Hat Dance

What happens when a haphazard team of journalists find themselves in a foreign land? In Hat Dance author Michael A. Thomas relies on his background in Mexican culture to tell the story.Lee White, an American journalist journeys to the Indian village of Huatepec hosts his daughter, Courtney—a documentary filmmaker—and her boyfriend, Kevin—her Chicano technician. The three set out with the help of Lee’s partner, Checo Rivera, a Mexican photographer to capture the sights and sounds of the holiday celebration, the Fiesta de Santiago Apostál.Along the way, White’s entourage of gringos and chilangos must broker cultural exchanges with villagers preoccupied with preparations for the fiesta, phlegmatic rural revolutionaries who are losing ground to the fiesta fervor, and nuns dedicated to charity and social justice. White’s entourage must also keep on the lookout for Lieutenant Campos, a military bureaucrat determined to root out the rebels, and Sam Cooke, an American soldier of fortune and sinister sometime associate of the Lieutenant. The good Lieutenant and the palpably dangerous Mr. Cooke are looking to sabotage the plans of the film crew and promote nefarious agendas of their own. The situation comes to a head as the Fiesta de Santiago explodes into the brash, sensory overloaded chaos that is the typical Mexican folk fiesta. Bands play, fireworks light up the summer sky, dance troops emerge, and the peasants feast and drink as if the past had collapsed and the future was a meaningless abstraction. Against the backdrop of the fiesta, White and the others find themselves involved in struggles that are as absurd as they are grim.The aftermath is not pretty but the film is in the can and the articles ready. Lee, Checo and the cadre of gringo journalists just need to get out of the mountains. But not before they’ve dealt with the cruel and senseless murder of some of the nuns, that Lee had characterised as “kind, dorky girls.” At the end of the novel, Lee has learned something about Love, something about redemption and reconciliation, and something about the persistence of evil.