Drink, Smoke, Exploitation, Work Plants and Ghosts in Seguin:
Moth and Ghost at Work, $12, Abode Press, 2025, 24p.
reviewed by Juania Sueños
“There was a belief that animals wouldn’t eat us,” Seguinite author Stephen Rendon opens Moth and Ghost at Work here. This is his debut, a hybrid collection published by the emerging Texan press Abode.
The book is reminiscent of Tomás Rivera’s …and the Earth Did Not Devour Him in its lyrical, stream-of-consciousness, fragmented account of the Latino working class. However, Rendon’s approach is closer to a postmodern, pastiche-like style. Each section in Moth and Ghost at Work is divided by diagrams drawing lines between abstract concepts like “animals, labor, computers”—shaping the tips of a triangle. The first page lists characters, including a Latino avatar from the video game Grand Theft Auto and actor Leo Carrillo. The book is humorous and playful, but staggeringly serious: unfolding a brutal history and evolution of the exploitation of Texas’ Latino labor force. In “hearing | 750 a month living space | 2010’s”
Walking to a bus wearing work clothes having people watch what they expect of
Mexican-Americans in 2021.
For them he sat right between filling jobs and stealing them.
We’re sitting somewhere next to him. Labor as a feature and a bug.
There’s a dystopian air in the narrative, resembling We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, where automation and totalitarian governments have replaced and taken over people’s minds, respectively. The characters are trapped by dehumanizing systems of labor and slowly replaced by robots. Though the government here is colonialism.
The father character, who shares similarities with Rendon’s own father, is the emotional epicenter in the book. The narrator fights to reclaim and connect with his father’s experience, aware that it has likely been distorted by those systems. Without his dad there, truth is slippery as he recognizes:
I only know that I do:
where I’ve never been except for through his words.
you just hear it as a memory.
He finds the most piercing connection in the parallels of his present life with his father’s past; both have been handled like disposable workers. “Each year a little more of the reality hits you.” There is a flurry of detailed descriptions of these memories, like his father “bringing toys to the house from trash cans / fixing the plumbing for city-run buildings sixty years in Seguin.”
There’s palpable pain in this collection, especially in the chord alluded to in the title—being a ghost to most people—many working Latinos’ realities. The way that harms people is clear in lines like “He might have washed christ’s feet and not thought anything of it / just moved on to whatever was next,” reiterating the point: labor drains the spirit. A Moth and Ghost at Work is a reckoning with the grief of losing one’s sense of self and value inside the maze of exploitation: “if our identity is taking jobs we want to be as efficient as possible.”
The last paragraph of the opening section leaves us stinging from gruesome racist history. “In the 1800s, ourselves left out in fields, they thought the skin would be unconsumed / because the taste left from the foods we ate.”
Stephen Rendon’s book is as relevant and devastating as ever.
This letter first appeared in the in-print publication Caldwell/Hays Examiner
