Autobiography of My Hungers: Rigoberto González

Tino Rodríguez, 

"When You Hurt Me, I Won't Let It Show"

detail, oil on tin mounted on panel, 1999

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An Interview with Rigoberto González

conducted by Roberto Cruz

Autobiography of My Hungers introduces us to the life of a speaker looking to satisfy both his physical and mental appetites. It touches upon author Rigoberto González’s childhood and adult years. It is not only a book about struggle, but about growth, a journey to fulfill some of the voids present in life. It is not only a recollection of memories, but a reflection of each of the experiences that are there to tell both the story of a life, and the way in which these experiences shape a life. As the son of immigrant parents myself, some of the themes in this book spoke to me. As with González’s experience in his younger years, I too have learned from my experience of growing up in Houston.

The interview below is a tribute to some of the major components of this book. My questions were aimed at touching upon general themes, as well as specific pieces. They reflect upon some of González’s feelings throughout his life, and even on his thoughts on certain past experiences through the viewpoint of the present. Identity is a theme I address in some of my questions and his responses hint at the struggle, sometimes, of being comfortable assuming an identity that feels true rather than being limited by some of the people around him. Coming up with some of these questions and reading Autobiography of My Hungers caused me to reflect upon my own circumstances. González’s answers made me realize that growth is something that is lifelong and ongoing. Coming across this book certainly brought about this feeling that nothing is assured, life keeps changing and I will keep coming across experiences that will shape me in a different way. There should never be any rush to have your life figured out.

—Roberto Cruz, University of Notre Dame (class of 2017)

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Roberto Cruz: I noticed that the “piedrita” excerpts are introduced every few chapters. How do you see these functioning in the book? Was their placement intentional or somewhat random?

Rigoberto González: The piedritas are dispersed to appear random but they’re actually connected to the timelines of the sections. I wanted these poem-like pieces to be a visual contrast to the prose (which is why they are shaped by italicized lines not sentences) and to represent the surprising little finds I reference in the opening piece, which explains what piedritas are and how they too are valuable finds. In the earlier drafts of the book I had no piedritas included, so it read like a much different book. Including them allows the reader to pause and reflect more often--particularly critical since many of the entries are heavy with emotion and imagery.

RC:  Different chapters of the book deal with different desires, both internal and external. Is this idea of desire meant as the book’s foundation given its title?

RG: Yes, desire is interchangeable with hunger—especially when that desire is not sated. Physical and emotional desire consume the body equally and can cause the body damage. But that doesn’t mean that the damage is irreparable—I also believe in the wondrous ability of the body to heal. Yet in order to heal, the body has to identify its wounds.

RC: The piece “fire” talks about the envy behind a family’s tragedy and ultimately their exit from that neighborhood because of a fire. Later on the book transitions into a later time in your life. Could you talk about how this might relate to your being able to escape an environment you seemed to dread?

 RG: A complex relationship to home, to family, is bittersweet in that way: we love but we want to leave. The decision to escape is connected to the reality that certain hungers will not be appeased at home. Certainly that’s why many have left the homes they love—for economic reasons, yes, and a lengthy history of migration from Mexico to the U.S. has been evidence of that. But I’m also alluding to the exodus of the LGBT community—how many of us leave home in order to survive, to be ourselves outside of silence and invisibility. My family left Mexico in order to live. I left my family in order to live.

RC:  Several of these pieces, like “trash” and “witch,” deal with strong reactions to the situation that you saw yourself living in as a child. How did this upbringing shape the decisions you faced as an adult?

RG: Those pieces were the most difficult to write. In fact, it took me 30 years to be able to write concretely about childhood poverty. I suppose there’s no greater incentive than such an experience to grow up wanting to achieve, to build memories shaped by success, not failure or dearth. Being haunted by poverty fueled my work ethic, my determination, my ambition. And in many ways I also considered my journey an extension of my parents’ journeys—I wanted our story, the story of the González family, to move away from want and unhappiness. Strangely, as I grew older I realized I encountered other kinds of wants—but struggle was nothing new to me by then, and I also knew that no desire had to be fatal.

RC:  You mention in your book that your family went back to Mexico, while you were able to stay in the United States and get an education, but then go on to write about your nostalgia for home. Could you talk about the process of establishing your identity while belonging to these two completely different worlds?

RG: When my family returned to Mexico in 1992 it was both freeing and frightening. My freedom was that I became completed independent—whatever choice I made would be reported back to family after the fact. Whatever mistakes I made were completely mine. Suddenly my life was in my own hands. But just as quickly the reality of the situation also came to light: I was alone, I had no home. I grew up hearing grow-ups consult each other, give themselves terrible advice, but also come to each other’s rescue. I had none of these options. Ironically, the longer I lived outside of that world the more I thought about it. My longing for that comfort zone became sated by my writing—simply returning was not the answer, but rather, examining that place I used to call home and reminding myself of its flaws as well as its blessings helped me make peace with my solitary journey. And not so solitary at that since memory became my constant companion. I’m not sure if that’s the best of both worlds but it’s certainly the most beneficial to a writer, an artist who mines the past to have a future. 

RC: The piece “voracious” seems to deal with a long trauma, with a part of your past that still haunts you. Do you consider this long standing hunger something you are managing to overcome or something you have learned to live with?

RG: When I was a college student I suffered from a number of eating disorders—kboth anorexia and bulimia. Whatever social anxieties I had became heightened in that unfamiliar territory I was now inhabiting. It wasn’t until my late 20s that I stopped, though I don’t think it was a conscious decision. I’m not sure what changed that but suddenly I was gaining weight and overeating. Since then I have learned to control my eating habits, somewhat, but there are some things I can’t shake, like being unable to leave food on my plate without guilt or being unable to keep much food in my apartment. To this day when I have guests they’re surprised I have very little to nothing in the fridge. That inability to store food I have learned to live with. I’m not sure what kind of lesson I’m offering here but I believe it’s something I will be exploring in a future project. I’m still thinking about this.

RC:  Throughout the book it is evident that there is a certain company that you long for. Was being a gay immigrant something that made it harder to find the company you were looking for?

RG: Yes, absolutely. It’s not coincidence that most of my boyfriends have also been gay immigrants from Guyana, the Philippines, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic. There’s a special unspoken affinity I have for men who understand the nature of cultural displacement and dislocation. I also write about my only girlfriend, who was born in Taiwan. I don’t have to explain the longing for home to any of them; they understand. I believe that’s why I have lived in NYC all these years. It’s a place of immigrants. But that commonality doesn’t translate into a functional relationship necessarily. Still, I have hope. I can’t see myself at this moment building a partnership with someone who doesn’t have a connection to a distant place, culture or language on the map.

RC: This is a very powerful book that touches upon a lot of experiences and how they shaped you, amongst these was your mother’s death. Would you say that her death added to the longing for the company that seems to be a major theme throughout the book?

RG: I believe so. Hers was the single loss that never quite healed. I was only 12 when she died. Thirty-two years later I still miss her and that feeling of being loved by someone who wants only the best for me. I have yet to find that in my life, and I say that with the utmost respect for my good friends and few relatives who are still alive. I suppose I have romanticized that intimacy to an extent that nothing will come close to it, but I’m fine with that—it becomes a high standard, not necessarily unreachable. For the moment I am living my life, content to be doing what I love best—writing. I’m nurtured by my work, the few friends who can put up with my moody nature, and by the knowledge that what I’m laboring over is being read and appreciated. It’s not such a bad place for a man like me who used to be a child with very few things to call his own, with very little room to dream.

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to learn more, visit: 

Rigoberto González

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April 10, 2014:

Rigoberto González on Carlos Fuentes

Carlos Fuentes: A Remembrance

by Rigoberto González

One injustice at the news of this death is that he never received the Nobel nod like his two formidable contemporaries from la Generación del Boom, Gabriel García Márquez from Colombia, and Mario Vargas Llosa from Perú, the latter just two years ago. (México’s only Nobel laureate in literature is Octavio Paz, who received the award in 1990.) This oversight, however, doesn’t lessen Fuentes’s importance or even threaten his stature as a giant of letters. He was México’s greatest critic and ambassador.

The details of his other awards and recognitions, his literary and journalistic accomplishments, his role as a cultured and savvy observer of shifts and trends in global politics can be found in the many biographical portraits that mushroom in cyberspace as soon as a figure of such renown passes away. I’d like to offer instead a more personal account, a “What does Carlos Fuentes mean to me?”

I would be lying if I said I knew who he was when I met him. This was in 1988, when I was a freshman at UC-Riverside, and Fuentes was one of the distinguished speakers in the university’s lecture series. I was simply drawn to the event because of his name, Mexican-sounding like mine. What a surprise to discover that indeed he was Mexican, though in the dark suit and with a receding hairline he resembled a banker from my country. The evening proceeded with politeness and dignity, until he began to read from his newest project, the novel Christopher Unborn, and the passage that imagines the conception of a narrator who, in utero, wonders what kind of place he will be born into 500 years after Columbus first set foot on the New World.

When I finally read that book, a decade later, I recognized the indictments Fuentes was making about the corrupt, polluted “Make-sicko City.” But at the time I simply sat there mesmerized by how this middle-aged man had broken out of his banker shell. His forehead glistened, and the spittle leaping off his lips was made visible in the stage lights. He held a copy of the book in one hand and chopped the air with the other, accentuating his delivery of a lengthy, winding road of sentences. But the climax of the reading, what gave me pause, keeping me suspended on a sound for the rest of the night, was when he uttered the word, “nalgas.” Yes, “nalgas,” perhaps the most comic of words in the Spanish language, an appropriate visitor in a description of two people groping at each other’s bodies on a beach. I dared to smile and decided right then and there that I would have to meet this brave, funny man face to face because I knew what he was doing, disarming the crowd with his conservative look, only to turn around and startle all of us with a steamy sex scene, with “nalgas.” Wasn’t that always the best strategy? The Trojan horse approach: Get in there first and then cause a stir. If they see you coming they will simply lock the doors! I have lived by that lesson ever since.

I stood in line for about 45 minutes to get my books signed. I bought the cheapest ones, paperback editions of The Death of Artemio Cruz and The Old Gringo. When I finally had my chance in front of Mr. Fuentes, whatever I had rehearsed to say had flown right out of my head.

He appeared broken down, fatigued, but he smiled back anyway. I handed him one book and he asked in English, “Who is this for?” And I said it was for me, “Rigoberto.” I handed him the other book. “And this one?” he asked. “It’s for me also,” I said. He looked up at me and laughed, so I laughed with him, not understanding why that was so funny. I knew my time was up, but I went for it anyway and said to him before I was turned away, “Yo soy de Michoacán. Yo también voy a ser escritor.” He humored me and answered, quite gently, “Pues, suerte, muchacho. Nada más cuídate los dedos.” He raised his hands up to show me and I was stunned: he had crooked index fingers. Many years later, I would read how he continued to write on a typewriter, using only those two digits. Another lesson I would come to learn about being a writer: its physical toll.

I have another confession. I didn’t always keep up with Fuentes’s books, though it pleased me to no end whenever he commented on this or that, particularly about the United States. When the English-only movement caught fire in this country, Fuentes quipped: “Those poor Americans. They’re determined to be the only monolingual idiots of the twentieth century.” He called it as he saw it, and it didn’t matter who didn’t want to hear it because his was a voice with volume enough to crack the walls of pretense and false posture--on both sides of the border.

What does Carlos Fuentes mean to me? Fearlessness, determination, and an enviable work ethic. I am saddened by his passing, but the clarity of his vision, the ferocity of his words, will continue to keep us honest, but only if we don’t succumb to the deceptive rhetoric of those who call themselves leaders and then lead us straight into the poverty of surrender.

Review Roundup--January 6, 2012

Rigoberto González reviews Luis Rodríguez’s It Calls you Back (Simon & Schuster, 2011) 

I have to confess that I have still to read It Calls You Back. And this confession comes from one who considers Luis Rodríguez’s work—both in deed and word—bedrock in his literary formation. When reading Luis Rodríguez’s work I am often reminded that if one discovers a writer in a felicitous hour—in the wakefulness of spirit, in a moment of uncommon joy or suffering—that poet becomes for that reader a tutelary and redemptive spirit. For me this first encounter with Rodríguez came sometime back in 2005: Luis was giving a reading at Sonoma State University, I was a junior in high school and without a clue to the world that lay beyond a precarious upbringing. Luis read “My Name is Not Rodríguez.” That evening was my first on a college campus and that poem a baptism into the world of poetry. I went home with a copy of Always Running: La Vida Loca and a sudden urge to write: I don’t know from where or how this came to me but that night I wrote my own version of that poem—pure fire, pure nonsense.  Years later now and at different crossroads, it is with this same sense of urgency and redemption that I find myself coming full circle and returning to It Calls You Back.

Here is what Rigoberto González (who is slated to read at installment three of Latino/a Poetry Now Macalester College in October of this year) had to say:

In 1993, Luis J. Rodríguez released "Always Running: La Vida Loca," a best-selling memoir that's been celebrated for its honest portrayal of a youth on drugs and involved with gangs in Los Angeles. The impetus for the book was an attempt by the author to save his son Ramiro from succumbing to the temptations that compelled Rodriguez to join a gang by age 11 and end up in jail as a teenager.

In a long-awaited sequel, "It Calls You Back" (Simon & Schuster, $24.99 hardcover), Rodríguez confronts another stark reality: his failure to spare Ramiro that devastating fate -- including prison time. The author takes a closer look at his own life journey after his release from jail, to understand why that crucial second chance was not an option for his firstborn.

Click HERE to read the review.

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The Write Christine reviews Ruben Quesada’s Next Extinct Mammal (Greenhouse Review Press, 2011)

Of Ruben Quesada’s debut collection D.A. Powell writes: “Like Whitman, Quesada is a poet of motion—journeying to the center of the US, where the traditions and innovations of first-generation Americans transverse the meditative starbursts of hills…. From Costa Rica to Los Angeles and across the continent, Quesada’s poems chronicle one family’s history…carries us toward “that seam in space” where dream and experience intersect.” But not everything in this collection is sheer movement. Two of my favorite poems in this collection are “My Parents Meet” and “Father.” In “My Parents Meet” Quesada writes: “He cuts in/ on her./ His parted hair absorbing the lights,/ nesting wings of a carrion…. Bodies tangled, curve vanishes,/ against curve; fitting into each other, a human/ jigsaw: ear to temple, nape/ to palm, forearm cradles/ hip, lips enters face—.“  In “Father” the speaker is moved by the details on his father’s face: the “aquiline/ nose, the mole above/ your right eyebrow that rises/ when you laugh.” There are also moments of unexpected tenderness and playfulness that act as kind of anchors to a reader that may suddenly find herself transcribed to a place of being, a place far from constant movement and withering. What Ruben evokes over and over again in this collection is the ever elusive and endangered animal of memory. His poems, portraits of neighborhoods and its people are above all poems of moving toward memory, toward the edges of beauty, of “the alpenglow of tomorrow and tomorrow.”

Here is what The Write Christine had to say:

Ruben Quesada’s début collection of poetry, Next Extinct Mammal, is a rare treat of imagery and frankness. At a time when plain, unadorned, weird and disjointed poetry is celebrated and sought, and after so much effort has been put, for so many years, into the rejection of style – into undoing Symbolism, undoing Romanticism, undoing Confessionalism, undoing Imagism – and into reform and political awareness and academic snobbery, reading the work of a poet who is not afraid of himself or of the life and thoughts he keeps company with is a welcome change of pace.

If there is a flaw in Quesada’s writing, it’s a touch of immaturity and simplicity and perhaps an overabundance of the aforementioned frankness, but if the book is green around the edges, the middle of it is in full blom. As a unit, it paints the story of a first-generation American and his family, and breathes to life a vivacious stranger in an even stranger land dreaming not only of belonging to blood and place but of belonging to the cosmos and the edges of time and beauty. Poem to poem, Quesada delivers surprising portraits of neighborhoods, rooms, and women, of changing seasons and cities, of mothers and fathers and sisters. Soft images with sharp hidden edges appear around the corners of sentences where we don’t expect them to appear, releasing us as readers from our expectations and evicting us from our own surroundings, transplanting us into another, less judgmental place.

Click HERE to read the review. 

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Heather Treseler reviews Deborah Parédez’s This Side of Skin (Wings Press, 2002)

Keeping up with what is quickly becoming a Letras Latinas Blog tradition (the re-posting and re-appreciation of already published reviews) in these Review Roundups, and taking advantage to wish happy tenth birthday to Deborah Parédez’s collection This Side of the Skin (2002) I present you here with a review of Deborah Parédez’s This Side of the Skin by Heather Treseler and which first appeared in issue

2 of Latino Poetry Review.

Here is what Heather Treseler had to say:

As her title suggests, Deborah Parédez's first collection of poetry plumbs liminal worlds. From the classical epic to the epidermal quick, Parédez explores a roughly hewn, unhybridized world in which stories from Hades perpetuate in the minds of the living, and elegies—for forsaken loves, childhood sublimity, veterans of violence, and the characters of nostalgia—offer a shapely sadness, a rhythm ultimately heartening in the courage of its returns. In over forty dramatic lyrics, Parédez's work unfolds a mythology of her own making. Engaging with tropes from Greek fable and German poetry, Texan heartlands and salsa dance-floors, Parédez's major themes of exile and divisionary worlds evince an admirable breadth, a restless picaresque verve that dares its critics to assign this collection to any single category.

Click HERE to read the review.  

Rigoberto González reads from Black Blossoms at Clarksville, Tennessee’s Austin Peay State University

On September 15th, Rigoberto González read from his newest collection of poems Black Blossoms (Four Ways, 2011). Afterwards he introduced poet Amanda Auchter winner of the 2010 Zone 3 First Book Award for Poetry, an annual contest hosted by Austin Peay State University and judged recently by González.

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One of the most searing impressions I have of the first CantoMundo gathering is this one: we are all gathered in a conference room at New Mexico’s National Hispanic Cultural Center—this is the last session of the workshops—we are wrapping up this first CantoMundo experience when a poet walks in. This man commands our attention; he gives off sparks as he walks. Imagine it for a second: he walks as if in a magnetic mantle, pulling us in as if we were iron or nickel. To say that at that time I knew who this man was would be deceitful. That poet’s name is Rigoberto González. I was in the presence of a giant and I did not know it.

To say that Rigoberto Gonzalez is a prolific writer would be an understatement.  The breadth of his work expands the memoir, the novel, the short story collection, the YA novel, the children’s picture book, and three collections of poetry, including the brand new Black Blossoms (Four Way, 2011), which was recently reviewed in Publisher’sWeekly.
 

But Rigoberto is also a generous man. To not mention his hard work promoting and enhancing the visibility and appreciation of Chicano/Latino writers would be to reduce his stature to the size of a pencil’s eraser. It would suffice here for example to mention his gracious introduction of Momotombo author Octavio R.Gozalez’s The Book of Ours (Momotombo Press, 2009). Or his ten years as a book-review columnist for the El PasoTimes.  Or his editing of Camino del Sol: Fifteen Years of Latina and Latino Writing (University of Arizona Press, 2010), which recently won 1st place in the poetry in English category at the International Latino Book Awards, and Xicano Duende: An Anthology (Bilingual Press, 2011) by Chicano poet Alurista, which Rigoberto edited and introduced.

I recently read So Often the Pitcher Goes to Water until It Breaks. Rigoberto’s poems here are a litany of characters, inhabiting a world of death and loss and even love, but never safety.  In his poem “Horn” Rigoberto writes of a bleeding bull—his horn violently snapped from the skull. Rigoberto writes: “There is no seeking pity,/ no screwing the horn back on.” Rigoberto’s poem too—like the bull—rocked me, snapped my horn off and now too—for me—there is no screwing the horn back on.

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Also check out Artemio Rodriguez’s print titled ‘’Que Culpa Tengo Yo De Ser TanGuapo” inspired by Rigoberto González’s poem “Papi Love” which was part of Letras Latinas’ collaborative project “Poetas y Pintores: Artists Conversing withVerse.” And keep Rigoberto González on your radar as Letras Latinas launches the multi-year reading series “Latino/a Poetry Now” this November. González is slated to read in installment three of the series, at Macalester College, in the Fall of 2012, alongside Xochiquetzal Candelaria and Lorena Duarte.

And finally a treat: Check out this taped recording of Rigoberto reading from his newest collection Black Blossoms:

--Lauro Vazquez