journalists-from-mexico

"...it’s an idea of displacement that has animated my work. I get bored always doing the same thing. On top of that, I have no interest in purity or fidelity to a genre or a tone or a single channel of exploration. I’m not careful. I think that maintaining one foot outside the tradition we belong to is a good thing. And even if it weren’t, I’d do that regardless. That impulse arises from a restlessness within me that’s manifested in many ways over the years. All digressions eventually become a different peephole through which to glimpse that displacement I’m talking about. Displacement has marked my destiny: family displacement and also creative displacement. Imagine, how could you not love Judeo-Spanish (which had not appeared in my previous work): a language made from geographic, linguistic, and family displacements . . ."

"Ladino is a unique cultural and linguistic phenomenon. I think that well beyond the question of community belonging, it’s tremendously interesting for any Spanish speaker. To listen to its words is like seeing your own language in its infancy, and even earlier: in a nascent state. This language was spoken for five centuries by people who were totally distant from Spanish. That is, the mother tongue of all those speakers could be Turkish, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Italian, Greek, French, Romanian, etc. Doesn’t it seem unique that they’d speak their mother tongue in the street and inside their homes they’d switch to this archaic Spanish? The biography of Judeo-Spanish is wonderful and tragic. Whether or not it has a future is up for debate, occasionally between very antagonistic positions. Listen, it’s hardly used by anyone at this point. The last speakers of the language are dying. There are many academic initiatives seeking to preserve it, and there are also isolated writers, but as you know, a language does not stay alive by decree. What is indisputable is that there should be some kind of souvenir—sound-based, literary, or poetic—marking its passage through the world. It makes me sad to talk about that. It’s as if I were beside a beloved person on their deathbed. I don’t know. There are surely other opinions on the matter. There are those who think it won’t die. I’d like for them to be right, but if there aren’t kids anymore who hear it daily, if it’s not used by anyone other than a handful of older people, how could it stay alive, then?"

"Identities can be an obstacle and a source of conflict between people and nations when they are erroneously carried like a flag. But it’s a different story when we recognize that nothing makes us better as beings in the world than our differences."

"A language is historical memory. Sometimes it preserves information and turns of phrase that people have forgotten, but the language doesn’t forget. In the case of the Sephardic community, language served as a binding agent that linked men and women across faraway geographies, carrying those words like an unconscious and pleasurable way of remaining united."

"The debt I have with my heritage becomes a declaration of love for what I’ve lost..."

"Catharsis consists in getting out from under something that’s been there constantly, buzzing around irksomely in your ear. And, when you do that, there’s a certain state of emptying that almost immediately initiates another disturbance. If it were any other way, it wouldn’t be possible to keep writing."

"What I find is never definitive—that would be a pretension and an idiocy."

"Without his walks, the evenings were not the same, and my sidewalks were full of fruit husks, peanut shells, and ugly words."

"here’s a very short list of Latin women novelists I think should have been considered part of the Boom…Mexico: Elena Garro, Rosario Castellanos..."

"(What Mexican books deserve greater attention in the United States?) I read Spanish too slowly to have any expertise here. But I do love and admire the works of Elena Garro, Elena Poniatowska and Rosario Castellanos, and, most recently, Fernanda Melchor and Cristina Rivera Garza."

"For the majority of readers, Latin American fantastic literature operates under the tutelage of the great masters: Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Julio Cortázar and Gabriel García Márquez. However, although few are acquainted with their works, many women began experimenting with this genre well before their male counterparts and were the true precursors of the form, though their names remained on the shelves of oblivion, without the recognition that they deserved. María Luisa Bombal, for example, wrote the fantastic nouvelle, House of Mist (1937) before the famous Ficciones (1944) of Borges, and the Mexican, Elena Garro, wrote Remembrance of Things to Come (1962) before the publication of García Márquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)."

"There is nothing easier for my people than that quick show of grief."

"if I had been, say, a French writer, I would have been free to write whatever I wished, which would have been writing of an imaginative sort. But in Mexico, because of the suffering that is the result of centuries of corruption, there is a moral obligation to write of this. I could not ignore it, and, because I have become known for it and have refined my ability to write this way through practice, it became my principal work."

"I have always had questions, and to this day, I don't have a single answer."

"I have always been drawn to characters like Jesusa Palancares. María Sabina, the one who performed the ceremony of the sacred mushrooms (LSD in Oaxaca), Juan Perez Jolote (the Chamula peasant from Chiapas), Demetrio Vallejo (the railroad leader), all popular heroes, even if they are not recognized. I admire them because of their wisdom and the way they impart it, with great patience, great prudence, with respect for the ignorance of the person who asks the questions."

"That the poorest Mexicans don't deserve their ruling class is a truth that leaps out at once."

"We have all been made bad, we are all needy, all unwanted guests around the feast, invited at the last minute. In recognizing this lies our creativity."

"I learned, as they say, by doing. I began as an interviewer for the society pages of Excélsior—the only sort of thing a young woman could expect in those days...Since Excélsior is a daily paper, I had to produce these pieces every day with almost no time for review. Then I would read them in print and see that I had spent too much time on things of little importance and failed to ask about what mattered most. And so,with frequent embarrassment, that is how I learned. One also learns ­humility doing interviews, because people may not want to give you much time and so keep you waiting in an anteroom or are dismissive or in a bad mood, and all this has to be accepted."

"Of course, imaginative writing always contains elements of the writer’s lived experience, but there is a ­different sort of freedom in it than there is in reporting or in novels based on interviews."

"style, as I see it, is not an adornment added to a work. It is more, as Buffon said, that “le style c’est l’homme même”—style is the man himself...That famous line is actually the conclusion of a longer thought—“Writing well consists of thinking, feeling and expressing well, of clarity of mind, soul and taste.” In my own words, I would say that style is a manifestation of the writer’s being, which, of course, changes over time but retains something essential of who he is...One does not develop a style. One develops oneself. Or, perhaps more accurately, one is born with a certain character and life shapes it. And then, if you write or paint or sculpt, you do those things with the person you have ­become. And that is style."

"Boundaries, after all—of custom, of language, of what is and is not permitted—not only function to keep others out but also keep those inside from expanding."

"It is one thing to identify oneself as a citizen of a country and to love its landscape, its people, its arts and culture. It is quite another thing to assess the workings of its social and political structure—the degree of freedom and opportunity enjoyed by its people, its standard of education and quality of life. A Mexican peasant has virtually no chance of becoming anything else. The standard of education was low fifty years ago and, if anything, is even lower today."

"There is an immense abyss between the very few who have money and the vast number who are poor—and there is scarce concern on the part of those who have for those who do not. The politicians can be numbered among those who have. So my being a Mexican writer and loving my country has come to find its expression in opening up this reality to other Mexicans and to the larger world, expressed through the voices of the least empowered—women, especially, and poor people of both genders."

"The question of being encouraged or discouraged by this or that event cannot be asked if one is to go on with a certain moral conviction."

"The ultimate outcome of our ­actions cannot be known. But despite our limited awareness, I believe we must always act with compassion."

"Like the Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska, I have tried to tell the stories my characters would tell if they were writers"

"(What moves you most in a work of literature?) I’m not yet the writer I aspire to be, but at my age, great books written by women over 60 give me hope. Diana Athill, Colette, Harriett Doerr, Marguerite Duras, Grace Paley, Elena Poniatowska, Jean Rhys, Mercé Rodoreda, to name but a few."

"(What Mexican books deserve greater attention in the United States?) I read Spanish too slowly to have any expertise here. But I do love and admire the works of Elena Garro, Elena Poniatowska and Rosario Castellanos, and, most recently, Fernanda Melchor and Cristina Rivera Garza."

"Working-class women's literature, women of color, specifically Latina women's writing like my friend Ana Castillo's, or my friend Cherrie Moraga's, Helena Viramontes's, Elena Poniatowska's, and Marguerite Duval's sends me all the way to my typewriter as much as Manuel Puig's stories."

"In light of her later books, we tend to read irony into Elena Poniatowska's claim of meek docility, but the lesson of her early interviews predicts Audre Lorde's eloquent and cautionary charge that "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master's house as their only source of support.""

"I would suggest that in its depiction of Mariana and Luz, La "Flor de Lis" offers a concrete and particularized version of what Adrienne Rich describes as the terrible ambivalence-love, anger, rivalry, desire, rejection-that the daughter feels for the mother in patriarchy."

"We women treasure faces; in fact at any given moment life becomes a single face that we can touch with our lips."

"According to the El Paso Morning Times, in 1914 there were seventeen thousand men and four thousand women in Pancho Villa's army, but there are many other statistics that show that, without the soldaderas, there would have been no Mexican Revolution."

"The locomotive was the main protagonist of the Mexican Revolution, but the Adelitas and Valentinas came a close second."

"Nellie Campobello, a great writer, published Cartucho (Cartridge) in 1931. Her explosive book was more like a grenade that laid bare the tragedy of the Mexican Revolution. In a succession of brief chapters, Nellie sketches a cruel, stark picture of the uprising as seen through the eyes of a little girl who was born before original sin. There are dead men-killed in battle or executed by firing squad-on every page. The girl eagerly watches from her window as men are shot down, and their corpses become her toys. When her favorite one is finally taken away, she misses it because it has entertained her for five days…If Nellie Campobello had not recorded her experiences, we would have been deprived of the most creative view of the Mexican Revolution ever written. Yes, I know, we have the writers Mariano Azuela, Martín Luis Guzmán, Rafael F. Muñoz, and the boring Francisco L. Urquizo, but there is no one as authentic as Nellie, no one who could say, as she did…Nellie Campobello-who wrote two novels, Cartucho and Las manos de mamá (A Mother's Hands)-was never granted the legendary status she deserves despite the fact that she is the only woman to have authored works about the Mexican Revolution. Her colleagues never acknowledged her nor paid her tribute of any kind, so much so that we are unsure exactly when and how she died."

"I write in order to belong."

"Widows used to go around the way the poet Jaime Sabines would like them to: "There is one way, my love, that you could make me completely happy: die." Now widows are not even merry."

"I absorbed Mexico through the maids. A system still persists in Latin America which consists of privileged people having at their beck and call the poorest of the poor."

"Without realizing it the maids provided me with a version of Benito Juárez; they were all like Benito Juárez. Like him they vindicated themselves: "Dirty foreigners." Like him they defended Mexico, as stubborn as mules. Like him they had no roof of their own and had eaten only poor people's food, and for me, a girl raised on French mashed potatoes, discovering them meant entering into "the other.""

"To this day, if I ask so many questions, it is because I don't have a single answer. I believe I will die like this, still searching, with a question mark engraved on my eyelids."

"in Latin America reality surpasses fiction."

"Life is very resistant. People-the same cannon fodder that nourishes great universal misfortunes, "the wretched of the earth," as Frantz Fanon called them. Suddenly, during an earthquake, one of them saves a life."

"I would like to return to earth because I love life."

"Carefully I asked them questions, visited them in their crowded neighborhoods, watched their kites cross the sky in February, treated them like kites, because that's how testimonial literature is. It fills one with anxiety, with insecurity. One handles very fragile material, people's hearts; their names, which are their honor; their work; and their time. And one tries to turn it into memorable material."

"I have always responded to challenges, followed apocalyptical personalities, apostles, Rasputins, Joan of Arcs who hear voices that come from Heaven, illuminated guides of humanity, holders of truth, priests."

"I live to the rhythm of my country and I cannot remain on the sidelines. I want to be here. I want to be part of it. I want to be a witness. I want to walk arm in arm with it. I want to hear it more and more, to cradle it, to carry it like a medal on my chest. Activism is a constant element in my life, even though afterwards I anguish over not having written "my own things." Testimonial literature provides evidence of events that people would like to hide, denounces and therefore is political and part of a country in which everything remains to be done and documented."

"The worker is the arm, the heart of the world."

"it is to him, untiring and tenacious struggler, that the future of humanity belongs. May you, beloved workers, integral part of human progress, yet celebrate, uncounted anniversaries, and with your example may you show societies how to love each other so that they may be mutualists and to unite so that they may be strong."

"At the turn of the century, Sara Estela Ramírez, the Villarreal sisters, Leonor Villegas de Magnón, Jovita Idar and the staff members of La Voz de la Mujer and Pluma Roja were organic intellectuals of their times who revealed different discursive positionings of women within their societies, positionings informed by the master narratives of nationalism, religion and anarchism. Until now these women's work as publishers and their written contributions have remained virtually unrecognized. Either because of political affiliations or gender discrimination, their work has not been recognized in Mexico. In the United States, these factors, as well as linguistic biases, have relegated their work to oblivion. These women's stories and their publishing efforts, nonetheless, capture the realities of a people, the significance of whose daily existence transcends the limitations imposed by political and national borders."

"The U.S. -Mexico borderland saw mexicanas fighting for the revolution, often with the PLM, and also to win justice for tejanos. They included Sara Estela Ramírez, who lived in Laredo and became known to thousands of tejanos as a labor organizer, human rights activist and poet. She launched a revolutionary feminist newspaper, Aurora, in 1904. She died in 1910 at the age of 29 but her unique, visionary poetry rings true today."