Courtesy of GULF COAST: “The Cinnamon Tsunami is Here”

Latin@s seem to be at the forefront of American consciousness in a way that is unprecedented.

—David Tomas Martínez

I don’t think we’re at the forefront of anything other than being an eternal cipher that looms larger and larger with every election cycle as our population power grows larger, while our political and economic power also grow, although not at the same level.

—Gustavo Arellano

In a twentieth century literature course I took as an undergraduate the only female author we read was Virginia Woolf. When I asked the professor why, he replied, “She’s the only woman worthy of being in the canon,” and proceeded to educate us on the Great Chain of Being. That was a very early exposure to the idea of “silence.” It hadn’t occurred to me to ask why there weren’t Latinos or Latin American writers on the list [.]

—Carmen Gimenez Smith

The other day, while waiting for the bus, an English professor asked, “Isn’t Romney half Mexican?” That’s when I realized that maybe many people thought the same thing and, wow, how little Americans actually know about the spiritual, political, economic, and physical fight Latin@s are in today.

—Angie Cruz

It’s clear to me by now that we are not erasable, that we can’t be forced into a few buzzwords that make it easy for politicians, pop culture, or even the American government to contain, define, dismiss, or expel us.

—Rigoberto González

Everything had three words at my kitchen table, and so every day I had to drink my leche, halib, milk. My mother was born in Cuba and my father in Palestine. My Cuban grandmother and her sister lived with us, which is to say that my house was a regular Babel at times, with a lot of mishearings and misunderstandings across the languages.

—Carolina Ebeid

And there was trauma, too—the tiny, loose orbs of my family that went their own ways and split apart and came back together again. It took time and a lot self-reflection and talking it out, writing it out. That’s it—I was blessed—I could write it out.

—Juan Felipe Herrera

I had the opportunity to read the multi-author discussion I excerpted above: the good folks at Gulf Coast will be happy to know that the Notre Dame bookstore carries their magazine, which I recently bought. I had attempted to read it in its entirety, online, a while back, but wasn’t able to. And so I asked David Tomas Martínez if he’d be willing to approach Gulf Coast, as well as the writers who took part in this discussion, about collaborating—giving this vital and necessary discussion an unfettered online readership. Letras Latinas is pleased to present it here, courtesy of Gulf Coast.   --FA

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“The Cinnamon Tsunami is Here”                 

a Latin@ writers’ roundtable featuring Gustavo Arellano, Angie Cruz, Carolina Ebeid, Rigoberto González, Juan Felipe Herrera, David Tomas Martinez, and Carmen Giménez Smith

This roundtable brings together a number of prominent Latin@ writers. The term “Latin@,” which signifies both Latinos and Latinas, is a semiotic gesture by Latinidad scholars intended to mitigate gender privileging in language. Or, as the scholar Gloria E. Anzaldúa argues, “Language is a male discourse.” This becomes obvious in a language such as Spanish where words can denote gender, but this is also inherently true of all language because it reflects the intended and unintended values of the speaker and of their greater society. I believe there are essential values to be unearthed by our tongues. And of these values, some should be honored and remade and some should be rejected, as they are no longer of use; thus, archeologist, archivist, and inventor are some of the vocations of the writer. This roundtable is one sluice of the larger wave of individuals working, not to supplant the rights of some, but to support the greater rights of all. I solicited each of these writers with the intent of encapsulating as much variance of the Latin@ writer experience as possible, which, of course, is tilting at windmills. But do not be fooled, this is not a space exclusively for Latin@ voices in this issue of Gulf Coast, but an inclusive space for writers to speak about their perspective, experiences, and values. But I guess, dear hypocrite lecteur, whether you view this roundtable as inclusive or exclusive depends on which side of the fence you reside. Enjoy, compas.

                                                                        —David Tomas Martinez

David Tomas Martinez: Roland Barthes said “language defines reality,” which feels to me pretty damn accurate. This statement implies that silence is a lack of being, and in a lack of language, or lack of discourse, or with an absence of perspective, comes an existential unmaking. For this reason, it’s an interesting time for Latin@s. On the one hand, both major political parties are cognizant of our voting power, and have pushed Latino candidates to the forefront in an effort to harness the political power of the country’s fastest-growing minority group. But simultaneously, there’s a subtle censorship occurring in places like Arizona, where harsh immigration laws, such as SB 1070, are being enacted and where “Latin@ Studies” are being banned from the classroom. The censorship is also taking place in as many as sixteen other states that are attempting to pass voter laws necessitating birth certificates and more stringent forms of identification. Latin@s seem to be at the forefront of American consciousness in a way that is unprecedented. How does that differ from your experiences growing up, and how did the literature by Latin@s, and from other minority perspectives, or a lack thereof, influence your perception of yourself and your immediate and larger world?

Rigoberto González: I was raised in Mexico, and when I was ten my family migrated to a mostly-Mexican community in southern California, where my grandparents had been living since the sixties without having to learn much English. They died not knowing much of the language at all. So my personal journey is Spanish, it’s Mexicano, it’s culturally and politically strong. I didn’t understand the word “minority” until I went to college and had to call myself that on paper in order to attain a scholarship. I didn’t realize my community was so threatening until it started to disappear from the books I read, until it started to be called   “illegal” in government policy-making. I was a graduate student during the dreaded California Propositions 187 and 209. This filled me with an anxiety, but it also fueled the urgency I had to keep my community visible and complex on the page, to do what I was discovering was taking place through literature—to perform activism with ink. Fortunately, twenty years later, there are new laws, louder protests against people like my family, like me—children of undocumented aliens—more stories, and more poems, from many of us. It’s clear to me by now that we are not erasable, that we can’t be forced into a few buzzwords that make it easy for politicians, pop culture, or even the American government to contain, define, dismiss, or expel us. We have stayed. And the beauty of our numbers is that young people who are feeling that same sense of anxiety I felt can still access the bookshelf—such a great thing that is, even if our books are banned, they continue to exist! The big lesson here is that our perseverance is unassailable. I keep hearing, “Nothing’s changed.” And if I think back on the community I came from—resilient and proud—my response is, “That’s great!”

Angie Cruz: Much like Rigoberto, I never thought of myself as a “minority.” I grew up in a predominantly Spanish-speaking neighborhood in New York City (Washington Heights). I understood that there was an “us” (Dominicans) and a “them” (Blanquitos), but also another “them” who were often part of “us”: Cubans, Puerto Ricans, African Americans, etc. And because my family’s world was, for the first fourteen years of my life, split between Washington Heights and the Dominican Republic, “the American consciousness” was not something I ever thought about. However, I was aware that the newspapers categorized our neighborhood as dangerous: “Little ’Nam.” Such articles were the seeds of my consciousness raising, of my understanding that the “news” should be read critically, and that point of view and intention were significant when telling a story. It wasn’t until college that I discovered Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, Junot Díaz’s Drown, Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands and Ana Castillo’s So Far from God. I remember feeling betrayed that I didn’t know these books, and others like them, were out there. In many ways, books by Latin@s offered me a key on how to tell my story, but also made me understand that my story was significant enough to tell. Also incredibly influential were books by James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, Paule Marshall, Edwidge Danticat, and other African-American and Carribbean writers. They truly changed my self-perception, because I started to understand the connections and overlaps in our histories and communities. These books offered a reconciliation between how I thought I was perceived and how I perceived myself.

     I call on Anzaldúa, who says it so beautifully: “By creating a new mythos—that is, a change in the way we perceive reality, the way we see ourselves, and the ways we behave—la mestiza creates a new consciousness. The work of mestiza consciousness is to break down the subject-object duality that keeps her prisoner and to show in the flesh and through the images in her work how duality is transcended. The answer to the problem between the white race and the colored, between males and females, lies in healing the split that originates in the very foundation of our lives, our culture, our languages, our thoughts. A massive uprooting of dualistic thinking in the individual and collective consciousness is the beginning of a long struggle, but one that could, in our best hopes, bring us to the end of rape, of violence, of war.”

     As for politics…ha! The other day, while waiting for the bus, an English professor asked, “Isn’t Romney half Mexican?” That’s when I realized that maybe many people thought the same thing and, wow, how little Americans actually know about the spiritual, political, economic, and physical fight Latin@s are in today. It’s apparently enough that he says his father was born in Mexico repeatedly. Scary, no? That’s why it's so important that we continue to write, read, and challenge that kind of political appropriation of our community.

Gustavo Arellano: I don’t think we’re at the forefront of anything other than being an eternal cipher that looms larger and larger with every election cycle as our population power grows larger, while our political and economic power also grow, although not at the same level. As a student of journalism history, the media has been proclaiming the awakening of the sleeping Mexican giant (to use that cliché, which the media loves) since the Chicano movement of the 1960s, and, even before, in the nascent rise of what Chicano Studies scholars call the Mexican-American generation (i.e., LULAC, American GI Forum, Felix Tijerina in Houston, Ed Roybal in Los Angeles, etc.). We all know our power grows with each year, yet why is it that the media and political classes are always surprised seemingly every five years?

     I grew up in an entirely Mexican environment—not Chicano, but Mexican. We differentiated ourselves by the state we were from, and usually by which ranchos our parents or ourselves came from. Like Rigoberto, I didn’t realize Mexicans were a “minority” until my college years, when a trustee for the Anaheim Union High School District proposed to sue Mexico for $50 million, the apparent cost of educating the children of illegal immigrants—children like myself. My dad was illegal until the 1986 amnesty, and I knew other undocumented folks—but I couldn’t imagine people would be so freaked out by it. It was that lawsuit—not literature, which I wouldn’t absorb until after college—that got me on the path to go after the haters and to laugh at how inept their continued freak-outs against us are.

Juan Felipe Herrera: There is also a language of “silence.” It’s hard to talk about since there are so many variations on “silence,” but we have been vocal since day one. The issue of political and ideological and institutional silencing is another thing. As Raymond Williams said in the ’70s in his work on Marxism and Literature, there are “emergent” and “residual” currents going on at the same time—expanding and contracting movements regarding, in this case, the “new” Latin@ presence and action. So all this seems to be a simultaneous motion. Of course. What is cool, I hope, is the wide and deep acceleration of Latin@ and Mexic@ political, artistic, literary, and political voices and acts. And all this and more fans out in multiple directions.

     I enjoyed my experience in the fields, in a real way, as harsh as it was, and as lacking in resources and new potentials. Some nostalgia—mixed in with the open eyes and heart of a child under the big sky, unaware of what was going on—moves me to say this. And there was trauma, too—the tiny, loose orbs of my family that went their own ways and split apart and came back together again. It took time and a lot self-reflection and talking it out, writing it out. That’s it—I was blessed—I could write it out.

     In 1962, I met Alurista, who lived across the way, about seven feet from my window screen in a forlorn gray apartment building near downtown San Diego, Eleventh & D Street. From there on, little by little, day by day, I became part of a most beautiful life, the literary and artistic world of El Movimiento, along with all the magnificent ingredients of the ’60s—sitars, incense, organic juice, Krishnamurti’s lectures, Borderlandia, Black Arts poetry movements, North Beach chapbook stands, Haight-Ashbury, the seeds of UMAS and MEChA, SDS, the UFW, the beginnings of post- ’50s Teatro Chican@, open-air public art movements, experimental performance and writing, and so on.

     Everything influences my perceptions and my sense of self. There are no specific molecules that stand out. The thing is to wash it all away, in a sense, and be part, a real part of the whole.

Carmen Giménez Smith: In a twentieth century literature course I took as an undergraduate the only female author we read was Virginia Woolf. When I asked the professor why, he replied, “She’s the only woman worthy of being in the canon,” and proceeded to educate us on the Great Chain of Being. That was a very early exposure to the idea of “silence.” It hadn’t occurred to me to ask why there weren’t Latinos or Latin American writers on the list; that was how it went. I got to study with Elmaz Abinader a year later, and she introduced the class to writers like Kazuo Ishiguro, Bharati Mukherjee, and Jessica Hagedorn, and the class prompted me to question why the first professor wasn’t aware of the groundbreaking work of these contemporary writers of color.

     This was my “aha” moment, the one many burgeoning writers of color experience: I exist, but on the margins, and I don't want to be on the margins. For much of my early writing life, I struggled to negotiate how to tell myself, especially since in the monolithic universe of Latinidad, my historical narrative (first generation American daughter to South American immigrants), didn’t match a lot of the expectations defining bodies had about me, and there weren’t many master narratives that corresponded with my experience either.

     I think my ignorance was a blessing in disguise because once I began reading more widely, I felt compelled to correct the wrongs I saw in the literary world and in the academy, a veritable bull in the china shop of hegemony. I paid a lot of attention to the ways in which literature was being told, and then I tried to fill in the gaps in class or on my own.         

     At the time, however, I didn’t have the language to describe the circumscribed American ideas around privilege, especially in relation to class, race, and gender, ideas I recognize, struggle with, resist. Privilege is a very valuable commodity, and people won’t give it up without a fight, which is why I think Arizona has become so nativist and reactionary. I also think that nowadays—thanks to the pioneering work of Chicano and Latino movement activists of the ’60s and ’70s—an amazing infrastructure of resistance exists to take that bigotry down. I feel privileged to be alive in this moment for that reason.

Carolina Ebeid: I grew up in New Jersey in a house with three languages: Spanish, Arabic, and English. Everything had three words at my kitchen table, and so every day I had to drink my leche, halib, milk. My mother was born in Cuba and my father in Palestine. My Cuban grandmother and her sister lived with us, which is to say that my house was a regular Babel at times, with a lot of mishearings and misunderstandings across the languages. West New York, New Jersey, was largely Latino, and growing up, all of my friends were like me, first generation Americans with parents from Cuba, or Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, etc. It was impossible to feel any “minority” status in such a setting, but I did feel like a bit of a “misfit.” I remember sensing I wasn’t Latin@ enough in high school, because I looked more like an Arab girl and my Arab last name did not immediately reveal I had this whole other hemisphere to my cultural experience. And I definitely did not feel Palestinian enough within my extended Arab family; I knew so little of the language.

     In college, I learned intellectually what these positions of “minority,” of “otherness,” of “powerlessness” were. I wish I could remember what it was like to first read Edward Said’s ideas in Orientalism. I imagine it was an expansion of consciousness, a minor birth, white light and all. It helped me form a worldview through which I could read history and current events. I was lucky, I think, to begin at a hippie-like college where people (friends, professors, including my very first poetry workshop with Martín Espada) were reading authors such as Gabriel García Marquez, James Baldwin, Amy Tan, César Vallejo, Octavio Paz, Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda, Toni Morrison, Cristina García—the list is long, and of course some of these writers are in the canon, but it wasn’t until my mid-twenties that I began to read Hopkins and Keats and Dickinson, authors we tend to call by their last names only. How did these books influence my perception of self? I could see my figure reflected in their pages as on a body of water. I experienced “identity.” I guess I’d like to think of each of these writers inhabiting a minority perspective, each a minor “I” in the annihilating world.

DTM: Buried within the word identity is the Latin root idem, meaning “the same.” This seems to me very contrary to the way most people speak about identity as being that which makes a person unique. I think the broken bridge between idem and the popular understanding of identity is best exemplified in legal scholar Kenji Yoshino’s idea of “covering,” or the compulsion to downplay a disfavored trait in order to blend into the mainstream. Could each of you talk about how your idea of Latin@-ness intersects with other factions of your identity (e.g., gender, sexuality, political affiliations, socioeconomics, class, career)? How are they supplemented or complicated? Has this idea of “covering” affected your own life?

RG: “Latino” is simply a term of convenience, a starting point. And yet it’s always presented as a monolith to make easy and catchall assumptions about who we are as a people or a political/cultural/social movement. I get so annoyed (of late) hearing about “the Latino vote”—as if there’s only one—and the rumor (before Romney selected a running mate) that the vice presidential candidate was going to be Marco Rubio, a Cuban, in order to attract “the Latino vote.” Such absolute ignorance of the differences between communities and their political trajectories! “The Latino vote” will quickly fade but other terms will continue to corral and imprison us. Thank goodness we have our literature, our art and music, that investigate and explore specific heritages and concrete paths from the homeland (wherever that is) to the adopted land (the embattled U.S. of A.). I suppose that this impulse by mainstream culture (and American letters, truth be told) to hammer our communities into a single shape has encouraged me to resist and defy, reshape and clarify through my work what it is to be a Chicano, an immigrant from Mexico, a gay man. I think of this creative process as an extraordinary freedom, an unshackling, an agency. Quite the opposite of what I sometimes hear from young and naïve writers who think of “labels” as limitations. I’ve got news: if the writer doesn’t claim the space, that space—a very small seat in the back of the theater—will be assigned to the writer. Oh, what a terrible lesson is surrender. But back to my starting point: embracing “Latino” is also an act of solidarity. What my work doesn’t do is sit there, unmoving and inert. My work travels with its fabulous queerness and pro-feminist masculinity, with a critical voice and an observant eye, and most important, a conscience borne out of a deep respect and awareness for my many communities. In brief, I’m empowered by identity, not burdened.

AC: Rigoberto, I love what you have to say about the unshackling, agency, and  freedom experienced when writing. One hopes that those who can’t get past our “Latina-ness” would read our books and try to connect with us on a human level and embrace our complexity.

GA: There was a Mexican artist in Orange County named Sergio O’Cadiz—fabulous, forgotten artist. He once told the Los Angeles Times, “My idea of America is the right to be as Mexican as I want.” Brilliant. And that’s always been my perspective on my “Latino” identity. For me, my identities are more based on geography than a presumable shared ethnic experience, but the great thing is that I can change my labels at ease. Some days, I do feel like a down-ass Chicano; other times, just a plain-and-simple American (how quaint, huh?). But the identities that I emphasize the most to people are that of being from Orange County, and of being from Zacatecas, as those are the identities that mean the most to me. “Mexican” really means little to me, no more so than “American” does, because those are such broad, empty terms—but being from Orange County means something more tangible, as does being from Zacatecas. And actually, the identity I refer to the most is “reporter”—when I wake up, I have stories to tell, and I want to find new ones.

     Yet what’s most hilarious is that I’ve achieved nationwide notoriety as a “Mexican.” Only in America…

JFH: I don’t know. “Identity,” in a way, was a trick word to get ourselves back to our humanity. We have moved closer to it, just maybe. As long as we continue to express ourselves, to be fully ourselves, and to assist others to do the same, then we are living in the bigger life-whole in which we breathe. We are on our way.

CGS: I vacillate between finding a great deal of value in acknowledging identities (mother, poet, teacher, Latin@, feminist, Gen X-er, publisher, editor, etc.) and feeling constricted by them. In this moment, I’m catalyzing all my identities to make the world more accommodating to Latin@s younger than me, so “…that [our] writing should often appear much more conventional, with the notable difference as to whom is the subject of these conventions, illuminates the relationship between form and audience.”¹

     Right now I’m writing and thinking a lot about the work of Ana Mendieta. I feel a deep kinship to her work, especially her engagement with the female divine, and I think it’s deeply tied with her status as an exile in the United States. Her art emerges from that particular tension, which also forms her identity/subjectivity. Where’s the discourse for that? In her work, I think the idea of Latinidad is especially significant, and there are plenty of places in my work where the same could be true. Speaking into or through Latinidad is one of many things I do in my poetry. As a woman of color in the literary world I want my identity and I don’t want it. I use my identity and my identity is used for me and against me. These issues affect how I get read as a poet and as a person, so I can’t avoid it. I have to work it out. Attending CantoMundo helped me with this because it felt like home. Latinidad was implicit in all of the conversations we had about art-making.

CE: A great question, and terrific answers! I especially appreciate Rigoberto’s introduction of the word “solidarity” into the conversation. Part of me wants to respond with an entire book, another part of me wants to answer with what’s inside a fortune cookie. I think I am usually trying to uncover my Latin@-ness whenever I can because an external Latinidad does not naturally claim me as easily as it does others. But that does not mean I would perform an assumption of Latinidad that is false or ornamental, like carrying a Carmen Miranda bouquet of fruit on my head. My brother tells me I spoke Spanish before I learned English, which is plausible, since my Cuban grandmother raised me daily while my parents worked. I’m sure everyone at this roundtable grew up bilingually, and that the two languages met to make the beautiful animal: Spanglish. Language is the seed out of which my sense of self grows. As others have expressed here, there are many facets to a personhood, for which we have a ready nomenclature. For me, being a mother, a mother to an autistic child, a wife, a poet, a kid of the ’80s, an Eastern Rite Christian, a Jersey girl, a political progressive, and a lover of Austin, Texas—each of these continually redefines me, and I, in turn (the motley group of me), continue to redefine these terms.

DTM: Russell Means, the Lakota activist, artist, and founder of the American Indian Movement (AIM), died recently. When asked whether he preferred the term American Indian or Native American, he said, “I prefer the term American Indian because I know its origins…As an added distinction the American Indian is the only ethnic group in the United States with the American before our ethnicity…We were enslaved as American Indians, we were colonized as American Indians, and we will gain our freedom as American Indians, and then we will call ourselves any damn thing we choose.” In this quote, Means calls for agency through naming, which is a step towards mitigating his culture’s commodification, appropriation, and assimilation. Voices like Means criticizing the dominant culture garnered focus from other thinkers—creating the current dominant movements in academia—to the harmful narratives in books, films, television, and other media that limited the American Indian experience to no more than an eponym of “wild west” or expansionist narratives, which had little regard for the actual experience of American Indians. How do you see Latin@ culture being commodified, appropriated, and assimilated in American culture? Which of these are problematic? Which of these are beneficial? How does your work reflect these tensions?

RG: The term “Latino,” like  “Hispanic,” has become such a safe word, sweeping a number of social and political histories under the rug. “Latino” in the mainstream media signals complacency and maybe assimilation—which is an inaccurate summary of the communities that are lumped together into this word. For an excellent unpacking of the term, I’d like to direct people to this wonderful anthology edited by Blas Falconer and Lorraine M. LÓpez called The Other Latin@: Writing Against a Singular Identity (University of Arizona Press 2011). The essays don’t let the dust settle on any argument, opinion, or perspective. My own struggle with the word has to do with living in NYC these last twelve years. “Chicano” just doesn’t carry that big of a punch. The Mexican population here is growing exponentially and will outnumber the Puerto Rican and Dominican populations by 2025. But who knows what the next generation of Americans of Mexican descent will name themselves. I suspect it won’t be Chicano. Maybe Nuyorexican. Still, I strongly believe they will reach for the literature written by other people of Mexican descent, los Chicanos, for direction, legacy, inspiration, etc. Which is why it’s important for me to uphold that term, a torch for anyone who wants to follow that path. When I identify myself, my work, my reading lists, it’s essential that I keep reminding people that the word “Chicano” still exists, that it has agency and responsibility. If not, then the power of naming, of guiding history, culture, and politics, becomes usurped by the outsider’s voice whose purpose is self-interest. It’s not lost on me the significance of Russell Means’s death, a day or two after the canonization of Kateri Tekakwitha, a Mohawk American Indian who lived in the seventeenth century, who became the Catholic church’s “first Native American saint.” I cringed when a Vatican official pronounced: “This is a great day for all Native Americans.” Without the voices of dissent that speak other memories and different stories, I might have agreed with that Vatican official’s laughable pronouncement. 

GA: The only truly successful aspect of Mexican culture that has been fully assimilated is our food, which is a subject I explore in my Taco USA book. I used to be one of those purists who recoiled at the idea of gabachos becoming millionaires off of our food, but after doing the book for three years, I wholeheartedly celebrate it. It’s not a superficial liking of our culture, but something fundamental—remember that humanity ridicules newcomers by demonizing their cuisine. And here’s our food, now a multibillion dollar industry!

JFH: Well, these are good questions—almost like a sociology and anthropology of Chican@ ethnicity. This has been on the stove a long time. And indeed, it has become more complex. And we need to talk about it like you suggest. I think, maybe, we have reached a moment where we can no longer talk about these things as separate strands or influences or acts. It is more like a human mural in motion. Let’s do this: let’s look at deep kindness and deep acts of compassion. Direct impact, into the eyes, hand-to-hand—like César Chávez and Dolores Huerta in their early strategies of bringing about change. They knocked on doors, introduced themselves, sat with the campesinos, and began a dialogue then moved from that point. Commodification, appropriation—well, when and where did it all begin? Let the poem unmask this. Let our lives unmask this, moment to moment.

CGS: The words change, the ideas change, but I’m most interested in artists who reappropriate problematic representations and make art from them or through them. So many exciting visual artists and writers are doing just that: Sherman Alexie, Sandra Cisneros, Glenn Ligon, Khadijah Queen, James Luna, Victor LaValle, Guillermo GÓmez-Peña, Kara Walker, Dawn Lundy Martin. I want to participate in that emancipatory work, so I pay a curious attention to how Latin@s are represented or explained.

CE: These questions quicken my pulse, David, and it is impossible to respond to them satisfactorily in one sitting. My initial reply is a question: can “American culture” be talked about so uniformly? Yes, of course; the idea of hegemony is a useful one, especially when viewed through the lens of our late capitalism, from which there is little escape. No, of course not; there are distinct regions, coasts, neighborhoods with their own systems and customs. There are towns in Hudson County, my home, where the entire community is made up of Latinos from different countries, where there is little need to go into “the City” because all the provisions are right there. You can walk to the hardware store, the cafés, the bakeries, la carnicería. All the signs read in Spanish, and the sound of the language, in its many accents, rings on the street: from the radio announcers and the cars streaming music and the catcallers and the passersby. The beautiful “blab of the pave,” as Whitman calls it. I’m obviously excited about such places, but I bring them up because they undermine, successfully, notions of assimilation.

     What does my work do? I don’t think my reflections about politics, ethnicity, or identity can be found in my poems, gleaming in any overt way. I prefer the space of an essay as a form/apparatus for thinking about these matters. I’m moved by what Juan Felipe said: “Let the poem unmask this.” Yes. Let the poem. Allow the poem to make its small revolution. I do think poetry has revolutionary power, in that it slows us down, does the work of expanding forever something inside, changing the reader/writer.

     I’m left with many questions. Is poetry, by nature, political? Can a poem be dangerous, a poem written in the United States where poets do not get jailed for speaking out, or killed for their publications? Poets here are never enemies of the state, are they? I think of Neruda writing in exile, or Mandelstam memorizing his poems because writing them down was too treacherous. We all have a keen sense of injustice and oppression operating in this country; what are our pressures under which we are writing?

 

DTM: “No speech is speech if it is not heard,” may be the words of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, but it’s a phrase that has been adopted by groups on the periphery of American society in an attempt to be recognized. The 2012 elections have shown the power periphery voices have in aggregation. However, when particular segments of society are rendered voiceless, violence occurs. For instance, it seems to me that Latinas are underrepresented and often go unrecognized in literature. Latin@s wrote nine books out of 742 reviewed by the New York Times, and of those nine, a woman wrote only one. What’s going on with these numbers? Where did the glory days of the Latina writer of the ’80s & ’90s go? Is this evidence of supposed Latino machismo, or just a problem magnified by a hierarchical system with minority women near the bottom?

RG: I just returned from the 2012 National Book Awards. Two of the finalists were Junot Díaz and Domingo Martinez. Díaz is our most recent Pulitzer Prize-winning Latino fiction writer (we have two—Díaz and Oscar Hijuelos); Martinez, a memoirist, is on his way. I attend the awards ceremony every year and have long since stopped being surprised by the lack of Latino finalists. I prefer to be pleasantly surprised by those who make the cut. A few years ago, I recall Luís Alberto Urrea stating that NBA stood for “No Browns Allowed.” A jab at the lack of minorities on the finalist lists. I’m trying to remember the last time one of ours received that nod, and I can only think of the late Victor Martinez for that incredible young adult novel Parrot in the Oven. In any case, yes, the National Book Awards matter—as do the National Book Critics Circle Awards and the Pulitzer Prizes—but if we don’t win those awards, if we aren’t reviewed in the New York Times, does that mean that we don’t exist, that what we write doesn’t matter? I don’t think so. We have to be careful with equating visibility and relevance with the white gaze. Just like we rolled our eyes when the Republican Party realized that we Latinos vote and are now a force to be reckoned with. It’s important to be graceful when we receive any kind of praise or recognition, but we shouldn’t cling to those moments as validation. Most of us will never be the subject of those moments. I sat there, drinking my martini and flirting with the Latino kid who served the wine. I was the only Latino at my table. Besides Junot and Domingo, I’m not sure there was another Latino guest in the room. And I chuckled, thinking, soon we Latinos will be sitting at every table. So don’t despair, raza. Few of us are invited to partake at the big table. Today. Tomorrow, we will be the big table. I sincerely believe that, which is why I don’t get frustrated at the lack of representation. Writers today should not bemoan their neglect. You will continue to be neglected. Hang your hat on the grace that the next generation will keep the memory of your journey alive when they look back and wonder: Who came before us? The glory days are ahead of us, not behind us.

AC: When you say “glory days” I wonder what the Latina writers from the ’80s and ’90s would say about that. From what I understand, those were incredibly tough years for women in publishing and writing. And I also know for a fact that those same writers that are taught and are part of our Latin@ canon continue to struggle to find time to write, to publish, to be produced, etc. But yes, if you look at the New York Times’ numbers on who is reviewed one would think Latinas are not writing or publishing. If you look at the figures from VIDA, women are being published in top journals in far fewer numbers than men. So I am not surprised that the disparity is also true among Latin@s. Again and again, when I sit on any committee to nominate writers to speak at an event, committee members always place men on the top of the list. Is it because of a favored aesthetic? Is it because they are more visible? Many years ago, I attended a conference where someone said that the reason men were more successful in the literary world is because men have wives. And when I think about the men I know who have mothers, sisters, girlfriends doing a lot of lifting so they could “succeed,” and I compare it to the women I know, many of whom are head of household, doing a bulk of the mothering, caring for their parents, doing “service” in academia, and definitely taking on more of the emotional labor at work, it’s no surprise that even if a woman finds the time to write, she doesn’t always have the resources and time to push her work out there like many of the men I know. But I want to end on a positive note. There are some wonderful first books out recently by Latina writers, such as Empire by Xochiquetzal Candelaria, One-Bedroom Solo by Sheila Maldonado, and Vida by Patricia Engel. I just received an amazing-looking galley of Raquel Cepeda’s Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina. And there are some very talented Latina writers that are in or who have recently graduated out of writing programs that have books in the works like Ivelisse Rodriguez, Daisy Hernandez, Catalina Bartlett, and Adriana Ramirez, all of whom are showing up in journals.

     We all have to do more of the kind of work that Rigoberto González does with his commitment to review Latin@ writers for El Paso Times. And what Sandra Cisneros does with Macondo, and Cristina García does with Las Dos Brujas, where many Latin@ writers find a space to write and develop their work.

JFH: Ah yes, the question of gender and literary order bears its little fuzzy, stinky head. Remember when Roberto Trujillo wrote an article on Chicano literature in the San Francisco Examiner in 1992 and said that since 1892 only 1,000 novels had been published by Latin@s or writers writing as Chican@s? Well, this is a big question. Things have moved quite a bit since 1992 and Latinas have been a big part of the shift.

     The question being posed has to do with “incorporation” into the literary order—do we talk about numbers or do we talk about monumentalization? That is, do we talk about how many Latinas “get in” or do we talk about a kind of selective and groomed appointment of one or two? Or do we look at the text-in-the-community? Which is the most important one? Or are all equally important?

     You are right; now is a new time. There is a lot being done by women. And there is so much going on. As Isaac Rosenfeld said in the late ’40s of the status of Jewish writers at mid-century, we are at a “turning point.” Latina women writers in particular are charging ahead, regardless.

     The Cinnamon Tsunami is here.

CGS: I had the amazing privilege of editing an anthology of contemporary Latin@ writers with the poet and scholar John Chávez. The book will be published by Counterpath Press in 2014, and we were moved to edit it because we wanted to index the incredibly groundbreaking poets and writers working today. The range, the ambition, the urgency—it’s thrilling. We also felt that stewardship was an important aspect to our roles as writers of color, as Latin@s.

     But this is not enough. My sense is that Latin@s have to infiltrate (and I’m using that charged and political word very deliberately) the strata that exist beyond the world of writing books. We should be reviewing books for major publications like the Times, editing books at major publishing houses or local micro-presses.

     Every cultural movement requires two important ingredients: idea, and the dissemination of that idea. According to Francisco Lomelí, “The rebellious and militant 1960s left an imprint on us as Chicanos. We came to the full realization of the capabilities we had at our disposal through the written word. If in the past literature represented a means with which to express a passing moment of beauty, in the ’60s it became a concrete mechanism with which to convey images of our particular experience. In a sense, we had to undo a long history of misconceptions, distortions, and caricatures that misrepresented our way of being. The Chicano Movement provided a context in which we could function, thrive, and finally declare our artistic independence and demand self-determination—the right to define our art in its own terms.”

     As other panelists have pointed out, we’ve written the books; now we have to storm the castle and participate in the conversation and production of the books. We also have to make a case that this production is sustainable, both to the public and to the young Latin@s who are considering becoming writers.

CE: I think I can only answer this question very obliquely. David’ s last question, as well as his first, began with an idea of silence. I’d like to say a few things about silence’s particular power here. Juan Felipe said earlier, “there are so many variations on silence,” and he mentions the “language of silence,” which is often thought to be in poetry’s domain. Indeed, sometimes you read a poem, and the white space is so present, so glitteringly silent, that one feels the writer had to cross a tundra to get to the next line. Some speech can only come out of silence.

     But political silencing is a different breed, as is the social silencing David draws out with these numbers of reviews and publications. What is most important is that we keep writing. I can’t speak to the way in which the fiction market works––what gets published, what sells, what some nameless audience wants to read. Latinas, younger ones, older ones, need to keep writing. The most invisible form of silencing is self-censorship, and in my opinion, it is the most insidious form. Do racist immigration laws in Arizona have a trickle-down effect, plaguing the nascent artist with voices that say, “you are not smart enough,” “no one is interested in what you have to make”? I think the answer is, Yes. And so we have to keep writing and supporting organizations such as CantoMundo, and the literary program Letras Latinas with their Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize (which has just published the terrific poet, Laurie Anne Guerrero). There are wonderful presses outside of the New York Time’s attention that are publishing important work, like Carmen’s press, Noemi. I’m heartened by the efforts of people like Carmen and Francisco Aragón and all the founders of CantoMundo.