“The Tattooed Soldier was born from my experiences as the son of Guatemalan immigrants, and as a young reporter assigned to cover the impoverished neighborhoods of central Los Angeles.”
--Héctor Tobar
In the days leading up to the 1992 riots, residents of Los Angeles gather in MacArthur Park hoping to find a moment’s respite. Lovers stroll the lake, mothers mind children, and men play chess hoping to temporarily forget an eviction notice, elude gang warfare, or sidestep social bigotry. Onto this stage step two men unwittingly connected by the past that haunts both: a Guatemalan death squad attack commanded by one man and survived by the other. Recognizing his assaulter by the yellow jaguar tattooed on his arm, the victim resolves to dispense justice on behalf of his murdered wife and child. Little does he realize that the verdict of the Rodney King trial and history itself will conspire to declare for Los Angeles a “municipal day of settling accounts” that will aid him in his vendetta.
–-Christina Sheldon, University Library, CSULA
Reviewed by Sybil Steinberg in Publishers Weekly, April 13, 1998.
The first novel from L.A. Times reporter Tobar is a gripping tale of revenge set on the lowest rung of L.A.'s social ladder, amidst the hardscrabble lives of illegal immigrants and the homeless. The fates of Guatemalan death-squad veteran Guillermo Longoria and traumatized, homeless refugee Antonio Bernal have been entwined since the day Longoria killed Antonio's wife and son in Guatemala. Obsessed by memories of his family and also by the mental picture of the assassin with a yellow jaguar tattooed on his forearm, Antonio ends up as one of L.A.'s drifting dispossessed. By chance he sees Longoria in MacArthur Park and is electrified by the possibility of avenging his loved ones. Meanwhile, in alternating chapters, we meet Longoria, a peasant who was forced to join the army but eventually grew to love the power it gave him. He absorbed the twisted logic that justified the massacre of an entire village to drive out the "infection" of communism, but he too is now haunted by memories. The novel's denouement occurs during the 1992 L.A. riots, a colossal day of reckoning when the powerless underclass of L.A. erupts in fury and when both men move toward their fates. Tobar's prose is clear and crisp, authentically colored by the liberal use of Spanish phrases. He never sentimentalizes Antonio's tragic story, and even the hateful Longoria is depicted with understanding of the social forces that molded him. The complexities of these two characters give this novel power and weight.