A Borderland Primer

A longer version of this review appeared in the American Book Review. For the full review please purchase a copy of the journal.

Mexican Writers on Writing

Edited by Margaret Sayers Peden

Trinity University Press

www.trinity.edu/tupress

210 pages; paper, $24.95


A Borderland Primer

By Christine Granados


Reading Margaret Sayers Peden’s book “Mexican Writers on Writing” was an uncomfortable reminder of how Anglocentric the public school education I received was, and I grew up along the Texas/Mexico border in El Paso. Not one of the twenty-four writers in her book, which constitutes the heavyweights of Mexican letters, was a part of my primary or secondary education in El Paso. Exactly two writers, Carlos Fuentes and Octavio Paz, were mentioned in my post-secondary schooling down along the border of Mexico.

Peden explains in her preface how language creates a barrier and may be one of the reasons “Mexico’s long history of letters … remains largely unknown to us” here in the States. I believe she is being kind to her countrymen. While, yes, language can be a barrier (a barrier Peden has done her fair share in helping to scale through her accurate translations), the Frenchman Voltaire, Englishman Shakespeare, and Russian Tolstoy managed to travel over oceans and languages into our literary lexicon. My unscientific guess would be that Mexican authors are a mystery to us here in the United States because we don’t value our neighbors to the south or the Mexican intellect.


That idea hit me while reading Peden’s cross section of Mexican authors’ thoughts. It struck me as odd that in college I read all about Sir Phillip Sidney’s “In Defense of Poesie,” but nothing about Bernardo de Balbuena’s “In Defense of Poetry.” Odder still, now that I know that Balbuena was Sidney’s contemporary, and maddening after I calculated that Kent, England is 5,000 miles away from El Paso, while el D.F., where Balbuena was raised, is less than 1,000 miles away from my college class. To know that a Mexican educated man—who, like Sidney, argued that poetry was a divine inspiration and further stated that without poetry there would be no music—would have given me such a different world view, tinged the opaque colored lenses from which I grew up viewing the world. Plus, his is a defense I buy, wholeheartedly.


I mention this only because Peden’s book fell into my lap one week after I spoke to a high school English class filled with only Mexican-American students in Austin. These students all wondered why they were studying English poets like Sidney and Chaucer. I looked at their brown faces and wondered the exact the same thing. I’m still wondering. Why do English tales take precedence over Mexican ones in the one state that shares the longest border with Mexico?


I believe that these Mexican-American students would have been better served by reading a book like Peden’s. This well-thought-out, chronological sampling of Mexican thought doesn’t have a single tiresome, scholarly footnote, which makes it such an eminently readable book and would thus be easy to teach, even at the high school level.


I can see all those brown faces coloring with pride after reading about the first novel published in Latin America. How José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi’s “The Itching Parrot” written in 1816, and translated by Katherine Anne Porter, shows the meticulous Mexican work ethic that has been instilled into these students from birth. To read in print where their already strong work ethic comes from would be a strong affirmation of their culture.


Even their teacher agreed that her students would be better served learning about Juan Rulfo, Paz, Fuentes and Elena Poniatowska. They would be able to see the different colorful personalities and get a taste of each Mexican writer and be able decide for themselves if they wanted to read more about them.


Peden’s book is a good primer for the uninitiated (like me), an uplifting pep talk to up-and-coming writers (i.e. high school and college students), and a reminder to literary scholars of the great Mexican intellect.


I, like Peden, can envision a time when there will be a free literary exchange between the United States and Mexico, “and it may be that one day a natural balance will be achieved.” Unfortunately, it just won’t happen in my lifetime.


Christine Granados is a working mother who has written numerous reviews, essays, feature articles and a short story collection “Brides and Sinners in El Chuco.” She is a reviewer for the American Book Review, based at the University of Houston-Victoria.

Smuggling Parrots

This essay appeared in the 2008 issue of Pembroke Magazine. No. 40 edited by Dr. Liliana Wendorff, chair of the Foreign Languages Department at The University of North Carolina at Pembroke.




CHRISTINE GRANADOS

As a child, I helped my mother smuggle parrots into El Paso, Texas, from Juárez, Mexico. My mother’s smuggling wasn’t premeditated, and she didn’t do it for profit. She bypassed Customs or "didn't declare all she had in her car" because she wanted to right a wrong. This was before the Bird Conservation Act of 1992, before the Mexican government banned the exporting of exotic birds, and before the avian bird flu. There were plenty of times we’d drive into Juárez for fruit, medicine, or to visit the dentist, and she didn’t look twice at the vendors selling birds by the side of road. But some of the trips were different.

Bird smuggling for her was an emotional response to inhumane treatment that disgusted her. She smuggled when she saw a particularly sickly bird, or if she didn’t like the way one of the vendors was handling the birds. She’d roll down the car window, and ssht ssht the vendor over to us. Before I knew it, she’d be handing me a brown paper sack and barking instructions: "Under the seat. Don’t crush the bird. Be gentle. Hurry up. God Damn it gently, I said." We’d drive through customs and lie about what we had in the car, then ride home. The risks she took were for naught because the birds usually died within days, all except for Perico.

My first encounters with Dagoberto Gilb reminded me of those trips to Juárez. When I met him he was doing his own type of smuggling to counter an injustice he saw, and still sees, in the American education system. He invited me, an aspiring writer, to his home for a workshop. I believe he was pissed off just as my mother felt when she saw the poor birds from Veracruz jammed into dented, rusted birdcages smeared with feces. She saw past their eyes dulled by heat, tequila, and traffic, underneath the coating of dust on their feathers and knew what magnificent birds they were.

After hearing my tales of rejection—four writing programs had told me to polish my writing skills and reapply—and even after reading my fiction, Dagoberto Gilb was still optimistic about my future. He said my material was great, but my punctuation and writing skills were getting in the way of my telling a good story. He knew that, like the birds on the border, my writing was fogged. He knew that in the right environment I could flourish and I'm sure he did some fast-talking and bargaining to get me into Texas State University like Mom when she bargained for Perico.

Perico was the smallest bird inside the cage. He still had fur on his tail feathers. The vendor tried to talk her out of buying him. He said the parrot would die before we got him home. Hearing that, Mom changed her tactic, and she began to badger the vendor into giving her the bird for free. He never knew what hit him. We left him standing on the street with the dirty string tied to his belt loop and the other end tied to another parrot’s foot, and one less bird in the cage.

Gilb offered me a safe place to perch until I understood fiction and honed my writing skills. He referred to the workshop he invited me to be a part of as the "Undocumented Illegal" writing workshop. There were four of us at his house in South Austin—four Mexican Americans who couldn’t get into MFA programs. And there was Dagoberto, a professor, friend, someone exactly like us, someone whose parents weren’t Ph.D.s but store clerks and laundry workers. Here was someone from a working-class background who was actually teaching at one the universities we were trying to get into. I never felt more comfortable with a professor than I did with Dagoberto. He talked too loud, cussed too much and nagged incessantly, exactly like my mother. And like her, there is no pretense to the man. Honesty, however brutal, is Dagoberto’s best quality. If you saw him walking on a dark night, you might cross to the other side of the street because he's big. Some might call him intimidating as one would have to be when you live in rough neighborhoods. His black hair hangs down past his chin and he glares at you with such intensity you have to look away. He is the anti-professor. That is, until he starts talking about books and writing. He's been published in The New Yorker and Harper’s, and done stints for NPR’s Fresh Air.

Being asked by Dagoberto Gilb to come over to read one of your stories is like Pete Sampras asking you to hit some balls, or Wynton Marsalis asking you to come over and jam, or Sandy D’Amato asking for one of your recipes. You get the picture. For some reason, he saw something in us. Three of us eventually made it into writing programs. Two went to Texas State University, one to the University of Iowa and the other is a director of Latino affairs for a Midwestern state—all because he saw something.

Once inside the walls of Texas State, I felt like one of those parrots stuffed into a brown paper sack and hidden under the car seat. I was slowly suffocating because I wasn’t well read enough, couldn’t string an eloquent sentence together, and sometimes didn’t understand what the hell the professors or students were talking about during class.

During that time, Dagoberto became my surrogate mother. It may seem strange to compare this big, Mexican-German writer to my mother, five foot two in heels. But if you ever meet her, you'll never forget her. It’s the same with Dagoberto. Like her, he can talk a blue streak, and he’d talk me down from my neuroses and self-esteem issues, there in his little closet of an office that they give professors at universities. He’s also got my mother’s stubborn tenacity. He, like her, goes against the grain, sees the unfair advantages the strong have over the weak, rich over the poor, finds the underdog and fights for it, for us. He wrote about the disadvantaged, people just like me, in an essay, "Poverty Is Always Starting Over." He said: "Poverty is about starting over again and then yet again. It’s about talent fully shaped, but which, unencouraged, discouraged, lasts the briefest moment."

He hunts down talent with an eye focused on the disadvantaged, just the way Mom picked which parrot she was going to save from the Chihuahuan Desert’s 100-degree heat. Those beautiful birds from the Gulf only lasted a day or two at our house. And my writing could have gone the way of the birds if not for Dagoberto’s encouragement. The simplicity and brilliance of getting a group of Mexican American students together to work on their writing is reminiscent of my mother’s solo animal-rights quest. Hers was a small step that made a big difference in the life one bird, Perico. The only bird we smuggled across that survived. He lived with us for two years. Because Mom didn’t have the heart to confine him yet again, he walked around freely, perching on chairs and couches. He walked around that house until he got strong enough to fly. One day, he was brave enough to fly out the door, and he lived in our backyard for a month. Each day, he’d take longer and longer trips away from the yard, until one day he flew off and never returned.

I gained strength under Dagoberto’s distracted and reluctant guidance. Found my voice in that office that he so completely filled. He listened to my rants. Let me speak freely about being the only Mexican American in some of the classes I was taking, maybe even the only person whose parents didn’t have college degrees, whose parents lived paycheck to paycheck, whose parents never once mentioned college as a possible future. He let me talk, and more importantly, he listened and validated my existence, through both his presence on campus and his writing.

My first collection of short stories Brides and Sinners in El Chuco was published in 2006 by University of Arizona Press and Gilb, like my mother, said he had nothing to do with it but I know the truth.

CHRISTINE GRANADOS was born and raised in El Paso, Texas. She is a stay-at-home mother of two sons and a freelance journalist. Her collection of short stories, Brides and Sinners in El Chuco, was published by University of Arizona Press in 2006. She was winner of the 2006 Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Foundation Award, a grant given by author Sandra Cisneros to further the aspirations of new writers. Her stories have been featured in Hecho en Tejas: An Anthology of Texas-Mexican Literature, Not Quite What I was Planning: And Other Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure (HarperCollins 2008); Texas Observer, El Andar Magazine, Big Tex[t] and the Newspaper Tree. She is a graduate of UT El Paso's School of Communications and the MFA creative writing program at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas.

Been a long time...

I've been in El Paso for an entire month, visiting mom and dad with the chavalos. Haven't posted in while so I'll post all the things I've published since May. Here they are from latest to earliest. Liked the book despite the hideous cover.

A Celebration

By CHRISTINE GRANADOS

Special Contributor

Dallas Morning News

The re-release of Tomas Rivera's work could not come at a better time. With the growth of the Mexican-American and Mexican population in the United States, reintroducing Rivera's work in an affordable version makes not only good educational sense but good sociological sense.

The sum total of Rivera's published works is in this Bible-sized paperback. Editor Julián Olivares wisely includes both the English and Spanish translations, allowing the reader to decide which language he/she prefers. Although Mr. Olivares translated a majority of the works, he chose Evangelina Vigil-Piñón's masterful translation of the novel …And the Earth Did Not Devour Him for this edition. Rivera's much-anthologized book of short stories The Harvest; his collection of poetry The Searchers: Collected Poetry and nine critical essays round out the corpus.

The Complete Works, first published in 1992, 8 years after his death, is already a standard in university ethnic studies courses throughout the country. In order to get a glimpse of who Mexican-Americans are as a people one need to look no further than the untitled piece after “First Communion” in …And the Earth Did Not Devour Him.. In it we are privy to the experiences of the Mexican-American community through the eyes of a young boy's Anglo teacher. The chapter, a mere paragraph long, answers many soul searching questions about the Mexican American and also may help explain why the ridiculous chili pepper, fiery stereotype has been attached to the culture.

“ The teacher was surprised when, hearing that they needed a button on the poster to represent the button industry, the child tore one off of his shirt and offered it to her. She was surprised because she knew that this was probably the only shirt the child had. She didn't know whether he did this to be helpful, to feel like he belonged or out of love for her. She did feel the intensity of the child's desire and this was what surprised her most of all.”

It's about perception and perspective, someone else's.

The point of view Rivera offers readers is one of the migrant laborer. He was born into a family of farm workers in Crystal City in 1935 and despite the nomadic life he managed to get an education and become a university administrator and scholar. His life, and work, “embodies the collective consciousness and experiences” Olivares said in the introduction--of the '60s, an era when the Chicano movement was at its apex.

This is a book that students need to read right alongside O. Henry and Steinbeck in English and history classes, especially in districts such as Dallas, where 60 percent of the students are Hispanic. But the re-release of this book allows readers of any age to see for themselves why Rivera has been the most influential voice in Chicano letters.

Christine Granados is a working mother and author of the short story collection “Brides and Sinners in El Chuco.”

First appeared in the DMN May 3, 2008.

Rest in peace

I, we, loved George Carlin at our house in El Paso in the 70s and not just because he smoked pot and did LSD but because we grew up with him on cable television. The seven words you can't say on television was our mantra: shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits. Always, always made us laugh even sitting outside in the fucking heat of an afternoon day.

I thoroughly enjoyed this, his last interview by Jay Dixit.

Also baked some slamming lemon squares. Yum. Recipe from smittenkitchen below:

Lemon Bars
Adapted from The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook

These are bold and tart lemon bars, ones I feel are best in smaller doses than Ina Garten suggests. I’ve made a few changes to the recipe–increased the salt in the crust, reduced the sugar in the lemon filling and an encouragement to grease your pan, as mine were all but cemented into their non-stick pan. For those of you who like the 1:1 crust to lemon layer ratio, use the second option.

Prep Time: 40 minutes (30 inactive)
Cook Time: 55 minutes

For the crust:
1/2 pound unsalted butter, at room temperature
1/2 cup granulated sugar
2 cups flour
1/8 teaspoon kosher salt


For lemon layer:

4 extra-large eggs at room temperature
1 2/3 cups granulated sugar
1 tablespoon + 1 teaspoon grated lemon zest (3 to 4 lemons)
2/3 cup freshly squeezed lemon juice
2/3 cup flour

Confectioners’ sugar, for dusting

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F and grease a 9 by 13 by 2-inch baking sheet.

For the crust, cream the butter and sugar until light in the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment. Combine the flour and salt and, with the mixer on low, add to the butter until just mixed. Dump the dough onto a well-floured board and gather into a ball. Flatten the dough with floured hands and press it into the greased baking sheet, building up a 1/2-inch edge on all sides. Chill.

Bake the crust for 15 to 20 minutes, until very lightly browned. Let cool on a wire rack. Leave the oven on.

For the lemon layer, whisk together the eggs, sugar, lemon zest, lemon juice, and flour. Pour over the crust and bake for 30 to 35 minutes (less if you are using the thinner topping), or about five minutes beyond the point where the filling is set. Let cool to room temperature.

Cut into triangles and dust with confectioners’ sugar.

El Paso in the news

Finally a voice of reason in this El Paso downtown development debate and I can’t believe who it’s coming from—Joe Olvera. For possibly the first time I agree wholeheartedly with what he had to say in Newspaper Tree. An excerpt:

“Well and good. Let’s preserve what should be preserved. For example, let’s preserve the housing units for which Carmen Felix and other activists fought such horrendous battles against powerhouses like Jonathan Rogers when he wanted to destroy El Segundo. Let’s preserve the Farmworker Center, let’s preserve El Sagrado Corazon Catholic Church, and let’s preserve some of the structures that have been a part of El Segundo for decades, and, yes, let’s preserve such historical buildings as where the book, Los de Abajo was first written and honored as the first book about the Mexican Revolution.

“But, do we need to preserve everything? We all know that the vast majority of housing units are rat infested, with roaches constituting a large portion of the vermin population. Do we need to preserve the Drug Lords/Smugglers who are using children as ‘mules?’ Can we preserve The Armijo Recreation Center and open it up to every youngster in El Segundo? That might be hard to do if the gang that controls that area doesn’t allow it. Oh, yes, gangs still control and create mayhem against children, youth, adults, abuelitos y abuelitas. That part of El Segundo hasn’t changed, although some people would like for us to believe that it has changed. But, no!”


To read the entire article click here. Mr. Olvera published a book “Chicano Sin Fin!” with Zapata 1910 Press for more information about it visit his blog.

A big congratulations to fellow El Pasoan Vanessa Ramos for winning the Dobie Paisano Jesse Jones Fellowship Award.

Chuco's, Chico's what's the diff?

Rudy Gutierrez
/EL PASO TIMES, Rodolfo Gonzalez/AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Whether you get your taco fix at Chico's or Chuco's depends on whether you are in Austin or 570 miles to the west. Chico's is a chain in El Paso. It is suing Chuco's, on 10th Street in Austin, for trademark infringement. Chuco's is hoping a name change will calm the waters over its 'drowning tacos.'


I gotta try this place out now.


For El Paso expats, Chuco's hits spot
A name change is on the horizon after Chico's Tacos files lawsuit for trademark infringement.
By Suzannah Gonzales
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF

Thursday, May 08, 2008
When at home, El Pasoans stop at Chico's Tacos. When in Austin, they stop at Chuco's Tacos.
But El Pasoans-turned-Austinites might soon stop at the Drowning Taco: Chuco's plans to change its name.
The move follows a federal lawsuit filed in El Paso. Chico's, an institution there, is alleging trademark infringement, saying that Chuco's is playing off Chico's with, among other things, its signature dish: rolled tacos in a special sauce, topped with shredded cheese, bright green salsa and served in a paper boat tray for under $5.
Rather than fight the lawsuit, the owners of Chuco's hope the name change will settle the matter. The menu will stay the same. Three beef rolled tacos at Chuco's cost $2.60, and six cost $4.93.
For those in Austin, Chuco's is the closest they can get to Chico's without making the eight-plus-hour drive.
"It's not Chico's, but it's good," Austin police officer Lorenzo Castro said.
At Chuco's, located in a yellow house on West 10th Street near North Lamar Boulevard, Castro said that when he goes back to El Paso once a year, the first place he stops and eats is Chico's.
"Now I don't have to worry about that. I can come here."
Mark Centeno, a die-hard Chico's fan with a three-times-a-week Chuco's habit, said that when you meet someone from El Paso, you ask where they went to high school, and then you talk about Chico's.
"It's a bond," he said.
Chuco's co-owner David Sahagun, who was born in Mexico and grew up in El Paso, says he tells customers five to 10 times a day: "We do not want to be Chico's; nor do we ever want to be Chico's."
The idea for the restaurant, which opened last fall, was to offer fast Mexican food in a casual-dining setting in that area of Austin, Sahagun said.
Other than that one item on the menu, Chuco's is completely different from Chico's, he said. While Chico's offers only the red, tomato-based sauce with their rolled tacos, Chuco's offers red and green tomato-based sauces and a vegetarian option.
Sahagun said the eatery represents both El Paso and Austin. In a hallway in Chuco's, opposite a University of Texas flag, a UT-El Paso flag hangs. The names of area high schools are painted around the flags. It makes El Pasoans nostalgic.
Sahagun has had to repaint the El Paso-area school names four times because of people writing their names next to their school. If it happens again, he says, he's not going to repaint.
Lawyers for Chico's and Chuco's currently are discussing the matter out of court, according to Chuco's lawyer Mark Osborn. They deny the allegations of trademark infringement.
"We don't want to fight with them," Sahagun said. "People came here for the food, not the name. We don't really care about the name. We'll change it."
The handful of Chico's locations in the El Paso area are owned and operated by the Mora family, who declined to comment for this story.
The dish of three or six rolled tacos — also known as flautas or taquitos — is nothing new and is common in parts of Mexico, Sahagun says.
They're also called tacos ahogados. Translation: drowned tacos.
El Chuco is a nickname for El Paso, El Pasoans say. It's short for "Pachuco," a zoot suit-clad hombre from back in the day. Naming the restaurant Chuco's, where pretty much all of the managing staff hails from El Paso, was a tribute to their hometown, Sahagun said.
"I'm from El Paso, and I love Chico's, mystery meat and all," said Mando Rayo, who wrote about the "Chuco's VS Chico's Smackdown" in the Taco Journalism blog and gave Chuco's four stars. (Chico's got five.)
"As my husband says, this is equivalent to the notion of every hamburger hut suing the other for sticking a slice of bacon in a burger and claiming trademark infringement," Trudy Alfaro Esquivel, a former El Pasoan living in Austin, wrote in an e-mail.
"El Pasoans have Chico's in their heart," Sahagun said. "I want Austin to have Chuco's in their heart."
sgonzales@statesman.com; 445-3616
Additional material from staff writer Rick Cantu.

***And to make you hungry watch this.

Tidbits

There is no theme, nothing really that holds these pieces together or no way I can group them, except to say that all these links deal with writing and I've enjoyed them all, along with Sheryl Luna's blog videos, he, he, he.

Another good review from Roberto Ontiveros.

Check out the Hecho en Tejas video about Dallas.

Good interview with Dorothy Allison.