‘Something to escape from’

Barefoot Gringo
by George Bowering

Vancouver: On Point Press, an imprint of UBC Press, 2026
$26.95  /  9780774890786

Reviewed by Harold Rhenisch

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This is a poet’s anti-memoir and a poet’s anti Lonely Planet guide, just as his novel Burning Water was an anti-history. It tracks George Bowering’s education in Mexico, from famous poet itching in the constraints of academic life to an old guy in a wheelchair in a Mexico in which everyone knows his name.

The background is that George was a small-town boy in British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley, where everyone did know everyone’s name, and knew their secrets, too. During his life-long absence as a professor of literature in Vancouver and then as Canada’s first parliamentary poet laureate, the Okanagan was gentrified and became a kind of Napa Valley North, centred on images of paradise and the Los Angeles-style canyon subdivisions of North Kelowna.

You can’t go home to that. There’s just no home there, yet in Barefoot Gringo George has gone home: sideways, backwards, with merciful strangers and his wife Jean pushing him in a wheelchair (to his undying admiration). In other words, he hasn’t gone home by going back in memory. He has gone forwards: not alone but with the help of others.

He writes the book, for example, in the present tense. Be careful with that as you’re reading. It’s simultaneously the strength and weakness of the book. I don’t want to throw any spoilers in here, so let’s just say it’s a very poetic present tense. And be patient. George is messing, teasing, with point of view.

There are ironies with this approach. One of them is that during George’s stint as poet laureate (2002-2004), he got into a spat with the slam poets of Vancouver, who championed oral presentation, with its background in improvisational theatre, while he insisted on presentations based on traditions of textual self-awareness, especially ones that tested their boundaries, often teasing with faux simplicity. The irony is that the two are very close.

To get our heads around that, it’s a good idea to go back to the historic beer parlours of pre-Craft Beer British Columbia. Yes, beer parlours, with their flat beer, little round tables with terry towel table cloths, noise, cigarette smoke, separate Ladies and Escorts entrances, and general cultural melting pot vibe. Those places, which siphoned off the wealth of a province of summer work camps up the coast and residential hotels in winter, served union-made beer for a working man’s culture. They were great places for honing storytelling and bullshitting skills, in the tried-and-true British Columbia tradition of one-liners, zingers, groaners, logger jargon, silences full of worlds of (sometimes drunken) camaraderie and general freedom from what George calls, right here in Barefoot Gringo, Presbyterian Canada. In the book, that place doubles as comfortable, privileged, rich and unacknowledged colonial life. It is something to escape from.

George is one of those raconteurs. The first half of Barefoot Gringo jumps from one zinger to another, all of them the kind of crowd pleaser recognizable around the social leveller of a table crowded with glasses and almost invisible through smoke.

A note on that: this is not sophisticated humour. In fact, as the book opens and chug-a-lugs into its middle-sections, a lot of the jokes are dated, as if it were still the 1950s. As the book goes on, though, the tone softens, as George slowly lets us in on a secret: he’s making a deliberate poke at modern middle-class pretensions.

That George chooses not to explain this evolving sense in the book and the anti-evolution behind it, is what I was referencing when I wrote that George favours presentations of textual self-awareness. He wants us to get these connections as we read, and be transformed as we go.

He starts off by dropping the names of famous writers he has known and worked with, but then flies to Mexico with friends, a small group that includes a small-town poet, Linda Crosfield, who writes honestly and passionately from Nelson and is not part of that famous world. Their affection is genuine.

That sideways return to George’s small town Okanagan past, as well as to the Mexico of his early literary days, transforms George. Slowly, he divests himself of literature by reading great Canadian books from his collection one at a time between naps in the sun (I mean, he’s not young anymore), and leaving them in bookstores and B&B shelves in Mexico, for someone else to find by chance. They are little zinging Georges quietly sitting there, waiting to catch attention long after he is gone.

There is a strong anti-US thread here. It’s not anti-US in general. It’s very specific. George makes it clear that he loves the US, considers Canada to be as American as the US, loves baseball, and loves US working class traditions and chain hotels celebrating Mexican food. He is also clear that he dislikes what the US has done to Mexico, including all-inclusive resorts, towering modernist hotels, and vacations insulated from Mexican life. In other words, he doesn’t support colonialism. This is a profoundly anti-colonial book.

It’s also a record of change. Over the course of the years George visited Mexico, he watched the country change. Some change is very positive. Beautiful kids that reminded him of his Okanagan childhood become beautiful young men and women, serving their culture with the same pride as their parents did years before. There are a lot of weddings, too, very traditional Mexican weddings.

Other change is very negative. This is the Lonely Planet the book counters: a world of looming hotels and sameness, full of restaurants not patronized by Mexicans. That a lot of these hotels are not US but Spanish is not the point. That 90-95% of their visitors are US-Americans is.

Which brings us to the “barefoot gringo” of the title. A gringo is a non-latino North American, usually from the US, but a “barefoot gringo”, that’s George’s thing. As I read it, the term means you can wear boots with spurs and star in a Western in which you invade Mexico and claim it as your own in an image of your own country (a historical reality for 55% of Mexico, including the Napa Valley and the burnt-out canyon developments of Los Angeles—both in the old Mexican province of Alta California), or you can go barefoot, walk on the sand, eat Mexican street food, and get to know Mexicans as friends and neighbours.

Those are two distinct kinds of invasion. George Bowering prefers the latter. There are turkey hot dogs. They are, he claims, the best in the world, following, by the looks of it, the logic that whatever is served from a Mexican food truck, or in a restaurant frequented by Mexican families, is the best in the world. The person who gets off the worst is a former Canadian university colleague who doesn’t adapt to being a gracious guest in Mexican small-town culture. She remains unnamed but is sure no barefoot gringo.

Overall, there is a lot of drinking and a lot of food in George’s Mexican experience. It wouldn’t be off the mark to say that George is devouring Mexico, and licking his fingers for the lingering taste of it. With that in mind, and because the term “barefoot gringo” is George’s, and this is the travel guidebook to barefoot gringo life, here are some other characteristics of barefoot gringos gleaned from the book’s pages:

Pacifico: A beer.

Salad: Fruit juice with tequila.

Jokes: Groaners.

Food: Tortillas. Or Tacos. Usually with fish.

Travel: Awful. Makes the narrator sick to the stomach. Literally.

Children: Loves them.

Childhood: Just the fun bits. The past (and the Okanagan) wasn’t, after all, paradise. Shh.

Time: The children get older and are loved more. They’re grandchildren, basically.

History: Really shaky on details. More like just “wow” moments. Lots of those.

Research: What you do with a) a blender and b) a straw. Salad. (See above.)

Historical Research: What’s that?

Crib: The Holy Game.

Heaven: Small-town Mexico.

Hell: US hotel Mexico.

Pajamas: Popular beach gear.

Shoes: What?

Swimming Pools: Strange. Not for swimming in.

Angel: A woman called Jean.

Poet: A woman called Linda.

Age: Something to laugh about, even when it gets very bad.

Present: Eternal.

The eternal present is the thing. George ages dramatically throughout the book, yet his zest for life, and his love for those around him, especially his sweetheart Jean, only increases. Mexico might have been torn from George abruptly during the 2020 pandemic, but it is not gone, and he has not left it, and now that he has written this book he won’t, even if Mexico leaves itself for a landscape of towering hotels and beaches that just go on and on without meeting the horizon.

Barefoot Gringo is a secular man’s ascension to heaven through literature.What seemed silly at its beginning gets very serious at the end. That includes the love he shares with Jean. This is a love story. You will be charmed. I sure was.

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Harold Rhenisch has written thirty-five books from the Southern Interior since 1974. He won the George Ryga Prize for a memoir, The Wolves at Evelyn. His other grasslands books are Tom Thompson’s Shack and Out of the Interior. He lived for fifteen years in the South Cariboo and worked closely with photographer Chris Harris on Spirit in the Grass, Motherstone, Cariboo Chilcotin Coast, and The Bowron Lakes; and he writes the blog Okanagan-Okanogan. Harold lives in an old Japanese orchard on unceded Syilx Territory above Canim Bay on Okanagan Lake. [Editor’s note: Harold has recently reviewed books by bill bissett, Garth Martens, Diana Hayes, Mary Dalton (ed.), Gary Geddes, and Tom McGauley for The British Columbia Review. His newest volume, The Salmon Shanties, was reviewed by Steven Ross Smith.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster