Category Archives: Literature

Writing about Julia

Vanessa Pérez. Photo courtesy of author. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

by Vanessa Pérez

In the early morning hours of July 5, 1953, two New York City police officers spotted a figure on the ground near the corner of Fifth Avenue and 106th Street in East Harlem. As they approached, they saw the body of a woman with bronze-colored skin. Once a towering woman at five feet, ten inches, she now lay in the street, unconscious. They rushed her to Harlem Hospital, where she died shortly thereafter. The woman carried no handbag and had no identification on her. No one came to the morgue to claim her body. No missing person’s case fit her description. She was buried in the city’s Potter’s Field. One month later, the woman was identified as award-winning Puerto Rican poet Julia de Burgos. Her family and friends exhumed and repatriated her body.

When I began writing about Julia de Burgos, I hesitated to mention her notorious death, seeking to move away from the narratives of victimhood that have shrouded her life for more than half a century. I wanted to focus on her poetry, her activism for women’s rights, social justice and the independence of Puerto Rico, and her legacy. Most Puerto Ricans already know her story, and many both on the island and in New York have been captivated by her life. However, I soon realized the importance of recounting even the most difficult details as I introduced her to new audiences. Her migration experience and her death on the streets of New York capture the imaginations of readers everywhere. Becoming Julia de Burgos builds on recent approaches to her work that focus on movement, flow, and migration. This book proposes a new way of reading Burgos’s work, life, and legacy, focusing on the escape routes she created in her poetry to write herself out of the rigid confines of gender and cultural nationalism.

cover of book featuring photo of Julia de Burgos

Book cover courtesy of author and University of Illinois Press.

For those of you who are not familiar with Burgos, let me offer a brief biographical sketch. Julia Constanza Burgos García was born on 17 February 1914 in the town of Carolina, Puerto Rico, the eldest of Paula García de Burgos and Francisco Burgos Hans’s thirteen children. Julia was intimately familiar with struggle, hardship, and death. She watched six of her younger siblings die of malnutrition and other illnesses associated with poverty. She obtained a teaching certification, a two-year degree, from the University of Puerto Rico, but would only work as a teacher for a year. In 1934, she married Rubén Rodríguez Beauchamp who she divorced only three years later. As a divorced woman in a conservative Catholic society, Burgos found that gossip, speculation, and vicious rumors undermined her respectability. During this time, she wrote her first collection of poetry, Poemas exactos a mí misma (Poems to Myself), which she later considered juvenilia and never published. In those early years, she also wrote “Río Grande de Loíza,” which became one of her most well-known works and was later included in her first published collection, Poema en veinte surcos (Poem in Twenty Furrows, 1938). This early work explored social justice and feminist themes, which she would continue to write about throughout her life. In poems such as “Pentacromia” and “A Julia de Burgos” she would write about her frustration with the institution of marriage and the limited roles available to women. In “Pentacromia” she repeats in each of the six stanzas the line “Hoy, quiero ser hombre (Today, I want to be a man),” expressing her desire for greater freedom to travel, and be an active participant in the world. In the poem, “A Julia de Burgos” she voices her frustration with social expectations of femininity through a split or double consciousness, suggesting postmodernist ideas of identity as performance. The speaker dramatizes the conflict between her socially acceptable constructed identity and her inner voices as a woman artist, as can be noted in the lines below.

Tú en ti misma no mandas; a ti todos te mandan;

en ti mandan tu esposo, tus padres, tus parientes,

el cura, la modista, el teatro, el casino,

el auto, las alhajas, el banquete, el champán,

el cielo y el infierno, y el qué dirán social.

En mí no, que en mí manda mí solo corazón,

mi solo pensamiento; quien manda en mí soy yo.

Tú, flor de aristocracia; y yo flor del pueblo.

Tú en ti lo tienes todo y a todos se lo debes,

mientras que yo, mi nada a nadie se la debo.

(You in yourself rule not; you’re ruled by everyone;

in you your husband rules, your parents, relatives,

the priest, the dressmaker, the theater, the casino

the car, the jewels, the banquet, the champagne,

the heaven and the hell, and the what-will-they-say.

Not so in me, who am ruled only by my heart,

only by what I think; who me commands is me.

You, aristocratic blossom; and I plebian floret.

You have it all with you and you owe it all to all,

While I, my nothing to no one do I owe.)

These lines offer an example of her commitment to freedom from prescribed roles for women. Burgos wrote and published her second collection of poetry, Canción de la verdad sencilla (Song of the Simple Truth), in 1939. Her third and final collection of poetry, El mar y tú (The Sea and You), was published posthumously in 1954. In January 1940, Burgos left Puerto Rico for New York where she stayed for six month. She then moved to Havana where she lived for two years before returning to New York in 1942. Several factors influenced her decision to leave Puerto Rico in 1940. The turn in Puerto Rican politics away from the nationalist and independence movement was one of the reasons. Also, many Puerto Rican writers, artists and musicians left for New York in those years in search of a wider audience, publishing houses, recording studios and greater opportunities to continue to develop their craft. Julia de Burgos wanted to be a part of this.

From late 1942 until her death, Burgos lived in New York where she struggled to make a living as a writer. She wrote for the Spanish-language weekly Pueblos Hispanos from 1943 to 1944, further developing her political voice. However, her journalism shows her political commitment to radical democracy and the struggle for immigrant and Puerto Rican rights and her advocacy of solidarity with Harlem’s African American community. In addition, these writings as well as her poetry reveal her understanding of cultural identity as fluid and unbound by national territory. While in the hospital months before her death, she wrote her two final poems in English, “Farewell in Welfare Island,” and “The Sun in Welfare Island,” describing the condition of exile and her sense of seclusion and desolation. These poems can be read as precursors to the literature of Nuyorican and U.S. Latina/o writers of the 1970s in both theme and emotional intonation.

Becoming Julia de Burgos recuperates a savvy, ambitious and influential intellectual who was a creative force both on the island and in New York. She is claimed by later generations as a beloved and inspiring icon and a fierce ancestor. There are at least two historical moments where we see a renewed interest in Julia de Burgos’s life and work. The civil rights movement of the 1960s is one of those moments. The women’s movement of that era led to a renewed interest in the poet on the island by feminist writers, artists and literary critics. The Nuyorican Movement of the 1970s led to ethnic revitalization and search for a deeper understanding of Puerto Rican history and culture that so many New York Puerto Ricans were distanced from. This coincided with first translations of some of her poems into English. As Latina feminists sought for intellectual genealogies during the women of color movement, they reclaimed Julia de Burgos as an ancestor. Julia de Burgos is remembered, reinvented and invoked in the poetry, prose, and artwork of various New York Latino writers and visual artist such as Sandra María Esteves, Mariposa and Andrea Arroyo, just to name a few. She is inscribed in the neighborhood of El Barrio in the form of murals, a cultural center named in her honor, and a street named after her. Sixty years after Julia de Burgos was found unconscious on an El Barrio street corner, she now forms part of the neighborhood’s urban landscape and cultural mythology.

Vanessa Pérez is an Associate Professor of Puerto Rican and Latino Studies at City University of New York, Brooklyn College, and the editor of Hispanic Caribbean Literature of Migration: Narratives of Displacement. She serves as an associate investigator on the City University of New York-New York State Initiative on Emergent Bilinguals (CUNY-NYSIEB), a collaborative project of the Research Institute for the Study of Language in Urban Society (RISLUS) and the Ph.D. Program in Urban Education at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Contending Worldviews in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead

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border fence held up by spear-like posts

Nogales — US/Mexico Border by Flickr User Flo Razowsky. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

by Theresa Delgadillo

This essay, originally prepared in 1996 for Professor Cherríe Moraga in her course on “Prophets/Scribes of Aztlán” at UCLA, has been updated and edited to meet Mujeres Talk requirements. Professor Moraga required students to do a kind of writing different from that typically required in a graduate seminar. She asked us to put ourselves into our critical work, and I took this to mean that we should write in a way that explicitly acknowledged the perspective from which we wrote, making clear and concrete, in writing, our investments and histories in the intellectual projects we undertake. For me, what it yielded was a creative non-fiction essay about a piece of literature, a form different than the academic article and made more so here through editing into a blog essay, a form that also calls upon authors to share more of oneself that one might in an academic journal. The blog essay is also a form necessarily focused on a small part of the literature under discussion, meant to provoke reflection, discussion, and further reading. I refer interested readers to the many excellent articles on Silko’s novel on the MLA International Bibliography.

In Almanac of the Dead (1991) Leslie Marmon Silko re-writes the history of the encounter between Europeans and indigenous peoples in the Americas. It is no longer the story of “civilization” meeting the barbarians, not the moment at which Indians begin to disappear, but a brutal, cunning, bloody, savage conquest that spawns equally brutal societies. It is almost as if Silko, in one massive novel, attempts to reverse generations of schooling on the history of this continent, though one has to be open and ready to hear new stories in order to understand the Almanac.

Growing up Chicana anywhere in the United States presents many challenges to one’s “story,” because our experience is undervalued or denied. We live in a nation where ours is not the official story, and yet it is ours. Like the speaker in Lorna Dee Cervantes’ poem who says, “I’m marked by the color of my skin” (35-7), so, too, have I been marked in every school I’ve been in since childhood. Though I knew it from my first day in school in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, I only began to understand it in seventh grade. One of my older brothers gave me a copy of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970), which I read while my Social Studies class studied the period of westward expansion into the Dakotas and the Black Hills Gold Rush. I was stunned by the glaring difference in these narratives. The two books had completely different things to say about the same events. While Indians were nowhere to be found in the school textbook, they were everywhere in Dee Brown’s account, prompting me to ask our teacher about this discrepancy.

My question to the teacher was not simply about facts or words, it was, as Linda Hogan says, about “ways of thinking and being in the world” (12). Around that time, there were a series of marches and protests by Wisconsin Native Americans in the news. Having already been mistaken for Native American, I knew that discriminatory treatment toward Native Americans was not unlike that directed against Mexican Americans. I was disturbed by how our textbook completely erased Native American peoples from history. Our teacher, however, insisted that our textbook was accurate. He dismissed my question. When I tried to explain what Dee Brown reveals in Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, he told me to be quiet. I continued, but the teacher yelled at me. I then did something completely surprising to all, myself included: I yelled back. Another supervising teacher was called in. Lots of tense whispering, then the bell rang, and so did discussion.

When I read Almanac of the Dead, I thought back to this youthful confrontation with history. Today, I also have to wonder about where Latina/os were in that curriculum, but back then I was just beginning to understand then what the novel illustrates so well — the difference between dominant history and story/ies/histories. A conception of history in the singular as the static and unchangeable past shields it from inquiry and allows it to be compartmentalized and separated from both the present and the future. New knowledge cannot alter it. History in that sense is perhaps why the teacher could not accept another version of the same events in the Dakota Hills and why he did not even consider it important enough to discuss–the events were safely in the past and therefore not of major concern, not to mention that Dee Brown’s version of events was in conflict with the textbook narrative.

In Almanac of the Dead, there are two conceptions of the past diametrically opposed to one another: dominant history versus story/ies/histories. These distinct conceptions are really competing worldviews and they create conflicts for individual characters, who must decide which view will guide their lives. One character who experiences this conflict is Sterling:

[He] had been carefully following advice printed recently in a number of magazines concerning depression and the best ways of combating it. He had purposely been living in the present moment as much as he could. One article had pointed out that whatever has happened to you had already happened and can’t be changed. Spilled milk. But Sterling knows he’s one of those old-fashioned people who has trouble forgetting the past no matter how bad remembering might be for chronic depression. (24)

The past Sterling wants to forget is his banishment from Laguna Pueblo, yet he was raised on the stories of his Pueblo, including the dispossessions and indignities imposed upon them by government and dominant knowledge systems (31). He cannot forget one portion of the past without forgetting it all. He enjoys reading the Police Gazette, with its stories of criminals past, in part, because this is one place where Indians to appear in the history of the West with some attempt at understanding their perspective (39-40).

An awareness of the contrast between dominant history and story/histories also operates for the character of Clinton, who, as an African-American Vietnam veteran now homeless, tracks on the discrepancies between the two. Clinton remains highly critical of what he learns in university classes yet he also finds there, in Black Studies, research that confirms his sense of his people as more than mere pawns of history, and gains a wealth of knowledge on the experiences and cultures of Blacks (414-431). When he critically recalls how wealthy Cherokee Indians had been rounded up by orders of Andrew Jackson, Clinton insists that a “a people’s history” must include all the stories: “That was why a people had to know their history, even the embarrassments when bad judgment had got them slaughtered by the millions” (415).

In the novel, characters who refuse the stories of others are racked with fear, and in the novel, doomed to failure. As Linda Hogan observes, “the Western tradition of beliefs within a straight line of history leads to an apocalyptic end” (93). This is what the characters Beaufrey and Serlo see in the future–cities burning and anarchy reigning–which is why they want to develop modules to survive in space (542). An apocalyptic ending is also what the character Menardo sees and why he is obsessed with insurance and security (266). In the novel, his first wife, Iliana, too, proud of the historical pedigree of having been descended from the conquistador De Oñate “still was gnawed by the fear that disaster was stalking all of them” (270). That fear is also one shared and preyed upon in the novel by characters representing the military regimes of Latin America and their U.S. collaborators.

Another view of the future emerges in the novel from the character of the Barefoot Hopi, who presents a perspective challenging for humans when he says:

You destroyers….don’t know how much the spirits of these continents despise you, how the earth hates you….All the riches ripped from the heart of the earth will be reclaimed by the oceans and mountains. Earthquakes and volcanic eruptions of enormous magnitude will devastate the accumulated wealth of the Pacific Rim. (734)

Unlike Serlo’s view or Menardo’s view, this prediction of cataclysmic events is not a prediction of end, but of beginning. In the Hopi’s view, the world does not revolve around humans and therefore the end of things human is not a catastrophe. He predicts that the Earth will cleanse itself and continue; this he does not fear. His view parallels Yoeme’s, who says that the sacred Earth “would go on, [it] would outlast anything man did to it” (718). This is what Sterling comes to understand, too: “Burned and radioactive, with all humans dead, the earth would still be sacred. Man was too insignificant to desecrate her” (762). In the course of the novel, several characters arrive at this understanding of the earth’s story, and must re-consider human interaction with it. Yet, do the Barefoot Hopi’s words leave us off the hook for what happens to the Earth or inspire responsibility?

The old woman Yoeme’s notebook, carried by the children in the novel, says, “sacred time is always in the Present” (136). Though it may sound like the same message of the magazines Sterling reads to cope with depression, it is not. Instead, it is akin to what Linda Hogan’s grandmother articulates: “Our work is our altar” (148); or what Hogan herself describes as “what happens to people and what happens to the land is the same thing” (89). The idea of the sacred in the present recognizes the web of existence that links humans with the natural world. It is also an idea that imposes demands on characters in this novel. As Silko says in an article in Artforum, “for the old people, no one person or thing is better than another; hierarchies presuming superiority and inferiority are considered absurd.”

The conception of story in the novel knits together past, present, and future. Story is alive and everything has a story, but not the same one. Story in this novel is not only the narratives characters create to make meaning of life, but movements and experiences of peoples, the variety of plants and animals in the natural world, the Earth itself. To embrace story appears as a way to embrace a worldview that accepts the interconnectedness of organisms through time.

Many characters in Almanac struggle to make sense of their story, trying to fit their past with their present and future. Some try to forget their own story and instead embrace history, like Menardo; some are rejected because they are evidence of a past that their families want to forget, like Root; some think that their own history is everybody’s history, like Bartolomeo; some see only part of the past and therefore mistakenly think they know what the future will be, like Beaufrey and Serlo; some make connections between other stories and their own and organize people to act with others, such as Angelita and El Feo; some people tell their own stories/histories, such as Clinton, Tacho, the Barefoot Hopi, Wilson Weasel Tail Clinton, Angelita and Lecha; while others, most, struggle to understand the relationship between their stories and other stories. Like the children carrying the pages of the almanac north (246-253), each person in Silko’s novel carries a story that is incomplete without the other stories/histories.

The almanac-carrying children are fleeing “the Butcher” who is enslaving and murdering their tribe, an allusion to both a historical genocide and contemporary circumstances forcing children to flee north. In this storyline, the novel represents the very real experience of the Yaqui tribe, who created a testamento of their creation and their land that is passed down today in handwritten notebooks, and even, as Evers and Molina point out, has been carried by messengers who had the document sewn into their clothes (32). Like Silko’s fictional almanac, both a document and an oral story altered with the additions of each narrator, it is expected and necessary that the Yaqui testamento be “unfixed” by those re-telling it (Evers and Molina 23). These are only two examples of the many stories and histories that are embedded in Almanac of the Dead.

As the character Clinton points out in the Almanac, denying people their histories helps to ensure submission and subordination (431), cutting people off from the stories of their ancestors means stranding them in madness and meanness (424). The novel seems to ask us: Do we recognize story/ies/histories, recognize “differences” as Calabazas says (203), and learn from them? Or do we continue to privilege destruction?

Works Cited

Cervantes, Lorna Dee. Emplumada. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981.

Evers, Larry and Felipe S. Molina. “The Holy Dividing Line: Inscription and Resistance in Yaqui Culture.” Journal of the Southwest. 34:1. (1992): 3-46.

Hogan, Linda. Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World. New York: Norton, 1995.

Silko, Leslie Marmon. Almanac of the Dead. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991.

Silko, Leslie Marmon. “The Fourth World.” Artforum. 28:10. (1989): 124-125.

Theresa Delgadillo is an Associate Professor of Comparative Studies and Coordinator of the Latina/o Studies Program at The Ohio State University. She has served as Editor of Mujeres Talk since January 2011.

Finding My Home in Psychic Restlessness

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by Lizeth Gutierrez

“Because I, a mestiza

continually walk out of one culture

and into another

because I am in all cultures at the same time,

alma entre dos mundos, tres, cuatro,

me zumba la cabeza con lo contradictorio.

Estoy norteada por todas las voces que me hablan

Simultáneamente.”

– Gloria Anzaldúa

Gloria Anzaldúa is my academic godmother. She has provided me the tools to create a sense of home. A space of survival. A space to call my own in the academy. This piece is inspired by Anzaldúa’s work, specifically her writing in Borderlands/La Frontera. Anzaldúa provided me the tools to name my restlessness. “Finding My Home in Psychic Restlessness” is about my journey to self-discovery. In this poem I recite ‘culture’ and ‘race’ as homogenous markers of identity only to strategically address the multiple identities I wear on my body. I do not seek to homogenize identity or discipline racial categories of identification. Culture and identity, as Anzaldúa’s writing reveals, are complex, multifaceted and fluid.

I wrote this piece when I was an undergraduate student at Grinnell College. As a current PhD student at Washington State University this poem continues to speak to me in painful ways. I am a first generation Chicana college student from Los Angeles, California who decided to pursue her Bachelor’s degree in small town Grinnell, Iowa. I oftentimes felt dislocated there and swore to myself that I would never go back to rural towns. I did not belong in those spaces. Ironically, my distaste for small towns brought me back to a similar rural town: Pullman, Washington. Maybe I am a masochist. Perhaps it is in that masochism that lies my sense of home. Who knows, but it is with this knowledge that I offer you a piece of who I am.

!Ya no!

No quiero sentirme marginalizada por tu hipocresía

Me exotizas por ser Latina.

Me llamas “lazy” por ser Mexicana.

Y te burlas de mi acento porque no es como el tuyo.

Tú dices “pizza” cuando yo digo “piksa.”

You tell me I can achieve the American dream, and yet set boundaries that aim to intimidate me and make me question my own abilities.

Si, vivo en un lugar de contradicciones.

I am in a college where I am the “exotic Latina,” pero soy la “outsider” en mi familia.

La “pocha.”

La “ya te crees muy miss thing porque vas a coh-ledge”

No me encuentro ni aquí, ni allá.

Why do you make me feel like I have to choose only one culture?

Soy mestiza, una hybrid, una mixture.

Anzaldúa me lo grita al oído in my dreams.

I, like Anzaldúa, believe in the new Latina consciousness.

Una conciencia que reconoce y tolera las contradicciones de mis dos culturas.

I love frijoles y las tortillas hechas a mano, and let’s not forget the smell of el cilantro en la salsa roja.

Y adoro el crispy chicken sandwich with large fries de McDonalds.

Soy Mexicana como mi abuela, like my mother who must constantly fight against the machismo of our patriarchal culture.

Y soy Americana: conquering my dreams and goals a como de lugar is the mentality of my gobierno capitalista.

Tú te sigues sintiendo perdida, abandoned, ahogada en un mar that restricts your identity

because it tells you constantly that you are not enough Mexican, ni suficientemente Americana.

Date cuenta that you are more than one culture, no te de vergüenza, no te escondas.

Do not let the waves of assimilation trap you.

No te dejes.

Nada. Nada más rápido. Defiendete, you can do it.

Our history has shown us that Chicanas are guerrilleras.

Tú como yo somos la negotiation of two distinct worlds.

Anzaldúa dice que vivas sin fronteras.

No dejes que la corriente del mar te lleve.

Do not let it make you choose one culture over the other.

¡Lucha!

Lucha por tu crossroads.

This internal fight no acaba hasta que hagas tu propia negociación de identidad.

Revolutionize your sense of self.

No eres prisionera.

You are not less than one culture or more than the other.

You are all cultures.

La güera. La negra. La india. La mestiza.

Eres la voz de la nueva Chicana and you have the inner-strength to create your third space of survival.

A space Anzaldúa so proudly calls “una conciencia de mujer.”

Lizeth Gutierrez is a graduate student in Critical Culture, Gender, and Race Studies at Washington State University. She researches representations in popular culture of gendered and raced Latinidades and is particularly interested in the commercialization of mainstream Latinidad in relation to U.S. discourses on second-class citizenship.

Holders of the Light

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People holding placards with lighted letters spelling out words.

Overpass Light Brigade at American Indian Sovereignty and Resource Management Conference, UW-Milwaukee, April 2014. Courtesy of Overpass Light Brigade.

by Kimberly Blaeser

In 1986, when I should have been writing my PhD dissertation, I was reading boxes (no exaggeration) of Department of Energy materials regarding the planned siting of high level nuclear waste repositories. One of the sites proposed was on my home reservation at White Earth, amid Minnesota’s basalt and granite hardrock deposits—very near the headwaters of the Mississippi River. I don’t now remember details of the science I learned during that time about crystalline rock, fractures, and ground water, but I do remember the urgency with which I investigated, the weeks and months during which I wrote, went to meetings, knocked on doors, and testified.

I had reason to recall that urgent dedication recently when Edith Leoso, Tribal Historic Preservation Officer for the Bad River Ojibwe of Wisconsin, spoke of the way her life had shifted unexpectedly with the proposal of mining in the Penokee Hills of Wisconsin. Likewise, Bad River Tribal Chairman, Michael Wiggins, Jr. was forced to quickly educate himself in the pertinent science and legal intricacies in order to lead the ongoing anti-mining efforts, to protect the land and the people, to guard the future.

Of the many ways to say please stand, I have chosen a few.

∂, Partial Differential Equation

All things being equal, things are never equal. Think of scope. Like the reach of the imperial. Or consider variables. Value. Or commodity. Ways of seeing. Angles and perspectives. Or how to solve for survival.

The consideration of seven generations. This wisdom rule has become common knowledge. Leaders teach that tribal decisions should be made taking into consideration seven generations in the past and seven generations in the future.

The national sacrifice. Lesser known, and frequently unacknowledged, this convenience policy has marked many generations. Uranium mining. The fallout from atomic bomb detonation at White Sands.

What we erase from polite conversation. Bodies on fire. The historic cleansing of the landscape, the sweep of humanity west, west, west. Environmental r ism.

Zongide’en, Be Brave.

Another partial differential equation. Let’s say a corporation proposes a mine. Variables include Tyler Forks. Bad. Potato. Rivers. A 22-mile, 22,000-acre strip of land. Jobs. Maanomin. Open pit. Exceptional or Outstanding Resource waters. Legislation. Iron oxide. Fish. Blasting and pulverizing. New legislation. The functions depend upon the continuous variables. Fluid flow, for example. And changing laws. Somewhere along the granite line, someone enters. Let’s say they have put down one life and taken up another: the solution of the PDE. They face arbitrary functions. Changing laws. Guards. Guns. If the life is stretched over two points. It vibrates. We cannot measure that vibration in this generation. We can sing it, or make it into light. (See above for a partial illustration.)

Minobimaadizi, Live Well.

This past week an environmental warrior from the Pacific Northwest passed away. Billy Frank, Jr. Frank was quoted as saying about himself, “I was not a policy guy. I was a getting-arrested guy.” But in the end he changed policy. A Nisqually tribal member, his battle for tribal sovereignty in resource management protected the salmon and left its mark on contemporary understanding of treaty law. To accomplish that he was jailed, beaten, tear-gassed, and chose to sacrifice much of his time and liberty. A life stretched over two points.

The Anishinaabe word minobimaadizi translated gives us the English live well. But it means something more. To live this good life in ways both obvious and less so. Though we may feel dwarfed by the largeness of passion and action of people like Billy Frank, Jr., we remain variables in the equation and can tip the balance one way or the other.

When we held an American Indian Sovereignty and Resource Management Conference at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee campus recently, we invited my colleague Lane Hall and his Overpass Light Brigade to participate one evening. Lane’s idea to create lighted letters and spell out protest messages above freeways has caught on around the country. At our event, we spelled words in Anishinaabemowin. (For these Lane needed more vowels!) I am not an OLB regular holder of the light, but I volunteered to be one of those to carry and display the large placards. You will find me at the “I,” the third “O,” and the “G.” One lighted letter in a 14-letter word? Only a pair of legs beneath a billboard? Ahem. Can you spell m taphor without me?

Gego Googiibike, Don’t Dive Into the Metal.

I’d like to ask you to fold up your deck chair and head to the Penokee Hills protests. But the truth is, you probably have an environmental threat within biking distance. Or canoeing distance. Mining companies are pushing to conduct a toxic new form of extraction for sulfide, right next to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northeastern Minnesota, near the 1,090,000-acre (4,400 km²) wilderness area that is located in the Superior National Forest. Where insistence is a function of insanity. If x then why. A mine parallel to 1,000 miles of canoe routes, in the habitat of moose, beaver, wolves, bear, lynx, deer, bobcats, bald eagles, peregrine falcons and loons, within easy polluting distance of our once remote family cabin. We’ve hardly hands enough to hold all the signs or mics needed in this indifferent world of resource capitalism.

And yet.

Poetry is one letter when we spell resistance.

Debwetaan, Believe.

Eloquence of Earth

Nominal signs, these words we use—future, ecology, seven generations—

have yellowed into clichés, editorials that line the cages

of captured birds, or burn in unransomed stone fireplaces

of America’s aspiring, royal mining families.

These green futures cast as fairy story,

sealed beneath the calloused ideals of legislators—

sleek smiling handshakes who seal bargains like Jabez Stone;

Our I-do-solemnly-swear paper-promise leaders

enticed by industry frenzy, slight of lips,

the short-sighted tally (seven hundred jobs)

coveted like Stone’s seven years of prosperity.

Though publicly professed (against all enemies, foreign and domestic),

and leather-oath sworn (will bear true faith and allegiance),

still quid pro quos reign, sell the soul of this land—

our waters our manoomin our children, abiinoojiihnyag.

Each season gavels strike new bargains with our oldest enemies

maji-manidoog, handsome fast-talking strangers disguised as prosperity.

Daily we watch patient warnings swim the Wolf River,

migrate to absent wetlands, trumpet old calls.

How do we translate the flashing fins of poisoned fish?

What other alphabet do you know to spell contaminated waters?

Like banned books words still burn on my tongue—reciprocity,

sacred, preservation, earth, tradition, knowledge, protect.

Even the vellum of justice has crumbled in fiendish fire.

Meanwhile we gather here, descendants of ajijaak and maang

lift our ancient clan voices in longing, for a chant of restoration

in a Faustian world.

Before a jury of the tricked and trapped and bamboozled,

before the very devil, Daniel Webster sang

the healing brush of common memory

a child’s wonder at each day’s waking

the freshness of a fine morning—waaseyaaban.

If I say Gichigami—Lake Superior—a turquoise plain, stretches

infinite, gete-gaming. If I say Wiikonigoyaang, she invites us to her feast,

how many will remember the eloquence of earth itself?

At dawn when jiibay mist backstrokes across the copper of northern prairies

eerie white hovering, damp and alive,

will you stretch out your hands in hope

cup the sacred like cedar smoke,

draw it toward you—a gesture

fervent and older than language?

Now I say wiigwaasikaa, everywhere we look

there are many white birch,

bark marked with sign, scrolls a history.

I say ritual, continuum, cycle of belonging,

I say daga, please; ninandotaan,

you must listen for it—aki.

Yes, our very earth speaks.

Who among us will translate?

Kimberly Blaeser is a 2014 Contributing Blogger for Mujeres Talk and a poet, critic and essayist. She teaches Creative Writing, Native American Literature and American Nature Writing at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she is a Professor. Her publications include three books of poetry: Trailing You; Absentee Indians and Other Poems; and Apprenticed to Justice. Her scholarly study, Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition, was the first native-authored book-length study of an Indigenous author. Of Anishinaabe ancestry and an enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, Blaeser grew up on the White Earth Reservation in northwestern Minnesota and worked as a journalist before earning her MA and PhD from the University of Notre Dame. Her poetry has also been translated into several languages including Spanish, Norwegian, Indonesian and French.

Review of Chopper! Chopper! Poetry from Bordered Lives

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by Paloma Martinez-Cruz

Verónica Reyes. Chopper! Chopper! Poetry from Bordered Lives. Pasadena, CA: Arktoi Books, 2013. 111 pages. ISBN 978-0-9890361-0-8. $18.95

I left my hometown of Los Angeles to attend college in the Bay Area, and then I left California altogether to attend graduate school in New York City. Many denizens of the San Francisco Bay and the five boroughs of New York City have no love for my birth town, so when people asked me where I was from, I felt shy about admitting I was from the place known as “72 suburbs in search of a city.” One day a fellow student shared with me what he loved about it: “You can feel how it’s red and brown.” After he said this, I realized that he was right, and that so many of the quips about L.A. being anti-intellectual and superficial were, in truth, about the other L.A., the tinsel L.A. that eclipses our red and brown realities, until violence erupts in the streets, or Chicana feminist jota poets like Verónica Reyes sound the thunder of our lives in verse.

The poems in Chopper! Chopper!, Reyes’ first published collection, envision East L.A. as the continuity of Mexican experience, participating fully in an Americas-based spirituality that venerates the natural world. As with physical sacred gatherings, the volume begins with a blessing. The poem “Desert Rain: blessing the land” [sic] surveys the desert cityscape with devotion.

The agua took her back to her childhood in México

rain that blessed her alma como copal shrouding her skin

She inhaled the desert aroma over concrete, nopales,

and limones beneath splintered street telephone wires

Socorro breathed in once and inhaled México in East L.A.

While I am exhilarated by the red and brown affirmation of Mesoamerica in Los Angeles, some of the portraits of Chicana ethnicity in this volume echo others. From my perspective as a Latin American/Latina Studies scholar, I question what seems like a nostalgia that conflates spirit, nature, and nation. Although some of the poetic turns tended toward predictability, there is also much to recommend in this volume. Reyes is at her best when she navigates the difficulty of voicing bicultural, transnational experience by moving in for the hyper close-up, telling us what she alone is capable of observing. In “Theoretical Discourse over ‘Sopa’ (what does it really mean?),” she playfully employs academic jargon to try to make sense of a word that has multiple meanings.

All our lives we called it “sopa”

Differentiated “sopa” from fideo

to estrellas or melones

labels for different pastas

titles to establish subjectivity

within the hegemonic world of pasta.

The poem concludes with the narrator and her sister agreeing to use the word sopa the same way that their mother had used it – to refer to Mexican rice – thereby legitimizing local, intimate knowledge over official language usage.

As in the postmodern approach to “sopa,” Reyes’ poetry consistently repositions authority so that cholos, jotas and bus patrons are key culture makers. In “Super Queer,” the queer Chicana becomes a supernatural champion, managing to survive homophobia, bashing and “what you thought no human being can withstand.” Where others are tempted to perceive marginalization or victimization, Reyes tells of pride and strength, urging the listener to “take off those silly straight lenses that skew your vision.” In “El Bus,” the narrator is proud to announce, “I speak in bus routes,” which, as Angelenos and visitors to the city are aware, is a dialect spoken almost exclusively by the poorest of the poor. In Reyes’ poem, the speaker claims “You got it, esa or ese, I know the system/It’s in my blood to travel the calles via el bus” as if to boast of royal lineage. Reyes’ poems invert the parameters of social inclusion, so that queer and street folk decide who belongs, and misguided wearers of “silly straight lenses” and novice bus riders become the outlanders in need of charitable assistance.

Vehicles of surveillance and pesticide application populate Reyes’ poetic universe, producing a bellicose environment in which East L.A. residents are surrounded by drone-like aerial hostility. “Green Helicopters” describes the apple-orchard helicopter that sprays toxins on the migrant workers, and “Chopper! Chopper!” depicts the play of young neighborhood children who turn the menacing sounds and lights of police helicopters into fantastic games.

The cops announced to the convict, “We know where you are. We know…”

And Xochitl ran out of breath chasing the big white light piercing the darkness

She stopped and stared up at the helicopter slicing the chapopote sky for a moment

It was almost as if it were stuck like the mammoths, the saber-toothed tiger, the Chumash

woman whose bones remained deep underground until the archaeologist came

The people screamed and wailed to be set free from the tar that pulled them down

that swallowed them little by little as they struggled to get out from the bottom

Still the thick goo engulfed them hole suffocating their skin, filling their mouths

Xochitl’s brown eyes stared at the chopper swirling in East L.A.’s summer sky

But the helicopter broke free, pulled back its white light and flew away to the hill

Here, the child Xochitl plays under a tar firmament where the craft hovers like a relic from California’s Pleistocene epoch, witnessing centuries of ancestors struggle against asphyxiation across the sky: just another summer night in East L.A.

While most of Chopper! Chopper! must remain unexamined here, there can be no doubt that Reyes achieves what she sets out to do. In her poem “A Xicana Theorist,” her queer protagonist moves through a lesbian, Latina social space, and yet she poses the question, “Are we really safe?” The final verse reveals the highest potential that theoretical work can aspire to achieve.

She dances with the woman from the bar

She holds her gently around the waist

She leans her body closely into hers

She wants to cry and tell her she is hurt

…tell her she is tired of fighting

…tell her she feels alone and scared

She wants to heal her wounds

These last lines of “A Xicana Theorist” leave room for interpreting whether the wounds she wishes to heal belong to her or to her dance partner, and this blurring of bodily boundaries and subjects allows the reader to interpret a more expansive notion of selfhood that includes all the Latinas who are wearied by building their lives in spaces that are racially negative and sexually oppressive. The desire that is repeated in these last lines does not hone in on sexual appetite, which would make sense given the erotically charged environment of the bar, but rather emphasizes the act of telling. The telling is the medicine the poetic voice craves in order to heal wounds.

In the tar and asphalt prism of East L.A., Reyes’ poems unearth and celebrate centuries of red and brown truths. While some of the writing resorts to idealizing Mexico as a font of political and spiritual alignment, the collection convinces readers to rethink urban spaces and witness the cunning and courage that develop under a dome of both hyper vigilance and civil neglect. In the midst of roaring engines, slicing blades and hostile surveillance lights, her courageous act of telling manages to cultivate a space of safety and healing: a place for pride to grow.

Paloma Martinez-Cruz, PhD, works in the areas of contemporary hemispheric cultural production, women of color feminism, performance and alternative epistemologies. She is the author of Women and Knowledge in Mesoamerica: From East L.A. to Anahuac (University of Arizona Press, 2011) and the translator of Ponciá Vicencio, the debut novel by Afro-Brazilian author Conceição Evaristo, about a young Afro-Brazilian woman’s journey from the land of her enslaved ancestors to the multiple dislocations produced by urban life. Martinez-Cruz is also the editor of Rebeldes: A Proyecto Latina Anthology, a collection of stories and art from 26 Latina women from the Midwest and beyond. Currently Martinez-Cruz is at work on a book publication examining the resistance fronts found in Chicano/a popular culture. [5/1/14 post updated to correct an editorial error]

Remembering Nelson Mandela

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Photo by Flickr User HelenSTB
CC BY-SA 2.O

by Inés Hernandez-Avila

I wrote this poem for Nelson Mandela in 1988 because he truly moved me, all along the path of his life as I began to know about him, and his spirit will continue to move me, always. The poem speaks for me of what I think of him. He was a great Spirit who came to this earth to be Nelson Mandela, and he kept the radiance he brought with him from the spirit lands of the ancestors. With the example of his life, he “lifted us up,” as my own Nez Perce elder, Albert Andrews would say. I have read the poem at literary events, but it has never been published. On the occasion of Mandela’s death, my dear colleague, Jualynne Dodson asked, on the Ford Foundation Fellows listserv, what the impact of Mandela had been on the Chicana/o community. I sent her my poem, from my own Native (Nez Perce) and Tejana perspective. As I re-read what I had written in 1988, I saw that everything that I wrote for him all these years ago, still holds true. And I did write the poem while listening to Abdullah Ibrahim’s piano composition, “Mandela.” Ibrahim, moved by Mandela, composed his piece, and I was moved by the beautiful music for this great human being, this Maestro, who brought his light to the world. It is a poem from my heart.

For Nelson–Leader, Tribal Person, Elder*

Summer 1988, on the occasion of Mandela’s 70th birthday, when the South African government offered him a six hour visit with his family

Oh Mandela, Mandela

I sing your name

in the name of all peoples locked in and up

in their very cells

weighed down by all the forces

that do not want their hearts light

and spirits lifted

Nelson, Nelson

Triumph is a sweet song

the one you know

saxaphones jubilant for your spirit

concentrating

in your space

to will your conscious waking

sleeping dreams

for all of us to see

And it is hard, Mandela, Mandela

Six hours offered you with family

with Winnie and your daughters

six hours to hold each other

gulp in every detailed facet

talk with hands eyes ears mouth

nose smiles tears

as if the heart of the very mother earth

would burst with joy at such a moment

but this joy cannot be

it is, as you say, not possible

for you are not alone

but one of oh so many whose pain like yours

meted out minutely daily

seeks to engulf you in despair

This visit offered is not to them

but to you

And what is six hours in the face of terror centuries old

horror with the face of most intentional genocide?

Six hours more or less of time

when in those same six hours

Children, little children

sit, like you, in other prison cells for their “subversion”

When heads are cracked and bodies wracked

across the landscape of a continent that is yours theirs

A motherland keeps count of each heart battered to a bloody pulp

to stop its count of life

And you know, too, that count

So you stop the maddened offer of a visit

What would you have said, Mandela, Mandela?

“Shall we have tea, Winnie?

Daughters, rub my back, I am so sore.

What shall we talk about?”

And in the next cells casually inflicting itself

in studied vehemence on seemingly countless others

the obscenity of racial/cultural boundless hatred

Nelson, Nelson

A visit?

We are visiting for you all over the world

for you and with you in our homes your face shines

from the walls of our hearts

Poets gather to sing for you

Peoples gather to struggle with you

Workers pass the light of your name from mouth to mouth

Races, classes and sexes unite for you and for the people

Children learn of you and of the brave children

through whose eyes and spirits we find courage

Agelessness is where principled commitment is born and lives

Even in the splattered, broken bones of death

that wants so badly to detain the march of liberation

in all its splendor

Mandela, Mandela

you are real

The people you stand firm for are real and true

The visionary will outlast the cynic, the impotent and depraved

It is a matter of time

Only a small matter of time

The freedom spirit is soaring from heart to heart

around the world

To stop for six hours for convenience?

No, Nelson, Nelson

How you knew how time is precious

How you knew to keep on soaring

Oh, Mandela, Mandela

Keep on soaring

*With thanks to Abdullah Ibrahim, because this poem was written to his composition “Mandela.”

Inés Hernández-Avila is a Professor of Native American Studies at UC-Davis, where she is also Co-Director of the UC-Davis Social Justice Initiative. She has been involved in creating both the MA and PhD program in Native American Studies at UC-Davis. Her research and teaching focuses on indigenous literatures of the Americas and Chicana literature and feminism.

Dictionary for a New Century

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Photo of gloves with definition of glove printed on them

2007 “Glove” by Flickr user Catherine

By Kimberly Blaeser

What would housework mean

to women who haul water from springs,

use lye soap and scrub boards,

who hang flypaper on ceilings

and sew cloth cupboard curtains

on the family treadle machine?

What does kitchen appliance mean

to those toasting bread in ovens

of old wood stoves,

or bathroom appliance

to those donning snow boots

to walk to the outhouse?

Somewhere between microwave pancakes

and the state-of-the-art mixmaster

I trip over the kitchen slop pail

retch at the smell of lard rendering.

Just as my fingers settle on the dvd remote

I remember to empty the ash can.

At three my daughter kisses and releases her fish

at four she asks if chicken is a dead bird.

At forty like Billy Pilgrim I come unstuck in time

still wait to take my turn in a three-foot washtub,

then light candles and soak in a warm whirlpool

now camped uneasily between progress and nostalgia.

With a heavy duty vacuum and a lightweight canister

I cruise the air-conditioned floors of my house

sweep away unearned guilt or hire a cleaning lady.

With electric everything and my computer whirring

I work my way through memories and philosophies

Try to recollect that proverb about idle hands.

What does convenience mean in a country of prosperity?

Should we use or release our histories?

Can education repay old debts?

If science and technology are the answers

who have we hired to ask the questions?

And what was it you said about women’s work?

Kimberly Blaeser is a Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she teaches Creative Writing, Native American Literature and American Nature Writing. She has published three books of poems, including Apprenticed to Justice (Great Wilbraham, Cambridge, UK: Salt Publishing Ltd., 2007), where this poem appears; a scholarly study, Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition; and numerous articles and book chapters. Blaeser is of Anishinaabe ancestry and an enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe who grew up on the White Earth Reservation.

Latina/o Futures, Literatures, and Necessary Tensions

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April 15, 2013

“2009-12-04 JJAY -27” by Aloucha from Flickr.

by Susan C. Méndez

Recently, I attended John Jay College of Criminal Justice’s 1^st Biennial Latina/o Literary Theory & Criticism Conference entitled, “Haciendo Caminos: Mapping the Futures of U.S. Latina/o Literatures.” The conference organizers Richard Perez and Belinda Linn Rincón did a phenomenal job of arranging provocative keynote addresses by Ramón Saldívar, José Esteban Muñoz, Mary Pat Brady, and Silvio Torres-Saillant. They also assembled two days of panels on Latina/o literatures. For a conference-goer such as myself, who always has a hard time finding the one-to perhaps-three panels that actually pertain to what she researches and/or teaches at every literature conference she attends, this event was a veritable cornucopia of literary insights. As a former co-chair conference organizer for MELUS 2010, I could especially appreciate all the hard work and dedication that it took, on the parts of Perez and Rincón and their support staff, to pull off such an endeavor.

Now to turn to the ideas presented at the conference; first, let me state a disclaimer that these summaries derive from my personal and admittedly incomplete notes as a single conference participant. Please forgive any unintentional inaccuracies. Ramón Saldívar set the tone of the conference with his key note address which examined the role of speculative realism in the future of Latina/o literatures. He offered a framework for understanding how the past and the future are more intimately connected than we may think. Saldívar asserted that for Latinas/os, our relationship to the future should be to realize the history not made. Speculative realist texts can act as a set of alternative thought experiments in order to create a new imaginary for the Latina/o community.

The next day, José Esteban Muñoz and Mary Pat Brady delivered powerful meditations linking politics and art. In their presentations, there was an uneasiness stated about hyphenated identities and other identity labels such as “Hispanic” and “Latina/o”; subsequently, Muñoz suggested returning to the label “Brown.” According to my notes, Muñoz explains that in “Brownness,” there is no ranking of “Brown” individuals or conditions; there is just the grounded experience of being “Brown” based on a shared sense of harm and yet flourishing as well. I particularly liked this idea about identity because it seemed to fit so well with feminist organizations like MALCS, where we have always stressed an non-hierarchical, heterogeneous inclusion of all women who share in the grounded experience of being from or connected to the Latina/o or Latin American community or world regions, and this experience is often rooted in a history of political and social oppression but is also marked by cultural flourishing and expression as women. Aesthetic practices and places can serve in the rehearsal of this identity, allowing Latinas/os to be who we want to be in the world. For Brady and Muñoz, this led to a consideration of recent reflections on “failure” by Halberstam and others, as well as recent discussions of “negative aesthetics in art” for understanding queer Latina/o literature and performance.

Lastly, there was the closing keynote address and conversation where Silvio Torres-Saillant posed the following questions to authors Helena María Viramontes and Ernesto Quiñonez: How does one study Latina/o literature without relying on literalization? Do critics do enough to emphasize the art of literature? How do we get students to do the artistic work? These questions caused quite a stir for the panelists and the audience. Several scholars contested the implied sentiment that current scholar-teachers are not getting their students to appreciate Latina/o literature as art. The writers, including author Angie Cruz from the audience, expressed interest in the feminist and other readings of their work by literary scholars. Sadly, I missed how the chaotic stir of discussion at this last session concluded; I had my own stirring chaos to contend with in visiting my dad and brother that last night in New York before I had to return home early the next day.

Putting the rich ideas of this conference aside for a moment, this last session emphasized the types of heated yet productive discussions that happened throughout the conference. These moments seemed to happen for two reasons: generational and gender gaps. In one roundtable conversation, a senior Latina/o literature scholar took offense with the assertion that critical studies of Latina/o literature did not flourish until the late 1980s, a perspective that overlooks earlier critical work. In another instance, following a reading of Pedro Monge’s “Lagrimas del alma” (a short play about the aftermath of the flight of Pedro Pan for one Cuban-American family), another debate occurred over what language the play should be performed in: English, Spanish, or a mix of both. Many audience members expressed the view that use of both languages seemed to be realistic and audience-friendly. However, one participant, an older gentleman, favored a seemingly purist view of language: a play by a Cuban man about Cuban history should be in Spanish. At still another panel, a scholar took issue with the frequent teaching of Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) as a feminist text. The rich discussion on all sides of this issue among the audience included more than one participant explaining how Oscar Wao is about much more than Yunior trying to score “pussy.” It escaped these audience members’ attention that by using words such as “pussy” in their discussion, they were not doing much to advance their assertion of feminism in this text. In this way, my feminist training, which is reinforced daily through my work with MALCS, reminds me of the importance of not only what I am talking about but also of how I am talking about the subject-matter at hand. “Pussy” only invokes a colonial and patriarchal legacy of violence that reduces targeted women and their communities to be mere objects and not the true subjects that they are. “Pussy” does little to flesh out a study of feminist agency, collaboration, and societal transformation in almost any work.

The take-away from all these passionate discussions is the need to keep having these important conversations about the history of Latina/o Literary Studies, language, and gender. We need to have these arguments, to be reminded of the importance of this history and these concepts, amongst our own community members engaged in Latina/o Literary and cultural production. Asking these questions of each other in our continued work and study should be a first and foremost concern for everyone involved. We need to keep each other honest and knowledgeable about our work always and most significantly before we present our work in more general venues and conferences. In this way, the new ideas, arguments, and theories presented at conferences such as this one are not the only benefit to be had; these other meaningful discussions maintain the field in a healthy state of self-awareness. Hence, conferences devoted to any facet of Latina/o Studies are crucial, should be strongly supported, and the organizers of such events deserve to be recognized for their substantial service to the professional community.

Susan C. Méndez is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English & Theatre and the Department of Latin American & Women’s Studies at the University of Scranton. She teaches courses on Multi-Ethnic American Literature and Women’s Studies. Primarily, she conducts research on novels written by Latino/a authors. Méndez is a 2011-2013 At Large Representative of MALCS.

Spilling the Beans: Mujeres Talk Can Be a Virtual Public Sphere

One Latina Life: Feminism, Rage, Punk Rock

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by Alicia Velasquez (AKA Alice Bag)

“I’m not a writer,” I whined.

“You’ve been writing a blog for years,” my husband said.

“But I’m not a REAL writer. I can’t describe people and places in flowery detail.” My husband gave me a pained look. That settles that, I thought to myself as I walked over to my latest craft project ready to take it up again, but my husband was not finished.

“We’ll set it up as a separate blog. You have time to write while I’m at work and Sophia’s at school.” I was tempted to list all the things that housewives do during the day that are never noticed: the beds that make themselves, the laundry that appears neatly folded atop the family dressers, the cupboards magically full of organic vegetarian food choices, the Sisyphean work of women. I decided to hold my tongue, sensing my husband’s insistence was a genuine effort to support my artistic growth and not simply create more work for me.

The previous day, a group of my girlfriends from Los Angeles had driven down to visit me in San Diego and we’d walked over to a little neighborhood bar for a drink. Two of the girls were writing a play called The Barber of East L.A. and were doing research by gathering oral histories from women who had grown up in East L.A. during the 1960’s and 70’s. Halfway through the interview one of the playwrights, Raquefella turned to me and suggested, “You should write a book.” I laughed it off but continued to think about the idea.

I had casually mentioned the comment to my husband before going to bed and this morning he brought up the subject again with renewed enthusiasm. “I’m going to set up the blog for you,” he told me. We had recently been to Comic-con, where I discovered that a friend of mine had written her own comic book. The idea had thrilled me and my husband knew it. He had found the perfect bait. “Maybe if you start writing, an illustrator will read it and help you turn it into a graphic novel. You can call it The True Life Adventures of Violence Girl.” That did it. I had been a voracious comic book reader as a child and still enjoyed graphic novels. The succinct text in graphic novels was not intimidating yet I also knew that many graphic novels had complex themes and ideas. I thought of my story in those terms. I wanted my book to be easy to read but challenging in terms of ideas.

The following Monday morning I stared at the laptop on the kitchen table. I walked by it, grabbed a box of old photos and let the memories wash over me. I looked at an old picture of my mom and dad, took in my earliest memory and started to write.

Every morning from 10:00 to 12:00 I’d sit at the kitchen table and write. I’d send my blog post to my husband, he’d edit it for me and give me immediate feedback. The journey was therapeutic. Suddenly, scenes I had blocked out of my memory were coming back to me. On more than one occasion I called my husband at work, crying, my stomach in knots, sobbing “I can’t write this, it makes me sick.” Other times my husband would call me from work to tell me he had laughed or cried at a particular entry.

A few weeks into the process our daughter told us she was being bullied at school. I had spoken to the school administration on several occasions but the situation had not improved. Back in Arizona the prices of houses had dropped dramatically and our old house was still on the market. We decided that my daughter and I would move back into our old house so that our daughter could return to her former school while my husband applied for a transfer at work.

I continued to blog and send my entries to my husband everyday. Now that we were living apart, sharing this intimate part of myself with him made me feel close to him despite the fact that we were living in different cities. The deeper I dug into my memories the more I learned about myself. I started to see recurring themes and cause and effect because I was looking from a new perspective using my writer’s vantage point. I understood that the seeds of feminism had been planted in my childhood. I saw that my punk stage persona had been an outlet for the impotent rage I had harbored for years.

At the same time, I was picking up followers on my blog. People were reading at their desks at work or at their own kitchen tables. If I tried to take a day off from blogging, I heard about it from my readers. It dawned on me that these people were following a story and expected me to finish it. Not only that, they expected a new entry Monday through Friday. I established a routine, I wrote everyday after my daughter left for school. I would not allow myself to start any other project or leave the house until I had written the next part of the story. I pretended I was a real writer, I visualized chatting about my book on Oprah. I thought about who would play my father in the movie (Edward James Olmos).

When the story was finished, I posted a question to my readers: “Who should I send this to?” We brainstormed together; I felt like I had a think tank behind me. We decided to approach an independent publisher called Feral House. I sent them an unsolicited manuscript with an introductory letter and within the week, I received a call on my cell phone: “Alice Bag, you sent me some of your writing. You may not remember me, but I met you many years ago…” It was the head of Feral House, and he wanted my book.

Alicia Velasquez (AKA Alice Bag) is a musician, Craftivista, author, blogger, junior pastry chef and master trouble maker. Her book Violence Girl is available now at http://feralhouse.com/violence-girl/

Comments:

Anonymous September 27, 2011 at 10:02 AM

Hey Alice Bag,

Amazing, keep writing, I sent you a message already but lost it because I did not sign into WordPress. Anyway, you keep doing what brings you some bliss. You will inspire others to do the same.
Juanita Suarez
of the Latina Dance Theater Project
darksidegirl77 September 28, 2011 at 12:11 PM

I loved your Violence Girl Blog and adore the book that the blog created. You are truly an inspiring person !!!!
Thank You for sharing your stories…
Alice Bag September 29, 2011 at 8:16 AM

Thank you both for your supportive comments, they are much appreciated.