Genealogical Tall Tales: Elizabeth Gonzalez Jones’s Family Epic Set in the Old West

WRITTEN BY JEAN HUETS

As so often happens when family lore is spun, The Bullet Swallower (Simon & Schuster, 2024), by Elizabeth Gonzalez James, merges facts and myth. The protagonist, Antonio Sonoro, is based on the author’s great-grandfather, whom the author describes as “a bandido around the Texas–Mexico border sometime in the late 1800s.”

In Gonzalez James’ hands, family legend morphs into much more than genealogical tall tales set in the Old West. A phantasmic fate-dealing character becomes entangled with multiple generations of the Sonoro family; a curse hangs over its male lineage; Antonio’s and his ancestors’ greed and cruelty reap retribution on a near-biblical scale.

In hopes of restoring the lost wealth of the Sonoro family, Antonio leaves his impoverished home in Mexico to rob a treasure-laden train in Texas, his younger brother tagging along. But things take a catastrophic turn, and the attempted robbery becomes a deadly pursuit of revenge with the Texas Rangers.

Flash forward to 1964: Antonio’s Mexican grandson Jaime Sonoro is a beloved character actor and singer, a decent guy with a comfortable home and a loving family. A book that arrives unbidden to his home reveals not only the full extent of Antonio’s misdeeds, but the crimes of generations before, whose consequences may well fall on Jaime himself, and his children, and their children.

While Jaime plays a crucial role in the saga, Antonio takes the main stage, and given his milieu, that story falls into the modern Western genre, with its tropes of horses, guns, grit, whorehouses, bandits, and merciless law enforcement. Gonzalez James drew from documented history, as well as fictional representations of the period, in creating the setting. “I am a huge Larry McMurtry fan, being from Texas,” she says. “And so Lonesome Dove was a major influence on me. The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu by Tom Lin is a fantastic Western shoot-’em-up of betrayal and revenge, and similarly to The Bullet Swallower, centers a point of view that’s often left out of the American West: a Chinese immigrant.” By presenting her anti-hero as a Mexican disenfranchised in part by border politics, Gonzalez James hopes her book “maybe complicates the picture readers might have about the border, Mexico, Texas, and history.”

Film also dressed Gonzalez James’ setting. “I love movies,” she says, “and when I write, the story takes shape in my head in a visual way. I watched a ton of Westerns while I was writing this novel, and so some of the tropes probably came from there, as well.”

One of the more notorious Old West tropes, violence, is interwoven in the plot and in the characters themselves. “Violence is, sadly, a fact of life for a lot of people, and so if I’m going to write about them I have to incorporate that reality into their story. The character of Casoose [a Texas Ranger], for instance, is based on an actual person who was notoriously brutal, so I had to describe exactly what he would do to people during an interrogation. Antonio is himself a violent person and comes from a long line of violent people.”

Gritty as The Bullet Swallower is, though, Gonzalez James shows another side of human nature. “I truly don’t know why people put so much creativity into finding ways to hurt each other,” she says, “but there it is. And that’s not to say I don’t believe in the inherent goodness of people, because I do, very deeply. I hope I have left readers with a feeling that despite how much violence and evil there is in the world, there’s always hope for grace and transcendence.”

Unlike in many stories of film and fiction, the women in The Bullet Swallower do not supply the men with the means to redeem themselves from the fates that bedevil them. In fact, with one exception, women play no protagonistic roles at all. “It’s sometimes difficult for modern readers to understand how little agency, education, and options women had for most of history. I read a book written in the 1940s about a woman who was in a miserable marriage, and in discussing it with my mother, I said, ‘I don’t get it. Couldn’t she just leave him?’ And my mother told me no, she couldn’t and she wouldn’t. It’s hard for those of us who’ve grown up with so much privilege to understand this sometimes. If you don’t want to write an alternative history you often have to box women in or leave them out. But even within these constraints women have always found ingenious ways to thrive and survive. It just takes a little more work of the imagination to figure out how.

The lack of women protagonists in The Bullet Swallower demonstrates the author’s sometimes reluctant respect for adhering to the shape of the tale she was telling. “In earlier drafts of the book I did have many more female characters,” says Gonzalez James, “but sadly they had to be cut to better focus the story. It’s Antonio’s story, and he lives in a man’s world.”

It’s a problem with historical fiction: “fitting” characters palatable to modern readers into a period with different social values, especially when it comes to people who during much of history did not leave us first-hand accounts of their lives and, by some lights, had little agency in their lives, hence little potential as protagonists. Readers’ cultures must also be taken into account. In the late nineteenth century, Gonzalez James’ book would have been rejected by most American readers, what with its sympathies slanted away from the legendary Texas Rangers and toward an impoverished Mexican bandit.

The grace that The Bullet Swallower bestows—to say how would be a spoiler—is not only for “descendants of people who did despicable things,” as exemplified by Antonio’s grandson Jaime. “We always have the chance, every day, to be better,” says Gonzalez James. “To choose differently, and to be points of light in a dark world.”

The choices Antonio and Jaime make are often mistakes, and certainly not always for the greater good. But their long, hard, and twisted path toward the light is what makes The Bullet Swallower a historical novel that resonates for today’s readers.

About the contributor: Jean Huets is the author of With Walt Whitman, Himself, acclaimed as “a book of marvels”; The Cosmic Tarot book, based on the visionary art of Norbert Loesche; and The Bones You Have Cast Down, a novel inspired by the true history of the Popess tarot card. She co-founded Circling Rivers, which publishes literary nonfiction and poetry. Visit JeanHuets.com.