Noé Álvarez is feeling around for the right word.
“Writing,” he says, “I don’t know—maybe writing was an act of . . . vengeance.”
It’s an unexpected insight. Even Álvarez laughs—maybe at the Hollywood-sized scale of the word, or maybe as a linguistic marksman admiring his shot. “Language was a scary thing for me growing up.”
Álvarez is the son of Mexican migrants who settled in Yakima, Washington, to wrench a living from the area’s apple orchards. Spanish was the language of their house, but it seemed to attract trouble for Álvarez at school and around town. “I had to conquer the word as a way to defend myself, essentially, [which] is why I’ve put so much work into language,” he says. “Because I was so fearful over language, I just got really neurotic about language.”
That has worked out well for Álvarez, Washington Semester Program ’06, now a lyrical author whose paragraphs are spring-loaded with evocative metaphors. His first book, Spirit Run, a 2020 memoir about leaving college to join an Indigenous nations–led marathon across North America, was featured at the Library of Congress’s National Book Festival in 2021.
“I’m happy that I finally found an outlet to articulate,” he says of writing. “But my reality has always been in the sounds and the music around me.”
Looming large in that aural mix are the Mexican hero-tragedy folk songs called corridos—enduring narratives once used to telegraph news from towns and battles—that he remembers his parents listening to on a radio in the orchards. For Álvarez, they also were the songs of quinceañeras, community gatherings, and Yakima’s bars and dance halls. It was a sonic backdrop that, a couple years ago, he suddenly realized he needed more than ever.
Álvarez had reached an emotional and spiritual impasse, a tumor of questions and grief that couldn’t be accessed with words. So he bought an accordion—two, actually: one that he had ordered from the century-old Castagnari workshop in Italy and another Castagnari he bought at a music store when he could no longer stand the wait.
That’s the level of soul-itchiness he was up against.
The attempt to scratch that itch has resulted in a new memoir, Accordion Eulogies, that is already garnering fresh accolades for Álvarez. A starred review in Booklist finds that “once again, this gifted writer proves to be an essential contemporary voice.”
When it’s suggested that a two-row, button-style accordion seems like a lot of instrument for someone to take up on a whim—in Colombian folklore, he points out in the book, it’s the instrument wielded by the devil—Álvarez doesn’t disagree.
“But that’s just the way I do things,” he says. “I don’t make it easy for myself.”
In conversation, Álvarez refers to the accordion both as “this beastly thing” and a work of profound craftsmanship. And the instrument would seem, for poetic purposes, the ideal personification of the emotional storm in Álvarez’s new book. In the expansion and contraction of its ribbed torso (called bellows), the accordion breathes and sighs; the buttons for treble and bass line up on opposing sides of the center, split like two halves of a mind; and, he finds, notes on the accordion easily layer and melt into music—a perfect foil for the dissonance pulling at Álvarez from inside.
It “always feels like you’re playing something beautiful,” he says.
But none of that is actually what led him to pursue the accordion. Instead, it was Álvarez’s lone photo of his paternal grandfather, a man named Eulogio, whose quirks and failings in his short presence had become magnified in his long absence.
In the photo, the grinning man is holding a piano-style accordion, which “seemed to have a smile of its own,” Álvarez writes. But little was known about his grandfather beyond what was visible in the picture; the rest was a bramble of family memories and tall tales—few of them endearing.
From those stories and a handful of personal encounters years before, Álvarez had known his grandfather as the man who left behind a young family, leading to Álvarez’s father being made homeless after the death of his mother. He was a perennial hunter of lost Spanish gold; a one-time police detective and movie-theater projectionist; and a traveling balladeer, especially of corridos. “Of his playing,” Álvarez writes, “some say that this man had harnessed the powers of our people in his hands, that he mastered the sounds of the motherland in all its grief and glory. That his accordion held the rhythms that determined the outcome of village events and foretold the tragedies of the poor.”
Most of all, he seemed to be an enigmatic wanderer and a dreamer, however flawed. And, with interest and discomfort, Álvarez saw in his grandfather pieces of himself.
Learning to play accordion and trekking to find the aging patriarch in Mexico would be an opportunity to fill in blanks Álvarez had held open all these years—questions about his grandfather’s choices and outlook, questions about the regrets he imagined must linger. It was also a chance to try to blunt the spread of emotional scars that had traveled and mutated through two generations.
Álvarez had long wanted to help his father find some peace with his traumatic past, which, Álvarez writes, had left his dad at arm’s length emotionally. And he wanted to reckon with his own restlessness and unresolved feelings he hadn’t shaken loose. Now a third generation was on its way, and Álvarez felt an urgency to clear the debris from this broken branch of the family tree for the sake of his own son.
At first, before it was a book project, it was wholly in the realm of music. And Álvarez’s early maneuvering around the accordion was almost like a hard reset, he writes, his “way of relinquishing the notion that I know anything about anything.”
The accordion initially sat unplayed for days. “It felt heavy, intimidating,” Álvarez says from his home in Seattle. “This is just such a courageous instrument to put on. It tells the world: ‘Look, I’m a musician,’” a declaration he was not remotely ready to make. It was enough for him to sit alone on a mountain or a riverbank and pump feelings through the bellows and buttons.
The tone he sought was a mournful one. “I think I needed to make space for certain emotions, harder emotions, that we as men culturally don’t know how to express or weren’t encouraged to express,” Álvarez says. “It was my way to feel through pain, grief, trauma and then try to literally make it beautiful again, knowing that it’s not going away—the pain—so why run from it? Let’s sit with it.”
As part of that, he spent time with others who have found their expressive natures on the accordion, an education he’d wished to get from his grandfather and father. Instead, he searched the expanse of the instrument’s cultural influence, from Louisiana to Italy. “Everywhere, it seems,” he writes, “there is an accordionist who softens the blows of life with music.”
This part of the story actually had been set in motion nearly two decades ago, in 2006. He was a philosophy major at Whitman College, when he came to AU’s Washington Semester Program to study peace and conflict resolution through the lens of Northern Ireland, which had recently emerged from a decades-long internal war.
In college, he says, “I was still not good with books, I was still struggling with my words and my writing was terrible. I needed to see; I needed something beyond the textbook.”
It was on that trip, at a bar in a seaside village, that Álvarez first heard the accordion’s Irish strain and people mourning through song in a way that erased the miles between Yakima and that far-flung coast. For many of the men around him growing up, “The only way to cry is through corridos. They needed this music,” he says. “That’s the way I understood it with some of the people in Northern Ireland, who still had very vivid accounts of what happened and the things that were happening in those communities.”
That night in Northern Ireland, they talked about the Troubles, about Mexican culture, and about a ribbon of melancholy that connected their worlds. Instruments emerged from behind the bar and sadness was hung out to dry.
Tangled in all this is a complicated lonesomeness, a sense of limbo between worlds. Álvarez’s circumstances are not those of his parents’, but he feels acutely the shadow of their struggles; he longs to be still, for them and for himself, but feels pulled by timeless currents to ramble; and he wrestles with a sense of being an outsider in either of the two nations that ought to feel like home.
David Vazquez, professor of critical race, gender, and culture studies at AU and director of the university’s Latina/o/x studies program, says that “In some ways, that’s the paradigmatic story of Latinx literature, questions about belonging. I never feel more American than when I’m in Latin America. It just happens.” Assimilation to one, Vazquez says, can lead to a sense of unbelonging in both.
In music, though, Álvarez finds a language for these existential pains, expressions that transmit cleanly across borders and generations.
“For me, the accordion is like the pursuit of unborn sounds,” he says. “I don’t know what’s inside of me; there’s so many things I’ve neglected—just like I didn’t know I had so many words inside of me. I was quiet for so long because I was just so vigilant, so on guard and so scared. The accordion for me now is like: What is my sound? What do I sound like?”
Even if what he uncovers are dark, brooding tones, “there’s still something beautiful preserved in there, and it fills me with hope.” It’s an opportunity, Álvarez says, for “documenting grief and the tragedy in a way that I feel proud to pass on to my kid.”
Álvarez has been composing songs, which lately are about loss—about shedding long-held internal narratives and the loss of that version of himself, and songs that contemplate the loss of his parents someday.
“What it’s really doing for me is helping me sit with death a little bit better, in a way,” he says. “I know more of it’s going to come my way.”
When that day comes, he imagines he will play it off with a deep, colorful wind from an accordion. But he’s also not waiting to make that connection. One of the two accordions Álvarez bought at the start of this journey—the one ordered directly from Italian craftsmen—is now with his dad in Yakima, like an ornate wooden bridge to the past.
Álvarez says that’s “the one I wanted to link up to his breath”—the one he roamed the US and Mexico with in search of wisdom and answers; the one he intends, eventually, to hand his own son. An instrument of pain and repair that’s been hugged by generations.