The opening pages of José Skinner’s new novel The Search Committee seem to promise readers a merciless academic satire set in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley. The first character introduced is a cringey assistant professor, William Quigley, originally from Minnesota and presently decked out in what he calls “his best tierra caliente outfit”—linen pants, guayabera, Panama hat, and huaraches. Quigley teaches a sophomore-level course on English-language novels about Mexico and likes to refer to his adopted home region as “Greene-land,” a nod to Graham Greene’s depictions of tropical outposts where no one can be trusted.
As we meet him, Quigley is waiting at the airport to greet a prospective departmental hire, the PhD student Minerva Mondragón, whose abstruse dissertation on the Mexican comic book series La Familia Burrón he amusingly deconstructs in his head. Then, just as we’re settled in for a spicy takedown of petty campus egos in the land of Border Studies, Skinner reveals that he has something else in mind.
Before heading back to campus, Quigley and Mondragón decide to slip across the border to the Mexican city of La Reina—a fictional stand-in for the cartel-violence-plagued Reynosa—in pursuit of a more authentic margarita. She gets kidnapped, and he gets in over his head trying to find her and bring her back without risking his tenure. Suddenly, the academic satire has shifted to a new register, taking on much heavier subject matter. It’s a risky gambit with real pitfalls to dodge, but Skinner pulls it off.
Along the way, The Search Committee paints, scene by scene, a rich regional landscape as the story twists and turns through various settings and milieus. Skinner’s breezy lack of pretense is refreshing for a book taking on such fraught topics as narco-violence and the U.S.-Mexico border, but his humility disguises real sophistication. Skinner knows this material inside and out, and he’s delivered a convincing vision of the Texas-Mexico borderlands in these dark times.
Skinner was born in Puerto Rico, raised in Mexico City, and earned a graduate degree from the famed Iowa Writer’s Workshop. For many years, he directed the bilingual MFA at the University of Texas-Pan American, later renamed the University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley, in Edinburg—clearly the model for the fictional Bravo University in The Search Committee. He has previously published two volumes of short fiction, The Tombstone Race and Flight and Other Stories, but this is his first novel. In 2023, he co-founded the Alienated Majesty bookstore in Austin, which has quickly become the city’s most reliable outlet for literature in translation and sought-after small-press books, not to mention a key space for lefty events in an era of political clampdown at the nearby UT-Austin campus.
Skinner’s biographical advantages make him an ideal candidate to take on his material. Yet it’s typical of his approach that his main protagonist is not some self-assured reflection of his own qualifications, but rather Quigley, a dopey gringo vacillating between colonial-gaze fascination and fear of a world he doesn’t understand.
Quigley also serves, conveniently, as a way in for readers hoping to learn something about both the Rio Grande Valley and the inner workings of cartels. At every twist, Skinner doles out nuggets of local knowledge, often with a dash of political commentary. For example, Mondragón’s kidnappers are discussed as ni nis, young men who ni trabajan ni estudian, bottom-caste border kids who get by on cartel payouts. When Quigley returns to Bravo University alone and turns for advice to his students, they school him on the types of kidnapping he might be dealing with: levantón (disappearance), express (quick tour of ATM machines with immediate release), secuestro (holding for ransom), and virtual (fake attempt to ransom a person not actually kidnapped).
As it becomes clear Mondragón is being held in secuestro, Quigley increasingly comes to rely on one of his cartel-savvy undergraduates not only for advice but as a go-between. Through this character, Omar, we’re treated to a glimpse of how American-side smuggling operations work, with the sort of peaceful, top-down corruption that once prevailed in Mexico but was lost to the spiral of violence in the post-2006 era: “Busts of safe houses hiding drugs or people happened regularly, but hardly ever violently, and often without arrests, the smugglers having been tipped off and fled. … As long as the smugglers got to move a reasonable amount of product and the authorities were able to replenish their coffers with a reasonable number of forfeitures, everybody was reasonably happy.”
As the stakes of the novel rise, we’re treated to inside views of both upper cartel management and U.S. intelligence services on border-region college campuses. We also get to hear various characters’ analyses of what’s gone wrong to cause the explosion of violence—from NAFTA killing corn as a cash crop for Mexican farmers to a “fragmented criminal landscape” resulting from the War on Drugs-era targeting of cartel leaders.
The book’s 101-level course in Cartel Studies alone is worth the price of admission, but The Search Committee’s subtlest charms lie in Skinner’s ongoing critique of literary writing in English about Mexico and the border. Alongside Greene, William S. Burroughs and Malcolm Lowry come in for ridicule for essentializing Mexico, respectively, as “a sinister place” and a land with “an underlying ugliness, a sort of squalid evil.” Do these tequila-soaked Anglos know enough to pass such judgments, Skinner seems to ask, or are they just filling in the blanks of their local expertise with portentous nonsense?
Skinner reserves his best jibes for Cormac McCarthy, the dearly departed dean of Texas border literature. Midway through the novel, another professor character drives alone through the scrubland northwest of the Valley, what he calls “No Country for Old Men territory.” As he drives, he unfurls in his head gobs of overwrought border prose: “The sun deployed in unmoved moving above the barren ungodded unsaged despoblado drawing forth tottering crenulations of towered heat…”
It’s a good McCarthy spoof. For Skinner, though, it’s also a gauntlet thrown to remind us of what he’s not doing: covering for a lack of nuanced local knowledge with pseudo-visionary, inherited notions of the innate violence of the borderlands. Instead, he walks us through the region as one gives a tour of one’s hometown.
Maybe the most memorable scene in the book is a minor one, set in a bar on the U.S. side of the border devoted to movimiento alterado, or the middle-class cosplaying of narco culture. There’s a Santa Muerte in a grotto by the bar; no one leaves her any money. The bartender complains that he’s similarly treated: “The tips aren’t that great here. If these guys were the real thing, I’d get a Benjamin every now and then.”
I see a hint of Skinner, the under-appreciated novelist, in that bartender. The author’s light-as-a-feather comedy is powerful enough to make us reconsider what “the real thing” is, when it comes to English-language literature about narcos and the border, and to convince us that he might know better than his more famous peers how to get it right.
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