MCM Books will release new book in March

March marks the third anniversary of MCM Books’ first book publication. Since the release of Balo’s War, MCM Books has published two other books and is getting ready to release its fourth. In March, the publishing house that focuses on South Texas will release Chon: The Story of a WWII Japanese Spy Who Became a South Texas Vaquero.

Ever since men entered what would eventually become known as the Americas, people from the orient, including Japan, were among them. They crossed the Bering Strait and made their way down to the Magellan Strait. No doubt some stayed in South Texas. It is not surprising then, that many natives of the area possess Oriental facial features. It is certainly plausible that a Japanese spy could have made his way into the United States by blending into the South Texas landscape.

Certainly, this was the thought that crept into Ricardo D. Palacios one day as he was hunting in his South Texas ranch in northern Webb County, near Encinal. Palacios was at his favorite deer blind, with the sun at his back, and ten feet off the ground waiting for deer to come out into the open and eat corn that had been spread in the lane going east from the blind for several hundred yards. Sometimes it took an hour or two before deer came out into the lane to eat the corn.

On that day, while Palacios sat in the deer blind waiting, he noticed a couple of immigrants crossing the lane in front of him, about two hundred yards from the deer blind. They crossed from the south going north, no doubt in search of employment.

“This scenario occurred several times,” Palacios recalls, “and while waiting patiently for a nice buck to come out in the open lane, my imagination took over, and I wondered if it had been possible for a Japanese soldier to have made his way through Mexico, then infiltrate the United States posing as a so-called ‘wetback’.”

In his book, such a scenario is explored. While the protagonist is a Japanese spy, he did not come to Texas on an espionage mission, but rather to escape a certain death that his country required of him if he was ever caught. With time, Chon embraced the Tejano culture and became a successful ranchero. It was only a matter of time, however, before his secret would become known. This book takes the reader on an adventure from the spy’s home, Tokyo Plantation, to Rancho Salinas in Webb County. It provides a compelling view of the South Texas ranch culture as well as the challenges immigrants face in coming to the United States in search of a better life.

Palacios was born and raised in Laredo where he attended and graduated from St. Joseph’s Academy, an all-boys Catholic school run by the Marist Brothers. He received a Bachelor of Business Administration from Texas A&I University in Kingsville in 1966 and a law degree from St. Mary’s University School of Law in San Antonio in 1970 and has practiced law in south Texas ever since.

He enjoys hunting and fishing and lives on his ranch near Encinal. He has four children and two grandsons. He is an avid reader and has served as a trustee of Laredo Junior College, president of the Laredo-Webb County Bar Association, president of Laredo Daybreak Rotary Club, and is a Paul Harris Fellow.

In 2007, Texas A&M University Press published his first book Tio Cowboy, a biography of his uncle Juan Light Salinas who was a rodeo roper who traveled the United States making as many rodeos as possible from 1936 to 1946, each year competing in the finals rodeo at Madison Square Garden in New York City. His second book Green Street Kid (Archway Publishing, 2013) is an autobiography, as he likes to say, “it’s everything you wanted to know about me, and everything you did not want to know about me.”

Chon is his first novel.

Readers can pre-order their copy of Chon in the MCM Books online store.