After only a few sentences of Brooke Shaffner’s novel, Country of Under (Mason Jar Press, 2024), I knew I would have a transcendent reading experience. The novel won the 1729 Book Prize and was a runner-up for the PEN/Bellwether Prize.
Country of Under revolves around the transformative friendship between Pilar Salomé Reinfeld, raised by her undocumented father, a descendent of Bolivian Mennonites, in a Mexican American community; and Carlos/Carla/Río Gomez, a gender-fluid DREAMer raised by their grandmother in the same Texican border town.
Through immersive depictions of Pilar and Río’s dovetailing coming-of-age journeys, which move between Texas and New York City, the novel challenges readers to reject false dichotomies—between male and female, contemplation and engagement, existentialism, and religion—and inhabit the spaces between them. Río’s understanding of their identity and sexuality changes over the course of the novel. Shaffner uses they/them pronouns when referring to them by Río (the name and identity that they finally settle on), she/her pronouns when referring to them as Carla, and he/him pronouns when referencing passages in which they go by Carlos. Part of the magic of this novel is that the characters move with us: as we read, they evolve. Country of Under embraces an evolving self and inspires a continual discovery of the multitudes in our voices, bodies, and identities.
I spoke with Brooke Shaffner via email, where we discussed the inspiration behind her book’s mysterious title, how activism became a way of life, and why dreaming is so important in our shared communities.
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The Rumpus: What is the meaning of “Country of Under”? Where does the title originate?
Brooke Shaffner: Most of us who come from or live in the Rio Grande Valley—the Mexican border region in the southernmost tip of Texas, where I grew up and where Pilar and Río are from—hate the way that the media reduces it to statistics about poverty and immigration and health crises. The ropa usada scene in Country of Under may seem magical to readers, but it’s very real to me. My friends and I used to find the most amazing things buried in those piles of used clothes: bell-bottoms, butterfly-collar shirts, and baby-doll dresses that transported us to another time, a new self. Outsiders may see the Valley as a flat, dry wasteland, but we drove past its wide-open fields with the music blasting, scream-singing, dreaming ourselves into being. Outsiders may see Pilar, Río, and their origins as “less-than” but they claim the “Country of Under” as a powerful space of gestation and, in their unique ways, usher their wild, strange beauty into the world.
The novel is full of underground movements and subcultures. The “Country of Under” is the beauty and power of all those submerged voices, particularly when they come together. The coming together and singing our stories is its own gorgeous country—one that will rise. But I wanted to say that the dream lives in the movement itself. The “Country of Under” is the Beloved Community that Pilar and Río create through their art, activism, and belief in each other.
The “Country of Under” is their and our dreams because we have to be able to dream a future of justice and beauty to summon the strength that we need to create it. We need to dream it, and we need actual experiences of creating and sharing abundance in our friendships, loves, and communities because those experiences help us to envision it on a larger scale.
I give credit to my wonderful longtime writing partner, Julia Miller. I had a terrible working title and Julia pulled “Country of Under” from a line near the end of the book and said, “That’s your title.”
Rumpus: Your characters, Pilar and Carlos/Carla/Río, have to revisit the past as it threads through their present lives, in order to build on it and formulate a future in which they can be their true selves. Is this true for all of us?
Shaffner: Pilar, more so than Río, feels the need or the compulsion to revisit and make meaning of her past. Río is more rooted in the present and its possibilities, in improvisation and play. As Dr. Yoon says to Río, “You invent a new self, name it, become it, and never look back. Pilar looks back; she gets stuck.” I think Pilar is excessively freighted with her past in a way that paralyzes her, while Río avoids delving into their past, so sometimes acts without self-awareness. That difference draws them to each other; they have so much to learn from each other.
In looking back at our past, I think it’s important to distinguish between what actually happened and the stories we tell about what happened. Pilar has to let go of stories that no longer serve her. She has to re-see and remake her past into a story that empowers her and allows her to move forward more freely.
The book I’m working on now is a memoir, so this question is very much on my mind. Robin Wall Kimmerer says, “What we gain in repressing what we do not want to remember, we have to pay for with the poisoning of so many other aspects of our lives.” I think that’s true of both our personal and social histories.
We are in a time of reckoning when love means stretching to hold hard truths, dark histories. I don’t think we can find a way forward without facing what we have done to each other and our home. We need the elasticity of the border, which taught me how to hold multiple truths. My hope is that we can stretch to hold all of what we have been to and could be for one another—the truth of violence, domination, and decimation and the possibility of reparation, reciprocity, and recreation.
Rumpus: How did the current political climate affect your writing process and the storyline in general?
Shaffner: I began writing Country of Under in 2011 and worked on it for ten years. I’d started working on admissions essays with mostly Latine and some Southeast Asian students from the Rio Grande Valley, who were, like my Garza family, immigrants or the children or grandchildren of immigrants. All throughout writing the novel, I was steeped in their stories—which were both hopeful and heartbreaking. One of the students with whom I stayed in touch and interviewed for the novel was undocumented and the valedictorian of his high school. When he returned to the Valley from visiting colleges in 2012, he was hauled into an underground ICE compound. If his teachers hadn’t rallied in his defense, the judge would have deported him. He attended Stanford on scholarship, and what he shared with me was important to telling Carlos’s story.
Obama was labeled Deporter in Chief by the immigrant rights community. Militarization of the border escalated after 9/11, which happened around the time when Pilar and Carlos become friends. The novel ends in 2007. I got involved in immigrant activism and advocacy in 2014 under the Not One More Deportation campaign. I was especially interested in how art could humanize politicized issues. I collaborated on an artivist event at the Brooklyn Public Library with two wonderful CUNY DREAMers, Carlos Ramos and Diana Arreaga, and professor Dr. Shirley Leyro. Together we organized an evening of artivist film, literature, theater, and music from Thanu Yakupitiyage, Theo Rigby, Theatre of the Oppressed, and Barbara Fischkin; and immigrant testimonies from folx like undocuqueer activist Antonio Alarcon. Collaborating with Carlos, Diana, Antonio, and other youth activists I met through Make the Road and student groups inspired the organizing scenes with Pilar, Angelina, Fatima, Diego, and Leo.
In college, Pilar teaches writing workshops for immigrant children at a Carmelite convent and ends up helping a Mayan refugee from Guatemala named Flor, the mother of one of her students, apply for asylum. Volunteering with the New Sanctuary Coalition from 2014 to 2018, particularly accompanying immigrant families to court, was integral to writing Flor’s story. That work took on more urgency with Trump’s assaults on immigrants. The emotional highs and lows and the Beloved Community I experienced through organizing, marches, and campaign work are in Pilar and Río’s experiences of activism and artivism.
These characters and their stories are entering the world in a time when DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) is blocked. The government has created a crisis at the southern border and is pouring more money and resources into its militarization and the criminalization of migrants. Our asylum policy is, in some ways, more restrictive than it was under Trump. Operation Lonestar is separating families and using violent tactics against migrants. About five hundred anti-trans bills have been introduced this year, and anti-queer attacks are on the rise. There is a global rise of nationalism, scapegoating marginalized people, and the US is funding a genocide—only unlike the Mayan genocide that we funded in Guatemala, this one is being livestreamed into our living rooms.
My hope is that Country of Under will inspire readers to get involved in ways that feel meaningful to them.
Rumpus: Mothers are a pulsing theme in your novel, both the loss of mothers and the finding of a chosen family who can provide the support of a mother. Are your characters finding or doing as much mothering as they can?
Shaffner: Imperfect mothers—biological, chosen, metaphysical—are a theme. In particular, Sister MJ, an Outward Bound leader turned conflicted activist nun, becomes a mother figure to Pilar when she volunteers in a Carmelite convent involved in immigrant advocacy. Dr. Yoon, a drag queen acupuncturist, who melds Salpuri with Philip Glass and Pina Bausch, becomes a mother figure to Carlos when they begin performing at Lucky Feng’s Drag Cabaret. MJ, Dr. Yoon, and the Sisters of Mother of Sorrows and Lucky Feng’s, mother Pilar and Carlos as best they can, but Dr. Yoon warns Río against putting excessive faith in him or anyone, saying, “No one is pure, not me or anyone else.” These characters help Pilar and Río to ask bigger questions. Pilar and Río grow and change within these communities, until they must push beyond their borders.
Self isn’t created in a vacuum, but in relationship to others, and I believe the purpose of relationships is to learn from each other.
Rumpus: As a queer person, the scenes of evolving identity particularly stuck with me—how we can change over time, in relationship to time and place. How do you think Carlos’s identity is impacted by his origin, and then encapsulated, when they come into themselves as Río?
Shaffner: Carlos’s mother’s boyfriend nearly kills him when he catches Carlos, at age five, wearing his mother’s dress. Carlos’s mother gives him to his grandmother to raise, believing he’ll be safer. Fearful for her grandson, Carlos’s grandmother constantly surveils and forces him to suppress proclivities and behaviors she sees as feminine. Carlos consequently becomes a chameleon. His keen powers of observation, wit, and ability to transform himself allow him to survive San Jacinto High as the star of the school plays.
When Carlos becomes Río in New York, they remember parking by the Rio Grande with Pilar, their sweaty body in a silk dress, how that ever-changing, ever-constant river let them tell each other everything. Río’s path is toward afluidity that’s not a defense but a return to the vulnerability that they found with Pilar.
Queerness teaches us to question, embrace change, and create outside of the dictates of patriarchal and heteronormative culture. I began dating women when I was forty-two, while writing this book, so I felt deeply connected to Río’s queer discovery process, even though I was middle-aged. (Of course, I was like Pilar in contemplating it for so long before acting.) My first love with a woman held the wonder of discovering both another and myself, anew. Openness to continual discovery is where intimacy, possibility, and, yes, our true selves reside.
Rumpus: Pilar and Río find themselves fascinated with snapshots of life: the faces of strangers on a train and their stories, the people who project their discomfort onto Río. How can strangers tap into the wounds we are healing?
Shaffner: I moved to New York City for writing school right after college. I was twenty three and was, like Pilar and Río, raw, searching, and porous. I tried to capture that free-flowing exchange between Pilar and Río’s heartbreaks and revelations and those of the city that surrounds them.
A lot of us kids who move from small towns to the city naively dream of escaping patriarchy and homophobia and finding our people, but of course these things are everywhere, and the city can be a lonely place. Being visibly queer, Río painfully encounters people’s discomfort with gender-nonconformity. There’s a scene where Carlos, in drag as Carmen Miranda, rides the subway to a show. They’re listening to Patti Smith’s Horses, which Carlos hasn’t listened to since high school. The music brings back their first drag performance to “Gloria” and how far that fierce, vulnerable first time is from Carmen’s campy drag performances. A man gets up in Carmen’s face and starts screaming about hellfire and damnation. This experience allows Carlos to confront the assault he experienced in high school. He understands that this man is, and his high school bullies were, attacking their own soft, vulnerable selves. Carlos’s collision with this stranger on the subway marks a turning point toward reclaiming the vulnerability and ferocity of their first drag performance.
Rumpus: You write, “She [Pilar] wanted to believe that we could write our lives.” The stories we tell, and those we don’t, are a thread throughout the book. How can holding onto destructive stories for too long prevent us from actualizing our true possibility?
Shaffner: Pilar’s desire to believe that we can write our lives is expressed in the context of her encouraging Ceci, her talented fourteen-year-old writing student, to write again. Ceci hasn’t written since her undocumented mother, Flor, was detained and they were forced to enter sanctuary. Flor has chosen to make public her long-silenced story of what she suffered in the Guatemalan genocide and in her harrowing journey to the US as part of the Sanctuary movement and consequently must share her story with Ceci. Though terrible things have happened to her, Flor chooses how to tell her story: “In the surety of Flor telling her daughter, We are a miracle, was the making of that miracle.”
Rumpus: Queerness is often more accepted when it’s kept quiet, but Río is not quiet. They express their queerness by playing with fashion, hair, and makeup. Why did you choose clothing as a talisman through which Río ultimately discovers Río?
Shaffner: I think it was partly a way of challenging my own anti-capitalist rigidity, which I like to make fun of by telling the story of my dramatic adolescent self bursting into tears in a Houston galleria food court on my birthday when the bottomless sadness of mass consumerism hit me all at once. Río’s fashion challenges dominant culture and are the portal through which they become their most authentic, vulnerable, brave, and connected self.
Rumpus: Carlos tells Pilar, “It’s okay to take time. To heal, be.” How does Country of Under make space for healing?
Shaffner: Our culture teaches us that if you’re not on the go, if you’re not visibly producing, you’re not worthwhile. That pressure intensifies when you’ve always fought to survive. In giving so much space to the characters’ internal worlds, I mean to insist on their inherent beauty and worth. The Country of Under is also the submerged worlds of these characters’ dreams, thoughts, hopes, and visions; their trying, failing, and discovering; their being and possibility.
Country of Under insists that contemplative time is needed for one’s well-being and for creating anything of meaning. It also insists on the importance of the time and energy that we devote to nurturing community, love, and creating beautiful experiences. These things refill our wells for the long journey ahead.
Rumpus: Once Río metaphorically rises from the ashes, a journey that begins with a dress found in a heap of used clothing, how do they feel into themselves enough to accept Pilar for who she is?
Shaffner: I think for Río, for all of us, it’s that work of questioning and trying to move beyond our knee-jerk reactions. When something feels foreign—when it threatens our sense of order—our instinctive response may be judgment, fear, or repulsion. Delving into that reaction, we may find that it’s rooted in some deep-seated fear from childhood or a fear of our shadow self. We may find it’s related to the ways that we’ve protected ourselves and survived. If we can step back from our fear and judgment, we might find parallels in our seemingly different experiences. Do the sisters of Mother of Sorrows Carmelite Convent fulfill some of the same needs as the sisters of Lucky Feng’s Drag Cabaret? As far away as it seems on the surface, how might this thing we’ve rejected actually be a lot closer to our own needs, desires, and experiences? We can’t get anywhere with anyone by rejecting them.
Rumpus: If Pilar and Río were not the dreamers they are, do you think they would have ever pursued their passions and ultimately found what they were meant to do?
Shaffner: For Pilar, Río, and all of us, it begins with a dream. My day job involves helping college and graduate school applicants, artists, and writers voice their dreams about who they want to become and the world that they want to help create. I’ll never forget first learning about the concept of performative utterance, of speaking a reality into being. First we need to dream it, then we need to give voice to that dream and build structure and community around it to usher it into the world.
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Author photograph by Niteesh Elias
