Transcript: 004 – Hanging with Helena María Viramontes

Helena María Viramontes – Transcript – Charla Cultural

Karla: Welcome to Charla Cultural, a little chat about culture from Aster(ix) Journal and City of Asylum. Me llamo Karla Lamb.

Adriana: And I’m Adriana E. Ramírez.

Karla: Today, we’re hanging out with Helena María Viramontes.

Adriana: Helena Maria Viramontes is the author of The Moths and Other Stories and two novels: Under the Feet of Jesus and Their Dogs Came with Them. She has also co-edited with Maria Herrera Sobek two collections: Chicana (W)rites: On Word and Film and Chicana Creativity and Criticism.

A recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the John Dos Passos Award for Literature and a United States Artist Fellowship, her short stories and essays have been widely anthologized and her writings have been adopted for classroom use and university study. A community organizer and former coordinator of the Los Angeles Latino Writers Association, she’s a frequent reader and lecturer in the U.S. and internationally.

Karla: Today we’re going to switch up our usual format. We’ll invoke the muse. Talk about Helena María Viramontes and set up her performance from November 2016 at City of Asylum on Election Night, no less. We’ll listen to that performance. Then we’ll listen to an interview Adriana did with Viramontes.

We’ll also chat some more and finally transition to what we’ve been reading and some Remedios for the road.

Adriana: Bienvenidos. And now we’ll listen to our voice of goddess Alexis Jabour invoke the muse by reading from “The Excavation of Identity as a Political Act,” a conversation with Helena María Viramontes by Elizabeth Rodriguez-Fielder, published in Sampsonia Way magazine and at Aster(ix) Journal.

Alexis Jabour: So, between 1920 and 1940, it was a very interesting time where they were really trying to discover what it was to be American, even though my grandmother and my grandfather were Mexican. It was a time that I’m excavating myself in my work because it was such a transition for them.

My mother was very different. She was raised Mormon and converted to Catholicism to marry my father. Though she had an altar at the house that my father built, which is where I got the inspiration for Under the Feet of Jesus, because any important paper she literally would put under the feet of Jesus. But she was never somebody who told us that we needed to go to church or imposed Catholicism on us.

In many ways she had a great belief in God, but she was not of the institutions. I guess part of it had to do with getting away from the Mormon church. The other part of it had to do with not agreeing with the Catholic church, either. My sisters and I didn’t understand how unique they were in their resistance, whatever my mother’s politics, whatever my mother’s religion, I saw that she was a creative woman. I acknowledged that not everyone saw what I saw. That was one of my primary inspirations for wanting to write about women, especially the women in my family. My sisters were very rebellious, but only within the confines of their jailed household. My father believed in curfew, in women not going out on dates without chaperones, but my sisters rebelled creatively, and with my mother’s help, too. If they would go out with a boy, my mother would be in the kitchen waiting in case my father woke up.

Adriana: Did you grow up in a household with a lot of rules that was restrictive?

Karla: You know, I did. I also grew up, so, my grandma in Mexico City raised me up until the age of five or six. And I was always told, you know, that my mom was working and going to school. And, and so when I lived with my parents after that age, they were so over-protective and then, yeah, in my teenage years, like if I even thought about going out, they needed to know who was going to be there, they needed to know, you know, their parents’ numbers, their addresses, like curfew, for sure. And then my parents will joke about it to this day that they wanted, like, people’s social security numbers just to know where I was. And yeah, so I definitely grew up in a very strict household. And I think that gave me a sense of rebelliousness and autonomy later in life, because I definitely have this like inherent distaste for authority.

Adriana: So, I grew up very like one more level of restriction, I think, than you. I wasn’t allowed to drive at night even after I had my driver’s license.

Karla: Oh, wow.

Adriana: I wasn’t allowed to give people rides, which teenage economy, right? Like so many people give you rides, so you have to give them rides when you have a car, and I wasn’t allowed.

And so that created issues. Yeah, I definitely snuck out. I lied all the time.

Karla: I was gonna say you did it anyway, didn’t you?

Adriana: Yeah, I was horrible. Like I was a horrible teenager and you know, I say this to my husband and I was like, oh my God, I was horrible. And my husband will say something like you were only horrible because it was so strict.

Karla: That’s really true.

Adriana: Cause like the stuff I would sneak out to do is like go bowling with my friends. Like I grew up on the border and sometimes I would sneak out to go to Mexico or stuff, but most of those times, I actually did have permission to go out, but I would lie and say I was going to a slumber party or something like that.

Adriana: And then instead I would go to Mexico and party, but you see like that’s horrible, right?

Karla: Yeah. I have empathy for parents these days. You never know, like you could be really strict and then yeah, you end up with like really creative people that like are really good liars in their adulthood. Like you and I, and or you are totally free and like cage free or what do they call it like those kids that are running around these days?

Adriana: Free range, free range, free range. It is like chickens. It is like eggs. There is an egg parallel there.

Karla: Then your child is like totally dependent on you. Or, you know, there’s like different ways that like, no matter what you can’t really foresee…

Adriana: You’re gonna mess them up.

Karla: Yeah. You can’t foresee the outcome of the way your child was going to develop. But like Mexican parents try super hard and it’s all love, you know, the intention is all love, you know, I feel in the end.

Adriana: Yeah, well, I think, okay, so a couple of things that I’ve been thinking of, which is, have you ever heard this metaphor about like holding sand in the palm of your head? You know, if you squeeze it really tight, right, all the sand is going to come out and you’re going to end up with like a tiny-ass lump, you know, whereas if you leave your hand open and still, right, the sand will stay. And so, I think that there’s something to that, you know, which is, if you give people freedom, then they won’t necessarily have the, you know, the need to rebel so intently.

Right. I don’t know. But then I think about my kids, and I think about, okay, what is the point of having kids? I mean, and I think about this all the time. Right. Which is, well, is it my job in life to force them to be a certain type of person, which is, I think very much how my parents’ generation thought of it, you know, which is you are going to be a good person if I have to beat it into you.

Right. And so, you know, we must protect your virtue to make sure you’re not slutty and that you don’t essentially disparage your own reputation yourself. So, we’re going to keep you locked up in your house.

Karla: Yeah. Or the reputation of the family.

Adriana: Or the reputation of the family.

Karla: And, you know, marry off to someone like, so you’re going to benefit.

Adriana: You’re still pure and untouched and innocent. So, it’s like female innocence though, is so synonymous in our culture with restrictions.

Karla: Absolutely.

Adriana: And I would say that that is somewhat true across borders, like internationally, right? Like thinking about Assia Djebar’s book, A Sister to Scheherazade, and her memoirs, she talks a lot about growing up Muslim and Algiers. And how, in many ways it was kind of that same sort of cultural pressure to be pure and through a kind of imprisonment, like the imprisonment of the female. And so, yeah, I was thinking about this, right. Which is, you know, this idea of women not going out on dates with them chaperones, and yet how women have always figured out how to rebel creatively.

Karla: Yeah, I love that line.

Adriana: Like, hidden away, a tucked in girl with the most restrictive father somehow gets pregnant, you know.

Karla: And it’s immaculate conception.

Adriana: So many fairytales and so many stories are about this guy who’s going to rescue this woman from what is essentially her parents.

Karla: Yeah. It’s hard to it’s… yeah. And then like the family, there’s so much to really say about that from like that excerpt too, because you know, if you fast forward to the future and then Helena Viramontes is excavating that history from her past, and then like talking about her mother, her sisters, her grandmother, and then like, what has it to, to become your own home in a way, or like to move around, like, oh, you’re moving around in the world with like a shell. Perhaps it’s like a metaphor that we can use there. So many women have tried to have come out of that restriction just with, I want to say like insight to the culture and like try to dismantle where it’s coming from.

Adriana: Yeah.

Karla: How many generations, how many generations, you know, how much trauma like inherited trauma from great grandmothers?

* Applause *

Helena: Thank you, my gosh, this is wonderful. It is so wonderful to be introduced by Angie Cruz and so wonderful to share the evening with Mary Gaitskill. I mean, what more can I ask? What I’m going to do is just read a small section from my work in progress. It’s called The Cemetery Boys. And all you need to know is that the Pfc is a Mexican boy and he’s modeled after my uncle who served in the war and was in the Philippines and in Okinawa.

And the reason I started this novel, was because of the controversy with the Ken Burns documentary that excluded completely Latino soldiers. And so I was heartbroken because I knew my uncle, who was my favorite uncle, came back a very, very broken man and suffered throughout his life.

And so I just felt, you know, I want to re-insert us back into the history. And so I started this, but then to start working on World War II, I started thinking about the communities that are most affected by war, in their community of color. And you know, I think of the Vietnam War. The two most common names in the Vietnam War Memorial are Johnson, and Rodriguez, you know, and Johnson is either black or white but Rodriguez we know you know. And so we’re not part of that narrative. And so, to do something like this, then, it became a story that wasn’t just about a family, but about a city in Los Angeles, then about the Philippines then about California. And that’s where I’m going nuts. And so just, just a small section, I’m going to do sweeps, please forgive me.

And so just this is just a little taste. This is from Book One, Section II.

When the Eastside Journal headline announced “U.S. Calls All Reserves,” the tenth and eleventh calls were combined and seven hundred local East-side boys—including the Pfc who had received his 1A Selective Service classiﬁcation postcard Order Number typed 691—were inducted into the Army by the Local Board No. 203–91, Los Angeles County 037 in the month of June alone, nineteen hundred and forty.

Barely nuzzling mustaches and hardly embracing full romance, much less a hearty meal made with ﬂour, beans, and beer stored in commodity barrels, the Eastside boys traveled in bulk in caravan transports on grimy and desolate stretches of Route 66 to Camp Needles, close to the Nevada-California border, in such elevated desert temperatures, the heat pressed against their razored scalps and the hot seats chafed their ﬂedgling scrotums. A nation on the move, the caravan transport was but one spoke in the expansive news reel wheeling thousands and thousands of young men to various military camps and corps, some traveling for the very ﬁrst time out of their pueblos, townships, valleys, counties, Indian reservations, and state lines. They reported for duty, carrying with them their meager possessions in old war rucksacks, their repositories of habits inside bedrolls, a neighbor’s borrowed oilcloth valise, beaten suitcases reinforced with maguey hemp containing the vestigial trinkets of family heirlooms—a wooden comb, a ribbon clip of a beloved’s curl, Great Grand-Pa’s soiled Sunday Missal. Some carried nothing more than a birth certiﬁcate inside a shoe repaired with a cardboard heel, while others saved a gallstone keepsake, a confederate uniform button stitched into the hem of their coats, necessities like a bent spoon inside a tattered trouser pocket fast available for staking grub.

Newly inducted, newly scrubbed and solemn faced, they journeyed from sea to shining sea, under dawn’s early light and rapturous alabaster twilights and across fruited plains and ﬂatland prairies where the deer and the antelope played. Ships assailed colossal oceans, planes impaled spacious skies, trains sallied through river bridges—looped around purple mountains’ majesties, rose into pine forests thick with scent that stuck like sap, crested the apex of ancient redwood, dense spruce, silver cottonwood, sloped down into amber waves of grain and irretrievable hours of tumble-weeds tumbling, of high-rises scraping, of oil reﬁneries and steel factories, their smokestack chimneys catching the gleam of morning’s ﬁrst beam. The massive deployment was in full operation: locomotives chugging west, something to behold; ruddering ﬂeets shipping south, a marvel of efﬁciency; truck bed cargos heading north, fueling the military engines; dusty buses roaring east, trooping all those draftees through all the aboriginal inﬁnitude of American vastness.

Under orders to revise their unspectacular lives, the Mojave heat sizzling right through the very soles of their new ankle laced boots, the boys had ﬁnally reached the last stretch of bushes stunted tightly to the rims of parched ravines on Route 66, ﬁnally arrived at the watchtowers, the barbed wire fencing, the tarpaper buildings, arrived en ﬁn at the grammar and punctuation of basic training.

For most of his life and right up until Paw landed steady employment at the Walker’s Quaker Bakery in the Eastside of Los Angeles, the Pfc, his parents, and his three sisters—Sayluli, Pomposa and Adelaida—were forced to travel the migratory circuit up and down the fertile California landscape, searching for work on an abundance of farms, and found it in Riverside’s orange groves, in Oxnard’s beet ﬁelds, in Bakersﬁeld’s grape vineyards, in Gilroy’s garlic, in Lodi’s bursting ﬁg trees, in Lompoc’s lettuce rows. A more proﬁcient English reader or speaker than Ama, Paw was charged with negotiating transportation, sought the good-will of drivers with WPA sponsorship and with enough truck-bed space to sit a family of ﬁve along with their crates of movable dry goods: ﬂour sacks like saddle bags, pinto beans in burlap, hinge-black skillets, three Dresden edge-chipped dishes, and Saint Eduviges votive candles wrapped carefully in pairs of washed overalls, chile ﬂakes in a clay jurro along with another containing salt, three mason jars stuffed with yerba buena, chamomile, and yuda herb; metal and wood utensils cushioned in laundered feed sacks; assorted pee pee cans—saving a frightening night trip to the outhouses; sacks and hats and stacked water buckets for washing and bathing, dented pails for picking; and a small portable cast iron cooking stove, Ama’s one proud possession, that she insisted on bringing along.

Paw bartered with contractors who drove creaky buses stinking of turpentine and other such toxins, the aisle ﬂoor linoleum as sticky as dulce de leche, the unopened windows broken, amplifying the heat. It was the contractor’s decision alone to stop at the next gasoline pump station for a break that afforded an opportunity to stretch their legs, relieve themselves, share a drink of water under oak shade, an awning, a bridge. Sometimes Paw simply had to entrust drivers in tin-lizzy contraptions whose gazes he concluded—in whispered consultation with Ama—never wandered past decent when time came to be in the company of his young daughters but who also seemed competent in replacing a tire tube puncture, ﬁxing a Model-T carburetor gone south.

Once they reached their destination, say, at the outskirts of the Ingram farm in Poplar, perhaps the Santa Suzana apricot ranch in Simi Valley, or in Delano where there might be vacancies in the government sponsored Camp 101, the Pfc accompanied Paw to canvas for harvest news, collect labor updates because winds of discontent, picket lines and police bulls, merciless deportation ofﬁcers and unpaid wages posed as much danger as the lawless-ness of the ﬁelds where everyone worked in deep chilled mornings or under three-digit degree sun, below the radar of what was fair and safe. Like the other farmworkers, the Pfc’s family homesteaded for months in barns, slept in decrepit sheds, derelict houses, in makeshift migrant barracks, government camps, under tarp tents along the highway, often toiling fourteen summer hours at 10 cents an hour, six days a week. They knew aplenty about the lethargy of heat, the ﬁst-size swells of spider bites, relentless itch of bedbugs, of red ant banzai, humid nights that burglarized sleep, the violent crack of morning, and the white clouds congealing like curdled clumps. Even after Átole was served for breakfast—noisy intestines still bloated with complaining want—even after a corn mesh gorda was devoured for dinner, the meals were sorely insufﬁcient at recruiting energy for another back-intensive day of picking seasonal fruit, harvesting annual vegetables.

Paw paired up with his oldest, Sayluli, the Pfc worked with his younger sister, Pomposa, and Ama held close to the baby, Adelaida. Camouﬂaged in long sleeves, gloves, rubberbands around their trouser ankles, their mouths and noses pressed under bandannas, the Pfc’s family appeared indistinguishable from the other farmworkers to the truck drivers who collected them before sunrise and drove them to designated harvesting sites. At sunset, they still resembled one another as they emerged from the ﬁelds and orchards, clutching empty water bottles, holding a child’s hand, their faces wrapped with a gauze of ﬁne white dust under wide brim hats or sunbonnets or conical straw hats; even hatless, their shoulders harmed after laying out the raisin grapes or stacking tomato crates, their backs damaged after hauling pounds of cotton or plucking tangerines and apples. The truck drivers returned them to their accommodations and they muttered gratitude in English tilted to regional accents, removed their cachuchas and hats, dusted off the soil in self-ﬂagellation, wiped away sweat with a rag dipped in soapy water, and felt a ﬂeeting frugal renewal.

At sundown, the kindling in the small stove crackling, Ama set to burning Santa Eduviges candles, to conjuring the mathematical wizardry necessary to ﬁnd the extra meal inside the calculated equation of never enough; the boys in the other camps collected ﬁrewood, scrubbed their respective ﬁre pit grates, raked the cinders clean; the girls in the other camps shucked the corn, boiled okra or nopal, measured the bacon grease, fetched water in the kettle; the women in all the labor camps labored the ﬁelds, baked the bread, rolled the tortillas, treated the lice, taught the alphabets, recited the prayers, repeated the folktales, bathed the young’uns, darned the socks, lifted the screeching steamy kettles to brew teas for baby or spousal colic, for ridding earaches and backaches, for breech or birthing babies, for easing monthly cramping, cooling a woman’s change, for burying buds not yet fully bloomed, each ﬁreside glow casting shadows on their glistened grimaces, the dimming circle of cinders spluttering upon their glassy exhausted eyes. Dishes cleaned, candles extinguished, the children cocooned atop cornhusk beds, a crescendo drone of nocturnal insects over the dozy harmonica bedtime tunes, the women watched each others’ kerosene lanterns sparking like ﬁre-ﬂies, the long distance of coal black night tightly wedged between them.

Thank you.

* Applause *

Helena: You know, because I know that I know exactly what she’s saying, because I’ve tried…

Adriana: In terms of thinking about censorship.

Helena: In terms of thinking about censorship and also terms of thinking about the reactions and the consequences of what happens. Because I did work with a City of Asylum writer back in Ithaca who was trying to write a novel about, about incest.

And so she, every Friday we would meet, it was wonderful. We would meet, and she would give me her pages and we would read the pages and then, and then have a discussion about that. And she was, you know, it was always so difficult for her to try to, to try to put, to try to capture this? Because of course, you know, if it’s in fiction, if people can read it, if you know then you know, then you have other eyes looking into this and saying, oh my God, what a horrible culture, this is what a horrible, you know, how terrible that these…

Adriana: Are you familiar with the Kathryn Harrison thing, she wrote a book called The Kiss. It was a book of non-fiction that was about genetic attraction and about how she ended up having an affair with her father. And what I found really interesting about it is that when people condemned it, they condemned it because it was a book about incest, but they never said. Oh, white people from the south are incestuous.

Helena: Interesting.

Adriana: They just said, oh, your family’s messed up. Yeah. Right. But it sounds like what you’re talking about.

Helena: There’s a different, different level of the stakes and assumptions and things like that. And so, it’s for her, it, wasn’t just a question about you know, what are the consequences?

It’s a question about how were these external sort of eyes in other, other cultures that don’t understand ours going to be judging us? So, I think it was, it was even, it was even more than that.

Adriana: Isn’t that a stake though, that, like all writers of color to some degree have to face that you’re charged with representation.

You know, that as a Latina or as a Chicana writer, people look at your work as being some kind of definitive insight into what Chicano culture.

Helena: Well, you know, I think I mean, that’s a mistake that, that, that, that readers have. But I, you know, when, when I read John Updike, for example, or John Cheever, for example and do I say, oh, well, this is the way all white people are.

Well, no, I don’t, you know, but it’s an assumption that people make about us. So, I always say, you know what, it’s not, we should be writing about what we want to write in the way we want to write it and not worry about readership because ultimately, they’re always going to have these assumptions. So, you know, the hell with that.

You know, I mean, did John Cheever when he was writing about the upper middle-class you know you know, New England family and, and infidelity and, you know male menopause, you know, did, did people say, oh, it’s, you know, he’s not representing, you know the American man, no, they said he was a great American writer.

They said he was a fantastic short story writer, but then they frame us. They frame us in these, in these really unfair biased, and, and in many ways, racist.

Adriana: Well, so I remember being in high school and this might be silly, but we read House on Mango Street, and everyone was like insight into Latino culture. And, you know, this tells us a lot about the barrio and all this stuff. And I remember reading Faulkner in class. And at one point I raised my hand. I went, yo, white people are crazy. And my teacher was like, this is not about whiteness. I just remember, you know, as like a little Latina going, well, I mean, House on Mango Street is not about Latinidad, right. I mean, it’s about this one street, this one neighborhood, these specific people and their struggles, their stories. Right, right. And. To say that it’s allegorical for our entire community.

That’s some like whack, Fredric Jameson kind of stuff, you know, is this idea that like Latinos or that third world, which I hate that term, writers are inherently trying to write this allegorical book about our countries or ourselves and that white people aren’t charged with representation in the same way.

And yet somebody like Faulkner is totally writing allegories about the South. Right. And so, I’m just, how do you negotiate people always trying to make it about race, even when you’re trying to just write a story?

Helena: Well, you know, the thing is, is that she did, but that’s another thing I, you know, when, when I think about, you know, just writing about my community and you know, a brown woman negotiating her existence within a colonized community, it is about race. But the thing is, is that, why does that then become the main focus of what, you know, why not? You know, it was going back to what I was saying about this professor who told me about the trouble with your work is that you’re writing about Chicanos. You should be writing about people and it’s like, you know, tell me, tell me that my craft is not, isn’t, you know, well-formed or that my syntax or that my spelling or that my sentence structure. Tell me anything, but don’t tell me about the people that I’m writing about are not people because they’re my family, they’re exactly the people I’m writing about.

Adriana: Right. And whose stories get to be told.

Helena: And whose stories get to be told. Absolutely. And whose stories have. You know, sort of like this, this this can canonized value, you know, this kind of nice value. So anyway, for me, I’m always thinking about, I’m thinking as a writer, you think about the character, then you think about the story, and then you think about the shape of the story, because how the character, or how are you going to, how are you going to shape this characterization?

I’m just thinking about it as a writer. But because I write about brown people, all of a sudden it becomes politicized by the audience, you know, by the readers who are outside of that.

Adriana: You’re a Chicano writer: Helena María Viramontes.

Helena: Yeah. I mean, and that, and it just, it frustrates me in the same way that it frustrates me, that I know a lot of the white writers don’t read Latino or Latina work, because they think that it’s only, that it’s only limited to the Latino audience.

Adriana: Like it’s a Tyler Perry movie or something, you know?

Helena: And it’s like, it makes me nuts because I mean, people are surprised that I read everything. Well, I’m a writer! Of course, I read everything, you know, of course I read everything.

I, you know, I have these totally sweeps of, you know, German literature and English literature and French literature and Spanish literature and Latin American literature. And of course, you know, American literature, but you know, don’t, and that’s the other way around for them. They look at, they look at, if I was to say, you know, by, you know, I call myself a Chicana writer.

They would dismiss my work and say, yeah, that’s just only for Chicanos.

Adriana: Well, or even the way Gabriel García Márquez can say he was influenced by Faulkner, and everyone goes, well, of course. Right. But if you say you’re influenced by Gabriel García Márquez, they’re automatically like, oh, so you’re a Boom writer or post-Boom writer or a magical realist, or, you know, and, and it’s fascinating that it just doesn’t carry the same literary weight, but it carries a far more political weight.

Yeah. And, I don’t know, I I’m, I’m constantly negotiating this, you know, and I’m just like, I take umbrage where people say like, you’re a Latina writer and I’m just like, I’m a writer. And then but then sometimes I’m like, of course I’m a Latina writer. What else would I be!?

Helena: But the thing is, is that I don’t, I mean, anywhere I go and everywhere I go, I always call myself a Chicana writer because people are limiting their assumptions and, and you know, and, denying their own pleasure by not reading me because they think I am just tending to that. That’s their fucking problem. Not mine.

Adriana: Yeah. Well, no, it’s like, it’s like every day I dress like a Mexican, like, no matter what I’m wearing.

Helena: Exactly. Exactly. You are you.

Adriana: I am Mexican. Yeah. And that is the it of it.

Helena: Yeah. Well, I know that we’re going to be awfully busy. I know you know as progressive individuals, we’re going to be very busy because, you know, it seems to me that everything that we stand for, including our principles are going to be attacked and are going to be dismantled.

And so, you know, we just, we’re going to have to do a lot more work and I go back to, you know, choosing what kind of activism you’re going to do, but I think we all can’t afford not to be active. Any of us can, cannot afford not to be active.

Adriana: So, you would say there’s a risk in being silent.

Helena: Yeah, there’s a big risk and being silent, we cannot afford to be silent. And that’s something that I said yesterday too, to that that Nigerian writer who asked me about the consequences, we just can’t, we simply cannot afford to be. If we, as people who have some basic skills, have stories to tell, have the courage to tell it, we have to speak up.

It is our, I don’t know, I don’t, you know, it is our responsibility. It’s our responsibility to speak up for those who cannot speak up for themselves. You know, and so I you know, like Einstein said, you know, bad things happen, but worse things happen when those people who can say things against it, don’t speak up. And that’s exactly the way I feel.

And so, as writers, I think, okay, remember I was telling you about Cherrie Moraga, who talked about activism and talked about, okay, whatever you do, look at it as if it’s a political practice. You know, if you resist a comment, that is a political practice, if you, if you have a particular passion that you want to help, then help that passion, but that you begin in a systematic way against the tyranny of, you know, I guess the tyranny of oppression.

Adriana: And even if you don’t want to, I was talking to somebody the other day who was saying and I don’t mean this to sound self-serving, but like not a lot of Latino writers have won significant writing awards. And she was like, it says something that you did. And I was like, well, I don’t, you know, and I was like immediately going, oh God, I don’t want to be political. You know, I had a lot of people *??* And you know, she said to me, it’s already political. It’s already inherently political.

The fact that you won, like your body is a political space. Yeah. You know, and just by virtue of you embodying yourself and you receiving this award, that means that somebody else is going to look at that and go, here’s a possibility that happened.

Helena: Right.

Adriana: And so even if you choose to not say nothing like your own actions and your own presence and your own self and the things that you can accomplish and do to some degrees speak for you.

Helena: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Adriana: And so maybe we just all have to find, I dunno, a practice that allows us to kind of, or the actions and the things that we can do, the things we can write, the things we can say, the examples we can give.

Helena: But you know that for me, it’s, it’s like, I do believe with Cherrie, the two of us both Cherrie and I, you know, we both grew up in the, in the sixties. I was evolving in the seventies, but Cherrie was already out there, you know, in the, in the main trenches really. I mean, Cherrie is really a visionary, and you know, there, there did come a time where in the 80s where one has to make decisions about where to best put these talents that you have, or these passions that you have.

But do it but do it for the sake of giving voice to people who are voiceless. And for me, it was, it was, I mean, I was, you know I was co-coordinator that Latino Writers Association, I was teaching workshops. I was organizing readings, but it came a time where I thought, what is, where can I be more, most effective? Doing these community organizings or actually working on my writing?

And that’s when I decided, you know what, maybe I should work on my writing because at least with my writing here I can be, I can be impactful in the community, but with my writing, I can be impactful internationally. And so that’s how I, that’s why I shifted my attention fully to writing.

And I still feel that writing is my political practice because I am trying to humanize. I am trying to humanize on the page people that most of the nation feel are sub-human or not human, or are, are people that, that can easily be deported without even thinking twice about it or people that are be, you know, people that are, that are you know, having this wall built between these two nations. I mean, I just

Adriana: Between families.

Helena: Between families it’s just, it is, you know, it’s beyond absurd. So, for me, it’s the most important thing is to try to comp… you know, literature complicates, it does some beautiful, I mean, literature really complicates a situation or makes you rethink or transform you in the way you think, or at least challenges you in the way you think.

And so, I think that, okay, then let me do this and let me do it the best that I can do.

Adriana:So maybe if I’m a white ally, my job is to make a reading space or my job is to create a platform where I can, or my job is maybe to just step aside and give somebody else a chance. Right?

Helena: Well, no, I don’t think at this point we can afford stepping aside.

Adriana: Yeah, that’s true. Well, I’m just thinking like, oh, I read so many pieces that were like, you know, very well-intentioned white people writing about race. And you know, and we know some people that are trying to write complicated things on whiteness, and there’s a part of me that is going, yes, that is very noble. That is very good. But also, why are you taking up this space that somebody else could be taking up, too? And the same…

Helena: You mean in terms of discussion?

Adriana: Yeah. In terms of discussion, like. I don’t know, maybe this is exclusionary, maybe I’m wrong, you know, and maybe this is why this is an interesting discussion, but if I’m a white person and I have a platform and I have the ability to maybe get my exact same editor to publish a person of color. Right. Isn’t my stepping aside in that case a revolutionary act, right? In a way of giving up your privilege and that space, then that platform that you’ve been given to a marginalized voice and raising another voice.

Helena: Oh yeah.

Adriana: You know, and that seems to me like something, you know, for people who, you know, if you come from the dominant, it’s gotta be hard to figure out how to give voice to the voiceless. And maybe part of that is giving up, you know, a piece of your pie.

Helena: Well, I think, yeah, I think you have a point. I think you really have a point there, but I’m thinking if, if, if even this person or these people are thinking about giving, you know, about the privilege that they have, I think then therefore they do have some principles and if they have principles, it’s not a matter of stepping aside, but fully engaging as a political practice to be more inclusive.

Adriana: So, write the piece but quote eight people of color in it.

Helena: Bring eight people of color and participate in this.

Adriana: Point, counterpoint. Yeah, yeah.

Helena: In this thing. I really, I really feel that we have to engage more in this whole discussion of race and very few people actually have the vocabulary by which to actually talk about it.

Adriana: That’s true.

Helena: And even, even, even I have to say, as we talked earlier, even between the Latinidad. You know, do we have the type of language to talk about nationalism, to talk about racism and colorism.

Colorism another yeah. Another big aspect of it, you know, do we even talk about it then?

There were so many complicated questions among all this stuff that it’s almost like anybody who wants to talk about race, let’s do it. Let’s talk about it.

Adriana: Let’s be uncomfortable together.

Helena: Let’s be uncomfortable together because you know, it’s all an uncomfortable discussion when we, when we, could you imagine if we deal with Latinidad and our racism within Latinidad and our nationalism within the Latinidad and our like, our exclusionary practices between one another.

Adriana: Sure.

Helena: Of course, it’s going to be comfortable.

Adriana: Oh man. I’d have to like to learn to like Argentina. It would be hard for me.

Helena: Yeah. And for them too. And, and for the Latin Americanists, for example here, who have, who, because of class don’t acknowledge or are interested in or engage in their Latino or Latina brothers and sisters.

But I always, I don’t know. I think that that once there is that kind of recognition that this, this is no… Ignorance is no longer bliss.

Adriana: Right but we’d have to break hierarchical things. Right. And that’s, that’s a huge, that’s a tall order, you know, and is to ask people to no longer think. Because I’m just thinking about, you know, like racist relatives in my family. Right. And like the people in my family who say things to me like, oh, it’s so good you married a white man. You are improving our race. Right. And my relatives say this to me, like, ahhaha, very normal. And it’s not, it’s not meant as an ill will. It’s very normal, but it reflects a hierarchical thinking where white is still at the top.

Helena: Right.

Adriana: Right. You know? And so, we’d have to, we have to break that and be like, okay, let’s talk about being in indigena. And you know, that’s something we don’t really engage that question so much. And that’s a complicated question.

Helena: Big time.

Adriana: And you know, how we negotiate it and how we, yeah, understand our own kind of inner colonialist tendencies.

Helena: Absolutely. That’s what I was saying yesterday. When I, when I was talking about the colonialized body, when you have this self-hatred, when you have this, you know, this kind of acceptance of patriarchy, this acceptance of women hating as a woman. I mean, look at 30% of white women voted for Trump even after they were, they were shown.

Adriana: It’s incredible. I think it’s higher.

Helena: Oh, it’s higher. Okay. There you go.

Adriana: It’s higher. It’s something like 60% it’s terrible.

Helena: Okay. But that’s what I mean about the call here. It’s the, we’ll call it the genderized or, you know, the sexist or, you know, but the colonized, of course, the colonized body is the dismissiveness of your own brown skin and black hair.

Adriana: It’s self-hating. Of course.

Helena: So, it’s all self-hating. It’s all about self-hating. And where do we get that from? We get it of course from the colonized imagination. And, and so when if we have that in existence and we have that interplayed with the gender genderized, you know…

Adriana: So, we’re fucked.

Helena: Unless, unless we speak up. Unless we engage. Unless we develop the vocabulary to actually talk honestly about it.

Adriana: And part of that is making each other human. And telling stories that humanizes. I mean, I think, you know, part of the reason that the former Miss Universe Miss Machado thing resonated was because, I mean, obviously, maybe it didn’t resonate long enough, but part of the reason that it resonated throughout the election is because I think so many women have been told at some point by a man that they need to lose a few pounds.

Helena: Yeah. Really, really. How disgusting. That was, man. Wow. Disgusting.

Adriana: And there were the women that agreed.

Helena: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I remember looking at the, you know, shortly after that whole you know, the whole controversy with Trump being recorded and saying these horrific things. Okay. There was a group of women that CNN interviewed, and these were all women for Trump, and they said, oh, he was just acting like a boy. I wasn’t offended at all. I wasn’t offended at all. He was just, it’s just, it’s just locker room talk. It’s just locker room talk. And they said, well, even when he mentioned that, oh, that’s just him being silly. Their dismissive seriousness showed their genderized kind of thinking. It’s just locker room. It’s just locker room talk.

Adriana: Right. And nobody’s going, oh, this is perpetuating rape culture.

Helena: Yeah. Or this is, you know, or this is, this makes me feel terrible. I hate this. No, not at all. It was, oh, this is the way men talk to other men.

Adriana: Boys will be boys.

Helena: Boys will be boys. And that was their dismissiveness.

Adriana: Well, bad ass women will be bad ass women and hopefully radicals will be radicals.

And hopefully we won’t be silent. Thank you so much Helena for being here for talking to us for being a part of the Aster(ix) family, man.

Karla: But what about like the bigger culture, you know, like the context. So, I mean, how do you bring that into your writing?

Adriana: And this, this allows us actually to kind of transition into the interview I did with Helena, right. We’re talking about sort of the weight and responsibility of having to represent your culture in your writing.

Karla: Yeah. Yeah. We’re still having the conversation.

Adriana: We are still having this conversation.

Karla: Yeah, but I’ve noticed I mean, I’ve been out of academia for a couple of years now, but it’s interesting that I think people are looking back in criticizing some of those programs and, and saying like, yeah, we can’t just catch all, we can’t, and, like these cultures aren’t monoliths and let’s expand, you know, the curriculum, you know, for these, from students.

Adriana: On some level. On some level.

Karla: Right.

Adriana: But then on the other level you have, we can’t teach un-American texts. We can’t teach critical race theory. We are indoctrinating youth by forcing them to read books from people from other cultures.

Right. You can’t read a book that no way is in critical of the U.S. Culture or U.S. Government. Our podcast right now, this discussion we’re having would be banned from certain courses in the states of Idaho, in the states of Arizona, you know? And so, you’ve got to kind of stop and go like, whoa, like we’re talking critical race theory because critical race theory inherently informs our experience in this country.

But for somebody who doesn’t necessarily have that, like realization or ability, yeah, like, I don’t know. We exist in this place where you don’t want to erase the books that exist. You want to expand. But at the same time, people are terrified of somehow learning that their country isn’t perfect.

Karla: Yeah, that that’s so wild. I saw a news clip that there were some parents that were, like white parents, that were tearing up. Like, just because I don’t want my child to learn or be taught critical race theory doesn’t mean I’m racist. And like this white lady was like crying about it and it’s like, okay, first of all, those tears, mhmm, kind of suss, it definitely says, but it’s kinda, like there’s fear. There’s fear there. Like knowing like, yeah, like let’s, let’s open our eyes a little bit. Like this country is not perfect. Just like walk down any street, you know, or any city.

Adriana: But I think the whole idea of American exceptionalism is so toxic, you know, and it’s, you have to buy into it to be a certain type of American.

Yeah. And if you don’t buy into it, then you’re not American, you know? And I mean, I grew up Republican I’ll, I’ll admit that I became a lot more liberal in college, but I mean, I grew up in Texas and I knew a lot of Republican people and I knew a lot of people that were… I remember having a conversation with a friend once where she was like, people are intolerant of intolerance and that’s hypocritical.

And I remember agreeing with her, you know, I stepped back, and I go, wait a second. What? Hold on a second. Of course, you should be intolerant of intolerance. Yeah. You don’t want to harm people. The whole point of tolerance is doing no harm. But I think sometimes you get so stuck in some rhetorical traps, or you’re so influenced by your friends and your neighbor and your community that you don’t kind of stop and go like, wait, what I’m actually advocating for is going to hurt people.

And I don’t think that realization really exists. You know, I think somebody’s going, oh, critical race theory well, that’s going to teach people that whiteness is wrong or that whiteness is bad. And that we enslaved people and that’s not quite completely true. And whiteness has done good things too blah, blah, blah.

And they’re not stopping and going, oh, but for some brown kid, this will help them understand how to explain their role and their place and what they’ve experienced their entire life. That there is a name for it. And so, I just, it’s so hard. Like every time I go back home or sometimes on Facebook with my childhood friends, my husband’s always like, I don’t understand why you’re still friends with these people on Facebook.

And I’m like, well, it’s because I grew up with them, and I know they’re good people. I just also know that their way of thinking has been so warped by tribalism and by this feeling that they’re being screwed. And they cannot imagine that the people that look like them are the ones that are screwing them.

Karla: Wow.

Adriana: So, they look to the outsider, you know.

Karla: The scape goat. Always, of course. I mean that, that kind of, I think that’s been the easiest route. It’s the, it’s the road most traveled, you know.

Adriana: But the same people that are like bemoaning how we’re losing population are the same people that are anti-immigrant. And it’s like the same people who are anti-choice are the same people that are pro death penalty. And you have to take a minute, you have to go like, wait a second. Like what? How do you reconcile these views? You know? And they don’t.

Karla: They don’t. Yeah. A lot of the time I think that they just, they just have, I don’t know, I don’t want to like pigeonhole people, but at the same time, like they have these opposing views, and they don’t do like the critical internal, what I want to say, like shadow work in a way, like to really reconcile, to ask themselves why. And I just kind of stopped right at the threshold of like, well, this is what I believe. And like there’s no questioning. And there’s no, and then there’s just like, they’re walking around with like horse blinders on honestly, and then like hurting people along the way.

Adriana: But they don’t see it as hurting people. And that’s the problem. Like I remember you were thinking about the Trump presidency and, you know, since Helena María and I talked to like literally in the day, after the election.

Karla: Yeah, I was going to ask about that, that, that tension is palpable.

Adriana: Yeah. You know, one of the first things she says is, well, now the work begins, you know, and looking back four years later, you know, we have to stop and think was the work done? And in some ways our country is so much worse today than it really was when the Trump presidency began.

Or maybe we just know it’s worse. Maybe we can now articulate it. Maybe it was always like this, but a lot of people have been radicalized and a lot of people have just fallen down, like the rabbit hole, I think in a really disconcerting way. I don’t know. And they really honestly think that hurting other people or that all of that is justified and it just…it’s like the big lie, you know, like it is easier somehow to believe that the election was stolen from Trump, that it was to acknowledge that they’re actually an oppressive minority force in this country. They cannot imagine that the majority of people are actually against them.

And so rather than even conceive of that, the big lie exists. Right. And so yeah, so I just, I think so much about this conversation and just in some ways how naïve we were thinking that there was work that could counter the machine of self-entitlement and this, you know, promise of one day being a gaudy millionaire, just like Trump that people really bought hook line and sinker.

Karla: Right.

Adriana: I dunno, even though Trump is no longer president, like looking at what’s happening today, you know, with the GOP, you just kind of have to go like, wow. Like we live in a country where 50% of the senators, you know, the Democrats represent, I think I read 40 million more people than the Republicans do.

Karla: Wow. Yeah. I’m thinking of all of the, yeah, definitely going down a little bit of a rabbit hole, but just thinking about all of the hate that’s been acted upon like against Asian Americans

Adriana: And us. They hate us.

Karla: And yeah.

Adriana: I mean, Karla, a large portion of the country just hates us.

You and me for being. For existing. Not because of anything we did. Not because of anything we said or anything, just because we’re immigrants who came over as kids and who grew up in this country, supposedly taking stuff from other people, even though that’s not really how resources work. And I think that happens in literature too, you know, like a lot of what Helena María was talking about, you know, was this idea of like having to represent and having to kind of bear the burden of being. And that’s so tough. And that’s tough for like little baby writers who just want to tell a story. Can imagine being like a trans person of color in this country who just wants to write a story?

Karla: Yeah. And, and how inherently, you know, you have to navigate that trajectory, just knowing that anything you do is just inherently political or politicized. And then like having to like almost tiptoe and walk on these eggshells and knowing that any word that you put down on a piece of paper is going to be used possibly against you, just because of how you identify.

Adriana: Gotta be a place where we can both, and I realize the tension of it, right? We both want to have our culture. We both want to be different. We don’t want to fully assimilate. We resent the idea that we have to be like everyone else, but also we don’t necessarily want to be othered constantly. And there’s gotta be a space where our culture can exist. Our culture could be, but also where we’re not completely subsumed and defined by it.

Karla: Yeah, and doesn’t Helena María talk about, you know, being like a baby author and, and her mentors would say like, oh, why are you writing about those people? And then she’s like, well, these are my people.

Adriana: My family!

Karla: Yeah, these are my people. These are my family. This is my experience. And I’m even thinking about you know, like Amanda Gorman recently, and the first, talking about like her bio, you know, what overshadows her name, like who she is, and you could say like, yeah, the youngest or the first and things like that.

But and that’s, that’s a point of pride. And, but then like, you’re talking about like representation, you know, like a little girl is going to look up to her and like, oh, I can be that. And that’s great. And but at the same time, the fact that we’re it’s 2021, you know, we’re still…

Adriana: Saying things that scholars were discussing in the seventies. Yes, yes, yes. But we’re also, we’re discovering it in a different way, you know, because the internet should have allowed us to all be kind of anonymous bodies that just existed, like our content existed which should have been able to free ourselves. And yet instead the internet in some ways affirmed identity politics, even more than ever.

And so, it’s, it’s always this tension that exists, right? I mean, I guess you could call it a dialectic except ughh nobody understands that word for real you know; it’s how two opposing things can be true, a dialectic. And yet that is true.

Karla: You know, actually this kinda brings up I believe in Viramontes’ excerpt or like the performance, or maybe it was the interview, where she talks about universal-tality, universality? Universality. Universality. There we go. So again, I think that universality is a taboo trope in a lot of writing in different genres, but then like we don’t, we don’t want to be that. You know, cause our writing is universal, you know, but like people can’t resonate.

Adriana: I’ve always been told that the universal is in the specific, right. That if you try to say like, oh, this man experienced heartache, that’s not going to be as impactful as, you know, Juan loved María, but then the Maria left him for Paco, you know, Juan experienced heartache. Right. And even just the specificity of those details, like ignoring the names even like it’s going to resonate more because it’s a specific situation.

Right. And yet the problem is, is that people can’t always see that. But you think about stories that, sell, I mean, like, of course we can all understand the stories of, I don’t know, for example, like Anna Karenina, right. Even though it takes place in Russia, you know, or going back to like Mark Twain, we can look at like Huck Finn and understand his quandaries.

Even though we are not a white kid, you know, hanging out with an enslaved man in Missouri, right in the 19th century. Right. And yet, because of the specificity, his experience, we’re able to kind of understand like the more universal themes and tropes. And I think that that’s part of the problem with the cultural landscape is that we don’t always embrace the specificity of everyone’s stories.

You know, even though we know that to be true, we’re not seeking out you know, trans stories. We’re not seeking out like immigrant stories. We’re not seeking out stories of like, 11-year-olds in Chicago, you know, growing up in bad neighborhoods or whatever. You know, we, it’s easier for us to put them in a cliché like, oh, Chicago is bad then to stop and examine this one person’s story, how they got there, what influenced them. What are the circumstances that led to this? And yet in that individual story, you know, we can reveal a lot more of the bigger systemic problems than we can by just saying, oh, there are systemic problems.

Karla: Yeah. And I think that’s such a good advice for any person, any reader well, also any writer that, just thinking, like looking critically at the world and like expanding horizon. I read a lot of women and I read a lot of Latinos.

Adriana: Oh, maybe now is a good time. To tell me what you’re reading.

Karla: Oh, yeah, I will.

Adriana: I can kick us off. I can tell you what I’m reading these days. So, I am definitely reading a lot of books on writing right now. And I’m actually reading this wonderful book by William Goldman. That’s called Adventures in the Screen Trade and it’s really, like, it’s part memoir kind of about how he wrote the movies that he wrote, but he’s also really going in and discussing how you write a screenplay.

And it’s really helping me with my nonfiction and with other things. So, I definitely would recommend that. And then I would also for sure Rosa Alcalá’s book, actually, in preparation for the event that we’re doing with City of Asylum and the International Literary Festival, I’ve been reading her work. And I just have to tell you it’s phenomenal. So, I’m going to link to the Cecilia Vicuña poems that she translated in our show notes. But I’ll also maybe provide a couple of other links to her work because it’s, she’s just such a phenomenal and unique voice. And the way she plays around with structure is really, really neat. So, I would encourage anyone to read her.

Karla: And that’s coming up on May 15th for anyone. And you can find info about that event on City of Asylum-dot-org, but yeah, for, for me, well, I’m kind of between books right now, but I’ve been paging through Yesika Salgados’ Hermosa, which is the third poetry book in a trilogy.

And she’s at L.A. Poet and I just moved to L.A. So, it’s very much about identity survival, grief, transitioning, small moments, and also love. So, it’s yeah, very much celebrating.

Adriana: Have you ever read Chicana Falsa by Michele Seros?

Karla: I haven’t no, tell me about it.

Adriana: It is, I read it long time ago, but if memory serves, it is about, it’s kind of like a hybrid memoir.

Then it’s about growing up in Oxnard. And so, and just that Southern California, Chicano ways and thinking about identity and whether or not, you know, you kind of like fit into what Latina life is in America. And so, I think, I think, sorry, I just made me think of what you’re going through. And I was like, oh, you should read that.

I read it when I was in college and I just remember being like, oh, like Chicano culture is so different from Texas, like Latino culture and just what a huge birth of experience there is in this country.

Karla: Yeah, it’s really interesting, too. Cause, you know, the last 10 years in Pittsburgh and always looking for like that Latino community and then just being a total transplant now to, you know, L.A. A lot of people have said like, oh, well now you can find your people, ¿Dónde está tu gente? Están aquí. You know? And I was like, oh yeah, I got to find the Latinos, but I’m not even there yet. I’ve only been here like four days. So, I mean, I know there’s Latinos in L.A., obviously, but…

Adriana: I can hook you up. I got friends.

Karla: Okay, cool. Thank you. I need that. And it’s also like, yeah, about like making your own community, which is a lot about what Helena talks about in her work.

Adriana: And there’s a tension too, being literary Latina is not necessarily like… it’s not a cliché for a reason. So, you know, there’s something to think about too. I mean, Latinos are some of the most well-read people I know, which is also kind of fascinating. And yet they’re not like…I don’t know There aren’t that many literary fiction and non-fiction writers, like given the proportion of the population, you know, like we’re like what 20% of the U.S. Population, 20% of the books on shelves are not by Latinos, you know? And so, I think that’s really kind of fascinating, like under-representation, over representation.

And so even though you’re going to be in L.A., like literary L.A. Is pretty cool. And yet, I wonder like, it is not the most Latino space either.

Karla: Yeah. Yeah. We’ve got to carve out that space and, you know, also give space and so many, ugh, I feel like this conversation touched on so many topics that I want to elaborate on. I’m really excited, but we probably should wrap it up!

Adriana: Wrap it up! Okay. So, for the road we’ve got that event happening. So, I think that’s, that’s pretty much our big thing. Anything else you want to add for the road? Anything you’re listening to, jamming out to now, whatever?

Karla: Yeah, I can shout out May 19th, which is Lit Fest featuring Viet Thanh Nguyen. He’s gonna be talking about his work The Committed and it’s gonna be a really excellent installation of Asylum’s first-ever international literary festival. So, check it out.

Adriana: I am so excited to be a part of it. Well, this was, this was really wonderful.

Alexis Jabour: City of Asylum builds a just community by protecting and celebrating creative free expression.

Adriana: Aster(ix) is transnational, feminist literary arts journal. Co-founded by Angie Cruz and Adriana E. Ramírez. Committed to social justice and translation. Placing women of color at the center of the conversation.

Charla Cultural is hosted by Karla Lamb and Adriana E. Ramírez. Voice of goddess is Alexis Jabour. Editorial support by Clarissa A. León. Production design and brand management by Little L. Creative. Our theme song is “Colombia Folk” by Luis Alfonso.

And thank you as always to our sponsors, Aster(ix) Journal and City of Asylum.