LeVar Burton Reads · LeVar Burton and Stitcher

"Mr. Mendoza's Paintbrush" by Luis Alberto Urrea

March 19, 2024·39 min·2 clips

Mendoza catches the narrator and Jaime peeping at bathing girls, sits on the narrator, and paints 'Pervert' on his face and 'This is what I am' on his backside.

The doorway is El Rosario. Burton introduces Urrea's town through mining history, a Baroque church, a family return, and a name remade for fiction. Then the story snaps into place. Mr. Mendoza is the town's artist in residence, part painter, part public scold, with black paint and total confidence in his own judgment. The boys think they are on an adventure. Hidden in reeds near the river, they watch girls from the preparatory school head toward a shielded bathing spot. Their awe is funny because it is so foolish. The narration lets their adolescent importance swell until spying feels, to them, like some grand expedition. Mendoza kills that fantasy fast. His hands land on their shoulders, and the punishment jumps from scolding to paint before they can wriggle free. Jaime gets marked first. Face, chest, body: all of him becomes a signboard for shame and ridicule. The narrator is next. His panic stays funny because the scene keeps the physical stuff close: mud, paint, bony weight, helpless bucking. The girls are not just background. Their privacy is the line the boys crossed, and Mendoza's fury makes the fantasy collapse into consequence. Burton reads it with the right looseness. He gives the comedy room without sanding off the embarrassment, so the town stays vivid and the boys stay painfully recognizable. The magic is ordinary here. A paintbrush, a riverbank, and one furious local conscience are enough to make bad behavior last.

As heard by us

A vivid reading that turns a river prank into public humiliation and a sharp moral turn.

LeVar Burton introduces Luis Alberto Urrea's "Mr. Mendoza's Paintbrush" with a clear sense of place, moving from El Rosario, Sinaloa, Mexico, to the town's mining past and its gold-leaf altar before settling on Mr. Mendoza as the conscience of the story.

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Why you'd press play

A river prank turns into a paint-splattered public shaming.

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