Nuestras Voces, Our Voices: Emerging Latina writers talk about their work - Lisa Bradley

Editor's note: this is the 13th in a monthly (sometimes twice-monthly) series of guest blog posts in which emerging Latina writers talk about their work, their process and what inspires them. 

Lisa M. Bradley writes speculative fiction and poetry. She has work forthcoming in Strange Horizons, Stone Telling, and Mythic Delirium. Originally from South Texas, she now lives in Iowa with her spouse, child, and two cats. Her latest project is a weekly blog series, "Writing Latin@ Characters Well." She listened to "Why We Build the Wall" (from Anaïs Mitchell's album Hadestown) nonstop as she wrote the following essay.

Borders

I think about borders. A lot.

It's probably natural, considering I grew up in South Texas, just minutes away from the international border. Once when I was young and living with my grandparents, a couple of men came to our door. Wet, ragged. Exhausted, wary. I fetched Gram and after speaking with them for a few minutes, she went to the kitchen and put together leftovers in aluminum foil for them, then tersely sent them on their way. I remember being surprised that my grouchy grandmother was giving food to apparent strangers. She didn't even like it when I served myself too large a glass of milk. I asked her who those men were, and she said they'd just crossed the river. She was pensive the rest of the day.

"The river" was, of course, the Rio Grande. I was amazed that the men had crossed a river without a boat, that they were on the run. I tried to imagine how scared and excited they were to be in another country, to be doing something illegal. I hoped they got away.

Another time, I went to Bentsen State Park with my family. The river runs right alongside the park, and when I looked across the sunny water, I saw sparse trees, some happy, relaxed goats, some people. I remember thinking, "That's Mexico. Those are Mexican goats. Those are Mexican people." I had to tell myself, because otherwise I wouldn't believe. The land over there looked exactly the same as on the American side. So did the goats. So did the people. We waved to each other. "That's Mexico" I told myself, trying to make it real. Trying to believe.

Living in Iowa hasn't diminished my interest in borders. If anything, the physical distance has brought the concept of borders into sharper focus. The novel I'm revising now is set in a west Texas town that's been quarantined after an industrial accident. The town is surrounded by watchtowers, an electrified fence, and a trench. The residents trapped inside protect themselves from violent neighbors by building barricades and booby-traps. Before long, it's impossible to tell who is fenced off and who is trapped inside, who the walls protect and who they keep out.

Even when I'm not writing about physical or geographic borders, I'm thinking about the hazy lines that divide one community from the next, one cause from another, one persona from the multiple voices inside our heads. I like to find chinks in the fences. My blog series "Writing Latin@ Characters Well" is an attempt to help non-Latin@ writers nudge under the fence of Thou Shalt Nots that discourages them from writing the Other.

A friend asked me to write specifically about the differences between what (conversations) the Latin@ community shares among themselves and what it shares with outsiders. This is the kind of question I love, but perhaps I am the wrong person to answer it. After all, I am so fond of transgressing. Is there anything I keep solely to mis compadres? Or even mis comadres? And if I can't keep private matters private, am I likely to be trusted by the community I seek to represent?

In How to Tame a Wild Tongue, Gloria Anzaldúa wrote, "being Mexican has nothing to do with which country one lives in. Being Mexican is a state of soul — not one of mind, not one of citizenship. Neither eagle nor serpent, but both. And like the ocean, neither animal respects borders."

By this definition, I am Mexican through and through, from one liminal "end" to an infinite number of other quasi-endpoints. My fascination with gaps in the walls, with crossing rivers fences laws, is not a barrier to but an illustration of my belonging to this group.

So maybe I'm a fine person to ask "what is shared and what kept hidden in Latin@ communities?" I'll poke at the question the same way I do all the fences blocking my view. I may not find an answer, but man…

It'll be fun tearing down the wall.

Nuestras Voces, Our Voices: Emerging Latina writers talk about their work - Ezzy Guerrero-Languzzi

Editor's note: this is the 11th in a monthly (sometimes twice-monthly) series of guest blog posts in which emerging Latina writers talk about their work, their process and what inspires them.

Ezzy Guerrero-Languzzi  received her B.S from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, is currently completing her MEd in School Guidance at Cambridge College, and plans to pursue a CAGS in Trauma Studies. She believes in the curative effects of bibliotherapy. She is a writer who is strongly influenced by the sciences, and is currently working on a YA novel with the working title, Where Hazard Meets New Hope. She also blogs at Sincerely, Ezzy. She lives in Massachusetts with her husband, son, dog, and two chickens.

Writing authentically

I didn’t grow up wanting to be a writer. A doctor, nurse, biologist, or astronomer, maybe, but a writer? Never. In fact, the thought didn’t occur to me until 2008, when I enrolled in an online grammar course through the Writer’s Digest. Something came alive in me during that grammar course ... a compulsion to continue enrolling in workshops. One class led to another, until I’d taken courses in the essentials: voice and viewpoint, dialogue, creativity and expression, plot and structure, and 12 weeks to a novel’s first draft —yeah, right— twice.

It’s also around then that I started to read books written by diverse authors, not necessarily ones you’d immediately find on the bestseller’s tables at Barnes and Noble. Imagine at my age, reading in print for the first time, thoughts I’d never shared with anyone, thinking that as the daughter of immigrant parents my feelings were unique. I’ve discovered voices I wish I’d read 20 years ago.

With each book I’ve read, I’ve also, realized how much I have yet to learn about storytelling. Certainly the workshops helped me hone my writing skills, but no workshop could teach me how to write authentically. This probably explains why, when friends ask about my work in progress, I change the subject and ask them what books they’re reading. First, because I love to talk about books, but second, because I’m superstitious. They remain unfinished.

Some (un)writerly quirks about me …

• I spend more time thinking about my story than I do actually writing it.

• My WIP is a cloud that follows me everywhere I go.

• For every four hundred pages I read, I’ll write maybe four.

• The best ideas come to me at the worst times.

• The main character in my current novel is who I wish I could’ve been.

• I’m structured about most everything, except for my writing.

• I both love and hate to write – simultaneously.

• Being focused on the journey, rather than the finished product, helps me keep my sanity.

My current novel’s narrator is a 13-year-old Mexican-American girl, who attends private school on a scholarship with her two younger sisters. The story is set in Southern California and takes place during her spring break, when a series of events and tragedies change her life. Sibling rivalry, family secrets, and cultural drama are a few of the topics I tackle, sometime, with a bit of dry humor. 

Here’s a glimpse into one of the novel's scene:

A tricked-out, neon purple car crawled low to the ground toward us, like a cat ready to pounce. Had it not been for the synthesized music turned low I might not have heard it until it was too late. It wasn’t until the car pulled up under the street lamp that I made out the silhouette of El Flaco sitting in the back seat of the car. Amber flecks lit up behind him like fireflies. Somebody smoked in the seat next to him.  

Fear ran through me, covered me like a sheet of ice. I couldn’t move and sensed Celeste had taken a step back.

El Flaco leaned out of the open back window, looking like he did every day, without a care in the world. The hazy street lamp barely illuminated his dark features. “You ladies wanna party?” 

Somehow I knew that my kind of party, the kind with balloons, a cake, and piñata, was not the kind of party this gangbanger had in mind. 

“You better get out of here before my papi comes out,” I said with an uneven voice. Then the words just spilled out. “Can I ask you something?” I might as well have started digging my own grave. 

El Flaco laughed and motioned to me with his chin. “Shoot.” I could barely make out his black eyes under the bandana he wore. He’d rested his arm on the side of the car. That’s when I saw for the first time that he had a tattoo of the Virgin Mary running the entire length of his upper arm, from his elbow to his shoulder. He wasn’t all that flaco, either, had some meat on those bones after all. 

“Why’d you have to burn my parents’ shop?” 

“That wasn’t us, morenita.” 

“You’re a liar. I don’t believe you. You did it to get back at my father.” 

“I don’t care what you believe,” he said, settling back inside the dark vehicle. “Maybe you should check with your old man." 

© Ezzy Guerrero-Languzzi, 9/3/2013. No part of this excerpt may be used for any purpose without Ezzy Guerrero-Languzzi's express, written permission.  

Heads up! Books are forbidden

This column first appeared in Spanish in Al Día news, April 13. Read it here.

I’ve been closely following Arizona schools compliance with House Bill 2281, a measure that pulled Mexican-American history and literature from the curriculum and, quite literally, off the classroom shelves. Some of the big names in U.S. Latino fiction and poetry have been deemed inappropriate for young Latino students to read as part of their school work.

Like that state’s noxious and contested immigration law, the move cannot be read as anything but a blatantly anti-Latino move. Unlike SB 1070, however, this ruling doesn’t bother to disguise its prejudice with the excuse of illegal entry or unauthorized residence. No, this move simply seeks to make sure Latino students, citizen and non-citizen alike, don’t get too uppity.

Because that’s what being engaged by education does. That’s what seeing your history and heritage seriously considered and represented in academic texts does. That’s what identifying with literary protagonists who might look like you, or sound like you, or live like you, does. It makes you damn uppity and harder to disenfranchise and bamboozle.

It gives you voice.

Poet Lorna Dee Cervantes gave evidence of just that during a rally to protest the ban. It wasn’t until she read the works of U.S. Latino writers, she said, that she felt entitled to put her words on paper. She went on to become not only a university professor, but one of the best known U.S. Latina poets.

The importance of Cervantes’ example should not be underestimated. Young Latinos grow up barraged with images of themselves as nannies, housekeepers and farmworkers — not writers, intellectuals and academics. Understand, I’m not disparaging that first set of  occupations — all honorable jobs requiring far more specialized skills and abilities than we commonly attribute to them — but bemoaning the lack of visibility for the second set.

Arizona institutionalizes that lack by banning from the classroom evidence that young Latino students can, and do, grow up to be U.S. Latino historians and writers and intellectuals who are not satisfied with rehashing Anglocentric historical analysis or literary trope.

By its decision, Arizona denies that U.S. history is big enough to include the history of its Latino citizens and of their legacy, which includes (but is not limited to) an academic, intellectual tradition that predates any other in North America. (The first university in Mexico opened a full 100 years before Harvard, the first university in the U.S., and 127 years before the first university in Canada.)

None of those students will be exposed to or discuss in class the literary merits of the novels written by “las Girlfriends” (Sandra Cisneros, Denise Chavez, Julia Alvarez and Ana Castillo), some of the nation’s brightest Latina literary stars, because the measure prohibits courses or classes that "are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group" and the school boards in places like Tucson believe none but Latinos would be interested in such literature.

It is a disaster — not only for the Latino students, but for all high school students in Arizona. Is it any wonder the Quality Counts compiled by Education Week journalists in 2012 gave Arizona a C- for its educational efforts overall and a D+ for its K-12 education?

To my dismay as a Latina writer, there hasn’t been a huge outcry about the Arizona ban, certainly nothing akin to the furor we saw when school districts tried to ban Harry Potter novels a number of years back.

But there have been some wonderful and ingenious responses. Tony Diaz, known on twitter as @librotraficante (www.librotraficante.com), put together a book caravan of the banned books, handed those books out to students and started four underground libraries. Gina Ruiz, a writer and the blogger of Banning History in Arizona (www.banninghistory.blogspot.com), promoted a YouTube “read-in” of the banned books. And almost all of the writers whose words have been excised have advocated for the ban to be overturned — in person at rallies, in print or online.

All of them, giving voice.