How to Look Away

“Daniel Peña liberates us from the false trap spectacles of pain with a simple message: Witnessing is not enough. By bike, plane, foot and with a brilliant eye, he takes readers on a tour of our benighted Americas. These magnificent essays do what is so difficult and necessary to do: They enlarge the frame. Here are the deported back home in Mexico, here are clues to the long history of how we got here. And here is the author himself wrestling mightily with his own freedom, his own joy, his own sorrow.”—John Freeman, author of California Rewritten

“Braiding journalism, cultural criticism, and memoir, the essays in this book look at the extreme tolerance of human rights abuses against migrants from Latin America and elsewhere.”—Chicago Review of Books

“After the Pushcart Prize–winning Peña was asked on a BBC podcast with journalist Allan Little, ‘What differentiates viewer from voyeur?,’ he began to write these essays about the American treatment of brown people, including Mexicans and Native Americans. The author himself has twice been stopped by ICE and reflects on how current policies separate everyone, regardless of citizenship, into those willing to use violence and ‘a lower tier to which the rest of us are condemned.’”—Los Angeles Times

“Apt that How to Look Away is set in the typeface Dante, because Daniel Peña is the Virgil we need right now. In blistering essay after essay, he safely guides us through the many circles of American cruelty until we emerge on the other side. With Joan Didion’s ear and Ryszard Kapuściński’s eye, this lyrical and luminous book is destined to become a classic.”—Tomás Q. Morín, author of Cat Love

“In the future, when people ask what the hell happened in North America in the first quarter of the twentieth century, they should reach for a copy of Daniel Peña’s How to Look Away. In gorgeously written essays on topics like ICE’s degradation rituals, the curious downstream effects of having a drug-cartel killer in the family, or the meaning of the Mexican deportee on both sides of the border, Peña dismantles the engines of the white gaze.”—Carla Power, two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and author of The Lady Imam

“Sharp, thrilling, and strange in the best possible way, Daniel Peña’s How to Look Away is a profound and fiercely contemporary collection.”—Mark Haber, author of Lesser Ruins

“A powerful, thoughtful rant against the monstrous innocence of twenty-first-century America.”—Ed Morales, author of Fantasy Island and Latinx

“A searing meditation on citizenship, white supremacy, and precarity in America today.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Within this fascinating study of dark material, he includes rays of hope, including a luminous tale of night cycling in Germany, family affection (even if they are narcos!), marital solidarity, and a blue jay he calls Fred who visited him daily during the pandemic in Houston.”—Booklist, starred review