2010 Latino Writers Conference: Photos and Texts

The Group Photo

***

Award winner citation: Premio Aztlán, May 21, 2010

Gloria Zamora has given us a memoir that is at once a nostalgic and loving

 remembrance of what life was like in a simpler and more humane New Mexico and at 

the same time, a chronicle that historians will consult when writing about what we once 

were.  She has provided a treasure for her extended nuevomexicano family and at the 

same time, an introduction to New Mexico for those only recently coming to live in the 

Land of Enchantment. She has shown that you need not be a university trained 

intellectual to write well, to write honestly, and to write in a way that moves people. She 

has truly lived up to the expectations and purpose of the Premio Aztlán.

Award winner citation:  NHCC Literary Award, May 21, 2010

Luis Alberto Urrea’s work is prolific and it is significant.  He has mined an incredible 

number of sources for his nonfiction work and he has delved into his very soul in his 

works of fiction.  His work not only bridges two cultures but also two countries.  He has

captured the meaning of the historical tensions between the two as well as the 

inevitability of a future coexistence, which is sure to come.  Luis Alberto shows us that

humans ultimately rise to their humanity.  At a time when the most retrograde,

chauvinistic and xenophobic forces have been unleashed in the national discourse on

immigration, he gives us a way to understand the U.S. – Mexican border and 

the chasm between Anglos and Mexicans in noble and honorable terms.  His work 

inspires new writers and fortifies more experienced writers.  He stands up for his 

community in his profession and he teaches us all that we are ultimately part of one 

community and one destiny.

**

National Latino Writers Conference (Albuquerque, NM) Keynote Speech

Rigoberto González

May 20, 2010

Before I begin I would like to thank the organizers of the National Latino Writers Conference for inviting me to participate this morning as the keynote speaker at this exemplary gathering. This is the 8th year of building community, of fostering creativity and critique, and of guiding early-career writers toward mentorships and professional relationships with established writers whose generosity and insights are shaping the next generation of artists. To be honest, there is nothing unusual about these expectations at any writers conference, and there are dozens that take place across the country--most of them perfectly competent and useful. But what makes this conference so unique is that it is ours--a forum that has facilitated the face-to-face communication between Chicano/Latino writers, readers, and thinkers. And for that, I congratulate all of you who have sacrificed time and resources to contribute to that experience. 

The year is 2010. And though we are currently standing beneath the shadow of the anti-immigrant and anti-raza legislation of our neighbors in Arizona (and let us hope that the disease of xenophobia is not contagious), I am going to keep my message positive this morning because, despite these acts of hostility against our people, there is much for us to celebrate. And if we do not recognize our successes, if we do not toast our triumphs, then we surrender to the afflictions of inferiority, invisibility and silence--the three disgraces of American politics and culture.

The year is 2010. To our left we have the U.S. Census, which will confirm for the country what we have always known when we wake up in the mornings to see the Aztec sun casting its rays over Aztlán: that we are plentiful, that we are here, that we are never leaving, that we will not be thrown out. To our right, we have the smoky memory of revolution, the cycle come back to the days of reckoning--1810, 1910, 2010--not only have we populated this land, we have also shaped its language, built its cities, spun its tales and written its songs. This is, indeed, nuestra tierra and we will keep the roots of our family and history embedded deeply into its indigenous and mestizo core.

But now come the important questions: How will each of us accept that responsibility? How will we contribute to this movimiento during this critical period of adversity? How will we know that we are marching on the correct path?

Since I am speaking in front of a group of poets and writers, I will speak to the answers through a cultural lens, acknowledging one of the greatest strengths of our community: its artistic muscle. Art and poetry, danza y teatro, cuento y canto, have always been essential components of the Latino cultural identity. From the pachanga navideña to the quinceañera, from the floricanto to the academic encuentros, we express ourselves through the arts because it is who we are: people who value creativity and imagination. Just look around you: the colorful palette of our folklore, the ingenious architecture of our altars, the linguistic textures of our slang, our names, our adivinanzas, the panoramic flavors in our foods, the range of decibels in our music, our cyber-chisme, our rascuachismo--it is all us all up in here, Senator Jan Brewer. 

The impulse to dance and sing and, yes, the impulse to write it all down, to record and remember, is as natural and familiar to us as the impulse to breathe. And it is with great urgency that we need more of that breath.

There has been much to-do about how Chicano/ Latino writers are now getting their due, getting their props for their hard work, getting published more and winning more awards. And yes, all of those points of progress are true and they are real. And they are ours. And yet, if we allow those statements to settle without further exploration, it would appear that only until recently have we discovered our talents. Or rather, that only until recently have we been discovered, which is to say, only until the white industries and institutions saw us did we see ourselves. 

Let us not drop into the pitfall of charting our history and our territory using the maps and timelines of those who came to our neighborhoods long after the ink had had dried on our pages. If we accept those observations as facts, we neglect the labor of previous generations of writers who produced and didn’t get published, who shared and didn’t garner those accolades, who educated and were not memorialized. I find it hopeful that we have many more opportunities to spread the word, but I will find it shameful if we move forward as if we had invented that word. So let us speak frankly about where we are now, by first paying tribute to those who paved the way toward the privilege of authorship and of organizing literary gatherings like this one, the 8th National Latino Writers Conference.

If we learn anything from this recent bout of American societal anxiety, it is that numbers don’t signify safety or acceptance or victory. In NYC, in the place I now call home, Mexicans will outnumber Dominicans and Puerto Ricans by the year 2025. By the year 2050, Latinos will outnumber all other minority groups in the country. You would think that this relatively quick population explosion--indeed the browning of the USA--would also translate into population explosions in other areas, like education and the arts. It will only seem that way because of the social networking media and technology that allows us to connect with other artists with a speed and efficiency that has never been experienced before. The truth is there will not be more of us, we will only be more aware of who and where we are. Only by choice will an artist remain detached or isolated, only by choice will a poet or writer remain disconnected from a literary forum. I say this as both an advantage to the young talent aiming to see itself as part of a bigger picture, but also as a disadvantage of skewed perception: there are not more of us and our numbers as artists, compared to our ethnic population, is and will remain devastatingly small.

This might sound as a contradiction to what I announced earlier, that the arts were the vibrant fabric of Latino cultural identity--but it is not a contradiction, it is complexity, and I’m referring to the specific representation in letters. Instead let us look at this as a challenge: and that challenge is in sustaining and empowering the writer. If we do not build, now that we have the tools, a system of nurturing and professionalizing the young writer, we will lose that writer, will we lose a warrior in the battle of the word against inferiority, invisibility and silence.

So let me now pose the following points as a framework of responsibility to all of us inhabiting the Chicano/ Latino literary landscape. This framework is a strategy for survival if we are to move ahead into the new millennium as champions of our own cause. It’s actually a simple formula, but a hard one to achieve without the collaborative energy to fuel it. This two-point prong is mentorship and community.

For the young members of our audience: learn who your literary antepasados are, know their names and read their words. This will keep your humility in check and your esteem on fire. Recognize that your influences are from a variety of bookshelves, not just writings from Chicano/ Latino writers, but also the writings from our Latin American cousins, plus the works in translation from Africa, Europe and Asia. Embrace your town or village or city but locate it within a larger map--world literature. 

Never be ashamed or embarrassed to call yourself a Latino writer. In fact, be more specific, call yourself a Chicano writer, a Dominican writer, a Puerto Rican writer, a Cuban writer, or any configuration or combination of these and other identities. Situate yourself within a nation and an immigrant history, it is what preserves the integrity of the sacrifices of your people and the loss of your people’s homeland. I’m frequently dismayed by Latino writers who subscribe to the notion of wanting to “just be a writer, not a Latino writer,” as if that designation “Latino writer” wasn’t true. Unless you don’t carry any signifier of ethnicity in your name, unless your work doesn’t illustrate your cultural identity, unless you can pass for white, you will never be “just a writer.” By moving forward with this delusional goal you are betraying your own inferiority complex, you are buying into the stigma imposed by the mainstream publishing industry that you are lesser than, regional, foreign, and derivative. This is why you need to read your literary antepasados--so that you can navigate the troubled waters of doubt, writers block or other creative frustrations with the strength and pride of those who came before you.

For those of you who have started publishing or who are in the early stages of a career, those of you who have one or two books under your belt, don’t rest on your laurels and expect the readers to come to you. Take some initiative and become your own best advocate: learn to speak in public, to articulate matters of craft and all things literature. You learn these skills by attending readings and listening to the seasoned voices, by attending conferences like AWP or this one, the 8th National Latino Writers Conference, and absorbing the wisdom, advice and knowledge of your instructors. And recognize that even at this level you already have something to teach others--share your mistakes and your moments of success. And don’t forget, as you further your career, that you are more than “just a writer.” You are also a role model: take responsibility for your public appearances, choose your words carefully and fight with intelligence--you are now a public figure, generate praise for those who are your colleagues not your competition, and don’t become that writer who chooses to remain detached or isolated, who chooses to remain disconnected from any literary forum. That sidestepping of accountability to your artistic community is nothing short of selfishness. Such weakness is the weight around the necks of the rest of us who must pull forward a little harder because you won’t.

You are a Latino writer, so you are also an empowered voice: speak out through your poems, through your stories, but also through editorials and informed opinions. Write those essays or blog entries, those words of critique and protest. Become politicized because writing is political, Latino identity is a political stance.  Have you not heard that “breathing while brown” is the latest oppression? Or are you “just a person” as you are “just a writer”? Being afraid is no longer an excuse, it’s a surrender. What use is our growth in numbers if we start censoring our language, tempering our tones and apologizing for our passions, our outrage and our cries for justice. We cannot hide behind the politeness of our advanced degrees or beneath the decorum of art spaces. Avoid the trapping of early success, called complacency, and tell yourself that if you don’t rock the boat you will be fine. Cowardice is never rewarded. Writing is not a static activity it is activism. Learn it and then teach it to others.

For the more seasoned writers in the room, I know you have journeyed far and labored tirelessly all these years, well, I am now asking you to work harder by keeping the doors you kicked open cleared for the rest of us. Too many times I have heard the doors slam shut as soon as one of us makes it in. Fortunately, there are many members of this elite group who mentor, who write reviews and endorsements on book jackets, who write letters of recommendation and academic evaluations, who introduce younger writers to editors, agents, and publishers. To those people I say thank you, and may you continue to do what you do and what we appreciate. 

The tragic side of that coin is that there are writers who do not contribute to the efforts of mentorship, who guard their writing time so jealously they see the rest of us as termites who will chew through the walls of their writing rooms if they even acknowledge us. They shall remain nameless, and may the Latino community repay them with the same level of affection and warmth that they have bestowed upon us. Como decía mi abuelita María: ¡Cuernos!   

And finally, this call goes out to anyone who will respond to it: we need more critics. As an executive board member of the National Book Critics Circle, an organization that has been granting career-making awards for the last 36 years, I am one of only a handful of Latino critics. In fact, most of us (and that number is four--one, two, three, four) have served on the twenty-four member executive board within the last five years. 

Literary criticism is a sophisticated community conversation between the writer, the reader and the critic. It is the evaluation that places the art within various social and cultural contexts, and that engages the power and relevance of a book. We can still have readers and writers without the critic, that’s true, but the critic is also an important translator for those who insist on believing that Latino writing is lesser than, regional, foreign, and derivative. The only training you need to become a critic is to be a good reader and to develop a critical position: Do you like the book? Why or why not? We need the critics writing for blogs, for journals, for newsletters and literary Websites. We can’t only write the books, we need to talk about them. More specifically, we need to read and talk about each others’ books. It never ceases to surprise me when I find out that Latino writers have not read the books by other Latino writers. It’s like those people who don’t read poetry but write it, and then expect the rest of us to be the readers they are not. What kind of message are we sending to our fellow writers: “You’re not worth reading but I am”? What kind of narcissism is that? I know, it’s those writers who shall remain nameless again, isn’t it? 

But not always. The truth is that criticism is one level of literary activism that remains neglected by most of us. It’s so easy when we pretend we’re “just writers” and not critics. It’s so easy when we convince ourselves that it’s a whole other genre, better left to the intellectuals and academics who “do that kind of thing.” I’ll say this: if you are thinking about what you are reading, then you can be a critic. Read more, read better, and you will be a kick-ass critic. We need those voices to speak up in the face of those who will continue to dismiss our literature as lesser than, regional, foreign, and derivative.  

Only if this multi-layered effort is made can we thrive as a community of artists and can we begin to celebrate that our bookshelves are expanding and that the number of nationally-recognized names is growing. Only then can we hold the ladder for those who are reaching the top and for those who are about to step onto the first important rungs. Only then will numbers have meaning and agency and endurance.

I’d like to close by addressing the participants of this, the 8th National Latino Writers Conference (I like repeating that name because nowhere else does something like this exist, so I want to keep it alive on my tongue and savor the wondrous beauty of it). 

Esteemed new members of the Latino writing community, esteemed participants of the 8th National Latino Writers Conference, write and write well. You are artists in a time of crisis, and these conflicts will burden you as much as they will inspire you to move that pen over paper or to press down on those keys on the board. Our veteran writers are dying, our seasoned writers are weary, and the world we live in is not the peaceful, tolerant eden our immigrant pioneers envisioned for us, their descendants. But it is still a world worth fighting for and one of those unflappable weapons we have inherited is language. Each of us here knows the power of literacy: did not that first book you held in your hands initiate a voyage that has brought you to this port? Did not that first childish scribble with pencil or Crayon set aflame that dream of authoring an entire book?

Now you must dream bigger dreams and envision possibilities beyond being “just a writer.” This country already has plenty of writers, it’s activist writers who are is short supply and in loud demand as we continue to gain momentum as Latino artists and lose ground as Latino citizens. These two roles (artist and citizen) are not mutually exclusive, they are perpetually linked, and if one breaks down, the other will collapsed right on top of it.  

The year is 2010. The plagues of the past have been resurrected, but so too the fury of the antidote. Let us fight our battles with poetry, with theater, with story, and let us lace those words with culture and history. Let us stand our ground over nuestra tierra. Esta es nuesta tierra, this is our land. So allow us, those who came before, those who wrote it down in the first decade of the new millennium, to be remembered by those who will write it down in the next decade of the new millennium. That’s how it works--one link locking around another, one branch holding up the next--so that together we remain unbreakable, unshakable.

So keep that in mind as you engage in the power of the word these next few days. This is a life-changing writers conference, but you should expect nothing less from it because it is a Latino writers conference. Much is at stake in the teaching and the learning, because much is at stake in the writing. We have made incredible strides as a visible artist community, but not without sacrifice and certainly not without struggle. Now there will be more sacrifice and more struggle, but take comfort in the company you will keep.

Muchísimas gracias and have a life-changing time at the 8th National Latino Writers Conference.

***

Thanks to Maria Melendez for sending these materials to Letras Latinas Blog

Category: Speaks for Itself

Courtesy of Rich Yañez

Interview with Michael Luis Medrano

Recently, Ashley McCaffrey, a student in Alex Espinoza's (author of Still Water Saints) "Chicanismo" class at California State University, Fresno during the Spring 2010 semester,  interviewed me for a class project. Due to the very intelligent and poignant questions I was asked as well as the current debate on cultural studies in Arizona and the recent push for a "new" curriculum in Texas, I felt it was appropriate to share this interview on Letras Latinas Blog. 

McCaffrey: In class we talked a lot about the concept of identity and how important of a theme that is within Chicano literature. How would you identify yourself? Do you consider yourself a Chicano/a poet or writer?

Medrano:Though I was born and raised here, in Fresno, and my family are peramently part of this valley fabric, I called myself Mexican. In Mexico, obviously this identity wouldn't fly, after all my parents were raised on Motown and The Beatles, but they were raised on mariachi and cumbias as well. It wasn't until college when I first started calling myself Chicano. I took chicano studies classes and became an activist in Mecha and The Brown Berets(the second incarnation) and began identifying closer to my indigenous roots. Then, sometime around 97' I fell for poetry. So, 13 years of poetry I've been writing, and I think now, I'm starting to adopt more the idea of a writer. Of course I'm a writer; I write poems, stories, prose poems, essays. But now, I'm starting to feel more comfortable as a writer. As far as identity goes, I'm so comfortbable at being Chicano, at thinking progressively, I no longer feel like I have to aspire to be that, like when I first started college.

McCaffrey:  We read many different works in our class such as Ron Arias, Marisela Norte and John Phillip Santos. Have any Chicano/a writers inspired you? What other authors do you look up to?

Medrano: Chican@ literature was central to my beginnings as a writer. I used to think being a raza writer meant  had to romanticize the cholo or write about the Aztecs, or try to model Corky Gonzalez's Yo Soy Joaquin. Then the late poet Andres Montoya introduced me to Luis Omar Salinas, and his writing did it for me. Salinas, who left us in 2008, wrote about everything: love, madness, despair, justice; everything I was in love with at the time, and still am. I'm also a student of Juan Felipe Herrera whose writings and commitment to fleshing out the best of his students is very admirable. Other writers/poets I have an affinity for among contmporary poets/writers include Dorianne Laux, Charles Simic, Lydia Davis, Lorna Dee Cervantes, and countless others. I always come back to James Wright, Allen Ginsburg, Wislawa Zymborska, Anna Swir...too many to name!

McCaffrey: What styles of writing interest you?

Medrano: In graduate school Ray Gonzalez introduced me to the prose poem. Over the past six years my writings have leaned more and more towards the hybrid poem and I'm starting to feel more at ease with both poetry and fiction. I'm completing a prose poem/flash fiction manuscript and felt that I've actually established more care in these prose poems than in my poetry, that is, I'm spending more time with each individual piece. I hope to finish the novel I've been working on, (off and on since 2009) which is about a second generation Chicano movement activist becoming disenfranchised w/ the civil rights organizations he belongs to.

McCaffrey: In your writing do you feel you fit into Chicano literary cannon or do try to break outside of that mold?

Medrano: That's a very good question. Prior to my mfa experience in Minnesota, I did not want be identified as a Chicano writer, instead, I purposely tried to resist familiar Chicano literary motifs. However, living in the upper Midwest, in a writing program which was dominated by caucasian females, I quickly realized, not only how culturally different I was,  but also, how much more male I did not want to admit to be. I was still part of the minority and majority culture and didn't know it. I had to just shut up and write and not think about those things.

McCaffrey: How did you begin doing poetry slams? Why do you like participating in them? What are some of the most memorable moments that you have had during these slams?

Medrano: Actually I like attending slams more than participating in them. I've been in, no more than five, since I first started performing at the Fresno open mics and elsewhere. Personally, it feels a little game-showesque...in other words,the energy is amped up, maybe too much? There is a history of me cracking in that competitive pressure. Go figure...I send my work out for publication!

McCaffrey: In class we talked a lot about how the need to diversify the literary cannon in high schools and colleges. What do you think about this and how do you think it might be accomplished?

Medrano: I think cultural studies courses are at heart in this debate: right now there are people who actually believe a diverse curriculum, such as Chicano Studies actually fosters racism. Actually these people who are anti-cultural studies courses are the same people who do not want a diverse literary canon. It's really about people of the majority culture who are more interested in stomping out our dreams to write good literature, theater, art, etc. So many of our writers who are recognized in this "canon", i.e. Gary Soto, Sandra Cisneros, etc. would not have the readership they have been afforded because of cultural studies courses.

McCaffrey: What do you hope to see for Chicano literature in the future?

Medrano: Well, given the recent immigration and cultural studies debates in Arizona, if this trend of hatred continues to influence other states in doing the same, then we better write like our lives depend on it, something we've always done. We're not going anywhere!

*

 Ashley McCaffrey is an undergraduate student at Calfiornia State University, Fresno in Fresno, CA.

Michael Luis Medrano is the author of Born in the Cavity of Sunsets (Bilngual Press). He teaches English and writes in Fresno, CA.

Francisco X. Alarcón's still timely poem

LETTER TO AMERICA

By Francisco X. Alarcón


sorry for
the lag
in writing you

we were left
with few
letters

in your home
we were cast
as rugs

sometimes
on walls
though we

were almost
always
on floors

we served
you as
a table

a lamp
a mirror
a toy

if anything
we made
you laugh

in your kitchen
we became
another pan

even now
as a shadow
you use us

you fear us
you yell at us
you hate us

you shoot us
you mourn us
you deny us

and despite
everything
we

continue
being
us

America
understand
once and for all:

we are
the insides
of your body

our faces
reflect
your future

* * * * * * * *

CARTA A AMÉRICA


perdona
la tardanza
en escribirte

a nosotros
nos dejaron
pocas letras

en tu casa
nos tocó
ser tapetes

a veces
de paredes
pero casi

siempre
estuvimos
en el piso

también
te servimos
de mesa

de lámpara
de espejo
de juguete

si algo
te causamos
risa

en tu cocina
nos hiciste
otro sartén

todavía
como sombra
nos usas

nos temes
nos gritas
nos odias

nos tiras
nos lloras
nos niegas

y a pesar
de todo
nosotros

seguimos
siendo
nosotros us

América
entiende
de una vez:

somos
las entrañas
de tu cuerpo

en la cara
reflejamos
tu future

© Francisco X. Alarcón
From CUERPO EN LLAMAS / BODY IN FLAMES
(Chronicle Books 1990)

William Archila at Cardozo High School

Last Friday, poet and editor Dan Vera met us at Cardozo High School for William Archila's visit there. Below are some of the pictures he took, which he put up at FACEBOOK where Letras Latinas recently inaugurated a "group." I've decided to post some of the pics here, and preface them with this comment. 

Frazier O'Leary, who teaches AP English at Cardozo, and who has been teaching there for over thirty years, has hosted writers with regularity. Most who visit are fiction writers in town as guests of PEN Faulkener, on whose board O'Leary serves. 

But Friday's visit was special: a majority of the students in the class were either born in El Salvador, or were the son or daughter of Salvadoran immigrants. There were also students from the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. As William was born in El Salvador, and didn't come to the U.S. until he was twelve, there was an immediate palpable connection between him and these students. William's wife, the Armenian American poet Lory Badikian mentioned that of all of William's presentations she's witnessed, this was one of the most moving. I know for myself it was among the most meaningful events Letras Latinas has been involved with. 

Many of the students in this class were budding writers themselves and Letras Latinas had pre-arranged to get The Art of Exile to them beforehand. It was particularly poignant watching them read along, rapt, as William read to them. But before he even got to his poem, he simply told them his story---how he came to the U.S. as an adolescent in the early 80s; how he returned to El Salvador in the early 90s only to discover he didn't quite feel at home there; how, back in California, he began his long journey of becoming a writer. 

I couldn't help but imagine how it would have felt to have been in those students' shoes listening to William's story which, in many respects, mirrored their own. One student, born in El Salvador himself, asked:  How did it feel writing about our country? To which William gave an eloquent response I won't attempt to paraphrase here. 

The experience made me think of two analogous ones for me, the only two that come close: one was attending a reading by Ernesto Cardenal on the UC Berkeley campus in 1983; the other was seeing and listening to Francisco X. Alarcón read at a special event at the Women's Building in the Mission District in the early 80s in San Francisco. I was in high school. These moments remain vividly with me; I've written about one ("Ernesto Cardenal in Berkeley"). 

I can't help but wonder if, last Friday, there was a young writer who, twenty years from now, will remember William Archila's visit in a similar way. 

***

This event, and others like it, 
are possible thanks to the generosity 
of the Weissberg Foundation, 
which supports Letras Latinas' efforts 
in the Washington D.C. metropolitan area

Farewell to this year's National Latino Writer's Conference

As the conference wraps up, and the National Hispanic Cultural Center looks ahead to their 10th anniversary celebration in October. Hard to believe that the institution is only ten years old, considering all they've accomplished! Can you imagine a writer's conference where, rather than competition and one-upmanship, a spirit of goodwill and openness to new ideas prevails? If you can, then you must've been at this year's National Latino Writer's Conference at the NHCC. An intense series of workshops, informal conversations and presentations concluded with this morning's group picture outside the Center's education building, followed by one-on-one interviews between writers and editors, participants and workshop faculty, or writers and agents. Each interview was scheduled for 15 minutes, and conference participants were allowed to choose two editors, agents or authors with whom they'd like to schedule appointments. I was fortunate enough to speak with ten interesting individuals, ranging in age from twenty-something to retired, most writing in English and one writing in Spanish, some gay, some hetero, some lesbian, a few Burque residents, and a poetry/prose split coming in at about 50/50. All this to say we Latino writers are a diverse bunch! I will be considering work from most of them for possible Momotombo or Pilgrimage selection. Felt great to offer what insight and encouragement I could---giving back to the karmic well, from which I have drawn long and deeply in my encounters with writer-colleagues and writer-mentors.

Speaking of mentors with far-reaching impacts...Rudolfo Anaya decided just this morning that he would invite the entire conference to his home for merriment this evening at 5pm. My family and I nosed around his thriving vegetable garden, enjoyed the company of his two sweet Dachsunds (at 9 and 4, a good match for my kids---13 and 9), and generally soaked in the spirit of camaraderie radiating through the adobe home stuffed with writers. I managed to sneak in a book-signing request when I saw RA seated with pen in hand...turns out he was about to jot down a few grocery-list items, not assuming the book signing position! Even Lucha Corpi, an esteemed retired writing professor and well-known novelist in her own right, someone who has known Anaya for years, remained star struck and reverant at the chance to be in his home, goodness bless her. She fondly remembered his wife, as well, gone only five short months. Mr. Anaya looked on at the festivities from his front table, as folks dropped in and out of the chair next to him for a platica. The spirit of his generous hospitality was an apt send-off from our days of vital community building in Albuquerque. Thanks so much to NHCC staff Carlos Vasquez, Greta Pullen, Katie Trujillo, and the many, many others who brought us all together, and a personal thanks to Francisco Aragon for the occasion to travel south and represent Momotombo Press.

Maria Melendez, Acquiring Editor, Momotombo Press

Hola from the Land of Enchantment

A joy to be guest-blogging from Albuquerque, where temps reach the high-80s or 90s, and the staff of the National Hispanic Cultural Center can't believe the cooler, rainy weather of recent weeks has finally cleared up in time for their annual Latino Writer's Conference. Key themes of the day, in reverse order:


7pm Awards Banquet: The Beneficent Domino Effect of Rudolfo Anaya's Life & Work

Premio Aztlan recipent Gloria Zamora (Sweet Nata, University of New Mexico Press, 2009) said that she had permission to write about her life growing up as a rural NM farmer's daughter because Rudy had published books about the kinds of people she knew from this region. She'd also been personally encouraged by Anaya. NHCC Literary Award recipient Luis Alberto Urrea (www.luisurrea.com) was also encouraged early on by Anaya, and named Anaya's novel Tortuga as a primary influence and source of inspiration. Urrea also rememberd being struck by something "Saint Rudy" said while Urrea was helping to drive him around for a speaking gig in southern California years ago. Urrea asked: "What do you say to people who accuse you of not being political enough?" The Anaya response invovled a firm dismissal of said detractors that included a well-placed f-bomb. All in the audience had a good chuckle, picturing the grand-tio of Chicano literature cutting loose with this human response---all including Rudolfo Anaya himself, surprise guest of honor at the banquet.

Question to tuck under your pillow: How would you finish this sentence? "Without _________, I could not do the writing that I do." Tonight, I'll fill in the blank with Pat Mora, Valerie Martinez, and Juan Felipe Herrera (the latter's here to deliver a poetry workshop at the Latino Writer's Conference, btw.)

4:30pm Break/Sight-seeing time: Nachos Supreme and Sopapillas Go Well with Discussions of Politics and We Heart Leslie Marmon Silko

The above is a brief summary of themes touched on over margaritas and an old-town stroll with University of Arizona Press/Camino del Sol editor Kristen Buckles and conference keynote speaker (best keynote EVER, per NHCC Literary Arts director Carlos Vasquez) Rigoberto Gonzalez. The politics? Arizona, of course, and tales of getting pulled over or fearing getting pulled over in AZ and/or the fear of being embarassed about one's home state. I was so glad to finally meet Kristen in person, after working with her on Flexible Bones, and it was good to see Rigo mobile and thinking ahead to books he's looking forward to promoting as reviewer and Latino literature advocate. The hearting of LMS began with recalling her essay about being pulled over by La Migra in Yellow Woman...

3:00pm-4:30pm Small Press Publishers Panel: One Nice Thing You Could Do

I really enjoyed moderating this panel of small press publishers, one of the highlights of which was Achiote Press editor Craig Santos Perez's remarks that if the kind, dedicated people at a small press go to the trouble to publish a book of yours, "one nice thing you could do is sell your books." Francisco and I have frequently remarked that the best-selling Momotombo Press chapbooks are those whose authors take a very proactive approach to reaching readers and buyers. Audience members had good questions about how each press defines worthwhile Latino literature ("Does it have to have certain themes to be considered Latino?"---I said abuelita poems are ok, but not required) and about the relationship of chapbook-length publications to book-length publications (Brent E. Beltran, of Calaca Press, doesn't retain any copyright of work Calaca publishes, and is happy to see the work reprinted wherever/whenever/however it can be). Hope Maxwell-Snyder, founder and editor of Somondoco Press, noted that she reads and accepts work from a variety of writers, and that while she doesn't have a particular focus on Latino writers, she does get to know each of the writers she's published before she becomes, or even has the possibility of becoming, their publisher. Brent put it more bluntly with the remark that "at Calaca, we do background checks on our authors," meaning that it's important for him to know that he can get along with, and enjoy becoming familia with, this person with whom he's going to be working so closely. He also likes to know that the writers have real-life-cred as activists, so that their work as writers legitimately supports Calaca's activist roots and mission.

Speaking of mission, learn more about each of these presses, and their missions, at the following sites:
http://www.achiotepress.com/
http://www.calacapress.com/
http://www.momotombopress.com/
http://www.somondocopress.com/
If you don't find one that's a good match for your work, but you're an emerging writer with a calling to get your work out there, consider starting your own small press. This was another theme echoed across the panel.

No doubt by now your tea is boiling/child is crying/favorite show is on/dog is ready to go out, so I'll end with a breeze back through the morning in reverse: informal Chicano Studies platica with Lucha Corpi, Brent Beltran and Rigoberto Gonzalez (Lucha remenisced about her tight little group of young writers in the Mission district of SF, helping each other along a decade before she published her first book---the details of which I hope she'll put in an essay!) and a memoir workshop with the radiant Demetria Martinez (she inspired us with the idea of writing as a devotional practice) where the conference's workshop faculty in travel writing, Stephanie Elizondo Griest, happened to be sitting in. Demetria is wrapping up a new collection of short stories (ahua!) and Stephanie will have new chronicles of the Texas border colonia communities coming out in the Dallas Morning News in early June.  I raise my bedside glass of water to these two powerful women!
 
Maria Melendez, Acquiring Editor, Momotombo Press

Stay Tuned: Latino Writers Conference

Tonight and tomorrow night, Maria Melendez, 

acquiring and managing editor of Momotombo Press, 

will be blogging from Albuquerque, NM 

from the 8th Annual Latino Writers Conference,
held at the National Hispanic Cultural Center.

For a peek at this year's conference brochure, click HERE.
For this year's conference faculty and special guests, click HERE

Tonight's Introduction

Good evening. My name is Francisco Aragón and I direct Letras Latinas, the literary program of the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame. I work out of an office in Washington, D.C. and it’s a pleasure and an honor to be introducing this evening’s poet. One of the initiatives I oversee for Letras Latinas is the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, which supports the publication of a first book by a Latino or Latina poet in the United States.  In 2006 one of the two runners-up for this Prize was titled Bury This Pig, and it was by a poet whose name was unknown to me at the time: William Archila. And although the final judge that year did not, in the end, choose William’s manuscript as the winner, Bury This Pig eventually became The Art of Exile— a book which, this past winter, was profiled in Poets & Writers in an article titled: “First things First: The Fifth Annual Debut Poets Roundup.”  One of the poems from The Art of Exile went on to be featured at Poetry Daily, the popular online poetry site. In fact, many of the poems in this fine collection have been gracing the pages of literary journals for years, including in such publications as AGNI, The Georgia Review, Crab Orchard Review, Hanging Loose Press, and Puerto del Sol, to name a few. A native of Santa Ana, El Salvador, William has also been the recipient of a number of distinctions, including a 2010 Emerging Writer Fellowship from The Writer’s Center, which is what has brought him here tonight, as well as the Allan Scholarship in Poetry at the 2005 Breadloaf Writer’s Conference. And it was at Breadloaf that William’s work came to the attention of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Yusef Komunyakaa, who has this to say:

“The Art of Exile summons us to a place where one must reckon with the imperatives of the human soul, where William Archila is the reigning master of some breathtaking imagery that encompasses a practiced, lyrical certainty. There’s a deep singing at the center of Archila’s world…” And yet one may still ask the question: What is at the heart of Archila’s world? Dorianne Laux, a former finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry has, I think, an answer. She writes: “The Art of Exile is what William Archila works to perfect in this first book of poems about El Salvador, a country ‘small as a paper cut.’ Archila breathes life into the boys and men left behind who have died in the dirt roads and stubble fields of his lost homeland as he builds the language of a new life in the north, a language steeped in jazz and blood, tobacco and chalk, concrete and dust…History, poverty, family and faith move these poems into mysterious territories where the living speak to the dead and the dead speak back.” Please join me in welcoming William Archila.

Mr. Archila goes to Washington

I'm sorry to be missing the Small Press Publishers Panel at the 8th Annual Latino Writers Conference in Albuquerque, NM this week. Momotombo Press will be well represented by Maria Melendez, who is the acquiring and managing editor now.  She will be joined by Craig Santos Perez of Achiote Press, and Brent Beltrán of Calaca Press, among others. I've stayed home for a special event taking place tomorrow at The Writer's Center in Bethesda, MD, where I'll be introducing William Archila, who will be reading with fiction writer Allison Amend as part of The Writer's Center's "LitArtlantic" Program, which pairs a poet with a prose writer, as well as a music group.

On Friday he'll be taking part in an equally significant event: William, a high school English teacher in Los Angeles, will be meeting with a group of twenty five students at Cardozo High School in Washington, D.C.----home of the largest Salvadoran community outside of El Salvador. This visit was made possible thanks to the efforts of poet Naomi Ayala, who is the Founding Executive Director of 826 DC. William's host at Cardozo will be Frazier O'Leary, a longtime English teacher at Cardozo, and board member of PEN Faulkener in DC, whom I had the pleasure of meeting a short while ago. William's appearence at Cardozo is being underwritten by Letras Latinas.

Here is an excerpt of something slated to appear next Fall:

“In November of 1980, I left my native country of El Salvador. I was only twelve when I left the war that tore my country apart. Without having read enough Salvadoran history, I arrived in Los Angeles, with many questions unanswered, conversations unfinished, and young years of my life unfulfilled. I had to learn a new language and culture. I became part of the growing immigrant community. Twelve years later in 1992, a peace treaty was signed between the left and right wing parties in El Salvador. I decided to go back, hoping to find a home, but in my own native country, I was a foreigner, a stranger. I searched for something that no longer existed, a quality remembered from my childhood, a sense of belonging to a country and a language that had changed. I also had changed. I returned to Los Angeles feeling not quite at home. Here I realized that home is neither here nor there. However, the need for a sense of home as base, a source of identity, grew deep inside of me. I began to understand that homelessness and its loneliness is the identity of the exiled writer. And as an exiled writer you try to rebuild your home in your work.” 

William Archila, 2010

from an interview conducted by Aaron Michael Morales

forthcoming in Latino Poetry Review, issue 3

From the Pew Hispanic Center:

Fact Sheets about   Hispanics of Mexican Origin in the U.S.

With Mexican President Felipe Calderón coming to Washington, D.C. this week for a state visit, two recent Pew Hispanic Center fact sheets on Hispanics of Mexican origin in the U.S. illuminate key demographic characteristics of this population group. Immigrants: No other country in the world has as many immigrants from all countries as the United States has from Mexico alone, according to a 2009 fact sheet. In 2008, 12.7 million immigrants from Mexico resided in the U.S. Of these, more than half were undocumented. Overall, 11% of everyone born in Mexico is currently living the U.S. All Hispanics of Mexican Origin: Nearly 31 million Hispanics in the U.S. self-identify as being of Mexican origin, representing two-thirds of all U.S. Hispanics, according to a 2010 fact sheet (which, for the first time, is also available in Spanish).  Hispanics of Mexican origin are not only the nation's largest Latino origin group, they are also its youngest with a median age of 25. Some 37% of all Hispanics of Mexican origin is foreign born. The fact sheets "Mexican Immigrants in the United States, 2008", "Hispanics of Mexican Origin in the United States, 2008," and "Hispanos de Origen Mexicano en los Estados Unidos, 2008" are available at the Pew Hispanic Center's website, www.pewhispanic.org.

The Pew Hispanic Center, a project of the Pew Research Center, is a nonpartisan, non-advocacy research organization based in Washington, D.C. and is funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts.

Recent Interview with Dana Gioia (from Commonweal Magazine)

Question for the day:

Is Dana Gioia, 

Catholic and son of a Mexican mother,

a Chicano or Latino poet?

Before you answer, read on: 

A Public Catholic

An Interview with 2010 Laetare Medalist Dana Gioia

Created 05/13/2010 - 3:41pm

Cynthia L. Haven

"What I envision is simple. In the diverse social mix of the United States, there would be a recognizable Catholic element in the arts and culture. It wouldn’t be a unified dogmatic block, but a vibrant and varied range of recognizable Catholic activity—rather like Jewish cultural life. This culture would not be the product of the church but of the laity."



Dana Gioia, this year’s recipient of the University of Notre Dame’s Laetare Medal, is an award-winning poet, a controversial essayist, and the former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts.



Although he holds degrees from Harvard and from Stanford, he was born in the tough, blue-collar community of Hawthorne, California, in 1950, the son of a Sicilian cabdriver and a Mexican and Native American mother. He attended a Marianist boys’ high school in Southern California, where less than a dozen out of his two hundred classmates went to four-year colleges.



Gioia has published three full-length collections of poetry, and is now working on a fourth. His last collection, Interrogations at Noon, won the 2002 American Book Award. His influential volume of essays Can Poetry Matter? (1992) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle. He’s been called a “Poet Provocateur,” especially after his 1991 essay in the Atlantic Monthly (“Can Poetry Matter?”) created a firestorm.



Yet Gioia’s years as NEA chairman under President George W. Bush, from 2003 to 2009, brought his more collaborative and harmonious side into the national limelight. Gioia succeeded in mobilizing bipartisan support in the Congress for NEA, and Business Week called him "The Man Who Saved the NEA."



Since leaving the NEA, Gioia has been director of the Aspen Institute’s Harman-Eisner Program in the Arts. He’s also writing more poems after a long silence.



I profiled Gioia for Commonweal in 2003 (“Dana Gioia Goes to Washington,” November 21). At the time he told me, “I think that being proud of your religion, your culture, and your ethnicity is the beginning of revival for Catholic artistic culture. As an individual, I refuse to be ashamed of my faith, my culture, or my family background.” On the occasion of being awarded the Laetare Medal, he continued some of those thoughts in the following interview.



Cynthia Haven: In commending you for this year’s Laetare Medal, Fr. John Jenkins, president of the University of Notre Dame, said you have "given vivid witness to the mutual flourishing of faith and culture.” You have spoken in the past about the need for a Catholic culture–what exactly do you have in mind?



Dana Gioia: What I envision is quite simple. In the diverse social mix of the United States, there would be a recognizable Catholic element in the arts and culture. It wouldn’t be a unified dogmatic block, but a vibrant and varied range of recognizable Catholic activity—rather like Jewish cultural life. This culture would not be the product of the church but of the laity.



CH: You have said that anti-Catholicism remains the only acceptable prejudice among intellectuals in America today. Has the situation improved in recent years?



DG: No, it has grown worse. Much worse. There has been a revival of militant atheism, which views all religion as a hindrance to social progress. This movement hates Catholicism, in particular, because of its size, authority, and continuity. In many circles now, anti-Catholicism isn’t considered bigotry, but a virtue.



CH: You have commented that today’s Catholic writers see their religion "as a private concern rather than a public identity."



DG: Catholic writers and artists have lost any sense of a meaningful cultural community. There is, of course, a meaningful spiritual community, but how do they connect it to their artistic vocations? They rightly feel as if they struggle in isolation without either the support or attention that a vital subculture should afford. Even unfavorable attention would indicate that what they are doing is important enough to argue about.



For most artists and intellectuals, their only havens are the institutions of secular culture, which have grown increasingly anti-Catholic in recent years. This situation compels most Catholic artists and intellectuals either to shed or disguise their core religious identities.



CH: In light of this prejudice, what do writers, artists, and humanists stand to gain from what you have called a “Catholic identity”?



DG: They would gain authenticity, integrity, continuity, and community.



Catholicism is not only a religious identity, it is also a rich range of cultural and ethnic identities—Italian, Polish, Mexican, Irish, Haitian, Vietnamese, Austrian, and so on. Catholicism is a universal without being uniform. I have regularly attended services in Mexican, Polish, and Italian parishes over the years, and each had a different sort of vibrancy.



American Catholicism needs to resist the suburbanization of consumer culture. Keeping in touch with one’s ethnic and cultural roots is an essential form of resistance to social homogenization.



CH: Such a culture used to exist—at least much more than it does today. What happened?



DG: Affluence, assimilation, and social ambition—all aided and abetted by the church’s general indifference to the arts and the secular culture’s distaste for Christianity. The situation is not entirely new. The American Catholic Church has always been an immigrant church populated by the working poor. Consequently, it has never had much social cachet for the upwardly mobile.



Meanwhile, the church has never had much use for artistic culture, which is a serious mistake since great art, especially sacred art, speaks across cultures and classes.



CH: How can individuals foster this culture?



DG: Catholics need to be better stewards of their cultural and intellectual traditions. Too often, they seem either ignorant or apologetic about their own legacy. Catholics also feel they need to cultivate humility and charity at the expense of culture, which is seen as a dispensable luxury. I think many Catholics feel especially virtuous for excluding the arts—as if having better music at services might be a luxurious indulgence that would morally undermine their commitments to homeless shelters and food kitchens. The poor do not live by bread alone.



CH: Speaking of your own resonance with this culture: A recent article by Janet McCann, “Dana Gioia: A Contemporary Metaphysics,” described you as having a "sacramental imagination," where heaven and earth are "closely bound to this world.”



DG: Being raised Catholic makes you deeply aware of symbols. That isn’t bad training for a poet. Catholicism also trains you to ponder the mysterious relationship between the visible and the invisible aspects of the world.



CH: Your poems sometimes presuppose the Christian, if not Catholic, conviction that history has a point, and is not merely a random succession of moments in some Zen-like eternal now—I think of “Song for the End of Time,” “The End,” “The Stars Now Rearrange Themselves,” “Pentecost,” “The Litany,” “California Requiem,” the list goes on.



DG: I am reluctant to gloss the meanings of my poems. If they don’t speak for themselves, no amount of commentary will redeem them. But let me make one general comment: Art craves teleology. It’s not necessarily a theological point. Hegel and Marx say it as clearly as Augustine and Aquinas. Unless one wants to write only impressionistic miniatures, poems need to go somewhere. Human nature also looks for patterns and meaning. If poetry is language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree, then you need to charge it with real meanings large and small. I like to connect small and large things in my poetry, especially to link the mundane and the mysterious.



CH: One of the themes of Interrogations at Noon is the limits of words to reach reality. I tend to agree with your conclusion in “Words”: “To name is to know and remember.” But the same volume ends with “Unsaid”: “the tongue-tied aches / Of unacknowledged love are no less real / For having passed unsaid…” Is the jury still out for you on the relationship of words to reality, and our perception of it?



DG: Words are an imperfect medium through which to understand and express the world. But they are also the best medium we possess as long as we don’t expect them to express everything. Language is probably the greatest achievement of humanity—how can a poet think otherwise?—but reality is greater. Language is vastly expressive, but we should also not forget the eloquence and mysteries of silence—be it human or nonhuman.



CH: In a number of poems—Nosferatu and “My Secret Life,” for example—you write not only the risk of losing love, but the risks of love distorted. In “California Requiem,” a powerful voice-from-the-dead laments environmental plunder: “What we possessed we always chose to kill.” You wrote of Breton in “Elegy with Surrealist Proverbs as Refrain”: “‘Better to die of love / than love without regret.’ And those who loved him / soon learned regret.” Love lost, love distorted—is this Dantesque theme the essence of the darkness that hovers on the edge of your poems?



DG: I don’t think I can briefly answer that large and interesting question, but let me go to the heart of it: Our vices and our virtues are related. Both arise from the same core human energies and impulses. Love, in particular, is such a powerful and dynamic emotion that it can lead us to heaven or hell.



The object of love is crucial. Love and desire the wrong thing, and it can corrupt you. The challenges, responsibilities, dangers, and failures of love are probably the things I’ve written about the most, though they aren’t themes that today’s critics find interesting. But that’s okay. Readers understand.



CH: When did you begin writing poetry?



DG: The first poem I ever wrote was in fourth grade. We had a class contest to write a poem about our guardian angel. Manny Di Benedetto won first place, but I could tell his mother had helped him. A little later, like everyone else, I wrote a few self-pitying poems in high school. At that point music was my chief passion, and I intended to be a composer. By the age of twenty, I discovered that poetry was what most excited me. It’s really not as if I chose poetry. Poetry chose me. I simply recognized my vocation. It took years of study and practice to write anything good, but the hard labor of mastering the craft gave me a great pleasure.



CH: How has your Washington post as National Endowment of the Arts chairman affected your poetry—besides obviously limiting your time to write it?



DG: Not writing was the essential thing. It’s not an altogether bad thing for a poet to stop writing for a while when the rest of life becomes engrossing. The unconscious works all the time. The poems will come eventually and probably be better for the wait. There is a silly pressure on American poets to publish constantly. So much new poetry seems dilute and underpowered.



Running the Arts Endowment for six years also reminded me of the larger purposes of art—both for individuals and communities—I never thought deeply about art’s communal role before coming to Washington.



At the Arts Endowment, I had a very simple goal—to bring the best art and arts education to the broadest audience possible. I tried, in other words, to be true to both art and democracy.



CH: Any indication of what your new poems will look like, how they have changed?



DG: Poetic inspiration is an involuntary process. I never know what a new poem will look like till it arrives, and I am often astonished by what appears.



I just finished a long narrative poem—a sort of short story in verse. I would never have predicted writing a psychological ghost story dealing with themes of wealth, ambition, and destructive sexual attraction. But one day the first three lines popped into my head, and suddenly the story and the characters were almost fully visible.



What will my future poems look like? Who knows! I just hope that poems keep coming. Poetry is a more mysterious art than writing workshops would lead us to believe.



CH: Given last year’s events at Notre Dame, with President Barack Obama being awarded an honorary degree and Mary Ann Glendon declining the Laetare Medal, do you feel under more pressure or scrutiny this year?



DG: I always feel under scrutiny. It’s a sort of psychological disability. And no occasion brings out more anxiety than speaking at a large college commencement. But these worries have nothing to do with Barack Obama and Mary Ann Glendon.



The problem is practical: How does one avoid being pompous and boring and manage to say something of value while addressing a large, restless audience who has other things on its mind?



The only harder gig is talking about poetry to sixth graders.