“I am going to the grocery
store.” That was the line poet Javier O. Huerta was asked to write
during his citizenship interview process. That simple line, years later, would
become American Copia: An Immigrant Epic, Huerta’s second collection of poems. Using a
vignette form, a play, and even text messages, Huerta weaves together a poetic
narrative that breaks the illusion that we live in a land of bountiful
substance. Here, a mere trip to the grocery store unveils the political, cultural
and economic nuances hidden away between the aisles of our supermarkets.
*
Lauro Vazquez: First of all thank you for agreeing to this interview.
Can you share a little of your personal background with us? What does
the childhood of a bilingual poet look like? In what language did your first
poems arrive?
Javier O. Huerta: No hay de que—so, nomas de papa. Gracias to you, Lauro, and to the Letras
Latinas blog for the interview.
A little of my personal
background—Back in elementary I had to repeat 2nd grade. My first 2nd
grade took place in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas. My second 2nd grade,
in Houston, Texas. It was decided that I should be held back in 2nd grade
because I needed the extra time to learn the language of our new country. I
remember being upset when they informed me of this decision, at the injustice
of it. In Mexico, in my first 2nd grade, I earned Primer Lugar in my
class, and I have the certificate to prove it.
So I found it completely unfair that I had to be placed in a second 2nd
grade. I picked up English pretty easily and was caught up by the end of that
year. Thus, I received two 2nd grade report cards: one from escuela
Guadalupe Victoria and one from Guadalupe Aztlan school. I still have those two
2nd grade report cards and have transformed them into a bilingual
found poem, which is part of a longer work-in-progress called La tarea me
marea: the education of Javier O. Huerta.
LV: Your graduate
student profile lists among your specialties “19-century British” and
“Chicano/a,” how did you arrive where you are?
JOH: So, “19-century British” and “Chicano/a.” Let me take them one at a time.
“19-century British”—This
begins with Keats. It begins with the
instructor in my first ever creative writing workshop expressing his preference
for Keats over Wordsworth. Imagine, he said, if Keats had lived as long as
Wordsworth. Then I took Keats with me to the Bilingual Creative Writing Program
at UTEP. In the critical introduction to my creative MFA
thesis, I argued for “negative capability” in the use of metaphors, that
metaphors and images should be allowed to speak for themselves without imposing
our own interests onto them, that the relation between the literal and the
figurative should remain in uncertainty. For the statement of purpose in my
application to UC Berkeley, I proposed a larger project based on that critical
introduction. I wanted to study Keats in relation to the connection/disconnection
between literature and science and explore how the decentering of the poet is a
consequence of the decentering of the earth. At Berkeley, they told me that to
study Keats I had to become a Romanticist, and if I wanted to be a Romanticist
I needed a contiguous field. So I chose the Victorian Period, and that’s how I
arrive at the Long 19th Century. I have
moved on, as many graduate students do, to a different project from the one proposed
in my statement of purpose. But that project on Keats is now a chapter of a
work-in-progress called, The Copernican Revolution in Poetry.
“Chicano/a”—This begins
with Quinto Sol, and Quinto Sol began in 1967, when the first issue of El Grito was published. Quinto Sol
Publishing and its journal El Grito
made an unprecedented effort to create a space for Chican@s to publish their
literary, artistic, and scholarly works in the late 1960s. Many of the texts
that are now considered foundational and canonical first saw light in El Grito and/or were published by Quinto
Sol via their Quinto Sol prize. The individuals behind this effort were
associated with UC Berkeley as undergraduates, graduate students, staff, and
faculty, including the late professor Octavio Romano. On April 16, 2012, Quinto
Sol Remembered (QSR), a student group at UC Berkeley, organized and hosted an
encuentro to commemorate the 45th Anniversary of Quinto Sol. Some of
the Chican@s who lived that crucial moment —Alurista, Hector Calderon, Juan
Carrillo, Lucha Corpi, Sergio Elizondo, Malaquias Montoya, Celia Rodriguez,
Edel Romay, Rosaura Sanchez, Gustavo Segade, Alex Saragoza, Nick C. Vaca—returned
to UC Berkeley to share the struggles and excitement of creating a space for
Chicano/a literature and scholarship “on our own terms.” I’ve always thought
that to be a Chican@ poet means to be in dialogue with the Chicano/a tradition.
Being a member of QSR and attending the QSR encuentro allowed me to learn more
about the first Chicano publishing house and the Quinto Sol generation.
Honestly to speak of the QSR encuentro is to speak in understatement because nothing
I say could capture the energy of that day. Our student group QSR has discussed
plans to edit an anthology of critical essays on Quinto Sol and El Grito in preparation for the 50th
anniversary.
LV: When
speaking of their influences, most writers will speak of certain authors or
poems that spoke directly to them or to their experiences. Much of your poetry is a record what of the
music that is often dismissed as inaudible for poetry: the music of a bad joke
or the chants at an immigrant rights march for example. I was curious thus as
to what your influences—literary or otherwise—were?
JOH: Corridos. The most overwhelming influence I
have to contend with currently is the form and the tradition of el corrido. I
have stated elsewhere that my first creative attempts were narcorridos that I
composed during child’s play. I have also stated that my father, a fan of Los
Cadetes de Linares, dedicated his life to one day being notorious enough to have
a narcocorrido dedicated to his exploits. This is the most overwhelming
influence currently for two reasons: one private, one public. Private—I suppose
it is time to reconcile with my father, who has recently been released from
prison. I have made the decision to write my father’s corrido for him, “El
corrido de mi jefe.” The corrido is a form that has traditionally narrated
histories of violence, and the hope—my hope—is that the rhythms and boundaries
of the corrido form will allow me to engage my father’s personal history of
violence. Public— This, too, is about violence, about loss. What has been lost
on the border due to recent drug-related violence? In La Colonia Mirador in Nuevo Laredo, a
two-story house remains uninhabited. The family that belonged to the house had
to flee because of possible threats. The house is still furnished and full of
useful things that no one can use. The family may never return. Home is lost.
So is the lost corridor since narcocorridos have been banned on Mexican
airwaves. I have about 55 pages of a work-in-progress I’m tentatively calling The Corridos Project, which includes not
only some corridos I’m writing but also essays, literary analyses, interviews,
and translations. The project, both creative and critical, is an attempt to
explore the form and significance of the corrido in our private and public
lives.
LV: Let’s speak about masks. In a previous interview for
Latino Poetry Review you said “we were them [masks] to be seen. And who is to
say that our masks are not our real identities?” Such is the logic of lucha
libre, as you point out, but also of the Zapatistas in Chiapas—the mask is wore
not conceal identity but rather to make the invisible visible. What mask(s) does Javier O. Huerta conjure up
and for what reason?
JOH: The mask of the future. But
let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s see. Imagine two young rommates: a city
planner (female) working as an intern on the City of the Future, and a robotics
engineer (male) working on the first laughing robot. Imagine that the city
planner is full of anxiety because she really has a difficult time with maps
and directions in general, and imagine the robotics engineer full of anxiety
because his laughing robot keeps malfunctioning and laughs uncontrollably.
Imagine a neighbor, versed in all types of philosophy, who is more than willing
to let the city planner and robotics engineer know when they are wrong, “You messin’ up!” (catchphrase). Now
imagine them brown, like you and me. And that is the premise of my sitcom, a
work-in-progress, called Artificial Humor.
I hadn’t placed much thought into the ethnicity of the robot, but when the
opportunity came to make a short video of the sitcom I somehow got stuck
playing the role of the robot. Without the help of a special effects/make-up
specialist, I had to be transformed into a robot. We, my production team
included some fellow UCB grad students, stumbled onto the defining detail of my
robot mask: an ipod nano placed on my forehead to serve as a START button. To
give the illusion that the robot is still under construction, we placed some
wires on my head and secured them with a beanie. And that’s how I came to wear
the mask of a laughing cholobot. Of course, it makes sense that the robot would
be brown, like you and me, if you consider all the projections about the Latino
population soon becoming the majority. So for the moment we, “Latin@s,” wear
the mask of the future, and the future wears the mask of Latinidad. As to what all of this could possibly mean,
only time will tell.
LV: What first drew me to your work, before I even had the
chance to read it, was your blog. In it
you had a series of posts titled “undocumented poems.” If I remember correctly,
these posts featured poems in response to a social injustice(s). One of these “undocumented poems” was Mahmoud
Darwish’s “The House Murdered,” the poem
was in response to what? A deported immigrant? A family broken? A house
murdered? I don’t remember exactly but what I do remember was the concept of
poetry in rebuttal, poetry in resistance to a recent crime and in “real-time.”
How did you conceive of this series of posts? Did these poems affect your
writing or your thoughts on poetry or technology?
JOH: I wanted to attract and maintain a regular
readership for my blog, Unitedstatesean Notes, so I thought that having a
regular feature would offer my readers something to look forward to. Every
Monday I posted an undocumented poem, by which I meant a poem that treated undocumented
immigration as a theme, and yes, I tried to make the poems relevant to what was
going on in the world. The first post featured “El lavaplatos,” an immigration corrido
from the 1920s, and other posts followed and featured the work of many poets
from movimento poets like Lalo Delgado to more contemporary Latin@ poets, from
U.S poets to international poets, from multiple-book poets to poets with one
poem published in a small journal. I realized that the rights of undocumented
peoples formed a major concern in the work of many of my contemporaries, so
much so that I believed that “the undocumented poem” could be considered a new
form in the same way that we consider elegy, love poem, ode, ekphrastic,
self-portrait and dramatic monologue to be poetic forms. I plan to edit an
anthology of these “undocumented poems” and have already started on the
introduction. In my “Documents and
Literature of the Undocumented” class, I teach work by artists and writers who
have personally lived the undocumented experience. These readings cover
different genres: performance art,
nonfiction, novels, and picture books. When it comes to poetry, I bring
together in a reader the poems that were featured on my unitedstatesean blog. This
reader and my lecture on the “undocumented poem” would be the basis for the
anthology and the introduction to that anthology.
LV: One aspect of these posts seeping into your work that
I can recognize is in the e-chapbook, “Almost as Beautiful as an Immigrant Rights
March down International.” The margin of
the page here features a single-line vertical poem (for the reader, imagine a
vertical line much like in a Japanese text) which features excerpts from the
“undocumented poems” posts and which mirrors both the music and shape of an actual
march. This poem to me also symbolizes
the various poets marching shoulder to shoulder with the undocumented. What
opened up your eyes to possi bility of capturing this image: that the closest
beauty poetry can aspire to is in marching down International?
JOH: Once the undocumented poem feature had run for 52
weeks, I decided to write a poem by taking a line from each of the 52 poems.
That poem was first titled “The Undocumented Poem to End all Undocumented Poems”,
which I then retitled when a friend suggested “The Poem to Document all
Undocumented Poems.” When the good
people at Deep Oakland invited me to submit a chapbook for their website, I
knew I wanted to create something specific to Oakland and something in the avant-garde
spirit of Deep Oakland. Octavio Paz says
that prose is like a march whereas poetry is like a dance, but I feel that my
most poetic experience was being part of an immigrant rights march down International,
a march that feels much like a dance. In contrast to the rally for which there is a line-up
of speakers, the march has no central voice; it has a head, by which I mean a
direction, by which I mean a purpose; it has a tail, by which I mean a history,
by which I mean a legacy; the march seems to be a living organism composed of
diverse and immediate rhythms. Anyone in the march can start a chant; you don’t
need a megaphone. I wanted to capture
the diverse rhythms of that march in the chapbook, to capture the
multidirectional voices. So I decided to
include the poem to document all undocumented poems in order to show what you
describe so beautifully: the image of
various poets marching shoulder to shoulder with los Inquiet@s.
LV: One of my favorite poems of yours is your poem “Yo también
canto los Estados Unidos”
Soy el hermano sin papeles.
Me Mandan pa’ fuera
Cuando tienen visita
Pero me da risa.
Y me echo un taco
Pa’ ponerme fuerte
Y no quedarme flaco.
Hoy el primero de mayo,
Voy a marchar con mi pueblo
Desde aquí hasta la promesa
Y nadie se atreverá a decirnos,
“Go back to where you came from.”
Además
Se van a dar cuenta lo chido que soy.
Y les va dar verguenza.
Yo también soy los Estados Unidos.
On one hand it is a bit
ironic to call your translation of Langston Hughes iconic poem “I, Too, Sing
America” “your” poem but on the other hand the things you make this poem do
through the Spanish language—the music you infuse it with—makes it not only
yours but also just as beautiful and urgent as the day Hughes wrote this iconic
poem. And yet in these bilingual poems, there
is also a beauty that goes undocumented for the monolingual reader. Could you
comment on this “undocumented” beauty?
JOH: I don’t know what I would
call this poem: translation? imitation? impersonation? cover? variation? If I
had to choose, I would identify it as a translation of Hughes’s poem in that
I’m not only translating from English into Spanish but also translating from
civil rights into immigrant rights. This poem and other such translations in
the chapbook were inspired by the Oakland-based Black Alliance for Just
Immigration (BAJI) and its stance that the struggle for immigrant rights is a
continuation of the civil rights struggle. One way to express this black and
brown solidarity for me was to write poems “after” certain voices of the Harlem
Renaissance, Black Arts Movement, and more contemporary African-American poetry. I consider the poems to be bilingual in that
I took a rhythm from a poem written in English and adapted it to Spanish. So
even though the poem is in Spanish there is still an echo of the rhythm of the
original English. I have considered taking these poems from the echapbook and
writing more of these “translations” and collecting them in a book tentatively
titled, La Bella Suerte.
LV: “Que le dice un guante a otro guante? …. I glove you.” This is one of your favorite jokes and also
captures much of the humor present in your work. What is the importance of
humor in your work and in particular the humor of the bilingual poem?
JOH: The importance of humor in
my work is to show the lighthearted aspect in the serious and the serious
aspect in the lighthearted. I write jokes and I write poems, and sometimes I
can’t tell which is which. I have jokes in my poetry, and I have poetry in my
jokes. In the immigrant rights echapbook
that we have been discussing, I have an undocumented joke on each page. My
favorite is, “why did the ‘illegal alien’ cross the border? To get to el otro
lado.” This joke is an imitation of the famous “Why did the chicken cross the
road?” joke, and actually the punch line to my joke is an exact translation of
the famous punch line, “to get to the other side.” But “el otro lado” is loaded
with significance for people living on the Mexican side of the border. Why
immigrants cross borders is a serious question that many scholars and public
officials have seriously engaged and attempted to answer. I just happen to
think that my punch line is a more satisfying answer than their push and pull
explanations. Here’s another joke from my poetry, from American Copia: “What does
the corn tortilla say to the wheat tortilla? No te awheates.” I shared this joke during a presentation in
Monterrey, Nuevo Leon last year, and during the Q & A, a woman in the
audience provided an interesting analysis of the joke from the perspective of
U.S/Mexico relations. She said that it made sense that the Mexican corn
tortilla would be the one to provide solace to the U.S. wheat tortilla. Her
analysis, I think, provides a convincing interpretation. I take jokes seriously
and poetry lightheartedly because jokes and poetry have this in common: they
both defamiliarize, and hopefully this defamiliarization leads to both delight
and wisdom. And, you should know, I have serious plans to publish a book of
bilingual chistes titled Puro Jokes.
LV: “Today I’m going to the grocery store.” This is the
opening line of American Copia and also the sentence you were asked to write
during the interview of your naturalization process. In the preface you point out that you wanted
to tell the INS agent that you could do “things with the English language that
she could never imagine.” What sort of things?
JOH: Let me tell you about my dream poem, the one that I
really want to make happen one day because I really do believe it is possible.
I want to write a poem that can be read as either English or Spanish. This poem
will be in both languages at once. Well, I guess it would be two poems because the
if-read- in-English poem would differ from the if-read-in-Spanish poem. Does
that make sense? It would be the same words, but you could read them as English
or Spanish. For example, “a pie”: this
could be like “a pie” that you eat or the Spanish words for “on foot.” So like that, but an entire poem. This is the
catch: I want the poem to be good in both languages. And this is the dream: I would submit it to
one of these high-profile English-only literary journals, and they would
publish the English poem without realizing that they also published an entire
poem in Spanish. The poem would be
titled, “Once.”
LV: And finally since this is an interview profiling your
recently published second collection of poems, American Copia, what do you hope
readers take from your poems?
JOH: I hope readers take the
stories in American Copia and retell
them. Copia didn’t start with stories; it started with one sentence: “Today I’m
going to the grocery store.” When I was asked to write this down for my INS
interview, the seven words in this sentence lost their conventional meaning and
took on a special significance for me. I loaded that sentence with all the anxiety
that comes with questioning whether one belongs or does not belong to this
country and what it could possibly mean to belong or not belong. I knew then I
had to do something with that sentence but had no idea what. I carried that
sentence with me for seven years, and the whole time those seven words only
signified, “This is the sentence I was required to write in order to obtain my
U.S. citizenship.” One day I learned of Erasmus’ Copia, in which the sentence “Your
letter has pleased me greatly” is rewritten in 150 variations. What appealed to
me is the obsessive attention to one sentence. I knew that this is what I had
to do with my sentence. But it became clear to me that I wasn’t just engaged in
a rhetorical exercise concerning the copiousness in language but with a poetic
exercise concerned with the copiousness of experience. I set out to reintroduce
meaning into those seven words. I didn’t
choose the grocery store; it was given to me. But now I had to choose it over
and over again. I had to fill the words in with meaning through specificity
because I wanted the words to mean something other than the significance they
carried for me. The “I” would become Javier Omar Huerta Gomez. But my
experiences would not be enough because my intent was to swell up the words
“Today I am going to the grocery store” with an abundance of meaning. I wanted
to explore the varieties of supermarket experiences, so I started to ask
friends for anecdotes or thoughts about the grocery store. Then friends of
friends. Then acquaintances. Then strangers. Then I searched the internet for
other experiences in order to swell up the “I” with as many meanings as
possible. People were generously responsive and shared their stories with me. “Today” became specific dates; “I“ became specific peoples.; “am going” became
specific movements; “to” became specific relations; “the grocery store” became specific supermarkets.
So that’s what I appreciated the most about writing American Copia: the stories and the old and new connections that
belong to the stories. Hopefully,
readers will continue the storytelling (even though it is already published, I
still consider American Copia to be a
work-in-progress) by thinking of their own supermarket experiences, and if you
see me hanging out at your local grocery store, you should say hello and share
a story with me.
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