Of course,literary provocateur that he is —in the best of ways— Michael then invited Nuriaand me to write companion pieces about our respective experiences as author andtranslator for La Bloga. And here we are:
And onceagain, Lucha and I have intertwined our discourses in order to ease the access tothe translation chamber, that frontier space between languages and cultures,where we, as author and translator, have met. And it has been a real encounterbecause we were coming from different locations with dissimilar ways of lovingthe text we were going to work on.
Allowingsomeone to translate one’s text constitutes the maximum act of generosity, becausedespite the impossibility of having absolute control over the meaning of ourown words, we all write in the hope that we will be transmitting certain ideasand values, and that we will be stimulating certain senses in our readers. Honestlyspeaking, all writers aim at spreading a specific message, be it aesthetic or ofanother kind. By allowing someone who is alien to such a creative act torewrite our text we assume the risk of that someone not sharing or even misunderstandingits intended sense, or purpose. For that reason, having one’s text translated reallyis, as I see it, an act of bigheartedness and trust. On the translators’ part, acceptingsuch a task implies the need to welcome each new text with the open attitude ofsomeone that is willing not only to understand and feel, but also to helpothers to understand and feel too. After all, translating is allowingcommunication between those who are different.
Luckilyenough, in this case our efforts of generosity and warm welcome, as well as ofmutual trust, have been greatly and mutually corresponded. Lucha had writtenthe text thinking of an American audience who is more or less familiarized withthe Chicano movement and its claims, but who might als
by Melinda Palacio
Stella Pope Duarte
Author and storyteller Stella Pope Duarte knows how to spin a tale. Beyond her many books and awards, her generosity and faith set her apart from most writers. After several careers, mostly in education, she began writing in 1995 after she had a dream that her deceased father told her to follow her destiny and become a writer. Not only does she sit at home churning out compelling prose and metaphors, but she shares her gift by traveling across the country and teaching the craft of writing. She’s taught creative writing to all levels. “I’ve always been an educator,” she said. Her words of wisdom begin with changes she’s experienced from within.
“It was me I had to change. My stories began to teach me. What I really wanted was to be free and let my spirit develop.”
In our phone conversation, Stella Pope Duarte was inspiring and mesmerizing. She described being at a school carnival and being offered a bench to stand on. She stood on the bench, taking note of the kids laughing and eating cotton candy and enjoying the rides. When started to tell a story, the entire carnival froze. “It seemed like the swings stopped in mid air,” she said. She captures that same sense of wonder whenever she speaks or writes her stories. Her unassuming presence is hypnotic, and before you know it, you are listening to a master. Pick up any of her books and see for yourself: Let The Spirits Dance, Fragile Night, If I Die in Juárez (American Book Award 2009) or her short story collection, Women Who Live in Coffee Shops and Other Stories (Chicano/Latino Literary Prize winner 2008 University of California at Irvine. She is no stranger to La Bloga and has been featured in a spotlight and interview by Daniel Olivas in 2008.
Currently, Stella is venturing into poetry. With her poems, she composes quickly and with her eyes closed (something she doesn’t advise doing); the strategy works for her. “The more I get out of the way the better the poem.”
As a teacher, Stella is extremely generous and her best creative writing students often become part of her family. She offers a line-by-line critique and goes the extra mile for students she believes have the calling for storytelling. She strongly believes in the young writers she works with. Of her mentorship, Manuel Saldate, 28, writes:
“I stopped writing for a long while, but it was in Stella’s class that motivated and inspired me to continue writing. Her mentorship has helped me reflect more internally and not hold back in my writing and tell more meaningful stories with multi-layered characters. I chose her as a mentor because I admired her style as a writer, very true to who she is as an individual; honest and culturally aware. Too, she’s an amazing presenter and oral story
Melinda Palacio
On Tuesday, I was a guest speaker at Santa Barbara City College’s Chicano Studies 121. The
class is taught by Magdalena Torres and focuses on The Chicana and Other Latina Women in the United States. I didn’t know what to expect. The class was from 6pm to 9pm and the instructor simply said I didn’t have to speak for the entire three hours of the class. Given how attentive and well receiving the class was, I wish I had taken more time.
The warmth and enthusiasm of Magda’s course was remarkable. The atmosphere was festive. I felt as if I were walking into a party held for me. Given that I spoke on the last day of class, I was also impressed by the attendance. In fact, to say I was impressed by the students is an understatement.
Santa Barbara City College is located on a mesa,
overlooking the ocean and the channel islands, one of the most beautiful spots on earth. They don’t call Santa Barbara paradise for nothing.
I’ve taken several courses at this gorgeous campus. I hope many of the students are tuning in because I forgot to mention that I was once sitting in their spot, being the attentive student. Only, because of my visual deficit, always sat front and center, teacher’s pet jokes aside. However, on this night, I wanted to impress the students by flaunting my educational background, a B.A. from UC Berkeley and an M.A. from UC Santa Cruz in Comparative Literature.
When I first moved to Santa Barbara nine years ago, I took advantage of the college’s many personal enrichment courses, including guitar, dance, and computer programming courses. I learned web design and brushed up on technical writing skills. In case no one has told you the big secret, writing doesn’t pay in real US minted cash. Ask some of my fellow blogueros, such as Daniel Olivas, who are lawyers by day. The “riches” come when reading to students and visiting classes such as Chicano Studies 121.
More college courses should create the sense of family that Magda Torres’s class exudes. I immediately felt at home. After my presentation, the instructor made all of her students say one thing they took away from my reading. Listening to what each student gleaned from my work was a highlight that I’ll think about whenever I sit down to write. In the past when I’ve spoken to a class, there might be a few questions. On Tuesday, every student, including the guest ESL instructor who came to hear me, spoke.
What surprised me was that a handful of students said that I was the first author they had ever heard. I am still digesting this sad information. Santa Barbara is filled with local authors, in fact several members of the Creative Writing Program at SBCC are well published. Three years ago, I remember hearing Victor Villasenor give the Leonardo Dorantes Memorial Lecture on campus a
Reyna Grande. Dancing With Butterflies. NY: Washington Square Press, 2009.
ISBN-10: 1439109060
ISBN-13: 9781439109069
Michael Sedano
Every now and again, one of “those novels” comes along that catches fire and finds itself on everyone’s must-read list. Put Dancing With Butterflies at the top of your list because Reyna Grande has one of “those novels” in her new release, Dancing With Butterflies. The novel combines excellent writing, compelling characters, and acute sense of place to make its 390 pages pass too swiftly.
Readers of “Los Angeles” novels will notice right away how Grande weaves in geographical details from throughout the region, from Highland Park to Boyle Heights, from Downtown to Pasadena. And her characters sometimes ride the bus, or walk. Street level gente, in other words.
Grande brings four women’s lives into acute focus. Middle aged Yesenia lives to dance. But age and arthritis make painful facts Yesenia’s mind refuses to acknowledge. Adriana harbors resentment at older sister Elena’s escape to college leaving young sister to abusive grandparents. Worse, there’s a dangerous second personality in Adriana who now and again runs wild. Elena is 36 weeks pregnant when she feels the baby die. Mourning leads to disaster for her marriage, made so much worse when she seduces a 17 year old boy. Finally comes Soledad. An undocumented worker, Sol’s costuming mastery sets Alegría dance company apart from competitors. Attempting her return from Mexico, Sol’s coyote abandons her in the Arizona desert.
Each character steps forthrightly onto her time on stage, to stand under Grande’s baleful gaze, but given voice by a skilled writer of conversation. Grande’s writing appears effortless, a tribute to the author’s control of her medium because there is so much one could heap on these women to get themselves right, but instead the characters do their own talking leaving the reader to make sense of the muck-ups and damn shames.
Yesenia steals dance troupe money to buy cosmetic surgery. Just as Yesenia’s TJ bargain tummy tuck goes bad, the dancers of Alegría revolt and the troupe breaks up. Much as Yesenia loves dance and this troupe, thinking her bad behavior the cause of this failure tortures but doesn’t defeat the determined dancer.
Adriana remains in an abusive relationship. She wants to sing, not dance, but because her mother danced, Adriana feels it’s a daughter’s duty to dance. And there’s The Other Adriana, some lurid, ugly tragedy looming ever closer.
Elena’s depression at losing the baby is made all the worse when she feels the opprobrium from family and friends because she has bedded the student. She is stunned when one calls her another Mary Kay Letourneau. Maybe she is? But what’s in it for Elena?
Soledad is about to get her own business going when her partner abruptly changes his plans, crushing her dream into yet one more frustration in her undocumented life. Left to be arrested in the desert, Sol is rescued by a hermit. When immigrants fleeing pursuing ICE agents pound on the door for succor, Sol sees the likelihood of capture if she offers an open door. The choice will haunt the remainder of her life, but she survives to return to L.A.
What’s OK? Can desperation mitigate foul selfishness? Where does the balance tip between reaching out to help others and holding on to help oneself? And when the fulcrum tilts in our favor, unfavorably for others, how does one define the outcome? These are tough questions you don’t have to ask, but are there in the text for the taking. Dancing With Butterflies isn’t going to hit someone over the head with an author’s message. The things these characters go through create ample reason to read, digest, and ask one’s own questions. Then recommend the book to a friend. Dancing With Butterflies is one of “those novels” you’ll enjoy so much you’ll want your friends to enjoy with you.
There's September's final Tuesday. A Tuesday like any other Tuesday, except You Are Here. Thank you for visiting La Bloga.
mvs
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Patricia Santana. Albuquerque: UNM Press, 2008.
ISBN: 978-0-8263-4409-0
Ghosts of El Grullo offers some haunting moments in Chicana fiction. That's not a cheap pun on the title. It's an accurate
description of what you'll find in the 287 pages of this fine novel. The absochingaolutely intolerable papá, raging--whether against his own ghosts, ignorance, or mental illness--drives his consentida to a finely-honed hatred for him through a lifetime of outrageous acts:
A male voice calls on the phone asking for one of his five daughters, the father screams at the caller not to bother calling here again. A daughter has gone to her high school prom without his permission; he drives over, drags her off the dance floor and brings her home to his cowering brood. He comes home early one from his night job to discover a party in progress; outraged at such festivities without his knowledge or permission he throws everyone out.
Do Mexicano fathers really exercise this kind of mind control over their daughters and wives? Do Mexicanas and Chicanas sit still for such abuse, accept Papá's outbursts as part of their lot in life and learn to be obedient wives and children?
Whatever grains of truth may lie in this fiction of the father, Patricia Santana so overstates the character that I began to mistrust the narrator's perception of her father's behavior. This unreliability becomes more acute as Yolanda the middle daughter of five (and four brothers), talks about her mother, who emerges a saintly presence. Although Yolanda declares how, as an eleven- and twelve-year old she was trying to hate her mother, Yoli has only kind words and warm memories to share.
This imbalance is the only truly weak element in an otherwise rewarding story. The working class girl finding her metier as a literature major at UC San Diego recognizes how her new world will tear her away from her familial culture and her father's rules, so her narrative focus leads her to the extremes that comprise the novel's most harrowing events, the horror a way to keep the fugitive grounded in her origins.
When Yoli's head isn't spinning on horrible memories she takes the time to enjoy living in her mother's culture back in El Grullo, Jalisco, Mexico. Here are some of the story's best elements, when Yolanda travels to the warmth of her mother's familial mansion, a perfect contrast to the struggling poverty of their San Diego household.
That Yolanda bears a striking resemblance to her mother brings the daughter special welcome in the hearts of her dead mother's family and long-ago friends. The ghosts are real. The tias have made peace with the spirits, but Yoli's troubled soul is easily touched by the household spirits. The susto the ghosts wreak on the twenty year old Yoli straightens her out and she returns to the States liberated--perhaps escaped--from her mother's and father's histories and ready to go forth on her own.
Santana expresses ambivalence about events that take a Mexicana or Mexican-American to Chicana. As a college student, Yoli becomes a fervent Mechista, but with an obvious detachment. An older sister had adopted a similar path, and Yoli would ridicule the sister's nationalism. Now, married and in a professional career, the older sister returns the favor, as if to say MEChA is merely a passing experience that one inevitably grows out of. When Yoli abandons her virginity to the president of MEChA--in one long, beautiful sentence that is a highlight of the written work--the experience leaves her unsatisfied and empty in a clear evocation of the political experience.
But abandoning youthful experiments may be the "author's message," as is required in coming of age stories. Yolanda gains profound insights into her mother's tormented marriage, and paths not taken. She comes to see her father in a more realistic state, then idealizes that as a way of forgiving his trespasses as he forgives hers against him. She may look like her mother, a priest notes, but does the daughter have the carácter of the mother? It's not appearances, but substance.
Ghosts of El Grullo is also notable for the character of Chuy, whom we met in Santana's earlier
Motorcycle Ride on the Sea of Tranquility. I was put off by Santana's portrayal of the veteran in the earlier novel--Yolanda is fourteen and it is 1969. Chuy comes home a stereotypical crazy ex-soldier who runs off into the night. Surely our veterans deserve better in literature. The broken Vietnam veteran brother is doing better in this novel. After a violent confrontation between broken father and broken son, in the end it is this son who leads Yolanda to do the right thing by their father. But then, Yolanda realizes she is a broken daughter.
Patricia Santana writes interesting prose. The narrative leaps easily from present to memory then back again. The writer introduces an image or a reference then drops it, only to bring it back with more dimension and with telling energy later in the story. She, or her editor, employ appositional translation of Spanish language terms, the italicized Spanish accompanied with an English translation--"my aunts admitted que les daba escalofríos--that it gave them goose bumps"--but more often in a unique manner. Sometimes Spanish is italicized, others not. Rarely is the translation direct--"add to this one frayed brincacharcos, high-water charro suit" or, "her entourage of viejitas (gossipy old biddies)"-- other times a term sits untranslated. "Pan dulce" likely doesn't require translation, but mother and daughter's chata nose, or "viejas chismosas" might not be so obvious. Such style is a good way to honor the intercultural reader while not bringing a compelling story to a screeching halt.
Patricia Santana has hit her stride with her Yolanda Sahagún character. As this novel wraps up, Yoli is heading for UCLA and graduate school, perhaps romance with the slick-talking ladies man and Chicano medical student. One thing for sure, Santana's set high expectations for a third novel in Yoli's career.
That's the second Tuesday of January 2009. Be sure to check out the Call for Writers to the 2010 Festival de Flor Y Canto--details upcoming. Until next week, hay les wachamos.
mvs
La Bloga welcomes your comments on this and any column. Click the Comments counter below to share your views. When you have a lengthier reply, or you'd like to share an independent view on a different book, a cultural, or arts event, know that La Bloga welcomes guest columnists. Click here to explore your invitation to be our guest.
La Bloga friend, Rigoberto Gonzalez wrote this review
about Carmen Tafolla's wonderful new book. Gente: if you haven't bought this book, run, do not walk to your nearest indy bookseller. And if you can't quite ambulate, click here. Lisa Alvarado
front (l) Peggy, Laura. Back (L) Hilda, Felicitas, Beckie, Gloria and Delia.
Teatro Chicana
A Collective Memoir and Selected Plays
By Laura E. Garcia, Sandra M. Gutierrez, and Felicitas Nuñez
Foreword by Yolanda Broyles-Gonzalez
"This collection of testimonials of early Xicanistas and their work in teatro is an important contribution to the preservation of the spirit and energy that made the Chicano Movement."—Ana Castillo, author of The Guardians and So Far from God"These memoirs are the personal, honest, and riveting testimonials of seventeen Chicanas who performed Chicana theater during the 1970s. These carnalas empowered themselves and thousands during the tumultuous years of the Movimiento by performing plays for working-class communities. From college campuses to the fields where campesinos toiled, estas mujeres had the courage to fight gender inequality. We need their courage today. And we need their stories for a new generation of Chicanas and for working women everywhere."—Rudolfo Anaya, author of Bless Me, Ultima and Curse of the ChupaCabra"'Órale, ya era tiempo.' Stories of 'the Movement' too often emphasize men's roles, ignoring the vital participation of women or relegating them to the sidelines. In Teatro Chicana, women are central to the ideas, emotions, strategies, writing, art, and music of the 1960s and 1970s when this country—and much of the world—rocked with revolutionary imagination and fervor. The Chicano Movement, like most social movements, also had many women warrior/leaders—this struggle was shaped and ignited by women, fed and nurtured by women, with many men at their sides. I was part of this—I knew first hand how feminine spirit, energy, and love embraced and impelled us. Seeing it again through the voices of the elder-teachers in this book, I'm reminded—no movement is complete without la mujer."—Luis J. Rodriguez, author of Always Running: La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A. and Hearts and Hands: Creating Community in Violent Times_______________________________________________________________
The 1970s and 1980s saw the awakening of social awareness and political activism in Mexican-American communities. In San Diego, a group of Chicana women participated in a political theatre group whose plays addressed social, gender, and political issues of the working class and the Chicano Movement. In this collective memoir, seventeen women who were a part of Teatro de las Chicanas (later known as Teatro Laboral and Teatro Raíces) come together to share why they joined the theatre and how it transformed their lives. Teatro Chicana tells the story of this troupe through chapters featuring the history and present-day story of each of the main actors and writers, as well as excerpts from the group's materials and seven of their original short scripts.Edited by:Laura E. Garcia is the editor of the Tribuno del Pueblo newspaper, a bilingual publication that gives voice to the poor and to those fighting unjust laws, such as those that make the undocumented immigrant an animal of prey. She lives in Chicago.Sandra M. Gutierrez is a lifelong community activist who has advocated for immigrant rights, unionization, youth counseling, and cultural diversity. She lives in Pasadena, California.Felicitas Nuñez was a co-founder of the Teatro de las Chicanas and continues to be a driving force behind the organization. She lives in Bermuda Dunes, California.
_______________________________________________________________
FILM IN THE PARK at Dusk
A program for the entire family, free of charge!
Elsa y Fred (Argentina/Spain)
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
Mozart Park
2036 N. Avers St.
Chicago, IL
Fred is 78 years old and a recent widower falls in love with his neighbor Elsa who claims to be younger. They fall in love, scandalizing their children and even their grandchildren. She is bound and determined to change Fred. She makes him laugh though, something he has not done for many years.
_______________________________________________________________
Based on the book by Pam Muñoz Ryan
Adapted by Lynne Alvarez
Directed by Henry Godinez
July 12 – August 10, 2008
Part of the Goodman Theatre Latino Theatre Festival
Goodman Theatre in the Owen, 170 N. Dearborn St.
Chicago, IL
Save $5 at any Friday performance! Use promo code "5off" to save $5 per ticket at any Friday performance July 12 through August 10. (Discount subject to availability. No exchanges or substitutions. Limit: 8 tickets per order.)
Call (312) 443-3800 or Groups of 10 or more call 877.4.GRP.TIX
Suggested for everyone age 8 and older
Esperanza Rising is the story of a wealthy Mexican girl whose privileged existence is shattered when tragedy strikes, and she and her mother must flee to California. Forced to work in a migrant labor camp, Esperanza must learn to rise above her difficult circumstances and discover what she's truly made of. Set in the turbulent 1930's, and based on the popular book by Pam Muñoz Ryan, Esperanza Rising is a poetic tale of a young girl's triumph over adversity.
Henry Godinez
Director Henry Godinez, a Chicago Children's Theatre Artistic Associate, directed our Inaugural Production of A Year With Frog and Toad. Henry is the Resident Artistic Associate at the Goodman Theatre, where curates their biennial Latino Theatre Festival and directed six seasons of A Christmas Carol. He serves as Artistic Director of Northwestern University's Theatre and Interpretation Center, and is the co-founder and former Artistic Director of Teatro Vista.
_______________________________________________________________
NUEVO DICCIONARIO CONFECCIONADO
POLINESIA: mujer policía que no entiende razones.
CAMARON: aparato enorme que saca fotos.
DECIMAL: pronunciar equivocadamente.
BECERRO: observar una loma o colina.
BERMUDAS: observa a las que no hablan..
TELEPATIA: aparato de TV para la hermana de mi mamá.
ANOMALO: hemorroides.
BENCENO: lo que los bebés miran con los ojos cuando toman leche.
CHINCHILLA: auchenchia de un lugar para chentarche.
DIADEMAS: veintinueve de febrero.
DILEMAS: hablale más.
DIOGENES: la embarazó.
ELECCION:
lo que expelimenta un oliental al vel una película polno.
ENDOSCOPIO: me preparo para todos los exámenes excepto por dos.
MANIFIESTA: juerga de cacahuates.
MEOLLO:
me escucho.
ONDEANDO: sinónimo de ondestoy.
TALENTO:
no está tan rápido.
NITRATO: frustración superada.
REPARTO: trillizos.
REPUBLICA: mujerzuela sumamente conocida..
SILLON: respuesta afirmativa de Yoko Ono a Lennon..
SORPRENDIDA: monja corrupta y muy dispuesta...
ZARAGOZA : bien por Sarita!!!!!!
Lisa Alvarado
Michael Sedano
Teatro Chicana
A Collective Memoir and Selected Plays.
Edited by Laura E. Garcia, Sandra M. Gutierrez, and Felicitas Nuñez
Foreword by Yolanda Broyles-Gonzalez
Austin: UTexas Press, 2008.
ISBN: 978-0-292-71743-5 (hardcover)
ISBN: 978-0-292-71744-2 (paper)
When my daughter was five years old, she became an honorary member of Teatro A La Brava
when she accompanied me to many a rehearsal as the teatro rehearsed a controversial but popular acto about a local injustice. My years with the teatro, and my daughter's involvement with us, remain among our warm memories of her childhood and my good fortune to be dad to one of the world's greatest kids.
Most likely my thirty-year old memories of that time color my reading of Garcia, Gutierrez, and Nuñez' well-edited memoir of a teatro group from the same era, the 1970s. Even if a reader has never been in a teatro,
Teatro Chicana will be worthwhile reading to learn from its seventeen voices how membership in teatro contributes to a person's political, cultural, and individual growth.
There also are some beautiful stories. And sadness. The collection opens with an endearing essay by Delia Ravelo that captures most of the themes that emerge from the other speakers: a chicana is trapped in her culture's antifeminist mores. She rebels, adopting dysfunctional behaviors that place her future and happiness in jeopardy. She escapes into higher education where she discovers teatro, and as a result she blossoms politically, socially, personally, making lifelong friendships and has a lot of fun in the process.
Ravelo's joy at her teatro experience takes on a somber note as she winds her essay to a close. Early on, the reader is pulling for the abused child, sharing humorous events and artistic satisfaction. Then in the final paragraph she writes how her "earthly journey eventually will end and then my body will disappear and my brain will follow." The next essay, by Peggy Garcia, acknowledges Ravelo's leadership and inspirational friendship--as do most other writers--reveals that Delia Ravelo died before this book came to press.
Sic transit gloria mundi would be a good subtitle for the collection. From hardship to teatro to hardship becomes one of the themes that emerge. One of the ugliest hardships several writers acknowledge is sexual abuse by family members. Helplessness is not the only way the subject is discussed. Guadalupe Beltran found a way to defeat her exploiter, and helped another little girl do the same. Beltran's essay is one of the best organized pieces. She begins in blank verse with intense recollections that serve as previews of the expository prose paragraphs that follow. Similarly, Teresa Oyos composes her entire essay in the verse format for an interesting diversion from the prose of her fellow teatro memoirists.
The most comprehensive historical memoir is the final piece by Felicitas Nuñez. Nuñez' work was the heart of the three teatro groups that the writers joined. Initially it was Teatro de las Chicanas. The group segued to become Teatro Laboral as its themes matured with the maturation of el movimiento. The final incarnation as Teatro Raices comes in 1979 and winds down in 1983.
The most touching essay comes from Sandra M. Gutierrez, who composes a letter, a benediction really, as a tía addressing a high school girl about to enter her own college career. Gutierrez' essay suggests the importance of this collection as one part of a full circle. Just as Gutierrez and the other women left home to start their own careers as student actors, wives, mothers, divorcées, professionals, just as the teatro found successive cycles of new members as established members graduated out of the college milieu, so too can today's women find satisfaction, expressiveness, individual direction by finding their own teatro to nurture their spirits through that transition from girl to woman, from a past of imposed limitations to a future limited only by the bounds of a woman's imagination.
The final third of the volume presents actos and artifacts of the various teatros. Several writers extol the power and wonder of a countersexism acto called "Bronca" whose impact comes from a chant blending "cabron" to the title, as in Broncabronbroncabronbroncabron. The acto deliberately affronted menso machos of the movimiento whose insecurities and priggishness demanded that men take spotlight roles and
women did the cooking. After such a big buildup, finding the acto itself is but an outline--the teatro worked a la brava through much of its career--is disappointing. But then, among the pleasures of chicana chicano teatro, and our actos, is the paradox of time and place; "you have to be there." That the compilers can present the outline, and a few more fully fleshed scripts, along with several pages of photographs, is tantalizing consolation that at least we can remember what was.
Gente! Here comes Independence Day, the United States' Fourth of July. Need I ask, "How many other countries have a fourth of July?"See you next week.mvsLa Bloga welcomes your comments on this an any column. Click on the Comments counter below to leave a message. La Bloga welcomes guest columnists. When you have a review, an extended arts announcement, or other worthwhile matter, leave a comment, or send an email here to arrange your invitation.
Today, La Bloga is happy to welcome Juanita Salazar Lamb sharing her experience reading and writing chicana mystery fiction. Great having you with us, Juanita!
One thing about me: I love reading mysteries, and as importantly, I form a bond with the main characters in the story. I’m in love—or maybe it’s just 
lust—with Jim Chee in Tony Hillerman’s books; I cast myself as the beautiful, rich, but oh-so-lonely female characters in the stories by Mary Higgins Clark. I’m as independent and resourceful as Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Milhone; and I dream of the day I can eat as many doughnuts and blow up as many cars as Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum. Over the years I’ve read hundreds of mysteries featuring Native Americans, Polish American nurses-turned investigators, Hungarian-Italian bounty hunters, WASP girls whose only connection with ethnicity is belonging to a Greek sorority, and even the occasional Latino investigator. Kudos to Rick Riordan for bringing us Tres Navarre, and to Rudolfo Anaya for Sonny Baca.
Another thing about me: I’m a Tejana. I spoke Spanish before I spoke English. My family went to visit the shrine of La Virgen de San Juan del Valle to pay our respects, and marveled at the bright costumes and soul-stirring beat of the drums as los matachines danced in homage of La Virgen. We made tamales for Kreesmas and ate buñuelos as we sipped té de canela on new year’s. On Easter Sunday everybody went to the park for a picnic and broke cascarones on each other’s heads. At the end of the day everybody—even my grandmother—would have a chipote on our heads and our hair was full of confete, harina and bits of broken colored eggshell. Growing up Tejana, I also ate pan de dulce (not pan dulce), crossed the bridge to Mexico for a day of shopping, and still know that Mexican Cokes taste better than Cokes bottled in the US.
So it’s only natural that when I started to write my own mystery series my main character would be a Tejana: Sara Garcia. Unlike Kinsey Milhone who was orphaned as a child and is now a loner by choice, Sara has strong family ties and a strong need to stay connected to her Mamá, Ernesta; and with her friend since high school, Sofía. Though Sara’s family is small—her father died a few years ago, and her sister lives in San Antonio—her familial ties extend beyond blood, which is how familias expand in the Latino community. Sara’s extended family includes Sofía and her husband Frank, and their daughter Mia. Sara’s downstairs neighbor, Annie, fills the role of older sister. Sara’s boyfriend, Bill, a fourth-generation Irish-American whose family still speaks with a brogue, provides Ernesta with hope that Sara will get married and give her muchos nietos.
But other things besides a Spanish last name set Sara García apart from all the other sleuths in the mystery genre, and this is one that I have trouble explaining to non-Hispanic editors and agents. Sara’s motivation for solving murder mysteries is not based on financial compensation or job responsibilities; after all as she is quick to point out she’s “an auditor, not an investigator.” Her commitment comes from her deep Latina roots. We Latinos are raised to help our family—and extension—friends of family. This training starts when we are very small children and our mothers remind us take our younger brother’s hand as we cross the street: “Agárrense de la manita,” my mother would call out to us. We are urged to walk together, not leaving anyone behind, because our mamás know there is strength in unity. When we have a party or family gathering, everyone is invited, not only the little school friend of the birthday boy, but the school friend’s entire familia. As we grow older those lessons learned so many years ago are transferred, and now we are the ones taking the hands of our abuelitos and abuelitas as they struggle with canes and walkers.
I live in Arkansas now, and I recently witnessed something I will never forget: On my way home from work, I drive past the rodeo arena. On a hot Friday evening in July, the rodeo was due to begin within the hour and traffic was heavy on the east-bound street. People attending the rodeo had to park their cars blocks away, cross a busy intersection and walk to the arena. One woman was walking with her mother...and I use the term “with” loosely. The younger woman was in her fifties, and her mother was in her seventies and using a walker. The older lady was struggling to maneuver the rough, uneven sidewalk as her daughter walked five to ten feet ahead of her. The noise of traffic and music coming from the arena would have drowned out the older lady’s voice if she’d fallen and cried to her daughter for help. I probably don’t have to add that they were not Hispanic.
It is with this sense of family and a need to help those in the family that Sara pursues her murder mysteries to conclusion. In the first book, Death at the Rock, Sara’s best friend, Sofía, asks her to solve the murder of her cousin’s girlfriend. Sara has met the cousin before, but remembers him slightly. It is Sara’s sense of duty and responsibility to family that drive her to find the real killer. As Sara sees it, if she does nothing and an innocent man is convicted can she forgive herself?
The relationship between Sara and her mother is not unlike most mother/daughter relationships, but with a Latina twist. The twist being that no matter how old a Latina daughter is, how many children of her own she might have, or how many college degrees she are on her office wall, her mamá will always be her mamá. She is the one Sara goes to when she needs someone to pray for her; when she needs caldo on a cold winter day, and when she needs some té to ease what ails her. Sara will dance with her mamá at Mia’s quinceañera, and will give her a heart full of chocolates for Valentine’s day, knowing her mother will insist on sharing.
In The Corpse Wore Red Lipstick, her second foray into solving murders, it is once again Sara’s sense of family responsibility and devotion to her mother that outweigh her arguments for not getting involved in another murder. When the granddaughter of her mother’s best friend is found murdered and the police have decided it’s the work of a serial killer, Sara’s mother Ernesta brings her in to find the real killer. To the non-Hispanic reader, Sara has no stake in this case. She met the granddaughter at a girls’ night out a few months earlier, but there had been no time to bond with the much-younger woman. But viewing the situation through the lens of Latino family relationships, Sara has a very high stake: her mother’s sense of duty to her friend; her mother’s pride in her daughter’s ability; and the family’s reputation that is firmly established in the barrio: if Sara refuses to help her mother’s friend, word will get around that Sara thinks she is too good for the old neighborhood.
In the third book of the series, Twisted Sister, Sara’s motivation is as old as humans themselves: self-preservation. When Sara is accused of being an accomplice in the armed robbery of a convenience store in her neighborhood, she must go underground until she can find the real perpetrator. In this story of twisted family relationships that reach back into Sara’s family’s past, she also confronts the discrimination and stereotyping that many Latinas face even today. Would Sara even be suspected of holding up a convenience store if she was blond, blue-eyed and her name was Tiffany or Barbie? Would the only eye-witness be so quick to claim that “you all look alike” if Sara were not Latina?
Through my writing, as well as through my own life, I confront the trials and tribulations of a successful, educated Latina living and working in a white, male-dominated world. But take some time out from your world and join Sara Garcia in hers, where it isn’t the guys with the white hats who win, but los nuestros.
Biographical information:
Juanita Salazar Lamb lives in Northwest Arkansas, where she still works as an auditor by day, and writes the Sara Garcia Mystery Series at every other time. She writes under the pen name Teresa Avila.
Click here to read Chapters 1, 2, 3 of Teresa Avila’s Sara Garcia mystery novel, Death at the Rock.
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Alicia Gaspar de Alba. NY: St. Martin's Press, 2007.
ISBN: 0-312-36641-8
Michael Sedano
Alicia Gaspar de Alba has done it again, created an incredibly arresting novel,
Calligraphy of the Witch. It’s a deeply emotional story with some of the same flavor as Gaspar de Alba’s important 1999 novel,
Sor Juana’s Second Dream. In
Calligraphy of the Witch, a character from Sor Juana’s convent—the nun’s scribe, in fact—frees a slave from the sadistic Mother Superior and they flee hopefully to freedom they seek in a black colony near Vera Cruz. But Aléndula, the slave, and Concepción Benavídez, the amanuensis, are captured by a Dutch slaver and carried into rape and captivity, up to Boston.
The pirate captain’s surname, de Graaf, is too much for the British tongue, so he’s been christened Seagraves by the Boston merchants. When he sells Concepción as a slave, her given name is irrelevant and the Greenwoods name her Thankful Seagraves, in honor of her freedom to be their slave.
Gaspar de Alba partitions Concepción’s story into manageable parts. An introduction in a daughter’s voice. The brutal voyage from New Spain, her earliest years in Boston, a middle passage when Thankful Seagraves is married to the old man Tobias Webb--Goody Greenwood’s father-- Concepción’s trial and imprisonment as a witch, and the end story. Several passages are typeset in script in the manner of a scribe. Fortunately, the script font is entirely legible, thus adding to the reading experience.
The voyage to New England for the twenty-something Concepción is one rape after another followed by beating and all manner of brutality. Unknown to the dark-skinned de Graaf, he’s impregnated the girl with his blonde genes. That’s what Concepción’s daughter looks like, far more resembling Rebecca Greenwood’s blonde blue-eyedness than the mestiza birth mother’s brown skin and bi-colored eyes.
The merchant Greenwoods have been unable to sire another offspring, so Rebecca starts a devious program to steal the child and raise the girl as her own daughter. This entails turning the child against the mother in truly horrific ways. The culture of the Visible Saints breeds hatred into the child, and when the mother Thankful Seagraves is arrested for witchery, her Popery, the devilish Spanish tongue the mother speaks provide persuasive evidence of guilt. Even more persuasive is the brainswashed daughter has provided the most damning evidence, such as the devil’s own creed embroidered on a cloth the mother lovingly insisted the child memorize:
Hombres necios que acusáisa la mujer sin razón,sin ver que sois la ocasiónde lo mismo que culpáis:si con ansia sin igual solicitáis su desdén,¿por qué queréis que obren biensi las incitáis al mal?Forced to translate, Concepcíon recognizes how Sor Juana’s satire could turn itself into evidence before the clouded evil of Cotton Mather and his ilk:
Whose is the greater faultIn an errant passion?She who falls for pleading,Oh he who, fallen, pleads?Who is more to blame,Although both be guilty of transgression,She who sins for a commission,Or he who for sin will pay?Hence with much logic do I unravelThat men’s arrogance wins the battleFor in ways direct or subtleMen are the sum of world and flesh and devil.With Concepción’s differences with her world viewed therein as not mere deficits but signs of evil, the reader is not surprised at the tragic consequences that befall the Mexican slave. Yet, the author keeps the reader hanging on every incident and development. Despite foreshadowing the story’s most tragic elements—the novel’s introduction in the estranged daughter’s voice, the seer’s vision that daughter would be stolen by the barren merchant’s wife and turned against mother, Concepción’s education at Sor Juana’s hand plopped in the middle of superstitious Puritans—Gaspar de Alba keeps a reader in thrall through every incident and stomach-turning violation.
Against these fearful pressures, Alicia Gaspar de Alba builds an almost unbearable tension. Will the innocent woman be hanged as were others? Will the daughter discover the truth, and if discovered, accept it? What could possibly save Concepción from the inevitable? So intense does the author build the tension that the reader keeps turning pages repeating the incantation, “it’s only fiction, it’s only a story”.
An excellent story, and, as one would expect, more than a mere historical exercise. There’s a strong contemporaneity in Concepcíon Benavídes’ Thankful Seagraves story that reflects our times or echoes themes of earlier literatura chicana. An uneven struggle for identity caught in the conflict between the weaker Spanish-speaking culture and the dominant English-speaking world creates strength in the parent but a burning desire of the daughter not to be seen as her mother’s child. As the witch hysteria begins to cool, the validity of confessions won through torture takes on a clarity for some that others refuse to accept. An underlying greed and covetousness masked by the guise of righteousness infects the rise and ebb of injustice.
Concepcíon is one of those flies to wanton gods who bounces helplessly from powerful enemy to powerful enemy until the abuse grows too great. Much of the tension in Calligraphy of the Witch grows from the seemingly total helplessness of women and the evil of men. What’s a woman to do? When Greenwood’s lust turns to rape, in a blind rage Thankful Seagraves wraps a rope around her former owner’s neck and throttles him good. The reader’s heart leaps with joy, so completely evil a character Gaspar de Alba has crafted, then sinks in dread. Had she killed him, there could be no possibility of reprieve. But what of hope? When a woman is battered so much that her only recourse seems to be murder, what should she, what can she do?
Among Concepcíon’s practices is writing letters to Sor Juana, Aléndula, and Concepcíon’s mother, only to burn them later, in the woods. This deviltry becomes evidence against her in her witchery trial. But in one such letter, the scribe offers a lesson she hopes her daughter might one day profit from:
“Aléndula once told me that there are always four choices to every decision: the wise choice, the foolish choice, the safe choice, and the choice that someone else makes for you. “
In the end, Hanna Jeremiah Greenwood, née Juana Jerónima Benavídez, is faced with this logic. It is 1704. Her mother has been gone a decade, and Mama Becca has died, too. Hanna Jerónima, la bebita de Concepcíon is a mother of twins whom she’s named in English after herself and her unknown Mexican grandmother. Daughter comes to a point in her life when she can finally shed herself of all that heritage and go on with her English life. She will make one of those four choices, either leaving the reader frustrated, or completely frustrated, either a little joyful or fully relieved. In that welter of emotions will be a bit of sadness accepting that the story did have finally to end.
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By: Rebecca,
on 8/24/2007
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Happy Friday to all. I hope you have plans to enjoy the tail end of August this weekend. Our condolences go out to the family of author Grace Paley, who died of breast cancer this week. If you want to learn more about her check out these great articles: LitKicks, Maud Newton or The LA Times.
Do you finish books you aren’t enjoying? I put down The Inheritance of Loss this spring and I’m still feeling guilty about it.
Curious about the origins of the online OED? Check out this fascinating blog entry. (more…)
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Wonderful interview with Stella! She's so talented.Thanks for sharing her background as an educator. As a retired educator myself, I know the importance of teaching writing to our newer generations. They're lucky to have a lauded author as their teacher.