost unimaginable violence, and the stage was set for another pretty grim telling.  I had included hints of warmth here and there in The Dead Women, but I felt it was necessary to expand the emotional palette of the next book to both avoid the impression that I write nothing but bleak ruminations on the futility of life and to give myself a break.  To that end, I made a concerted effort to give each of the book’s three main characters a positive relationship that showed what they were living for.  For Flip, the gang member, it’s a chance at a normal love affair that could lead out of “the life.”  For Cristina, it was her bond to her mentally disabled son.  For Matías it was the wife for whom he’d give anything.

I’ll never say my first book was bad, but I will say that leavening the cheerlessness of the subject matter with brighter shades made for a much stronger second work.  I’ve kept that lesson with me ever since.

Personal storytelling is the best storytelling.

What crippled me in my early writing formation, and I suspect this is true of many others, is the old saw, “Write what you know.”  As if being an airline pilot who writes means the only really good stuff he or she will ever create has to do with being an airline pilot.  It’s a dumb, reductive piece of advice that does no one any favors.  But I don’t think it’s the fault of the advice itself, but rather how people take it.

Everybody has life experiences.  Everyone knows what it’s like to be alive.  And maybe you’re not a DEA agent or professional hitman or whatever, but that doesn’t mean you can’t write about those things.  I’ve never been a gang member, but I know what it’s like to have made critical errors in life and suffering because of them.  I’ve never been a cop, but I am the father of a child with autism, so I know the hopes and fears of a parent who lives with that burden daily.  I’ve never fought crime in Mexico, but I’ve experienced the push and pull of a marriage stressed to the breaking point by outside factors.  All of these insights I was able to put into Tequila Sunset.  The rest is almost window dressing to the human story.  We care about the plot because we care about the people.  We care about the people because they’re drawn from real stock.

I did a little bit of this in my first book, when I tried to exorcise the memory of my brother’s violent death at the hands of a hit-and-run driver, but it wasn’t until Tequila Sunset that I realized the fuel for compelling writing is quite literally everywhere, whether you’re writing slice-of-life stories or crime fiction or books about international espionage.

Mexican and American crime are more closely linked then you’d think.

One of the things most people know about Mexico these days is that it’s wracked by incredible drug-related violence, responsible for killing tens of thousands of people since the mid-‘00s.  What they don’t know is that is that criminals in the United States are the ones providing the fuel for this particular conflagration.

Say what you want about the rightness or wrongness of marijuana being illegal in this country, but the fact remains that in forty-eight states it is illegal, and with that illegality comes money.  Lots of money.  Scarcity drives up prices and almost all of that cash flows south toward Mexico.  The drug cartels then turn around and do in the United States what they can’t do in their own country: buy guns.

Mexico has some of the most restrictive gun laws in the world, but gun battles are common.  Why?  Because of the deluge of weapons crossing the border from America.  So-called “straw buyer” purchases have legal sales done on behalf of those who can’t buy for themselves, private sellers circumvent the law and sell directly to the cartels or others simply ferry weapons southward to feed the ravenous demand.  As much as we Americans like pot, the cartels like money and guns.  Maybe if we stopped giving them so much of both, things would be a lot more peaceful down there.

Oh, and locally source your weed.

The world is full of people who do good.

It may seem like the world is packed with nothing but bad actors, particularly when you look at the Mexican drug war situation.  Corrupt cops, gun smugglers, dope dealers, money launderers… the list goes on.  But you can’t have a war without having two sides, and I realized when writing Tequila Sunset that it was reductive at best, and flat-out wrong at worst, to simply assume everyone involved in this situation is tainted.

My book has three main characters: a convict and gang member, an El Paso police officer and a Mexican federal agent.  They are all, to a one, honorable people doing their best in a situation where honor is considered a weakness.  I could easily have had Flip, my gang member, be an irretrievable scumbag with no redeeming qualities, my El Paso detective a hapless victim of the back-and-forth drugs-and-guns trade, and my Mexican federal agent corrupt.  And it’s definitely true that people of these types exist.  But what’s the point of a story told from that perspective?  We all know things are bad.  What we don’t know is that there are forces on the side of right who will sacrifice anything, even their lives, for the cause of justice.  There’s more drama there than in a million tawdry stories about drug-addled losers.

I had an interviewer ask me about this very point, and I told him I believe in people.  It’s way too easy to stop believing, and I think that’s a tragedy.

Don’t go too big.

The problem of Mexico and the drug war is, as I mentioned, enormous.  When more than 60,000 people die over a six-year period, that’s huge.  Under other circumstances a body count like that could be called a genocide.  Massive agencies on the federal level, American and Mexican, struggle with this issue daily.  Millions are being spent.  It’s the central preoccupation of the entire country of Mexico, when all the people really want to do is make a living and do right by their loved ones.

In a situation like that, the temptation is to go big.  Really big.  Movers and shakers make for high drama, right?  But people don’t read novels to hear about policymakers.  They want to know about other people, and that means telling stories that are meaningful on an individual basis.  I boiled Tequila Sunset down until its focus fell on just three people, each representative of a greater part of the conflict, but people nonetheless.  That’s where the heart is found.

I once tried (and failed) to write a novel that tackled these gigantic issues with similar scale.  Tequila Sunset works, if it works at all, because I learned my lesson from that book.  When you get right down to it, those most directly affected by Mexico’s drug war are the ones who are most important.  Not the suits in Washington, DC or Mexico City.  To catch the big fish, go for the smallest lure.

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