Review: A mixed-blood Indian in 'The Five Acts of Diego Leon'

In America of the ’20s and ’30s, Mexicans were sprayed and dusted before they were allowed in. They were barred from lunch counters, turned away from hotels. God forbid they should fall in love: In California, as in many other states, the government had outlawed interracial marriage. If, like Dolores del Rio and Ramon Navarro, a Mexican managed to claw his way to stardom, he worked hard to pass himself off as an “exotic” of indeterminate ancestry, a “Latin” of European extraction. And like del Rio and Navarro, he soon found himself cast from that paradise — out of luck, out of work, culled by the harsh mill of fortune.

That is the story Alex Espinoza sets out to tell in “The Five Acts of Diego Leon,” a novel that takes its hero from the crucible of the Mexican Revolution to Hollywood during a heady transformation — from silents to talkies. It is a story undertaken with gusto, imagined with daring and executed with mixed results.

This is not the first time Espinoza, a Mexican American, has written of cultural displacement. His highly praised first novel, “Still Water Saints,” told of a healing priestess who doled out herbs, candles and cures from a shop on the fringes of contemporary Los Angeles.

His new story harks back to a more nettled time. Diego Leon is a child of two Mexicos: His mother is from a well-to-do home in the city of Morelia; his father is a full-blooded Indian of the P’urhepecha tribe. So it is that a half-indigenous, half-Creole boy, whose father returns from the revolution a broken man, is sent off to be raised by his uppity Morelian grandparents. In time, they convince him that he is white, special, destined for greatness. An aging actress who takes interest in the boy’s theatrical abilities convinces him that he was meant for a larger stage.