Essayists From The United States

"Each of these women has a story. Each beat incredible odds to get where she is today. They, too, have given a helping hand to other women on the way up. That's what they have in common with the women of their grandmothers' and great-grandmothers' generations. They didn't stop worrying about equal rights and equal access when they made personal gains. They turned around and said, 'There's room for you, too.' ("Against All Odds," September 1992, Hispanic Women's Network, Olympia, Washington)"

"this is the role of the writer. By telling stories, we weave a narrative thread that ties our experiences together. The aftermath of September 11th has been flooded with stories of heroic deeds, of mysteries, loss, and simple friendship. In other words, the full tapestry of the human experience. This is how we make sense of the world. Storytelling is the glue of civilization. ("Words That Heal, Words That Bind", 2001)"

"In some cases, the stories take the reader right over the line to horror, the worst thing you can imagine fulfilled. In others, the fantastic elements are merely implied, and if the reader tried to pinpoint the specific elements that made the story fantastic, it would be impossible to do. Rather, the fantastic element lies in "the overall effect" that Edgar Allan Poe tried to infuse into each of his stories."

"Writing about family history has taught me that much of who we think we are is based on the unexplainable. ("The Skeleton in the Closet" September 24, 2003)"

"By becoming a writer, you can rewrite history. ("Your Grandmother Might Have Been Mayor, or Why Write?", 1990)"

"What I do know is that a writer's main job is to always be open to the possibilities of story. Like the interconnected lakes, old stories lead to new ones, and lead to new ways of seeing and living in the world. Like Amalia clutching her yellow roses, I will continue to follow these stories wherever they lead me. ("The Skeleton in the Closet" September 24, 2003)"

"We each seek to retrace those steps that led us from where we once were, to where we are now. ("Found in Translation")"

"We are not going to eradicate poverty by bombing people. ("Dear John: A Letter to a Friend Following 9/11")"

"In this desert was my beginning. My ancestors were born here, lived and loved here, suffered loss here, and died. Eventually, war scattered us, and we have lived a sort of exile ever since. But in our exile, the stories of the desert have taken on mythic qualities. Nothing else can ever fill up the empty place in our hearts left when we departed this place. Only the deserts and the oceans, the places where the rhythms of the universe are most apparent, can assuage that ache for a few moments. ("The Desert Remembers My Name", March 24, 2000 at The Border Book Festival in New Mexico)"

"In Latin America, there hasn't necessarily been a clear line between fantastic literature and literary fiction. This has allowed writers like Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez and Clarice Lispector to be noticed by upstanding and respectable critics of modern culture, and has led to the eventual translation of their work, as well as that of many others. They now form a canon of work against which all the rest of us must be compared, although, in many cases, we have little in common with them other than the Spanish language."

"In the desert, deep inside the spiny center of the cactus, nests a bird no bigger than my finger. While the sharp thorns fend off animals that would eat the eggs, the parent birds come and go at will. And this was my mother's name, "living at the heart of the spiny cactus," Chiri, what others would call Hummingbird. The last time I saw her was on the way to Casas Grandes. (first lines)"

"That’s what made me a writer as much as anything. I wanted to hear the endings of stories that didn’t have endings. A family member would tell a story. I would ask, “What happened?” No one would say because no one knew. So I had to write stories."

"She could drop her shyness the way she dropped it to recite a speech or a poem, then step back into it like a cloak."

"as time succeeded time into a whirlpool of eternity."

"When children went every day to school to learn to live in a world that no longer existed."

"Once we lost the keys to our houses in Barcelona during The Plague, or the Inquisition or whatever other excuse was given for taking our properties, all the world was our temporary habitation. We saw each place through the eyes of the stranger seeking that pocket of refuge where we could set up shop until the next disaster turned people against us."

"After all, what is the passing of time but a diamond turned to dust?"

"Tater was proud of her unusual name, and secretly hoped she was like them, ordinary at first look, but gem-like on the inside. Rooted."

"This is how they took back the world - step by step, song by song."

"No matter what the venue, we can be witnesses to our own existence. "If we do not define ourselves for ourselves," said Audre Lorde, "we will be defined by others- for their use and our detriment." Each generation must look around with a critical eye and ask, "Is this who I am? How will we be portrayed to future generations?""

"This is the story of my journey to Tucson, where I would find both happiness and sorrow. This is the story of my people, the Opata, who once numbered as many as the saguaro of the desert, and who once farmed many rancherías and had many villages, but are now just a few, and scattered far and wide from their home and the constellations that knew them. (p5)"

"This was new, the consciousness that she might have a future beyond herself."

"When I was growing up these stories were dismissed. They were about a time and place our teachers did not recognize. They brought in other stories and said, “You’re American now, so these are your stories. You must adopt these. You must forget those.” There is no reason, though, for the stories of our grandparents to die just because we speak English now. Stories have emotional as well as practical value."

"That's how dreams are. Nothing ever quite happens, but you assume it's going to. It's as though your mind stops wasting energy on the image once it thinks you understand what's going on. (p163)"

"I knew that death had many faces but I had only one. And so I began to ask questions about the outside, about the future, about myself. (p22)"

"We remake our world by reimagining it, by sharing our idea of the world."

"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.""

"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 a way, artists are messengers between worlds, bringing ideas and symbols from one to the other."

"Providing the narrative thread to life is one of the oldest functions in culture. People need storytellers. They make sense out of life. Instead of being an abstract concept, a road without an end, life becomes something that we can touch, hear, feel, taste, see. Chekhov gave us the Lady with the Dog, James Joyce gave us Leopold Bloom, Sandra Cisneros gave us Woman Hollering Creek, and by creating the specifics of a life, they give us a sense, they make sense of, life."

"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."

"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."

"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"

"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."

"Kathleen Alcalá is one of America's best writers. The clarity and depth of her work allow us to see and treasure the many untold stories about our indigenous ancestors in a territory always influenced by both Mexican and American history."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"(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.”"

"Every story that is written or told has the capacity to heal. (undated)"

"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."

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

"I got very obsessed with documenting nineteenth-century family life and our relationship to history because I meet so many people who feel we have no foundation in history. We had to reinvent history after the Mexican Revolution. We have sort of cobbled together a history out of what we know and our place in the United States, which included, from all of society that surrounded us and brought us up, this notion that you are not worth anything; you are at the bottom of society. And so I think it's important that we see that we have roots that go deep into the earth here, in the United States and Mexico and in Spain, and all of this is something we can claim as our own heritage. That's certainly how I take it. Rather than being confined to being a mall rat in Southern California, I claim all of this as my heritage. I guess I would like other people to see that as well."

"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."

"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."