The Many Deaths of Inocencio Rodriguez

Author: Iliana Rocha

Publisher: Tupelo (2022)

The Many Deaths of Inocencio Rodriguez chronicles an obsession with the 1971 unsolved murder of Rocha’s grandfather while interrogating the true crime genre, tabloid culture, immigrant identity, the phenomena of missing and murdered women, troubled relationships with law enforcement, and the intersection of prose and poetry. Because the details of his death were (and are) terribly unclear, part of how the family reconstructed him was to share the different accounts heard over the decades, and this collection attempts to pin down these shifts and contours through destabilizing form and genre. Each speaker reconfigures a past mysterious and tenuous, clouded by distance, language, and time in order to demonstrate how Inocencio Rodriguez defies a single narrative.