Essayists From The United States

"To write is also to bear witness, to resist the dehumanization of the world, and to tell and reveal."

"I think that memory is a form of translation. What motivates the artistic expression of poets and fiction writers, essayists and painters is memory. But memory is also very complicated because it consists of what one chooses to remember."

"The translation of art, the translation of poetry, however, is the translation of the spirit. A good translator translates what is not said."

"how to become someone else-that's perhaps the greatest challenge for a translator because to become someone else is to become compassionate. To become someone else, you have to be in love with someone else. And in that sense I strongly believe that translations are acts of love"

"Writing and culture are very much related to the possibilities of the human imagination. The capacity of language allows the imagination to flow and to transform and mend the world."

"Books unite people and books in translation are the thresholds of other cultures, invitations to travel and to know others."

"Translations are like crossings of borders, crossings of landscapes, crossings of voices."

"...what is essential to art: They create art despite trauma, no matter how heartbreaking. They constantly question the reality in which their texts were born, but above all, they make more beautiful, through words, the failure and pain of existence."

"translators are the messengers of the spirit. You bring a message to someone who does not understand the original."

"Only while in nature's perfection—where there is no difference between the outside world and myself and, at the same time, my own indifference—have I truly felt that I belonged."

"Home, for many Jews, was their existence in the Diaspora, their perpetual state of homelessness. Home was that place where they sought refuge from persecution and discrimination. However, the Jews are not and have not been alone in"

"We are what we remember and we understand heritage and belonging through our own passion to remember. Home is a living scrap-book of memory that we carry as we move about, as we remember the vanquished and their respective passions and sorrows. Memory can never reside in abstraction. Memory must be cemented into concrete, must be worn like a dress, must be lived in like a home of differing levels, textures, and colors."

"children are a universal treasure...I believe that the best way to determine if a country is defending its human rights is to see how the children of that country live. (Introduction)"

"I want literature to be a means for creating humility. (Introduction)"

"As a child I would always be asked whether I was Jewish or Chilean and, thus, my identity became always conflicted, always a matter of either/or and seldom both. ("Jewish Women in Latin America")"

"Home is understanding and being understood."

"“I have been so busy asking for faith that I forgot to ask for patience. (p330)"

""...sometimes memory is dangerous, but on most occasions it can be a salvation. Sometimes remembering means to live a moment in the past again, and in that way survive the present." (p357)"

""Yes, I am a refugee. And it is a beautiful word, a beautiful thing. I am an exile. That means I am a traveler of the world and I belong to nothing but the things I love." (p454)"

"If America is a grandiose melting pot and multicultural society, then it is also a place that has not fully welcomed its immigrants, especially those of color. It is a place that used to prohibit the speaking of native tongues, and it is a place that racially profiles those whose origin is from elsewhere. A friend recently asked me why I seem so critical of this society that has given me so much. I think that to be critical is to be American. Freedom, complete freedom, includes the right to a dissenting opinion, the right to question an election. However, considering that only 30% of the citizens of the United States vote, it is fair to call the political culture dormant."

"Maybe once you are an exile, you always are an exile. Always missing somewhere else, always carrying a bit from here and a bit from there and always with a bit of a broken heart. (p280)"

"She lay hidden, as if she were the very darkness of night. (first line of "Rivers")"

"“Everyone is always learning something new," my father would remind me when he checked to see if I was doing my homework and found me gazing out the window at the stars. "If not, why be alive?” (p184)"

"It seems that...literature grants us the ability to endure and encompass traumatic and horrifying events, to articulate them through writing and the evocative power of memory...It is a way of articulating the self, as well as the soul. A world without writers would be a world lingering in the shadows of silence...Literature moves us, rescues us from oblivion, and makes us witnesses to our history..literature binds the voices from the most diverse geographies, makes the experiences of women universal, and gives hope to future generations."

"as poets, as writers, as artists we can copy others, but it is very dangerous to copy one's self."

"I think that it still takes a very motivated-either by need or exceptional ability-woman to succeed in Mexico today. In a country where the minimum wage is the equivalent of three dollars a day, most working-class women are still too busy putting food on the table to organize. The teachers union is very powerful, and it will probably be through some sort of labor movement, rather than strictly social or cultural, that real change will come about."

"Border literature implies the ability to dip into both cultures and step back and forth across the border. This area was a place of cultural convergence long before the Spanish or Americans showed up. By its very nature, the Southwest has always encouraged the cross-pollination of cultures, so border literature appeals to me."

"I hope that by including these cultures, the Jewish and indigenous as well as the mestizo, we can get past the idea that we are a monolithic people."

"There is a love of place that transcends the love of individuals."

"what I'm writing about in each of these novels is the notion that these are people who look around at the society they live in or the culture they live in and say, "This isn't necessarily where I belong. I need to change my place in history and I need to change my place in this culture.""

"the response shows a generational shift in aesthetic viewpoint, from encouraging the production of literature that shows Mexican-Americans in a socially acceptable light (the society being white), to literature being written to express all that our culture has to offer, and not really caring what others think of us as a result."

"It was only in researching this work that history, in general, started to mean anything to me. Economics, the repercussions of the Civil War, the history of Texas, all made sense. Growing up in California, nothing we were taught seemed to have anything to do with us"

"Maybe that's the kind of thing you find out when you get older, that these cycles repeat themselves through the generations, how we respond to our relationships with our families, and how they're mirrored in the language we speak and we in turn pass that on to our children."

"(What is your advice to Latinex writers?) Don’t devalue your own stories. Two of my role models are Ana Castillo and Denise Chavez, who draw on their backgrounds for the work they do. They are fearless. I look at them and know I have no excuse. For years I wondered who had given Castillo permission to write? I wanted to ask her in person. By the time I met her, I realized she gave herself permission. Apparently, that was what I was waiting for, for someone to say, it’s okay. Well, I gave myself permission, and it’s okay."

"something that interests me is the fact that we continue to document things even if it's after the fact, even if it's a hundred years after the fact, to show that there were other voices, other points of view. I continue to do my work in historical fiction, but whoever we are and wherever we're living, the events around us continue to influence our view of history and we each continue to rewrite history in our own way. There is no set history. Each of us brings a new history to bear...I've done so much research with what's considered history that I've decided that it's just as fictional as fiction is. And many of the truths that I'm interested in telling need to be told in a narrative form, which history or anthropology or some other disciplines doesn't necessarily lend themselves to. People need to hear things in a certain way in order to understand them, and so I think that fiction in many ways tells truths that history is unable to tell."

"Writing every day worked for Hemingway and Dineson. Dineson advised writing a little every day, without hope or expectations. I don’t write every day, but if I intend to write every day I do more than I would otherwise."

"Anyone can imagine a story. Writers imagine and get the story down on the page."

"I grew up on the edge of the Mojave Desert in a very rural part of southern California until I was six years old, when we moved into town. Every time I start writing a new piece, I write a description of that landscape; it’s as if I have to ground myself in those very early memories and relationship to the land before I move on to the next thing."

"People had big families in those days. And the thing we need to remember about them, in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, which is still true in most of Mexico, is that your family is your treasure. You may not have anything else, but people really value children"

"One of the anthropological terms I've learned that applies to all of these peoples is this notion of syncretism, that cultures and religions come together and forge new cultures and new religions and new languages. And this is really the sign of a living culture and a living history. People are trying to preserve the past and aren't happy with other people if they aren't doing everything the same way that their parents and grandparents [did them], and they'll say, "Oh, that's wrong. You're not doing it right." But the fact that languages change and people change and adapt to new environments is the sign of a living culture to me. I certainly mourn the loss of the heritage that has fallen by the wayside because it was tied directly to landscape. When people moved from the land, they lost that. I also have to admire the spirit of endurance that made people continue to remember."

"I'm really interested in is this notion that when you read histories and when you read official documentations of countries and people, they tend to be very much on the macro level. When I did the research on nineteenth-century Mexico, you can find out where all the railroads ran, you can find out the front lines of all the battles, of all the wars, but you can't find out things like how women actually prepared meals in the home every day. That was much harder to find. The outward history, the official history, is easy to find. But the little things of how families interacted were much more difficult to research and I had to dig a little deeper."

"Stories of the supernatural are stories of transformation, from one state to another. Love is the strongest transformational force that we know, and also the one most sought after on a daily, ordinary basis. These stories, for the most part, were not tales of alienation, which might have been expected if this was a collection of strictly horror stories, but of people searching for connections, usually to others. When our drive to connect, to transform ourselves from one state to another (unhappy to happy, unloved to loved, shackled to free) is so strong that it seems to exceed the limits of the physical world, then we may invoke the otherworldly on our own behalf. And sometimes there is a response, but not always in the ways that we expect."

"Since we were in church half the time, I used to sit there and read the Bible, which, like Shakespeare, encompasses most of the human condition."

"I never made a distinction between realistic and magic realistic writing. The first book I read that probably fell into the accepted canon of magic realism was One Hundred Years of Solitude, by García Márquez, maybe in 1972 or ’73. I remember I found a copy in Spanish later and sent it to my parents, because it was so like our family stories. I also made my husband read it before we married, so that he would understand what sort of a family he was getting into."

"Not only are each of us part of the whole, but a single act of kindness is an act of universal grace. A single act of cruelty is a falling away of a bit of the whole for which we are all striving."

"When we use the term feminism in 19th Century Mexico, it means something entirely different from what Americans think of as feminism from the 1960s or 70s. Feminists in Mexico, at that time, were fighting for state-funded education for women. They were fighting for legitimate employment for women, fair wages and working conditions. Women had actually lost legal status in the mid 1800s under the rewriting of the constitution after independence from Spain, and women did not get the vote in Mexico until the 1950s. I suppose the fight is not too different today, including the search for cheap labor by the United States, and the search for foreign capital by the government of Mexico."

"Once you start talking about people as individuals, which I try to do in my fiction, it's impossible to say that any group of people can be excluded from full human rights."

"(In terms of telling stories based on cultural differences, do you consider yourself a “magical realist”?) The term became an easy way to classify a set of writings that didn’t match up with North American expectations. I ended up writing/talking a good deal about magical realism in relation to my work. I had already read One-hundred Years of Solitude when I was in college, probably because that was when it was translated into English. I sent a copy in Spanish to my parents, saying, “Look this is just like our family stories!” And they said, “Yes, this is like our story-telling tradition.”"

"In a novel or a movie, it’s often silence that communicates what cannot be said through words."

"Fiction is all about that moment of transition from one to another state of being. If that metamorphosis doesn’t occur, the character doesn’t change. We, the readers, don’t change. This reminds me of Walter Benjamin, who observes that stories transform the storyteller as well as the listeners."