(Dagoberto Gilb, Luis J. Rodriguez, John Phillip Santos) The event will be a reading of selected and new works by two of the most important American writers reflecting on the experiences and story tradition of the Latino community. Both Luis J. Rodriguez and Dagoberto Gilb are also involved in innovative initiatives in creative writing education and community efforts committed to positive social change. Question and answer with discussion will follow.

Published Date: April 26, 2013

Transcription

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the AWP Podcast series. This event originally occurred at the AWP Conference in Chicago on March 2nd, 2012. The recording features Luis J. Rodriguez and Dagoberto Gilb. You will now hear John Phillips Santos provide introductions.

 John Phillips Santos:

Thank you, Christian. This is second or third year that the Macondo Foundation has the great honor and privilege to present writers at the AWP Conference. So we are particularly honored and delighted to be able to bring today to Chicago two great voices of American literature. All the more powerful for the fact that they speak of communities that American literature has virtually not dared to cast its gaze upon, and they do it with voices that are really unforgettable, that are historically unforgettable. Dagoberto Gilb will read first, Luis Rodriguez will read following that. Dagoberto is the author of Before the End, After the Beginning, recently published in November by Grove Press. And his previous books include The Flowers, Woodcuts of Women, the Essays Gritos, Last Known Residents of Mickey Acuna, and The Magic of Blood. He's also edited Hecho En Tejas, a massive volume that canonically gathers the work of Texas Mexican writers, the stuff that Arizona is banning these days. And many authors in that volume are proud to be among the list of the banned books in Arizona.

Dagoberto also has written for Harper's, recently for New Yorker, Kalulu, and is widely anthologized. He's a winner of the Guggenheim Fellowship Writing Award, Penn Hemmingway Award finalist, Penn Southwest Award. I think those are victories, actually not finalists. And his books have been a finalist for the Penn Faulkner and National Book Critic Circle. He's also the Executive Director of the new Centro Vitoria, a cultural center for Mexican American literature and Culture at the University of Houston in the great historic capital of Vitoria Texas, a place where he is committed to working with the community for the sake of the advancement of the culture. So with no further ado, Dago Gilb.

 Dagoberto Gilb:

Everyone. Thank you. I hate for those to end. I like to be complimented, and I liked that he brought up Vitoria as the former capital of... no actually New Spain, but it was, [inaudible 00:03:05], yeah, and New Spain, what became Mexico and then we had a little trouble. And anyway, it's a pleasure to be here. I'm going to read a story that's in the collection and I want to thank everybody when I got here. I'm having some physical issues these days and like, "Oh my God, you don't have light. I can't see you without light." And they turn the light on, so I'm really happy. So anyway, bear with me if I screw up. But the story I'm going to read is called Uncle Rock.

In the morning at his favorite restaurant, Eric got to order his favorite American food, sausage and eggs and hash brown papitas fried crunchy on top. He'd be sitting there eating with his mother, not bothering anybody, and life was good, when a man started changing it all. Lots of times it was just a man staring too much, but then one would come over. Finally friendly, he'd put his thick hands on the table as if he were touching water and squat low so that he was at sitting level as though he was so polite. And he'd smile with coffee and tobacco stained teeth. He might wear a bolo tie and speak in a drawl, or he might have a tan uniform on a company logo on the back, an oval name patch on the front. Or he'd be in a nothing special work shirt, white or striped with a couple of pins clipped onto the left side pocket, tucked into a pair of jeans or chinos that were morning clean still with a pair of scuffed work boots that laced up higher than regular shoes.

He'd say something about her earrings or her bracelet or her hair or her eyes, or if she had on her white uniform, how nice it looked on her. Or he'd come right out with it and he'd tell her how pretty she was, how he couldn't keep himself from walking up speaking to her directly. And could they talk again? Then he'd wink at Eric. Such a fine looking boy. How old is he? Eight or nine. Eric wasn't even small for an 11-year-old. He tightened his jaw, then slanted his eyes from his plate at his mom and not the man. Definitely not this man he did not care for. Eric drove a fork into a goopy American egg yolk and bled into his American potatoes. She wouldn't offer the man Eric's correct age either saying only that he was growing too fast.

She almost always gave the man her number if he was wearing a suit. Not a sport coat, but a buttoned suit with a starched white shirt and a pinned tie meant something to her. Once in a while, Eric saw one of these men again at the front door of their apartment in the Silver Lake. The man winked at Eric as if they were buddies, grabbed his shoulder or arm, squeezed the muscle against the bone. What did Eric want to be when he grew up? A cop, a jet airline mechanic, a travel agent, a court reporter, a dog groomer? Eric stood there because his mom said he shouldn't be impolite. His mom's date said he wanted to take Eric along with them sometime the three of them. What kind of places did Eric think were fun? Eric said nothing. He never said anything when the men were around, and not because of his English, even if that was what his mother implied to explain his silence. He didn't talk to any of the men and he didn't talk much to his mom either. Finally, they took off and Eric's night was his alone.

He raced to the grocery store and about half a gallon of chocolate ice cream. When he got back, he turned on the TV, scooted up real close, as close as he could, and ate his dinner with a soup spoon. He's away from all the men, even though a man had given the TV to them. He was a salesman in an appliance store who'd bragged that a rich customer had given it to him, and so why shouldn't he give it to Eric's mom who couldn't afford such a good TV otherwise. When his mom was working as a restaurant hostess and was going to marry the owner, Eric ate hot fudge sundaes and drank chocolate shakes. When she worked at a trucking company, the owner of all the trucks told her that he was getting a divorce. Eric climbed into the rigs with the rooms full of dials and levers in the sky. Then she started working in an engineer's office. There was no food or fun there, but even he could see the money. He was not supposed to touch anything, but what was there to touch the tubes full of paper?

He and his mom were invited to the engineer's house where he had two horses and a stable, a swimming pool and two convertible sports cars. The engineer's family was there, his grown children, his gray-haired parents. They all sat down for dinner in a dining room that seemed bigger than Eric's apartment, with three candelabras on the table and a table and a tablecloth and cloth napkins. Eric's mom took him aside to tell him to be well-mannered at the table and polite to everyone. Eric hadn't said anything. He never spoke anyway, and so how could he have said anything wrong? She leaned into his ear and said that she wanted them to know that he spoke English. That whole dinner he was silent, chewing quietly, taking the smallest bites, because he didn't want them to think that he liked their food.

When she got upset about days like that, she told Eric that she wished they could just go back. She was tired of worrying. Back for Eric meant mostly the stories he'd heard from her, which never sounded so good to him. She had to share a room with her brother and sisters. They didn't have toilets, they didn't have electricity. Sometimes they didn't have enough. Sometimes they didn't have enough food. He saw this Mexico as if it were the backdrop of a movie on an afternoon TV, where children walked around barefoot in the dirt or on broken sidewalks and small men wore wide brim straw hats and baggy white shirts and pants. The women went to church all the time and prayed to alcove saints and heads down, fearful, counting rosary beads. There were rocks everywhere and scorpions and tarantulas and rattlesnakes and vultures and no trees. And not much water and skinny dogs and donkeys and ugly bad guys with guns and bullet vests who rode laughing into the town to drink and shoot off their pistols and rifles driving their horses all over like dirt bikes on desert dunes. When they spoke English, they had stupid accents. His mom didn't have an accent like theirs. It didn't make sense to him that Mexico would only be like that, but what if it was close?

He lived on paved, lighted city streets and a bicycle ride away where the Asian drugstore and the Armenian grocery store and the corner where Black Cubans drank coffee and talked Dodgers baseball. When he was in bed where he sometimes prayed, he thanked God for his mom who he loved, and he apologized for not talking to her or to anyone really except his friend Albert, who he apologized for never going to church for and for his never taking holy communion as Albert did. Only to God would he admit he wanted to because Albert did. He prayed for God to come for his mom and for him, since God was like magic. And happiness might come the way of early morning in the trees and bushes full of sparrows next to his open window, louder and louder when he listened hard, eyes closed.

The engineer wouldn't have mattered if Eric hadn't told Albert that he was his dad. Albert had just moved into the apartment next door and lived with both his mother and his father. And since Albert's mother already didn't like Eric's mom, Eric told him his new dad was an engineer. Eric actually believed it too, and thought that he might even get his own horse. When that didn't happen and his mom was lying on her bed in the middle of the day blowing her nose because she didn't even have a job anymore, that was when Roque came around again. Roque was nobody or he was anybody. He wasn't special. He wasn't not. He tried to speak English to Eric, thinking that was the reason that Eric didn't say anything when he was there. And Eric had to tell Albert that Roque was his uncle because the engineer was supposed to be his new dad any minute. "Uncle Rock," Eric said, his mom's brother, he told Albert.

Roque worked at night and was around during the day and one day he offered Eric and Albert a ride. When his mom got into the car, she scooted all the way over to Roque and on the bench seat who was supposed to be her brother, Eric's uncle Rock. Albert didn't say anything but he saw what had happened and that was it for Eric. Albert had parents, grandparents, and a brother and a sister, and he'd hang out only when one of his cousins wasn't coming by and Eric didn't need a friend like that.

What if she married Roque, his mom asked him one day. One day soon after she told Eric that they would move away from the apartment in the Silver Lake to a better neighborhood. He did want to move, but he wished that it weren't because of Uncle Rock. It wasn't just because Roque didn't have a swimming pool or horses or a big ranch. There wasn't much to criticize except that he was always too willing and nice, too considerate, too generous. He wore nothing flashy or expensive, just ordinary clothes that were clean and ironed, and shoes he kept shined. He combed and parted his hair neatly. He didn't have a buzz cut like the men who didn't like kids. He moved slow. He talked slow, as quiet as night. He only ever said yes to Eric's mom. How could she not like him for that? He loved her so much. And even could see his pride when he was with her. He signed checks and gave her cash. He knocked on the door carrying cans and fruit and meat. He was there when she asked, gone when she asked, back whenever, grateful. He took her out to the restaurants on Sunset, to the movies in Hollywood, or on drive to the beach in rich Santa Monica.

Roque knew that Eric loved baseball. Did Roque like baseball? It was doubtful. It was doubtful that he cared even a little bit. He didn't listen to games on the radio or TV, and he never looked at a newspaper. He loved boxing though. He knew the names of all the Mexican fighters as if they lived here. As if they were Dodger players like Steve Yeager or Dusty Baker, Kenny Landrow or Mike Marshall, Pedro Guerrero. Roque knew about Fernando Valenzuela, even everybody did, even his mom, which is why she agreed to let Roque take them to the game. What Mexican didn't love Fernando? Dodger Stadium was close to their apartment. He'd been there once with Albert and his family, well outside of it on a nearby hill to see the fireworks for 4th of July. His mom decided that all three of them would go on a Saturday afternoon since Saturday night, Eric thought, she might want to go somewhere else, even with somebody else.

Roque of course didn't know who the Phillies were. He knew nothing about the strikeouts by Steve Carlton, or the home runs by Mike Schmidt. He'd never heard of Pete Rose. It wasn't that Eric knew very much either, but there was nothing that Roque could talk to him about, even if they were to talk. If Eric showed his excitement when they drove up to Dodger Stadium and parked, his mom and Roque, I didn't really notice it. They sat in the bleachers and for him the green of the field was like a magic light. The stadium decks surrounding them seemed as far away as Rome. His body was somewhere it had never been before. The fifth inning, that's how late they were, or they were right on time. Because they weren't even sure where they were sitting in the right seats yet when he heard the crack of the bat, saw the crowd around them rising as it came at them.

Eric saw the ball. He had to stand and move and stretch his arms and want that ball until his bare hands and stayed there. Everybody saw him catch it with no bobble. He felt all the eyes and voices around him as if they were every set of eyes and every voice in the stadium. His mom was saying something and Roque too, and then finally it was just him, that ball in his stinging hands. He wasn't even sure if it had been hit by Pete Carrero. He thought for sure it had been, but he didn't ask. He didn't watch the game then, he couldn't. He didn't care who won. He stared at his official nation league ball, re-imagined what had happened. He ate a hot dog and he drank a soda and he sucked the salted peanuts and the wooden spoon from his chocolate malt ice cream. He rubbed the bumpy seams of his home run ball.

Game over, they were the last to leave. People were hanging around, not going straight to their cars. Roque didn't want to leave. He didn't want it to end so quickly, Eric thought, well, you still had her with him. Then one of the Phillies came out of the stadium door and people swarmed, boys mostly, but also men and some women and girls. And they got autographs before the players climbed into the team bus. "Joe Morgan," they said. Then Gary Maddox appeared. Eric clutched the ball, but he didn't have a pin. He just watched, his back to the gray bust the Phillies were getting into. Then a window slid open. "Hey, big guy," a voice said. Eric really wasn't sure. "Give me the ball, [Spanish 00:20:26]," the face in the bus said. "I'll have it signed, [Spanish 00:20:30]. Just toss it to me." Eric obeyed. He tossed it up to the hand that was reaching out.

The window closed. The ball was gone a while, so long that his mom came up to him worried that he'd lost it. The window slid open again and the voice spoke to her. "We got the ball, mom. It's not lost just a few more." When the window opened once more, this time the ball was there, "Catch." There were all kinds of signatures on it, though none that he could really recognize except for Joe Morgan and Pete Rose. Then the voice offered more and the hand threw something at him... And the voice threw something at him. "For your mom, okay? [Spanish 00:21:22]?" Eric stared at the asphalt lot where the object lay as if he'd never seen a folded up piece of paper before. " [Spanish 00:21:33]." He picked it up and he stared.

He started to walk over to his mom and Roque, who were so busy talking, he hadn't noticed anything. Then he stopped. He opened the note himself. No one had said he couldn't. "I'd like to get to know you," it said, you are [Spanish 00:21:55], very beautiful and sexy. I don't speak Spanish very good. Maybe you speak English better. [Spanish 00:22:04]. Would you come by tonight and let me buy you a drink?" There was a phone number and a hotel room number and a name too. A name that came at him the way that the home run had. Eric couldn't hear. He could only see his mom ahead of him. She was talking to Roque. Roque was talking to her.

Roque was the proudest man full of joy because he was with her. It wasn't his fault he wasn't an engineer. Now, Eric could hear again, like sparrows hunting seed, boys gathered round the bus, calling out while the voice in the bus was yelling at him, "Hey, big guy, give it to her." Eric had the ball in one hand and note in other. By the time he reached his mom and Roque, the note was already somewhere on the asphalt parking lot. "Look," he said in a full voice, "They all sign my ball." Thank you.

 John Phillips Santos:

Thank you, Dago. Al Macondo Foundation was founded in the mid-90s by Sandra Cisneros and became the locus of the Macondo Writers Workshop, which is held annually in the cool last weeks of July in San Antonio, Texas. It's grown from being a circle of writers gathered around Sandra's table in the mid '90s, to a community of over 150 writers. First year writers are usually called Mocosos. These are all terms that have been dubbed by Sandra. There are Famosos, and there are Chupa Rosas, the folks who come in and participate in some of the seminars but aren't fully teaching. But we've had unbelievably distinguished writers visit the workshop over the years. Elena Poniatowska recently. Leslie Marmon Silko, the poet I, many others. And among the greatest Luis Rodriguez joined us a few years back and has come back since. So Luis is here today also as Macondista, as a Famoso, non-Mocoso.

But Luis is the author of 14 books of poetry, children's literature, fiction and nonfiction. He's probably best known, at least for now, for the bestselling memoir, Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A. Like Dago, he's committed to the social change aspect of writing and he's the founder editor of Tia Chucha Press, which published many Latino writers and a small cultural center, Centro Cultural, the Tia Chucha Centro Cultural, in L.A, which also has a bookstore. Most recently though, Luis is the author of It Calls You Back: An Odyssey Through Love, Addiction, Revolutions, and Healing, published last year or late last year. And was recently announced as a finalist for the Nonfiction National book Critic Circle Prize, for which he will walk the red carpet next week in New York City. Please join me in welcoming Luis.

Luis J. Rodriguez:

Thank you. This is honor to be here with Dagoberto, with John, with all of you. I'm just going to share maybe a couple old, I say old, but some of my older work and then a couple news things. How's that sound? Good. We get consensus here, man. We democratic, we get consensus. So I'm going to start by little piece that comes from Always Running and Always Running has been banned for being very graphic sexually but also violently and everything else. And I'm going to read you the one little section that people tell me is probably the most graphic scene of all of it. And it has to do in, when I was in Watts, we moved from Ciudad Juarez, El Paso, to Watts when I was two years old. And so the first book deals with just growing up in that community, and this is a little image about my mother that I'm going to share with you. It's called Heavy Blue Veins.

Heavy blue veins streak across my mother's legs. Some of them bunched up into dark lumps at her ankles. Mama periodically bleeds them to relieve the pain. She carefully cuts the engorged veins with eraser and drains them into a porcelain like metal pale called a tina. I'm small and all I remember are dreams of blood, me drowning in a red sea, blood on sheets, on the wall, splashing against the white pale and streams out of my mother's ankle. But they aren't dreams. It is Mama bleeding in today, and tonight, bleeding a birth of memory, my mother, my blood by the side of the bed, me on the covers and her slicing into a black vein and filling the pale into some dark forbidding red nightmare. Which never stops coming, never stops pouring this memory of Mama and blood and Watts.

This next poem is another one of these older poems. I'm celebrating 18 years of sobriety, which is a very big important thing for me. Thank you. Thank you. But this is like one of my drinking poems. You can almost drink the poem. Anyway. It's called Rosalie Has Candles. Rosalie has candles and a circle around her bed. One night as I lay on a couch and a tequila stupor, she takes off my shoes and trousers, pulls a cover over me and snips two inches of hair from my head. She places the hair in the glass near the candles. I don't know why. I don't know why she searches for me. I don't know how she finds me in the bars. I don't know why she ridicules the women I like and uses me to meet men.

Rosalie usually finds solace and a glass of whiskey. In my face he finds the same thing. I don't know why. We argue too much. We fain caring and then hurt each other with indifference. With others we are tough and mean, but in the quiet of darkness we hold each other and caress like kittens. She says she can only make love to someone when she is drunk. She says she loves men but has lesbian friends. She loves being looked at. I want to hide. She hates struggle. That's all I do. She has god's to pray to. I just curse. I don't know what she sees in my face or hands for that matter. I only know she needs me like whiskey.

I want to read one of Mexico. It's in Merida. It's in Merida. It's called the Old Woman Of Merida. The old woman stares out an open window, shards of sunlight pierce her face, cutting shadows on skin. She is washing her hands, or after the dishes, dipping them into a sea of hues and shapes. A sea of syllables without sound, and a stone house in Merida, her Merida of dense Mexico. The water is a view to the distant place. Kitchen walls fall to reveal a gray sky. An array of birds in flight through fog, the crush white of waves, curling their feet. There appears a woman in forested hair, eyes of black pearl, who touches the hued face of a man and palms that feel like bark. She cringes at its blemishes and something in her careens against the walls of her heart. She never wants to let go. Never wants to stop tracing the scars above his eyebrows, the tattoos on black and skin while a lick of a tongue steers the night inside her. The old woman looks at water and into this vision shaped into a mouth, the mouth of the sea that swallowed her sailor husband so many sunlit windows ago.

You guys are so polite and calm. I'm going to read you some new poems, and I'm going to start with a poem about... For my two youngest sons. I have four kids, the oldest are in the mid-thirties, and my youngest is 17 and 23. And then I have four grandkids who are actually all teenagers. And one of them is actually going to the University of Central Florida. Can you imagine your grandkid going to college already? Yeah, no, it's amazing. It's great. Somebody's like, "Yay, Central Florida." So now I got more fodder for poems, but I'm going to read a poem about my two youngest boys who were born in Chicago. They still got Chicago in their blood, even though now we've been in L.A for many, many years. This is called Moonlight to Water, and it's for my youngest son's Ruben and Luis

Ruben recalled the day I brought mama and his baby brother home when he was six. In the backseat of the car, he said was an Asian looking child, hair sticking straight up on his head. Chito, short for Luisito looked this way because he's part Raramuri and Huichol. But mostly all universe. Ruben must have wondered about the galaxy of stars, bird songs and stories that had been dreamt to fashion such a boy. When Chito arrived, I'm sure Ruben knew his world would never be the same. Until then, Ruben had been our only child. To mom and dad. He was the screech of car breaks, a side to a bad joke, the glove to our ball. And now this, a bewildered boy gazing at a sweet faced earth child wrapped in a light blue blanket.

I asked Ruben what he thought about his brother. Eyes gleaming with his six-year old's clarity he answered, "Oh, I already knew him. I saw Chito when I was in mama's stomach." I gave Ruben look that I often offered and replied to his amazing observations. Somehow though the statement rang true. His younger brother was in the wings preparing to part the next one, patiently abiding his turn. As they grew older, Chito followed his brother's every move. Entering wide-eyed into Ruben's dense sphere, sharing the same music, games, imaginings. Ruben never hurt or exploited him as older brothers often do. The boys connected from the start. Like hummingbird to flower, like poems to breath, like moonlight to water brothers since the womb.

This next poem has to do with it... Part of it's actually in the new memoir. Some of my memoirs actually have some of my poems. Because you write these incidents and poems were the best way I could have written it so I don't have to rewrite them, just making prose, but they're actually part of the poem. So this one's called Fever Shape because when I was 18 years old, I was using heroin, I was in a gang. And earlier I was put in jail for murders row when I was 16 years old. And I had a cell right next to Charles Manson and the whole thing, it was an adult facility even though I was a youngster. And they had me in there because of three people who died in these riots, and the so-called riots. They really weren't riots, but that's what they called it.

And what happened is I started writing in jail. And some of that writing was really badly written. No good spelling. It had no punctuation, but I showed it to... I always dropped out. But I went back to school and I showed it to my counselor. She was a homeschool counselor, Chicana who was working with the community. I lived in this barrio that was considered if not the one of the poorest neighborhoods in LA County and it was called Las Lomas, The Hills. And it used to be an old migrant community of Oakies and Archies. You all remember the Oakies and Archie, Oklahoma Archies that came in the '30s? They started this little neighborhood called Wilmar because of Wilmar, Arkansas, and they even had a tattoo of Wilmar with a donkey because they were from Wilmar, Arkansas. Well, in the '40s it became all Mexican and so it stopped being called Wilmar became Las Lomas, The Hills. And just so you know, when I was living there up to the mid '80s, it was dirt roads, it was ravines and gullies and hills, abandoned cars and little shacks. There was one street, we called it Little Tijuana, Little TJ because it was just little shacks, really, really poor.

Anyway, I gave my little poems that I started writing to this counselor who was the homeschool coordinator for that neighborhood in the school. She typed them up and actually sent them into a contest, the Quinto Sol Chicano Literary Award. This is 1972, '73. And unbeknownst to me, I'm getting the honorable mention for this contest. I'm 18 years old and my writing gets honorable mention, so they invite me to come to Berkeley. They actually put me on the plane for the first time ever. And I'm still using, I'm still kind of messed up, but this is really exciting to me. Though unfortunately I got very sick over there because I wasn't using and I got very sick. But anyway, the point was I went.

And I went to my first poetry reading because all that writing I'd done, I never heard a poem, didn't know what a poem was, never heard a poet. And so this is the incident when I go to this poetry reading and the impact it had on me. And I have to mention that there was three great performance poets. Some of you know these people very well, Jose Montoya, the Godfather of Chicano poetry. I know what else you want to call him. He was reading. David Henderson, who was a leading African-American performance poet at the time. And the incomparable Pedro Pietri. Can you imagine those three guys in one room? And the first time I ever see poetry, I get to see them. So this is my poem. It's called Fevered Shapes, about that incident.

I wallowed in a needle, spawned world. Addicted to dope in the crazy life, and yet there I was in Berkeley for my first poetry reading. I was 18 with a bullet as they say. Earlier, I had flown on a plane for the first time. Sure, I've survived half a dozen gun assaults, cops knocking me around, ODs, blades to my neck in jail cells, homeless in dank streets, and beat downs in barrio brawls. But flying, that scared me to death. I sat there in a crowded cafe not knowing what to expect. Poetry, I never heard this before. Oh, I had written lines, vignettes, images, fears, thoughts. I didn't know they were poems. I had no idea what a poem was.

First up on the mic was Jose Montoya with Chicano prayers of old pachucos and strained loves and guitar solos and Indian hands and corn flour. Then David Henderson took the stage gleaning urban black streets, racist stairs, Black Panther fury, and Southern cooking. Finally, Pedro Pietri came up, new Yorican word meister, flashing at various experiences with poems located in phone booths and real life wisdoms that made us laugh and shake our heads. I had never heard words spoken in this way. More music than talk, more fevered shapes than sentences, more Che and Malcolm than Shakespeare. These poems came for me, lassoed my throat, demanded my life savings, taking me for a sunset ride, knocking me to the dust. These poems were graffiti scrawls along the alleys and trash thrown tunnels of my body. The metaphoric methadone for the heroin hurting through my bloodstream. The lifeline I already had inside and didn't know. These poems were pool sticks, darkened gangways, the sword of sunrise after the graveyard shift, a blood black yelling behind torn curtains, a child screaming and nobody coming to help.

They were a woman sent after night of lovemaking. A sweet touch of hand to face, cascades of hair on a pillow, a moan during an elongated kiss. These poems were shadowed in tents, startled doubts, sorrows without grief, the moon without sky, unknown melodies. The falling inside that happens when you push razor onto wrist. They came for me as I sank into my suicide, while fidgeting in a chair, inching under the skin, as I wondered why I even came. Jose, David, and Pedro, I was never the same after this. They came from me and I've never let go. They came from me and I've perspired poems ever since. They came from me and all my addictions, my sorry-ass lies, my falling mess, my pissed off wives, neglected children, angry friends, and back-to-back failures could never ever take them away. Thank you.

 John Phillips Santos:

Thank you, Luis. We have lots of time for questions, about half an hour, so be thinking of a few. I'm going to pitch the first one. Both of you all are Veteranos of the written word. Now, artists and artists who work alongside the work that you do as writers of fiction and nonfiction, poetry. Work very much through commitment to advance social change and the work that you do with the Centro Cultural and the work of Vitoria Hecho En Tejas Project. So I'm wondering how you all see the current moment in American literature with this Latino [Spanish 00:41:51] voice that you bring forward? Given that 20 years ago it probably would've been unlikely to have a reading featuring such voices in AWP Conference. But at the very same time, we're seeing the onslaught against Latino creativity places like L.A, parts of Texas, parts of California. How do you all reckon and understand the contradictory nature of the moment in which we see voices coming forward for the first time, but see this onslaught against voices like your own in American literary culture?

 Dagoberto Gilb:

You want to start?

Luis J. Rodriguez:

I have to mention Tucson because right now it's a battlefront. It's the frontline of our books, our literature. And it's not just about Chicano, Mexicanos, Latinos. It's really for every literature. Anybody that caress about writing has to battle against what's happening in Tucson. For those who don't know, they've shut down the Chicano Studies Department [inaudible 00:42:51] Studies. They're storing away books, banning books, 50 books at least that I know of. Many of our books are being banned. And what the beautiful thing have to mention is some of you are imparted with this, the Librotraficante people are bringing books from other communities going into Tucson, stopping it and creating independent libraries. This is to me where we're at. We need to fight this kind of closure of our minds and our imaginations and people are taking it on.

So my feeling is that that's the moment that we're in, that we've achieved so much as [Spanish 00:43:25], as writers, literarily in all kinds of ways. And yet there's still all this pushback. But the difference is that we've been here long enough, we are not... In other words, we're going to take it on. There's no way around that. We're going to take it on and I think that's important.

 Dagoberto Gilb:

I'll jump in. Is this on? Am I on? Okay, I'll jump in on that because I actually think when they do something like that, they ban books in Arizona, I think it's just the best thing that can happen for us because of all the publicity we get. It's something we all know. It's nothing new to us. It's just that suddenly the newspaper gets to cover us and we get to talk about it. And we've known about anti-Mexican racism, which is a hundred percent what it is. It's this idea of ethnic studies is totally false. In the South, there's no hesitation to teach southern lit. And I don't think people really worry when you study Irish lit. But somehow it's very upsetting when Mexican Americans study their heritage, and especially if you're in Arizona in places that have historical... The history of Arizona and New Mexico is really the history of racism against Mexicans right there.

So it's nothing new to us and it's just fabulous that we get to actually talk about it in a theatrical way. The Librotraficante thing is theater, it's political theater, and we're happy to do it. And let's be open. Let's just talk about it. Here we are. And I had two books banned, and hell, I've been working all my life to get honors. And thank you very much.

Luis J. Rodriguez:

You made it.

 John Phillips Santos:

I mentioned Dago's Hecho en Tejas book, a massive volume that collects work going back into the 19th Century to the present. But maybe you could talk a little bit about the effort behind that book. You've also organized seminars around the state for how to teach that literature and how to use that book in classes, no?

 Dagoberto Gilb:

Well, okay, two things I'll talk about there is the inception of the book. I've always been bi-coastal. It's sort of El Paso L.A. And I don't know, El Paso is not really Texas. And so you don't really notice until I got into Austin, I had to get a job. And suddenly I learned how extensive the, and I'm going to say ignorance as in ignorance of Mexican-American, the Chicano, they don't... In Texas, the word Chicano is still, it's a pre-Chicano place in a lot of ways. And I found that even where I took a job, I needed a job, I became a professor of English. And am going to say something braggy, but I've published four times in the New Yorker. That's historically unprecedented. And yet I'm not taught in the school that I teach at. And in Southwest Lit or Texas Lit, none of us are taught, none of us are taught. And to bring it up would always be, if I said even who you're teaching, it could have been anybody and nobody was. "Well we don't know who they are," that would be the excuse. "Well we don't know anybody." Even Sandra Cisneros, who would generally get the default attention.

So at some point, given that that was always the answer, I decided I would put a book together and say, "Now if you don't teach that you have no excuse. We can call you what you are." And so that was my first way of dealing with it and I did this. And now of course when they have a life and lit of the southwest and they don't have any of us, we know it's not a Chicano teaching the class. So then I took this new job and we have a place we named Centro Vitoria, and we're trying to get a six-week curriculum of Mexican-American Lit and we are right now focused on Texas. Six weeks of us in the schools. And half of Texas, within the next decade will be 50% Mexican-American. And yet when you go into the Rio Grande Valley or in San Antonio or in El Paso, and you go into a classroom where 24 of 25 children are brown, and even the white kid there, the black kid there is a Chicano, it's impossible to not be.

And they are reading Eudora Welty, they're reading John Updike, and they have no idea. They think literature is like studying math. And if you mention South Africa, people don't even really know what that is. That's how undereducated. And in that respect, us in our community of Texas, and the Anglo community and that's been our project. We are trying to get this curriculum in the schools of Texas. And I try to say, "There's really kind of two options. You can do this politely with me or I can guarantee in a few years there'll be younger people that are not polite like me. And choose."

 John Phillips Santos:

If I commend the book to all of you, Hecho En Tejas, published by-

 Dagoberto Gilb:

University of New Mexico Press.

 John Phillips Santos:

... University of New Mexico Press. Questions? Yeah.

Audience:

[inaudible 00:49:52]. A little confused about how they dare to ban books. I don't understand the reason. [inaudible 00:50:03].

 Dagoberto Gilb:

I do know the answer. It's a really simple law that they're banning it through a... The specifics, it's probably a little more complicated, but the excuse is any classes that organize an ethnic group that, when the solidarity of that ethnic group is opposed to the solidarity of the entire state. And so it's-

Audience:

There's not logic there.

 Dagoberto Gilb:

Well it was to single out, it was a hundred percent, it was a disguise, it was a singling out of... In a Arizona, they're really upset about Mexicans. They do not like Mexicans. And it's just a complete... And so we ourselves have made, called it Ethnic Studies. We're trying to euphemized the entire thing. Everybody is trying to euphemized it, when it's really like, "You don't like us, and we're going to teach our kids why it's good to be smart." If you look at the banned list and you imagine your child in that high school class, which it's an undergraduate, it's probably junior level class. Any kids that are studying these books. It's no less than an AP. These are all children going to Stanford and Yale and the best schools in the country.

 John Phillips Santos:

The people who organized the effort claim that the books were advocating the overthrow of the United States.

Luis J. Rodriguez:

Yeah. But then they'll read the books. And let me just tell you just real quickly about another great banning. Number one bookseller outside of amazon.com, we all know that, it as a brick and mortar places, Walmart's. Our books aren't there. And we fought so hard to get in there. And now they've completed, Borders has gone. That was a big battle. And then finally Borders has books and wanted to know, but they're all gone. Thousands of books stores closed. And then Walmart's "Because no one's selling." Well, you can't find our books. We're being banned even without official laws. You know what I mean? The laws are just silly after a while. Why do you have a law if you're already banning us? We can't find our books anywhere. I felt really bad because he's won major awards. We have writers here who have won major awards. You can't find their books in the airports. I actually go to the airports and I look for books that are amazing and interesting. I don't just look for Chicano books, but obviously I'm interested. I don't see them. So we're getting banned anyway.

The laws just make it like, "Oh, okay, well now we know what you really think." And I'm not talking about every White person or anything. I'm talking about a historical problem in our country, this country. That there's a group of people they don't like things different, heterogeneous. They want in a homogenized group of people that think the same and act the same. The whole Republican debate drives me up the wall because that's what they're fighting for. They're fighting for same thing, same ideas. That's not what this country is. It's not what the world is. You see what I'm saying? So anyway, so this is something that I think people have to take on. Everybody should take this on. One of my good friends Jeff Figures is a guy from Illinois family go out of West Virginia and he's been fighting this battle in Tucson. So this is a battle that everybody should take on. We should not allow people in this country to tell you what to think, what to read and what not to read. That's what we should just never allow anywhere.

 John Phillips Santos:

Can you stand up?

Audience:

As a young writer, I write about my Pakistani-American experience, immediately labeled minority literature in writing. I was wondering if you could talk about the [inaudible 00:53:48] about that label and also ways to combat it?

Luis J. Rodriguez:

I don't combat it personally, but I will say something that impacted me. One of my sons, Ruben, he says that he wants to be a writer. I don't know what's wrong with the kid. But at one point, and this is my son who grew up under a very political socially active family, me and my wife have been active in the community. He says, "Dad, I'm thinking of changing my name to be a writer." I go, "Mijo, tell me about this." And he says because he doesn't want to be pigeonholed. And he thought, "No matter what I write," because he wants to write fantasies, he wants to write about all kinds of people, which is fine. That's great. Perfect. Why did we fight all this time? So you can write like me or write like a Chicano, write whatever you want. That's why we fought for her. I don't care what you write.

But anyway, the point is though, he wants to change his name and I go-

 John Phillips Santos:

Did you choose a name?

Luis J. Rodriguez:

No. Not that I wouldn't even go that far, but I had to say, "Okay, at a certain point though, you had to just think about your integrity. Hang onto your name and then write the heck whatever you want. Don't let people make you change your name so you can write what you want." You know what I'm saying? So he's going to be that generation of people that ain't going to be pigeonholed. They're not going to be put in any box. And I personally don't care. I fought for having a place as a Chicano, you know what I mean? I fought for that, but I understand... [Spanish 00:55:10] that wrote the paper, the serial novel Chicano kid. Really good kid.

Audience:

[inaudible 00:55:18].

Luis J. Rodriguez:

Yeah. What was his name?

Audience:

[inaudible 00:55:22].

Luis J. Rodriguez:

Oh, okay. I saw him in Mexico, [Spanish 00:55:24]. We were in Mexico at the [Spanish 00:55:25], and he was complaining about when he was writing, he didn't want to write like Chicanos. And all his professors were telling me to write like Chicanos. And I got up and I said, " [Spanish 00:55:36] , you should write whatever you want. That's all we fought for it. Not so you can write like a Chicano. Write whatever you want." And he says, "Well unfortunately you were the guy that they kept pushing me to write like." Oh my God, who needs that? So yeah, I think people should just break through whatever bounds there are. Write whatever you want. You don't have to change your name, unless you want, it's your business. But there's a level of integrity. Why?

My name is a Spanish name anyway. I'm indigenous, I'm native. I don't care a hoot about that. But I don't change my name, it's my name that was given. But I know who I'm coming, where I'm at. Hang on to integrity. But whatever you need to do, break whatever walls you have to break. Even with the walls that I created, break them down.

 John Phillips Santos:

Anything Dabo, for the question?

 Dagoberto Gilb:

I always, when they talk about immigrants, I'm like, "Yeah, I actually think they should send them all out. I think they should go back to Kentucky and go back to Tennessee and go back to Mississippi and leave us alone." I don't know. That whole, the minority thing is like, I think we should be polite to those people because they did live here too. And just because we've been here longer and there's more of us, we should learn to be polite and generous. Just because they weren't with us. We should learn from Nelson Mandela and we should learn that we are going to embrace their culture at some point and they can get along with us.

 John Phillips Santos:

Carlos?

Audience:

The young man, Pakistani-American, again, why the stigma? But let's consider this. If you are a person who is a Spanish surname person in North America, even though we are as Luis points out quite accurately linked to the indigenous roots, Greek Spanish roots, why are we still feeling any stigma whatsoever when Spanish was spoken here before English? When we think about it historically, Spanish was spoken before English. But we have this great amnesia that somehow Spanish is the foreign language. But if Spanish is foreign, therefore so is English I would say. Now added to that, again, the stigma I hear about beautiful Ruben thinking [Spanish 00:58:01]. The very fact that you have that in the 21st Century is a shame. So think about the environment we're in. That's the sin. It's the classic thing that happens. People say, "I love Mexico, I just can't stand Mexicans." I don't know who said that. And they love the southwest, but they love it better when we're not around.

[inaudible 00:58:41] I've taught your books twice, when I taught a writing class. [inaudible 00:58:47]. So you have anything taught-

 Dagoberto Gilb:

That's good, thank you.

 John Phillips Santos:

Where do you teach?

Audience:

Kansas State University.

 Dagoberto Gilb:

All right.

Audience:

And then secondly, being that I teach non-native English speakers, as far know for both of you what the role of language and code switching in your work and how much that affects maybe how much you think that you're pressured, that you're dealing like Arizona? And how much is this fear of language maybe? Even though you have a lot of English, the idea that you have, like you said, a surname and the assumption of only Spanish-speaking taking [inaudible 00:59:34].

 Dagoberto Gilb:

When I was younger I didn't read. And when I did, I might as well be reading Shakespeare. I had no idea what Shakespeare said, "What is this?" And I remember people, I didn't go to college and study English. I was a philosophy major and stuff because one reason I was a philosophy major, you could read a page and that was reading. And I was so slow, it was perfect for me. But I remember when I started reading, I read like Tess of the d'Urbervilles, you go, "Tess of the d'Urbervilles." And I didn't know what that was, all these things until I found out and I said, "Well, I don't really understand how English, I can't write. I'm just not a good writer." And then there was a few people including Jack Kerouac, where I actually thought Jack Kerouac sounded like us, until I heard him. I thought, "That dude is not from L.A."

But I realized that I was reading the Tess of the d'Urbervilles and all these things right. They just were rich and they talk different. And I realized that I liked, and this is the Kerouac, and I actually think James Baldwin, he had a larger voice and affected voice. But Richard Wright, a voice and a story that was much more like mine, and wanted to tell stories from the point of view where people like me came from, from streets in L.A. Poorer people that didn't have books. I didn't have books in my house. And I liked that common voice. And it could be another language, but even in any language there's levels of language, there's classes of language. And I liked that class. I wanted to represent that class of common speech, which probably you encounter when you get those students. Those are uniquely...

I went to, we call them junior colleges, they've euphemized them and called them community. But I like junior. Junior colleges, and that was a big deal to me to go to junior college. And people like me went there and we had voices and stories that sounded like me and not like Henry James. And so I liked that. And a lot of times my stories are first person and it's because I try to capture, it's not my particular voice, but voices of those people that come places where books, there may be only a couple books in the house ever. But we use a lot of words and we have a lot of stories. And I think it's really important that we appreciate the battle that's going on outside of the classrooms to represent...

Just quick, and I'm done. Yesterday I was talking to a publisher that's going to put me in a textbook. And one of the things he was trying to do is he wants to capture people that have been a working class. And if you look in the textbooks now, there aren't many. And we've been through a 30-year period where working class people have actually had jobs and normal lives that didn't have pedigrees and prestige lives are publishing. There's not too many. So that was kind of exciting to me that they're going to have a book. And they're actually looking at the demographic that's changing. And God knows what's happening right now in this country to everyone that's not... People here in this country think about the depression and what happened in depression, but the depression is being Mexican. It's all the time. And so they're finally having their depression. And suddenly this generation, there's going to be something in the next 10 years, you're going to see a whole bunch of people telling stories that are going to sound like us.

Luis J. Rodriguez:

Let me just add that to me, I didn't come out of the academia, not that I'm against it. I just didn't come out of there. So to me it's always been to be natural. It's rich, it's part of the way we talk. And it's not a mixture of Mexican and American. It's a whole new culture. You know what I'm saying? A whole new way of interacting. Some of it is influencing Mexico, and some of it of course is influencing the United States. And it becomes a new language, a new way of a new culture that comes out of certain parts of Texas and L.A and whatever you might be. And so I think it has been natural.

In fact, it was so natural that when I did Always Running, they insisted that I have a glossary. And I go, "Why? I only have five words." I didn't realize I had put so many words that were in Spanish or Calo, the so-called Spanglish. I didn't realize I had put so many. It was just so natural to me. I thought it was only five of them. And they had a whole mess of words. "We got hundreds of words here." But I think it's important that you just write naturally and everybody does it. Every writer, if you're from the south, you're writing naturally from the south. If you're from the Native American reservations, it's natural the way you speak and inflections. African Americans, everybody does it. You write in Cajun, you're writing a third culture. You know what I'm saying? And so my thing is that's how it should be seen.

It's a rich part of American tapestry, whatever it is. We're part of it. We're Chicanos, Tejanos, whatever you want to call it. And we have this way of talking and interacting that is just special to this. It doesn't mean it's special to anybody else, but you know what I'm saying. We have to be just natural to that.

 John Phillips Santos:

Have time for maybe one more question, yeah.

Audience:

[inaudible 01:05:32]. A lot of us teach, black folks, brown folks and [inaudible 01:05:43], whatever, people of color and in enlightened white folks teach these books. Well, this is the sheer numbers have changed [inaudible 01:05:52]. Arizona and Texas or wherever, they know that its inclusive as-

 John Phillips Santos:

Censorship. Yeah.

Audience:

[inaudible 01:06:02].

Luis J. Rodriguez:

Exactly. Keeps these books, and I have this to add, Always Running has never made a bestseller list. It is a best, I've sold close to half a million copies of that book. It's never made a bestseller list. But here's the thing, teachers know that book works with kids who don't have any other book that relates to them, and they use it in the classroom. This is why the book sells. The librarians who get it. You know what I'm saying? And there's all these books, but now we got materials. When I was growing up, there was no materials. People had nothing to give us. So now we got them. And they want to ban it. No, teach it, push it to the kids. I don't mean push it like a drug, but, [Spanish 01:06:42]. Whatever you can do with that, [Spanish 01:06:44].

The point that I agree with you, man, you all got to teach it. You all got to have these books. If you have so-called American literature, it's got to include all these people. That's what America is. This is what we fought for, right? This is why we're here, is for all of us. We all belong here. I don't care what anybody says. And I'm a native person and I relate to that, but somehow we're all here. Let's all respect and honor what we've done and honor the future because my son should have his book the way he wants to write it. We honor it by honoring the people who have written and have fought for it now.

 John Phillips Santos:

In his own name. I think we could hardly end on a better note. I want to ask you to help me thank Luis and Dago both for being here. And to wish Luis good luck next week with the NBCC finals.

Speaker 1:

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