My mother, Studs Terkel, and me
I was lucky enough to tell Studs this before he departed for the great big radio station in the sky, and he was lucky enough to meet his star pupil, Elvira Cordero. I have a photo of my mom and me and Studs in the WGN studio, all of us looking surprised Divine Providence could bring us together, but that’s Divine Providence for you.
In the Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska’s novel La Flor de Lis, this dialogue occurs more than once between the protagonist and others:
—But you’re not from Mexico, right?
—I am.
—It’s that you don’t look Mexican.
—Oh, yeah, well, what do I look like?
—A gringa.
—Well, I’m not a gringa. I’m Mexican.
—A poco. You gotta be kidding.
Some artists belong very much. Perhaps not so much to their home country, but their adopted one. Elena Poniatowska was born in Paris, but came to Mexico to live with her grandma as a young girl during World War II. She spoke French at home, English at school, and learned Spanish from the poorest members of Mexican society, the indigenous domestic workers—the cook, the nanny. This Mexican Spanish embraced Elenita, and she embraced it back to such a degree that she won the highest literary honor for a Spanish-language writer—the Cervantes Prize—for writing so essentially Mexican, it’s made her writing almost untranslatable. She has become an ambassador for the voiceless, a courageous voice in a country where speaking up can cost you your life.
I remember seeing Carlos Fuentes speak at the University of Illinois, Chicago, when I was una jovencita, a young thing. What command! What presence! The public adored him. Adored! Well, that one was the ambassador of everything, so handsome and dapper, like a Mexican Cary Grant. Who wasn’t going to pay attention to him?
I remember Fuentes sprang to his feet, ran down the aisle, and gamboled onto the stage like a kid goat. He read something…I don’t remember what, except I remember I didn’t understand a word. But what is engraved in my memory was the little leap onto the stage, a Mexican hat dance of sorts that only someone with the utmost self-confidence could give before uttering a syllable. En esos tiempos, en ese país. In those times, in that country.
I’m reminded too of the many occasions I was in the audience for the lectures of Jorge Luis Borges. Every time he came to Chicago, we thought it would be the last since he was so old. There would always be a huge wave of disciples, and un silencio enorme, a great silence, even before he opened his mouth and spoke. The master Borges was already an elderly man, and blind besides, which, as he himself admitted, inspired kindness.
En esos tiempos, in those times, el maestro Borges sat on a chair and leaned, it seemed to me, on a cane. At least he is leaning on a cane in my memory. He spoke of marvels, things that cause astonishment, labyrinths, mirrors, stories that leave you with your mouth open, because he liked to tell those kinds of stories.
And like a blind Tiresias, Borges spoke as a prophet to those of us who were writers. His work appealed to young writers. He was experimental and avant-garde. The form of his fable stories, the ones that later would be published in the U.S. in a collection called Dream Tigers, especially impacted me, a new genre between poetry and fiction, even though Borges’s poetry seemed to me then, as it does now, old-fashioned. But it was his stories, many less than a page, that inspired me to invent a new form of writing, a novel like a pearl necklace, without being aware of Elena Poniatowska’s diminutive story cycle, Lilus Kikus.
I don’t want to appear pretentious and say I write like el maestro Borges. I only want to say that it was his Dream Tigers that gave me permission to dream in the same way that Kafka gave Gabriel García Márquez permission to dream, that Thomas Wolfe gave permission to Betty Smith. Sometimes we need permission, encouragement, someone to fill our heart with desire, because without desire you can’t invent anything.
I don’t know how I wound up writing a book of fiction while in a poetry workshop, but I know that the International Writing Workshop at Iowa and books from the Latin American Boom allowed me to find my way home at a time when I felt I didn’t belong.
I don’t know anything, but I know this: whatever is done with love, in the name of others, without self-gain, whatever is done with the heart on behalf of someone or something, be it a child, animal, vegetable, rock, person, cloud, whatever work we make with complete humility, will always come out beautifully, and something more valuable than fame or money will come. This I know.
The House on Mango Street was written in a period of complete impotency. As a high school teacher, I had no idea how to save my students from their own lives except to include them in my writing, not for their sake, but for my own. I couldn’t undo myself from their stories any other way. How do you get any sleep at night if you witness stories that don’t let you go?
During the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, a student demonstration took place in a plaza called Tlatelolco. Thousands of students were massacred by the police, including Elena Poniatowska’s brother. She said she didn’t want to be an accomplice to impotency, and so she wrote Massacre in Mexico, a book that gave Elena a home in Mexican letters by inventing a new genre, a book made of oral testimonies. I think the great opportunities in life arrive when we are in this state of grace.
And so, I find myself coming home when I read Thomas Wolfe. The Gants are my family, their crowded rooms shared intimately with strangers called family. They take me in and happen to lead me to my own crowded rooms in a house on Mango Street, or a falling-apart fixer-upper on El Dorado Street in San Antonio, Texas, in a novel called Caramelo, with a mom who also has big real estate dreams.
Wolfe guided Betty Smith all the way home to Brooklyn in his own writing about the same terrain. And Betty Smith writing about growing up poor, growing up ashamed because she was poor, sheltered my mother when she was a young woman trying to find her way from poverty and shame out to her true home. I am kin of Betty Smith, and Betty Smith is kin of Thomas Wolfe, and so we are branches of the same tree. Your people are my people, whither thou goest, me too.
The paradox for a working-class writer is that we are never more exiled from our real homes, from the blood kin we have honored in our pages, than when we have drifted away from them on that little white raft called the page.
I had dinner recently with two other Latina writers, and I asked them if their families had spoken to them yet about their new books, and we paused and looked around and blinked. None of us could admit our books had brought us closer to our families. Not once in the recent or faraway past. Maybe it’s as the writer Cherríe Moraga says: they don’t need to read our books; they have us.
I know for myself I can’t go back home to that place where I was raised except through stories, spoken or on paper. Once when I tried to invite a relative to a reading I was giving in Chicago, she looked at me, exasperated, and said, “Sandra, I’m your family, I’m not your fan.”
I should’ve said, “But I’m your fan.” Of course, I didn’t think to say this then, but I’m a writer, and I’m saying it here now.
Instead, I look for my kin in my fellow writers. Those I know in person and those I know on the page. I feel fortunate at least to open books and be invited to step in. If that book shelters me and keeps me warm, I know I’ve come home.
Luis Omar Salinas
Luis Omar Salinas was one of the Fresno School of poets who influenced a younger generation of poets like myself. His work reminded me of the Spanish poets because of its lyricism and flights of the imagination, but now in hindsight he reminds me of the self-taught artist Martín Ramírez, who wrestled his demons into art. I would meander into my own darkness three years after meeting him. I wish we could have a conversation now. I’d ask him how he managed to become a poet coming from a working-class home, how he dealt with living at home as an adult with his father, was it true he was once with the marine reserve, did the madness arrive before or after, and did he ever talk to un curandero o
r a therapist? I would’ve mentioned that I too was bullied by hard-core Chicano activists who thought my writing not Chicano enough. Rereading this article I realize I was too young a writer to understand everything Salinas was telling me. I had to live a life first and then ask myself the hard questions later.
This article appeared in the June/July 1984 issue of Tonantzin, the magazine of the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center, where I was literature director at the time. Salinas visited in April and May of that same year as part of a series of readings that included Norma Alarcón, Cherríe Moraga, Helena María Viramontes, Ana Castillo, Pat Mora, Rolando Hinojosa, Evangelina Vigil, Alberto Ríos, and Ricardo Sánchez, among others. With the exception of the poetry cited, the Salinas quotes are drawn from a conversation we had just before his performance at the Guadalupe Theater.
A version of this selection was reprinted in the 2014 anthology Messenger to the Stars: A Luis Omar Salinas New Selected Poems and Reader, edited by Christopher Buckley and Jon Veinberg.
I SALUTE THE DEAD
In this drunken town
bitten by the whores
of Texas, I pause with
a beer to salute the dead.
Someone’s in my house
—the dead child of Texas
haunts the woodwork
and the child is everywhere
tonight waiting for the dawn,
tomorrow maybe playing
in the mud.
My nephew asks if the black
children he sees on TV
are the poor, and I reply,
“We are the poor.”
He cannot understand,
and I know this house
is as poor as this drunken
town
and I drink my beer and
hiccup into song.
Darkness Under the Trees/Walking Behind the Spanish: Poems by Luis Omar Salinas, Chicano Studies Library Publications, University of California, Berkeley, 1982
It was Salinas all right, his hand extended out to greet us. Salinas the poet came to town to read his poems. Salinas the man approaching us at the San Antonio airport. Salinas the creator of “her lips have the softness / of olives crushed by rain.” Salinas arriving with a smaller version of himself in a brown suit—Salinas and Salinas’s father. The elder Salinas speaking the gentle Spanish of grandmothers and children. An exchange of formalities. Yes, their flight had been fine. No, this was not their first visit to San Antonio, recalling a relative’s death and a funeral that had brought them here three years before.
Salinas seemed timid, tired, sad like an uncle who has never married. A man who used language sparingly, yet the Salinas I knew of the poems seems intoxicated with language, leaping from one scintillating image to the next, “words coming as confused larks…play[ing] games.”
Had I not been familiar with the Salinas photograph on the cover of Prelude to Darkness, had I not known Salinas’s face with its quixotic pucker at times turned into an enigmatic wince as if a bee had stung him, Salinas drawing a cigarette to his lips, Salinas young, frozen forever in that black-and-white photo in the Entrance: 4 Chicano Poets anthology, had I not known the face that approached us, the same, slightly fuller, slightly sadder, I wondered if I would have recognized him from his poems alone. Salinas the romantic, Salinas the lyrical, the somber Salinas of the poetry.
Here he was all right. El mero chingón de poesía, as the poet chingón José Montoya had crowned him. A poet with five books to his credit, winner of the Stanley Kunitz Award, the recent recipient of a GE Foundation Award. Shy. Pauses. Reluctant answers to our inquiries.
We took him for a brief tour of San Antonio, the usual tourist attractions, pointed out the Alamo, the River Walk, took him to El Mercado. A trolley car passed by. “If we had time we’d get on one of those,” I said. Salinas just smiled. It was hard to tell what he was enjoying as we drove around and pointed to things one must point to. It was hard to tell what he was thinking in his silences. When we stopped at the Instituto Cultural de México, where he sat beside the Olmec stone head, patiently allowing himself to be photographed and rephotographed, I couldn’t help but draw a connection between the face Salinas wore and the other ancient face of stone.
Salinas, after all, was coming “home” to Texas. He had been born here, in Robstown, but had moved away at the age of eight to California, a move crucial, Salinas states, to his becoming a poet.
“Actually the phenomenon of becoming a poet was rather an accident, just mere knowledge of people and also my willingness to get involved. It’s strange, you know. It’s fate. I could’ve been somebody else, a bricklayer, a carpenter, or a shoe salesman. If there hadn’t been la revolución [referring to the Chicano movement of the 1960s] and all this interest in Chicano literature, I probably wouldn’t have become involved in it, or if I hadn’t gone to college, or had I gotten married as I planned at twenty-six.”
Salinas admits he “fell in” with the writers on the West Coast, writers like Jon Veinberg, Peter Everwine, Philip Levine. Does this perhaps explain his popularity in non-Chicano circuits? How is it, then, that the poetry of Luis Omar Salinas is embraced beyond the Chicano literary community?
“I don’t know why,” Salinas admitted sincerely. “I really don’t know how to explain it. I’ve always considered myself a Chicano poet, even though the writers who influenced me were not Chicano. I feel a personal kinship with the Spanish poets. Hernández, Jiménez, Lorca. But definitely I’m a Chicano poet,” Salinas responded defensively during an open mike the night prior when asked about his political direction. “Every Chicano writing is a Chicano writer. Chicano poetry is human poetry—that’s where the heart of the matter lies—human compassion.”
Salinas seemed less comfortable with questions on the political theory of his work. “There has to be some kind of tension, some kind of conflict,” Salinas confessed. “Most writers are at odds with their environment or at odds with themselves. For the poetry to be of any consequence, the poet must have a fight on his hands.
“In my life,” Salinas continued, “there has always been a battle with madness, bad friends, lack of money, romances that didn’t work. All played a part in my alienation. Most poets are on the triste side.” He chuckled. “I guess there’s been a lot of sadness in my life.”
As to whether these hard times helped his writing, Salinas disagreed. “No, but they did ask for courage. How can a person write under bad circumstances? But I’m a poet that deals with all facets of experience. I don’t hold anything back. And poetry, of course, is like magic. It helps to balance my life. That balance is very important. When I’m not writing, I tend to lose balance.”
Curiously Salinas seems at home in his odd role as poet. The poems attest to this. Salinas addresses Salinas, creates a persona of himself, divides himself into two in much the same way Jorge Luis Borges speaks of a Borges and a Borges in “Borges and I.”
“Yes, I have always felt comfortable as poet, even more so in my early years in college. Lately I find it more difficult to write. When I don’t travel as much as I used to, the same kind of poems come up, and you don’t want that. I have periods like this when I don’t write for months.”
How does he explain, then, the ten-year gap between Crazy Gypsy, his first book, and the rapid succession of the four others that followed?
“After Crazy Gypsy I came back from a strange purgatory,” Salinas explained. “I was dying, in a sense, spiritually, and the poems seemed to get better as I wrote them. Crazy Gypsy was written at the height of my youth. Basically it’s a struggle to survive and to write and not go crazy, not commit suicide. Books were a way of saving myself. My friends were encouraging, my family.
“My grandfather was a poet and an orator too, but none of his work survived. He wrote a lot of things in fixed verse, rhymed lines and all that. I don’t remember him very well, but I do have a poem I wrote for him.
“And, of course, my family has been very supportive of my being a poet. My mot
her has an eighth-grade education, my father a fourth-grade, but they’re very sharp and perceptive. I always show my poems to my father, and he makes comments. He can tell me where a bad line is. He’s always been a help. My mother, she says ‘That’s good’ every time I bring a paycheck home from doing a reading. Only she says I should stay out of bars. She’s afraid I’ll escape into Cervantes’s world of fantasy at times.”
—
Tuesday, May 1st. The day of the poetry reading. Salinas arrives at the Guadalupe Theater, where he is to share the stage with the San Antonio poet Art Muñoz. Salinas is handsome in his suit and tie, spick-and-span, like an altar boy. He blushes a little when I compliment him.
“You know,” Salinas confided before the reading, “coming here to San Antonio and meeting you and the Guadalupe staff and everyone is one of the real highlights in my life. Everyone has been very kind. Chicanos have been very supportive of me, and I’m pleased about that. And very grateful.”
“Does that surprise you?” I asked.
“In a way,” he said, and smiled. “In a way, I am surprised.”
And then the reading began. Forget his nervousness the night before, his lack of eloquent answers regarding theory or politics. He reads his poems, suddenly, simply. Because all at once one understands Salinas is not a poet of rhetoric and theory. He is a poet of the heart, of that “human compassion” that is Chicano poetry. Salinas the poet and Salinas the man merge into one, vulnerable and lovely.
“We all strive for the muse,” Salinas had said earlier to me in regard to poetry. “We all strive to achieve some things. In my life if anything at all has happened or hasn’t happened, it’s a little bit of fame, recognition. Bread, dreams, and poetry. That’s all I’m after.”
A House of My Own: Stories From My Life Page 4