Burien author’s new book investigates his roots through music

Many authors know a manuscript is not a therapist. But as Noé Álvarez’s new book, “Accordion Eulogies,” draws to a stirring conclusion, readers encounter a writer figuring himself out on the page, wrestling with ideas about family history, the complexity of national borders and his purpose as an artist.

It’s an exciting place to land after a worthwhile journey, one that carries the now Burien-based Álvarez from his hometown of Yakima through Boston, New Orleans, San Antonio, and the Tierra Caliente region of Mexico. The reason for this trip is a reunion with Álvarez’s distant grandfather, a mythical family figure who abandoned his son — Álvarez’s father — before the family left Mexico for Yakima.

“He was a migrant and a traveling musician,” Álvarez writes of his grandfather, who “held music more tightly than he held his children.”

“Accordion Eulogies” brims with such phrases: efficient, poetic, often delivered with double meaning. Álvarez, 38, published his first book “Spirit Run” in 2020 and has been working on “Eulogies” for the past three years.

“Life is always an interrogation for me, a self-investigation,” Álvarez said. “I didn’t grow up around books, but I started writing as a way to deal with the heavy things in my life. In a way, I found myself through writing.”

If writing brought Álvarez closer to himself, he figured the accordion might bring him closer to the lifestyle of his grandfather. In Álvarez’s youth, his grandfather enchanted crowds with his corridos (Mexican ballads) and refused the hardness of Yakima, instead keeping to himself in Michoacán.

“I needed to imagine things being different than how they were in my town,” Álvarez said of his childhood in Yakima, where he watched his parents struggle with long days of manual labor. Álvarez admits that his conception of the arid farming community has changed over the years. In “Eulogies,” he calls Yakima “The Palm Springs of Sadness.” Yet he sees how it shaped him and feels a corresponding responsibility to give back. Álvarez will host an accordion-centric music festival and book event at the Central Washington Agricultural Museum on June 29, focusing on corridos and local artists.

“Accordion Eulogies” is as much a musical ethnography as it is a book about Álvarez’s family. The author purchases an accordion early in the tale and devotes a hefty portion of his pages to the instrument’s history. “Nowadays,” he writes, “accordions seem to exist only in pawnshops or antique shops, collecting dust and passing through the hands of hobbyists. They are seen as fixtures of a time past, their reeds and their stories both grown stale.”

For Álvarez, the instrument could not be more pressing. It’s tied not just to his grandfather, but to a generation of migrants that includes his own parents. Álvarez grew up hearing the staticky reed melodies on Yakima radio. He has nostalgic and emotional bonds to the sound.

“I know that the accordion will help me become something beautiful,” he writes. “But the sight of it is also bittersweet. It will always remind me that at the instrument’s core are the struggles of my family’s past.”

Álvarez’s musical inquiry leads him to hotbeds of the accordion’s past in Louisiana and Texas. In New Orleans, he spends time with Jeffery Broussard of the Creole Cowboys, a zydeco player who embraces the genre’s localized working-class origins. “It’s music that holds a lot of sadness,” Broussard said. “[Zydeco] is not a commercial thing. It is the recognition of our elders. It is respect dedicated to them.”

Some 250 miles west, in Beaumont, Texas, Álvarez meets Ed Poullard, “a world-class fiddler and one of the last remaining Black Creole accordion makers.” Poullard takes on occasional apprentices, but because of the work’s difficulty, he would appear to bookend a long line of exacting craftsmen. “Building an accordion is one of the most complicated woodworking projects one can undertake,” Álvarez writes. “It takes over one hundred hours to build a single one, and Ed usually spreads it over a four- to nine-month period.”

All the while, Álvarez is also teaching himself to play the instrument. “Playing, to me, can be abstract,” Álvarez said. “So much of writing is silent. With the accordion, I wanted to feel the sounds and agony of life. The process of learning the instrument was important to me.”

Music and family come to a riveting head in the final and strongest segment of “Accordion Eulogies,” when Álvarez travels to Mexico for a reunion with his grandfather. Chauffeured by his cousin through the winding valleys of Tierra Caliente, Álvarez encounters a land inhospitable to foreigners. Beset by cartel violence, the roadways a mess, the area is only accessible to those with legitimate local ties — and sometimes not even then. Álvarez admits to a powerful mixture of doubt and impostor syndrome among these hardships. “At times,” he writes, “I worry that I’m living out a delusion, thinking I could make sense of the ghosts that have haunted our family. In chasing my grandfather’s story, I may be reawakening a chapter of our history that may hurt others, or insult the hard work they’ve done to trap this demon.”

As in any hero’s journey, confrontations intensify at the quest’s finale. Álvarez saves his best writing and most fascinating reflections for Michoacán. The most relatable notion is that, in his embrace of the artist’s path, Álvarez could unwittingly become an itinerant dreamer like his grandfather, who harmed the family in a nominal pursuit of music and freedom. Whether in Mexico or Yakima, Burien or New Orleans, this cyclical dynamic is something that every reader can sympathize with.

“I know that I have established a powerful relationship with my past,” Álvarez writes. “This is enough. My grandfather cannot take it away from me.”