Tuesday, January 30, 2024
Saturday, January 27, 2024
Preocupación en Unicef por el gran aumento de niños que no leen ni escriben en Latinoamérica
“A nosotros nos interesa mucho la cooperación internacional, acercar a los países y estar listos para que cuando los países lo necesiten podamos brindarles con asistencia técnica, hacerles llegar las experiencias más innovadoras, las experiencias de otros países en Latinoamérica y otras regiones", afirmó el Jefe regional de educación del Fondo de las Naciones Unidas....
Wednesday, January 24, 2024
Festival Nacional del Libro (12), Washington D.C. Escritores de origen latino: Mel Valentine Vargas. Por Javier J. Jaspe
En Pocas Palabras. Javier J. Jaspe
Washington D.C.
“The
2023 National Book Festival was held in the nation’s capital at the Walter E.
Washington Convention Center on Saturday, August 12, from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Several programs were livestreamed, and video of all talks can be viewed online
shortly after the Festival’s conclusion. Mark your calendars now for next
year’s National Book Festival, scheduled for Aug. 24, 2024.”
EN: https://www.loc.gov/events/2023-national-book-festival/about-this-event/
Una lista completa de los autores que participaron en el
Festival Nacional del Libro de 2023
(FNL2023) puede verse EN: https://www.loc.gov/events/2023-national-book-festival/authors/
La serie que finalizamos hoy se refiere a escritores de origen latino que participaron en el FNL2023. Su objeto no consiste en realizar un análisis de su obra, sino el de publicar material encontrado en Internet relacionado con la misma y sus autores, para lo cual nos servirá de guía el propio Website del FNL2023 en inglés: https://www.loc.gov/events/2023-national-book-festival/about-this-event/
Los textos de Internet se transcribirán en itálicas, en español o inglés, según sea el caso, con indicación de su fuente. Esta duodécima y última entrega se refiere la autora Mel Valentine Vargas. Veamos:
Mel Valentine Vargas
Mel is a queer Cuban-American graphic novelist and
illustrator located in Chicago. They hope to draw the kind of illustrations
that their younger self, and others like them, could have seen to feel less
alone and to feel a lot more love. Vargas illustrated the graphic novel
adaptation of Meg Medina’s “Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass,” which will
be featured at the 2023 National Book Festival.
Conferencia/Entevista
en el FNL2023
2023
National Book Festival: Drawing Yaqui Delgado with Meg Medina & Mel
Valentine Vargas
Video EN: https://www.loc.gov/events/2023-national-book-festival/schedule/item/webcast-10985/
Website de
la autora:
Biografía
en el Website de la autora:
Mel is a queer Miami born, Chicago based, Latine comic
creator and illustrator. They work largely with digital media and have a BA in
illustration from Columbia College Chicago. As a member of Columbia College
Chicago’s 2020 senior class, Mel was awarded Illustrator of the year.
Mel loves drawing minorities and art that their younger
self needed while growing up. Their work is largely inspired by LGBT, Hispanic,
and fem experiences, and is focused in graphic storytelling with themes that
help highlight minority lifestyles of all shapes and sizes. It is Mel's goal to
ensure that their illustrations help people who are not often represented feel
a little less alone and a lot more love.
When they aren’t working Mel can be found playing with
their cats, eating gyoza, or playing farming simulator games.
Mel has worked with Candlewick, Little Brown, Harper Collins, and Penguin
Random House. They have also done
editorial work with many publications including The Chicago Reader and Lions Roar Magazine.
Follow Mel to stay tuned in on their events, work, and
projects!
Instagram
@onlinevalentine
Twitter
@melvalentinev
Email
: Melvalentinev@gmail.com
Libros en
el Website de la autora:
https://www.melvalentinev.com/graphic-novels-and-books
Ilustraciones
en el Website de la autora:
https://www.melvalentinev.com/illustrations
Cómics en
el Website de la autora:
https://www.melvalentinev.com/comics
Reportajes/Entrevistas
Mel Valentine Vargas on adapting Yaqui Delgado Wants
to Kick Your Ass into a graphic novel
"I tried to keep the story as similar as possible to the
original because it was already so good. It's a timeless book, really."
Interview by Contributor
Published
on Oct. 11, 2023
Mel Valentine
Vargas’ art is evocative, endearing, and true to life. Their recent adaptation
of the Pura Belpre award-winning novel, Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick
Your Ass, is just as relevant to teens
now as it was ten years ago when Meg Medina first authored it. From the
adaptation's first page, Valentine Vargas draws readers into the vulnerability
and relatability of Piddy Sanchez’s story.
Yaqui Delgado Wants
to Kick Your Ass tells the story of Piedad “Piddy” Sanchez, your normal
15-year-old. Once her mom relocates them to a new part of Queens, Piddy's had
to switch schools, move houses, and separate from her best friend. Amongst
those issues, Piddy is learning how to navigate her Latinidad, deal with the
repercussions of her absent father, and there’s just another tiny problem:
Yaqui Delgado hates her.
Can
you tell me about how you came to illustrate Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your
Ass?
Valentine
Vargas: So my agent actually reached out to me with this
opportunity from Candlewick, who originally published the original chapter book
version of this book about ten years ago. They wanted to create a graphic novel
version for the ten year anniversary because they wanted to revamp the fan base
of this book. People already loved this book so much, and they really thought
that it needed this new coat of paint…..
Image….
I always say this, I did not know that this book existed before [Candlewick] came to me with the opportunity. I think when [the novel] came out, I would have been the perfect age to pick up this book and love it. So [Candlewick] sent me over a chapter book version. I read it and I loved it, and I agreed immediately to adapt it and turn it into a graphic novel. And that's kind of how that started.
That's
awesome. I know I had never heard about it either until I decided to review it,
and I fell in love with this graphic novel version. And so now I have to go
back and read the chapter book version.
Yeah, I mean, the
chapter book is so good. It's different in a lot of ways, but I tried to keep
the story as similar as possible to the original because it was already so
good. It's a timeless book, really.
Yeah,
it definitely is. And one thing that stood out to me was how well you were able
to capture Piedad’s emotional journey throughout the book. I know cyberbullying
was certainly the main focus of her story, but she was also struggling with her
Latinidad and her relationship with her absent father. How did you go about
creating these difficult moments in Piddy’s life, but visually?
It was kind of hard
for sure, because I feel like chapter books have such an incredible way of
writing something and making it universal because they don't add enough details
to where you can kind of separate yourself from the story. So I think they add
this perfect level so that you can still see yourself within this character's
life…..
Image….
I always say
this, I did not know that this book existed before [Candlewick] came to me with
the opportunity. I think when [the novel] came out, I would have been the
perfect age to pick up this book and love it. So [Candlewick] sent me over a
chapter book version. I read it and I loved it, and I agreed immediately to
adapt it and turn it into a graphic novel. And that's kind of how that started.
That's
awesome. I know I had never heard about it either until I decided to review it,
and I fell in love with this graphic novel version. And so now I have to go
back and read the chapter book version.
Yeah, I mean, the
chapter book is so good. It's different in a lot of ways, but I tried to keep
the story as similar as possible to the original because it was already so good.
It's a timeless book, really.
Yeah,
it definitely is. And one thing that stood out to me was how well you were able
to capture Piedad’s emotional journey throughout the book. I know cyberbullying
was certainly the main focus of her story, but she was also struggling with her
Latinidad and her relationship with her absent father. How did you go about
creating these difficult moments in Piddy’s life, but visually?
It was kind of hard
for sure, because I feel like chapter books have such an incredible way of
writing something and making it universal because they don't add enough details
to where you can kind of separate yourself from the story. So I think they add
this perfect level so that you can still see yourself within this character's
life.
It's hard to transform those [moments] into comics, but I don't think it's impossible. When you really take these moments that Meg paid so much attention to and you're like, 'This is a moment where I really have to zoom in on Piddy’s face because we have to know exactly how she's feeling in this moment.'
And
these moments where I'm going to zoom in on this object because this object is
important to this part of the story. The audience can infer how these
characters are feeling. It's like a jigsaw puzzle deciding what each panel will
hold to really continue that feeling and sensation of the scene. Sometimes it's
a lot of me deciding how blank I want to make the page because I feel like
making pages mostly blank in graphic novels is such a powerful move, and it's
important sometimes to draw less…..
Images….
As
you mentioned, Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass is the celebration of the
ten year anniversary of Meg Medina’s book. It feels like this graphic novel is
just as relevant, if not more so, than it was ten years ago when her novel was
first published. Why do you think that is?
Unfortunately,
bullying is still a thing. I experienced [bullying] when I was a child. I think
it's rare to come across somebody who wasn't bullied in some way or another by
their peers, let alone by other people in their lives. And then on top of that
it's struggling with your identity, which again, who hasn't gone through that,
whether you're Hispanic or not. It's struggling with your friendships and
feeling more distant from your friends who you once were super close with.
Again, who hasn't been through that. First crushes, first jobs, school, it’s
such a timeless book because it really is a culmination of so many things that
we all go through.
I always say - it’s
important in all the ways we're similar and it's important in all the ways
we're different, too, because it's great for somebody who isn't a Hispanic
teenage girl dealing with these problems to pick up this book and understand
this point of view, the same way that it is important for a Hispanic teenage
girl to pick up this book and see herself within this novel.
Yeah, the scene where Piddy is dealing with the aftermath of Yaqui Delgado fighting PIddy, then everything was posted online afterwards for the whole school to see — how does a young Latine girl recover from that? It was very impactful.
I know this graphic novel was just published, but I was researching a little bit about the novel itself. I saw instances where Meg Medina had spoken about book banning in relation to Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass. I was wondering if you’ve already had instances of discussion around book banning with your graphic novel.
So the book just got
released September 5th, so I have not experienced any banning with it. I have
thought about the possibility of that happening because people really are
banning books just for showcasing minority voices. I know it can happen. I
wouldn't be surprised, unfortunately.
I’m a stereotypical
Cuban from Miami because my parents came from Cuba and I was born in Miami.
I've lived in Florida my entire life until I moved to Chicago for college. And
Florida is a leading state in book bans. I wouldn't be surprised if it got
banned in my home state.
I've seen a lot of
really, really good books get banned because they're showcasing somebody's
culture that isn't White™. There's this children's book about making dumplings
that got banned. I'm like, why?
So I haven't dealt
with that. But obviously Meg and I are very against book bans, and I would be
the first to speak out about it if it did happen. I'm outraged enough that it
happens to other people's books.
What
advice would you give to young readers of Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass?
Honestly, it sounds
cheesy, but tell somebody if you're going through something. I know that's
always so hard. Because again, who hasn't been through bullying? I got bullied
in school, and I think it really is just such a relief when you're able to tell
somebody. Unfortunately, it's not always the solution, because it really
depends on who you tell.
There’s adults who
will try their hardest to help you, and there's adults who don't care,
unfortunately, for lack of a better word. It's a battle of wanting to be heard.
It’s important to tell people what it is that you're going through, whether
it's a teacher, a counselor, your parents.
I also went to the
NBF with Meg, who does the National Book Festival in Washington, and our book
talk was specifically in the kids programming. A lot of the kids asked me art
questions, which made me very emotional. The advice I was telling the kids is
to continue to do what it is that you love even though you think you're bad at
it.
They were like, 'My
art doesn't look the way I want it to look.' And I was like, that's okay. That
happens to me now. So I think it's important that if you want to do comics or
if you want to write stories: continue to do that and you'll get better. Nobody
is born being good at something like that.
I
love that. How did you get started into writing graphic novels?....
Image….
I actually didn't
know that I wanted to do this. I want to say that until I graduated high
school, I always knew that I liked to draw and write stories and create
universes or characters. I used to do costuming for a theater for seven years.
That was my major because I went to an arts magnet school.
I love the drawing
process of designing the costumes. And to this day, drawing clothes is one of
my favorite things to do for the characters. In college, I would come home from
class and all I wanted to do was draw.
And originally I was
going to college because I was getting a biology degree. And I was just like,
all I want to do is draw and read comics and something has to change in my
life, because if I'm coming home and I'm not really loving what I'm doing at school
and all I want to do is draw, obviously that's what I should be doing. So I
kind of went feral one day and just started looking up art colleges. I was
going to community college at the time, and I started looking up art colleges
that still had applications open. And I got lucky enough that Columbia College,
Chicago had their applications open. I left Florida, which I've lived in my
entire life, and moved over there, which was one of the best decisions of my
life. I've met incredible people and have really poured my heart and soul into
this career. I've moved up my entire life to go and follow this thing and I've
loved it.
I've made zines,
I've done things for newspapers, I've done other books, and have had other
opportunities with conventions. And it's all been around drawing comics. And
I've loved every second of it. It feels like what I'm meant to be doing, which
feels really good.
Here
at Popverse, we celebrate the best in TV, movies, and comics. And I was
wondering what Latine TV, movies, shows or comics are you loving right now that
you're not currently working on?
I'm sure that other
people from minority groups can relate, but sometimes I watch the media and I
don't really relate it to the minority that I am, I just watch a show.
But I watch a lot of
media that I categorized as queer because I'm queer. Survival of the Thickest
is a show on Netflix that’s really good. It's about this fat woman who just got
cheated on and she's like 30-something and she's trying to live her life. She’s
a fashion stylist. That show was so good and so funny. It's just beautiful.
Watch it.
Fanbase Press Interviews Mel Valentine
Vargas on the Upcoming Release of the Graphic Novel Adaptation, “Yaqui Delgado Wants
to Kick your Ass”
Written By Barbra Dillon, Fanbase Press Editor-in-Chief
Image….
The following is an interview with Mel Valentine
Vargas regarding the upcoming release of the graphic novel
adaptation, Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass, through
Candlewick. In this interview, Fanbase Press Editor-in-Chief Barbra Dillon
chats with Vargas about their creative experience in bringing the award-winning
novel (originally written by Meg Medina) to the sequential art medium, what
they hope that readers may take away from the story, and more!
Barbra Dillon, Fanbase Press Editor-in-Chief: Congratulations on
the upcoming release of Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass! What are you most
excited for readers to experience with this adaptation of the award-winning YA
novel?
Mel Valentine Vargas: Thank you! Meg
Medina and I are very excited about it! I hope that having this book adapted as
a graphic novel will both satisfy fans who cherish the original while also
reaching new people who will love and see themselves in this story.
BD: The creative process of approaching an
adaptation of a prior work – especially one as well received as Yaqui Delgado Wants
to Kick Your Ass – can be a daunting experience. How would you describe
your approach to breathing new life into the story through the sequential art
medium, and what did you find to be most rewarding/challenging about the
process?
MVV: Firstly, I read my copy of the original book
twice in preparation for this graphic novel. I actually did not know this book
existed before I got presented with this project, which is crazy since I would
have LOVED to read this as a teen. My copy now is so well loved, full of
highlighter marks, notes, and color coded sticky notes.
I tried keeping the story as similar as possible to
the original while also sprinkling it with more modern takes so that it stays
relevant, though it wasn’t hard considering Meg wrote it out so perfectly
already. It’s such a relatable story that it’s not truly necessary to change
much in order to make it shine as a graphic novel.
BD: What makes Candlewick the perfect home for this
story?
MVV: Candlewick has worked with Meg Medina for
years, so I knew that there was going to be a lot of love put into this book
from the whole team. I feel honored to have been given the opportunity to work
on this with skilled people who were familiar with the original and couldn’t
wait to see this book blossom.
BD: At Fanbase Press, our #StoriesMatter initiative endeavors
to highlight the impact that stories can have on audiences of various mediums.
How do you feel that Piddy’s story will connect with and impact readers?
MVV: No matter how you slice it, Piddy’s story is as
relevant as it was ten years ago. Heck, it was relevant 100 years ago. What
person hasn’t dealt with feeling different, family tension, friend drama,
crushes, or bullies? It is imperative that stories like this continue to be
told, because people need to know that they are not alone, that things will get
better, and that they will survive.
For those who perhaps do not see themselves in
Piddy, read this anyway. I would hate for people to think that because they do
not fit into all the categories that Piddy does, that they shouldn’t pick up
this book. In fact, I think it is important for us to push ourselves to read
books about those that are different from us, so that we may understand others
better.
BD: Are there any other upcoming projects on which
you are currently working that you would like to share with our readers?
MVV: My next full length graphic novel, Pillow Talk, written by
Stephanie Cooke and illustrated by me, will be out in 2024. Other projects are
in the works, too, so keep your eyes peeled.
BD: Lastly, what is the best way for our readers to
find more information about Yaqui Delgado Wants
to Kick Your Ass and your other work?
MVV: Readers can find more of my work on my
Instagram (@Onlinevalentine), and if you have any questions or thoughts, you
can email me at Melvalentinev (at) gmail (dot)com.
I hope you all love the book as much as I loved
working on it!
Book Review: Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass by Meg Medina, illustrated by Mel Valentine Vargas
By Ileana
González Soto
EN: https://latinxinpublishing.com/blog/2023/9/20/book-review
If
you’re reading this review, you probably know just how petrifying high school
can be. Not fitting in, not feeling good enough, getting good grades, romance,
friendships, body image. High school is a lot, on top of the struggles with
family and identity that are often prevalent as you make the transition into a
young adult. Add social media and cyber-bullying into the mix and high school?
Yeah, it’s hell.
Meg Medina’s award-winning novel, Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass,
is expertly transformed by Mel Valentine Vargas into a graphic novel that is
pertinent to teens of today. It takes elements that were strongest in Medina’s 2013
prose and brings them to life in a revitalizing way. We still feel the
yearning, loneliness, and vulnerability that Medina crafted for us through
Piddy Sanchez’s story, but Vargas expertly gets us to know Piddy through their
contemporary art.
Meg Medina’s award-winning novel, “Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass”, is expertly transformed by Mel Valentine Vargas into a graphic novel that is pertinent to teens of today. It takes elements that were strongest in Medina’s 2013 prose and brings them to life in a revitalizing way.
Piddy
Sanchez feels herself slipping, and she feels alone.
Her mom Clara works late, and is doing
the best she can to raise Piddy as a single mom. And despite her mom doing
everything she can for Piddy, Piddy still feels like a piece of her is missing.
Her father is no longer in the picture, choosing instead to live with a second
family in the Dominican Republic. Her best friend Mitzi is actually fitting in
at her school, and forgetting about Piddy. Her grades are falling, she's
skipping class, she’s had to move, and oh yeah, Yaqui Delgado wants to kick her
ass.
Image….
Though
the title is centered around Yaqui, we actually get to know her very little,
except that she hates Piddy for being the new girl at school. She can’t stand
the way that Piddy shakes her hips when she walks. Piddy isn’t the
stereotypical Latina, but she’s just as Latina as the rest of the girls at
school. Still, she knows she doesn’t fit in because of her accentless Spanish,
her light skin, and her adeptness in the classroom. And Yaqui blames Piddy for
talking to Alfredo, a boy that Yaqui has her eyes on.
So, after weeks of bullying, Yaqui finally
kicks Piddy’s ass. And posts the fight online for the whole school to see.
We know today just as we did back in 2013
(when Meg Medina’s prose novel was first published) about the intensity of
cyberbullying. The fact is, social media has become even more of a staple in
young teens’ lives than it was ten years ago. It is proof that young readers, young
Latine readers, need Piddy’s story now more than ever.
Yes, Piddy Sanchez is going through
it. Kids her age can suck, and the pressure to succeed and fit in threatens to
make her head explode. But, the most important thing that Piddy learns through
all of this is that she is never alone. She learned how to play piano from her
mom, how to dance and shake her hips from Lila, and how to make new friends and
try new things from her best friend Mitzi. She has friends and family who love
her and will stick up for her no matter what she is going through. With a
strong community around her, Piddy learns to stick up for herself and gathers
the strength to not give up, even when it feels like the entire world is
against her.
También puede verse:
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Festival Nacional del Libro (11), Washington D.C. Escritores de origen latino: Luis Alberto Urrea. Por Javier J. Jaspe
Washington D.C.
“The
2023 National Book Festival was held in the nation’s capital at the Walter E.
Washington Convention Center on Saturday, August 12, from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Several programs were livestreamed, and video of all talks can be viewed online
shortly after the Festival’s conclusion. Mark your calendars now for next
year’s National Book Festival, scheduled for Aug. 24, 2024.”
EN: https://www.loc.gov/events/2023-national-book-festival/about-this-event/
Una lista completa de los autores que participaron en el
Festival Nacional del Libro de 2023
(FNL2023) puede verse EN: https://www.loc.gov/events/2023-national-book-festival/authors/
La serie que continuamos hoy se refiere a escritores de origen latino que participaron en el FNL2023. Su objeto no consiste en realizar un análisis de su obra, sino el de publicar material encontrado en Internet relacionado con la misma y sus autores, para lo cual nos servirá de guía el propio Website del FNL2023 en inglés: https://www.loc.gov/events/2023-national-book-festival/about-this-event/
Los textos de Internet se transcribirán en itálicas, en español o inglés, según sea el caso, con indicación de su fuente. Esta undécima entrega se refiere al autor Luis Alberto Urrea. Veamos:
Luis Alberto Urrea
Luis Alberto Urrea is the bestselling author of many works of
nonfiction, poetry and fiction, including “The Hummingbird’s Daughter” and “The
House of Broken Angels,” a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. He was
a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for his landmark work of nonfiction “The
Devil’s Highway,” now in its 34th paperback printing. Urrea is a recipient of
an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, among many other honors. He
lives outside Chicago and teaches at the University of Illinois Chicago.
Urrea’s newest release, "Good Night, Irene: A Novel External," will be featured at the 2023 National Book Festival.
EN: https://www.loc.gov/events/2023-national-book-festival/authors/item/n92083371/luis-alberto-urrea/
Conferencia/Entrevista en el FNL 2023
2023 National Book Festival: The Family You Need, the Family You Create with Esmeralda Santiago & Luis Alberto Urrea
Video EN: https://www.loc.gov/events/2023-national-book-festival/schedule/item/webcast-10986/
PBS
Books 2023 National Book Festival Author Talk: Luis Alberto Urrea
Video EN: https://www.loc.gov/events/2023-national-book-festival/schedule/item/webcast-11035/
Website
del autor:
Biografía
en el Website del autor:
Hailed by NPR as a “literary badass” and a “master storyteller with a rock and roll heart,” Luis Alberto Urrea is a prolific and acclaimed writer who uses his dual-culture life experiences to explore greater themes of love, loss and triumph.
A 2005 Pulitzer
Prize finalist for nonfiction and a Guggenheim fellow, Urrea is the critically
acclaimed and best-selling author of 19 books, winning numerous awards for his
poetry, fiction and essays. Born in Tijuana to a Mexican father and American
mother, Urrea is most recognized as a border writer, though he says, “I am more
interested in bridges, not borders.”
Urrea newest book, Good
Night, Irene, takes as inspiration his mother’s own Red Cross
service. With its affecting and uplifting portrait of friendship and valor in
harrowing circumstances, Good
Night, Irene powerfully demonstrates yet again that Urrea’s “gifts
as a storyteller are prodigious” (NPR).
The House of Broken Angels (2018) is a novel of an American family, which
happens to be from Mexico. Angel de la Cruz knows this is his last birthday and
he wants to gather his progeny for a final fiesta. A national bestseller, The House of
Broken Angels was a finalist for the National Book Critics
Circle Award in fiction and a New York Times Notable Book.
In 2017, Urrea won
an American Academy of Arts and Letters Fiction award and his collection of
short stories, The
Water Museum, was a finalist for the 2016 PEN-Faulkner Award and
was named a best book of the year by The Washington Post and Kirkus
Reviews, among others. Into the Beautiful North, his 2009 a novel, is a
Big Read selection by the National Endowment of the Arts and has been chosen by
more than 50 different cities and colleges as a community read. The Devil’s
Highway, Urrea’s 2004 non-fiction account of a group of Mexican
immigrants lost in the Arizona desert, won the Lannan Literary Award and was a
finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Pacific Rim Kiriyama Prize. The
Hummingbird’s Daughter, his 2005 historical novel, tells the story
of Urrea’s great-aunt Teresa Urrea, sometimes known as the Saint of Cabora and
the Mexican Joan of Arc. The book, which involved 20 years of research and
writing, won the Kiriyama Prize in fiction and, along with The Devil’s
Highway, was named a best book of the year by many publications.
In all, more than
100 cities and colleges have chosen Into the Beautiful North, The Devil’s Highway or The
Hummingbird’s Daughter (or another Urrea book) for a community
read.
Urrea has also won
an Edgar award from the Mystery Writers of America for best short story (2009,
“Amapola” in Phoenix Noir and featured in The Water Museum). Into the
Beautiful North earned a citation of excellent from the
American Library Association Rainbow’s Project. Urrea’s first book, Across
the Wire, was named a New York Times Notable Book and won the
Christopher Award. Urrea also won a 1999 American Book Award for his
memoir, Nobody’s
Son: Notes from an American Life and in 2000, he was voted
into the Latino Literature Hall of Fame following the publication of Vatos.
His book of short stories, Six Kinds of Sky, was named the 2002 small-press
Book of the Year in fiction by the editors of ForeWord magazine. He has also won a
Western States Book Award in poetry for The Fever of Being and was in the 1996 Best
American Poetry collection. Urrea’s other titles include By the Lake
of Sleeping Children, In Search of Snow, Ghost Sickness and Wandering
Time.
Urrea attended the
University of California at San Diego, earning an undergraduate degree in
writing, and did his graduate studies at the University of Colorado-Boulder.
After serving as a
relief worker in Tijuana and a film extra and columnist-editor-cartoonist for
several publications, Urrea moved to Boston where he taught expository writing
and fiction workshops at Harvard. He also taught at the University of
Louisiana-Lafayette.
Urrea lives with his
family in Naperville, IL, where he is a distinguished professor of creative
writing at the University of Illinois-Chicago.
Libros en
el Website del autor:
Fiction:
https://luisurrea.com/books/goodnight-irene/
https://luisurrea.com/books/the-house-of-broken-angels/
https://luisurrea.com/books/the-water-museum/
https://luisurrea.com/books/into-the-beautiful-north/
https://luisurrea.com/books/the-hummingbirds-daughter/
https://luisurrea.com/books/queen-of-america/
https://luisurrea.com/books/in-search-of-snow/
https://luisurrea.com/books/six-kinds-of-sky/
https://luisurrea.com/books/mr-mendozas-paintbrush/
Non-Fiction:
https://luisurrea.com/books/the-devils-highway/
https://luisurrea.com/books/nobodys-son-notes-from-an-american-life/
https://luisurrea.com/books/across-the-wire-life-and-hard-times-on-the-mexican-border/
https://luisurrea.com/books/by-the-lake-of-sleeping-children/
https://luisurrea.com/books/wandering-time-western-notebooks/
Poetry:
https://luisurrea.com/books/the-tijuana-book-of-the-dead/
https://luisurrea.com/books/ghost-sickness-a-book-of-poems/
https://luisurrea.com/books/the-fever-of-being/
Other:
News/Events
en el Website del autor:
https://luisurrea.com/news-events/
Conferencias/Entrevistas
Bringing the Joy: A
Profile of Luis Alberto Urrea
By
Bethanne Patrick
From the May/June
2023 issue of
Poets & Writers Magazine
EN: https://www.pw.org/content/bringing_the_joy_a_profile_of_luis_alberto_urrea
The
novel Good Night, Irene tells
the story of two American women who joined the American Red Cross Clubmobile
service during World War II, forged a friendship while seeing and experiencing
untold horrors at the front line, and ended up in hugely different
circumstances. It’s the kind of novel you’d expect to see from, say, Kristin
Hannah—and, in fact, Hannah has blurbed Good Night, Irene, calling it “powerful, uplifting, and deeply
personal.”….
Image….
But the spring 2023
lead title from Little, Brown, forthcoming at the end of May, wasn’t written by
Hannah or another woman. This epic journey told from a female perspective comes
to us from none other than Luis Alberto Urrea, the acclaimed author of books
about Mexico and Mexican American families, including nonfiction reportage
like The Devil’s Highway: A True
Story (Little, Brown, 2004) and Across the Wire: Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border (Anchor,
1993); novels such as Into the
Beautiful North (Little, Brown, 2009) and The House of Broken Angels (Little,
Brown, 2018); the graphic novel Mr.
Mendoza’s Paintbrush (Cinco Puntos, 2010); and poetry collections
(his fourth, Piedra, will
be released by FlowerSong Press later this year).
Before it’s even
possible to ask Urrea about the female perspective from which he has written
his new novel, he is explaining the shift in a thoughtful torrent of words.
(Urrea confesses he honed his skills as a wordsmith and “big talker” in places
like his San Diego high school, where he always had a coterie of girl friends
with him. “And I mean girl friends,”
he emphasizes. “I was the one they came to for little drawings of sheep on
their upper arms, or when we needed to talk our way into a club.”) The point,
as he continues, is that Luis Urrea has always been, if not a ladies’ man, a
man surrounded by ladies—women, and by “women” he means a family consisting of
his grandmother, aunts, and cousins he spent time with whenever his parents
sent him to stay with his father’s relatives in the Mexican state of Sinaloa.
Still, not a single
major character in Good Night,
Irene is a Mexican woman. There is one Mexican American character,
a soldier named Garcia, whose role is minor yet meaningful. Much of the action
takes place in the European theater or on Staten Island, New York, where his
mother grew up in the 1930s. How did Urrea, who has been named to the Latin
American Literary Hall of Fame, who was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in
Nonfiction for The Devil’s
Highway: A True Story, who spent years working with and advocating for
immigrants at the Mexican border, wind up writing about white women in World
War II?
The answer has to do
with two specific white women, one of whom is in the new novel, the other
living by the author’s side: His mother, Phyllis McLaughlin Urrea, who died in
1990 at the age of seventy-four, and his wife of twenty-seven years, Cinderella
“Cindy” Urrea….
Image….
Luis Urrea’s first
marriage “imploded” (“the less said about that one, the better,” he says) in
the early 1990s. So he decided to leave Boulder, Colorado, where the two had
been living, and head to Tucson, Arizona, to research a book that involved the
Yaqui, an Indigenous people of Arizona. “I liked the writing community there,
too, which included Charles Bowden and Leslie Marmon Silko,” he says. “But one
of the first things I got asked to do was to contribute to a serial novel in
the Tucson Citizen that
they were calling ‘Heat Stroke.’”
The reporter assigning
“Heat Stroke” installments was Cindy Somers. “We met for lunch, and she said,
‘No offense, but I don’t know your work.’” Luis tilts his head toward his
spouse with long-held affection. Cindy laughs, the sunlight streaming through
the windows of their hotel room in Key West, Florida, where Luis is teaching at
this year’s Key West Literary Seminars.
Their initial lunch
lasted three hours; they now have a grandson (the child of Cindy’s daughter
from a previous marriage, Megan) and a daughter of their own, Chayo, a recent
graduate of the University of Illinois in Chicago. “It was the second marriage
for both of us, and we’re not messing around, you know?” says Cindy. “For Luis
to have the kind of career he wanted to have, I needed to quit the newspaper
business and help him do the research that became The Devil’s Highway.”
When Cindy Urrea says
“help him do the research,” she is not implying she was some sort of invisible
amanuensis, akin to the character of Joan Castleman in Meg Wolitzer’s 2003
novel, The Wife, or
someone who types feverishly as the Great Man spews deathless prose. Cindy is a
strong, opinionated, and accomplished individual who has chosen to collaborate
with her spouse on his artistic journey—and, without her, Luis is quick to
agree, his new novel wouldn’t exist.
“He’d never told
anybody the stories about his mom,” says Cindy. “When he decided to tell me
about her service in the Second World War, I said what is wrong with you? Yes,
the border, that’s important. But here you have a story about a woman during
wartime, right at the front, and you have primary sources, her letters and
keepsakes. It’s a personal story that no one else has.”
Phyllis Urrea did have
a story: In 1943 she left her family home on Staten Island and joined the
Clubmobile service, a little-known arm of the Red Cross that sought to provide
a small (and, in many cases, final) taste of home to soldiers at the battle lines
in France, Belgium, and Germany. Clubmobiles were glorified food trucks
outfitted with coffee urns, doughnut fryers, and usually a trio of young women
in canvas uniforms whose mission was to share chat and cheer with “the boys.”
Phyllis and her comrades
wanted to go as close to the action as possible, although not all the “donut
dollies,” as they were sometimes known, much to their chagrin, shared that
ambition. Regardless of their taste for adventure, the women of the Clubmobiles
were supposed to be “healthy, physically hardy, sociable, and attractive.” They
wore lipstick and nail polish, played swing records and danced with soldiers,
and they carried chewing gum, cigarettes, magazines, and sometimes mail on
their trucks.
Here was a
little-known and even somewhat misunderstood slice of history that Luis Urrea’s
mother took part in and that Luis and Cindy Urrea knew had been important to
her. And they both knew for certain Luis could bring it to life through
fiction. There was just one problem: The mother Luis had known was a nervous,
affected woman desperately miserable in her marriage and disappointed by life.
How could he write about her as a brave, formidable presence who had moments of
deep happiness and connection?
“The skeleton of my
mother’s sorrow informs this book,” says Urrea, speaking this time from his
Chicago-area home, Cindy again by his side and a vital part of the
conversation.
Urrea
was born in 1955 to Phyllis Irene McLaughlin Urrea and Alberto Urrea, who met
in San Francisco and threw in their lot with each other without perhaps
thinking things through as well as they should have. Phyllis came from a
sophisticated New York City background filled with culture and nightlife; she
always called her only son “darling boy” and encouraged him to be as white and
Western and culturally knowledgeable as possible. Alberto, often described by
Luis as an Errol Flynn look-alike, had different plans for his son, wanting
Luis to become as macho and Mexican as possible…..
Image…..
Both served in the Second World
War, and “both of them suffered from PTSD, I now realize,” says Urrea. “At
night, when I was growing up, my father would be in one bedroom with
nightmares, grinding his teeth until they all cracked, and my mother would be
in another bedroom shouting and kicking and crying through nightmares. They
both suffered, but they couldn’t communicate about that suffering.”
He says that as he got older, his
mother “got crazier and crazier, and more and more unhappy. There would be
moments of the old Phyllis, when she might gesture with her hand bearing a
large topaz ring and holding a cigarette, say something witty and effervescent,
flick a bit of tobacco off her lip....”
Alberto Urrea kept their small
family “very isolated,” Luis says. “My mother never drove again after her
Clubmobile experiences, and it was easy to cut her off from family and friends.
He had the car and he’d leave, and he was cheating on her and she found out.
They were locked in this hopeless battle. I found out later that her family had
tried to reach out to her for decades, but she remained kind of opaque, behind
a wall of fog.”
Luis Urrea knew his mother had a
story, but he didn’t know how to tell it. Then Cindy Urrea read a book that was
revelatory, both for the research side and the writing side. “The coolest thing
about this book for me is that it came from the women telling their own
stories,” says Cindy. “We couldn’t find any historical record. We couldn’t find
any facts and figures. We couldn’t find anything like that.” But then she read
Svetlana Alexievich’s The
Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II,
translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky and published by Random
House in 2017.
“That’s the one that
changed everything,” she says. “Some of the stories about the Soviet women who
enlisted were so much like the American women. The Soviet woman who brought a
suitcase full of her favorite chocolates and the American woman who brought all
of her evening dresses because she thought that’s what ‘entertaining the
troops’ meant.”
But there’s a much
more serious and dark side that Cindy realized after listening to Luis’s
stories about his mother’s sadness. “PTSD takes different forms for women, and
it’s taken us too long to acknowledge that. When Luis told me about his mom’s
service I said, You know what? Phyllis gets a free pass for everything. Every
day your job, as a Clubmobile operator, is to listen to these boys. They’re
boys! These women saw planes go up and some didn’t come back.”
She continues: “Just
knowing that you are the last bit of home that Bobby Jones from Oklahoma is
ever going to see. So you better not ever be in a bad mood. You always smile
and serve a cup of hot coffee and a hug. Because you’re saying goodbye to him.
You’re standing in for the world.”
“I couldn’t believe
there was no historical record about these women,” says Cindy. “I kept coming
up against brick walls. But the Alexievich book opened something up for me that
I was able to share with Luis. When these women came back, no one was interested
in their stories—but they weren’t interested in telling them, either. They
didn’t consider themselves stars of the show.”
For some time, Urrea
worked on a book that he says was about a “gray, sad ghost of a woman” that
didn’t work, although his longtime agent, Julie Barer, refrained from telling
him so. “She would just nod and encourage me to keep going, even though we both
knew I wasn’t getting it.”
It wasn’t until 2014
that Luis and Cindy Urrea found Phyllis’s Clubmobile partner and closest friend,
“Darling Jill,” that the story morphed significantly. Jill Pitts Knappenberger
happened to live near the Urreas, in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. When they got
in touch with her and requested a visit, she welcomed them into her life and
her home and loads of memorabilia: clothing and knickknacks covered in
patriotic symbols, all of Phyllis’s letters to her, her own diaries—and a tiny
gold Clubmobile charm on a gold chain “that she never took off,” says Cindy.
“They weren’t considered veterans. Jill never got over not being able to take
advantage of the GI Bill.”
Darling Jill was able to show Luis Urrea the side of his mother, Phyllis, that he had never known, and that enabled him to write the kind of book he had never written, a women’s war story that takes no liberties with the history of the central conflict and manages to illustrate how differently war affects women, both during and after.
Luis Alberto Urrea has
had a particular and important job in the literary world, that of telling the
stories of the border. He has been telling stories of Mexican Americans since
his first book, Across the Wire,
was published in 1993, and he is still telling those stories. One of his
best-known quotes is “Fill your pen with compassion, or don’t pick it up,” and
he clearly felt, for decades, that he had a responsibility to the people among
whom he had lived and worked to share and shape their stories with compassion.
“It’s a political act to go into Mexico and face poverty and disease and danger
and heartbreak, to give the kind of love God would call you to give to people
who on the surface might be unlovable and certainly are forgotten,” Urrea says.
He continues: “Well,
isn’t that the same story in war? Those grunts. Those GIs. The soldier who
confesses he kissed another male soldier on the mouth. The guy who was so
scared that he actually defecated in his pants and is too ashamed to come near
my character Irene. She’s the last person on earth who should be washing shit
out of a guy’s pants, but she does it because it’s an act of love. It’s an act
of service. She’s there to do her job, and that becomes a beautiful political
act. It wasn’t any kind of genius on my part. It just kept happening,
organically, that people who were in dire straits reached out to each other.”
Urrea says he had a
lot of stories he needed to finish before he could write about his mother, and
not simply because he was wary of “splashback” about writing from the
perspective of a white woman. “My mother’s story was always percolating in the
background,” he says. “But finally I understood that borders separate us all
constantly. Feelings keep us separated. When I realized that my poor mom was
trapped behind a wall she didn’t know how to breach, I finally saw her.”
The Urreas took
several research trips, including two to Europe, to fully understand the
overall experience of the Clubmobile women and the specific wartime life of
Phyllis Urrea. “For me, concrete things speak loudly,” says Urrea, who is
sitting near a sculpture of a coyote on a motorcycle that represents one of the
book’s soldier characters. “When we went to the airfield where Phyllis and
Jill’s plane took off for France, the manager took me on a walk down the
runway. He bent down and pulled a piece of tarmac from the grass and said,
‘This is the original. You better take it because your mom might have stood on
it.’” His eyes fill with tears. “You know, when your parents are dead and gone
so long, to be suddenly given a little piece of trash that is an unexpected
connection to one of them…. It’s on my desk now. I see it every day.”
He looks up and to the
right. “It is witness. But this is the key to everything I do. It’s the
literature of witness. That’s what I care about. And isn’t it stunning to see
that you don’t understand enough about your own parent to witness their story?”
Urrea says he could write about his father because he was killed, because when
he went to bury his father he had all his Mexican family with him to recall his
father to life. “But my mom’s story was kind of sealed. It was a secret, put
away.”
Darling Jill had part
of Phyllis’s story but not all of it. “I realized every one of those women’s
stories is a secret,” says Urrea. “Even Jill, who was open and sunny and
sharing with us, she had an absolute border you could not cross.”
Cindy adds, “My
favorite part of watching this book come about was watching Luis on the couch
in Miss Jill’s apartment as she introduced him to his own mom. I would just sit
there trying not to cry, because she knew Phyllis when she was at her very,
very best. I don’t know that Luis ever met that Phyllis. To watch him meet that
Phyllis through Jill was the magic about this novel for me.”
Luis nods and says, “Mom
brought the joy sometimes, but I only saw it in little eruptions, like when we
saw the movie Patton eight
times. She’d met General Patton ‘over there’ and revered him, and when she
watched that film she was back to her wartime best self.”
The “magic key” that
Jill Knappenberger gave to Luis was showing him that his mom brought the joy
around the clock. “Jill made it very clear that my mother was delight on two
legs, something I could not fathom. I thought my mother was a very strange
character. When Jill said, ‘Your mother brought the joy,’ that was one of those
moments that changes your life forever.”
In 2022, while Little, Brown editor Ben George was working on editing the manuscript of Good Night, Irene, Luis and Cindy Urrea were looking forward to their last research trip for the book, which would take them from England to Germany. In February they learned that Luis had cancer that would need to be aggressively treated by surgery.
Luis’s hand strays to
his throat. “You have cancer surgery and you leave for a long trip,” he says.
“I have pictures of myself with these gauze pads hidden under my shirt collar
because I was bleeding. I don’t know how to put this, but it was my first brush
with the shadow of mortality.”
Now fully recovered,
he nevertheless thinks experiencing the scare was a good thing for this book.
“All of my dearest and closest best friends had died,” he says. “I was ready to
understand that we are given a limited moment here on earth.” Being forced to
consider the brevity of human life also brought him closer to his book’s
inspiration. “When we went to England and saw the village where my mother and
Jill and the other Clubmobile women were billeted, at one point I saw that I
was staring up at a window my mother had once looked out of, in a picture we
have. In another picture she’s looking at a graveyard we walked in. Things that
we saw while thousands of miles from home made me feel closer to my mother than
I ever had.”
Luis Alberto Urrea
laughs. “Once we’d walked the runway where their plane took off for France,
once we’d visited Buchenwald, I thought, my mom was a badass. I tell my
audiences over and over, you should rethink the old gray women in your life
that you take for granted. My mom’s own madness wrecked her. But you try and you
try to give something back, and in this book, I finally gave my mom a happy
ending.”
Bethanne Patrick is a critic, the
host of the Missing Pages podcast,
and the author of the memoir Life
B: Overcoming Double Depression, published by Counterpoint Press in May.
She teaches creative writing at American University and serves on the board of
the PEN/Faulkner Foundatio
Correction: An earlier version of this profile stated that Luis Alberto Urrea was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for The Hummingbird’s Daughter; in fact, Urrea was a finalist for the prize in nonfiction for The Devil’s Highway: A True Story. The text has been updated to reflect this correction.
Luis Alberto Urrea’s life seems like wild folk tale
From Tijuana to
Naperville, with stop at Harvard
By Christopher
Borrelli
Chicago Tribune
Luis Alberto Urrea,
whose name has the lofty ring of an artist you think you know but you can’t
place, and who has quietly built the kind of reputation that validates such
feelings, is about to become, finally, arguably, after decades of books and
trails of critical hosannas, a major figure. As in, a household name. That
arguable part? It comes not so much from those already reading Urrea and more
from the man himself: He looked into the bookshelves of his Naperville home and
said that his new book, “The House of Broken Angels,” a multigenerational saga
about a Mexican-American family quite similar to his own, was his go-for-broke
attempt to stand alongside his heroes. He nodded at Twain, he mumbled Steinbeck
(whose work his veers closer to), then said that he would likely fail, but he
wanted, for a moment, “to just exist in that same arena.”
Which sounded
disingenuous, considering the collection of literary awards and large heavy
medals residing behind glass in the next room.
Still, if any author
looks due for next level-dom, it’s Urrea.
When John Alba Cutler
started teaching Latino literature at Northwestern University 10 years ago, his
classes were full of students who hadn’t actually read much Latino literature.
“I would maybe get a student who read ‘House on Mango Street’ and that was it
for familiarity with Latino literature,” he said. “Now the majority have read
Sandra Cisneros, Junot Diaz, Luis Urrea. They’ve laid groundwork. And Urrea,
he’s crossing over with a wider appeal, outside Latino classrooms. There’s a
proliferation of fiction about the U.S.-Mexico border, but he sits at the top.”
The problem is, where
do you begin with this guy?
With the sprawling
historical fiction? Or the journalism, poetry, memoirs? The ballet? Worse, in
telling Urrea’s own story, where do you start? And stop? A day earlier, in a
studio at WBEZ-FM on Navy Pier, Urrea was taping the NPR show “Fresh Air,” and
host Terry Gross, whose cool, soft voice came through headphones from her
studio in Philadelphia, sounded exasperated with their limited time. They had
talked for 90 minutes (which would be edited later into an hourlong interview)
and the moment they were finished, off the air, Gross blurted: “Oh, your life
has just been too eventful!”
Urrea, 62, rocked
backward in his chair, delighted.
Indeed, the story of
Luis Alberto Urrea itself has a whiff of folk tale. He is a lot like his
best-sellers, an epic mix of ancient and contemporary, a touch of magic realism
here, a chunk of painful reality there, yet approachable, warm, not prone to
literary pretense. (The Chinese-American family novels of Amy Tan, a friend of
Urrea, is a fair approximation.) His Mexico, similarly, is not the monolith of
political rhetoric, but generationally and ethnically diverse. Urrea himself
has blond hair, blue eyes — his grandmother was named Guadalupe Murray. He
speaks in conspiratorial tones, as if — despite a story crammed with incident
and anecdote — there is always more left unsaid.
With good reason, his
first books, which he has called “The Border Trilogy,” were memoirs, stories of
his own life growing up on the border. There is too much history here, funny,
scary, random: His father, beloved in the Mexican government, had the license
plate “MEXICO 2.” As a child, Urrea had teeth drilled without Novocaine as a dentist
swore in his face. He once took science fiction legend Ursula K. Le Guin to see
“Star Wars.” He had an aunt who became the national bowling champion of Mexico.
He cleaned toilets for a living, made doughnuts, was a cartoonist for a nudie
rag.
And on and on.
A friend of Urrea
calls him “The Stuffer.” Even success arrives in a pig pile. Walking to their
car after the “Fresh Air” interview, his wife, Cindy, an investigative
journalist, turned to Urrea: “The thing is, you wait your whole life for the
kind of attention you’re getting now, for everything to happen, and everything
happens at once, in a mad rush.” Urrea sighed. Once in the car, he perked up:
Their oldest child was leaving for college soon!
Cindy: “Nothing ties
us to Naperville!”
Urrea: “We’re free!”
Then, like that final
scene in “The Graduate,” after Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross escape a
wedding only to find themselves in the back of a silent bus, exhilaration faded
back to reality. The car went quiet. Interview requests were piling up, a long
book tour was starting. It had been the second time in as many days Urrea taped
an NPR show. TNT was developing a TV series based on his 2009 novel “Into the
Beautiful North,” about a Mexican woman, inspired by “The Magnificent Seven,”
who sets out to protect her village from banditos; the book itself, selected in
2016 by the National Endowment for the Arts as its nationwide Big Read, already
kept Urrea on an never-ending tour. And now the publisher Little, Brown was
throwing its marketing weight behind “House of Broken Angels.”
“It’s dizzying,” Urrea
said.
Even as they arrived
earlier that day at WBEZ, the room already buzzed. Cindy, who acts as a kind of
de facto manager/researcher for her husband, was steamed at The New York Times:
Urrea had written an op-ed about the wall that President Donald Trump wants to
build, now weeks later, “now, suddenly, as he’s about to go on Terry
Gross, they need changes, and links to sources, right now, right now, and
sorry but no — not right now.”
Urrea just smiled.
He soaked in the
hubbub. He settled into a chair at the soundboard, and when Gross came on, he
brightened. He thanked her (off the air) for buying him a beach house — a
“Fresh Air” interview is a publishing holy grail. Gross said if she asked
anything too personal, let her know; but it’s all in his books already. She
said if he made a mistake, start again; yet he’s so used to telling his story,
he never fumbled.
Midway through the
chat, Gross herself stopped: There was a wind tunnel in her studio, and a door
swung open — hold a second. Headphones went silent as she shut the door.
Urrea leaned back.
“The ghosts of my
ancestors,” he said.
Urrea is the literary
conscience of the border.
“The Devil’s Highway,”
his disturbing, humane 2004 nonfiction account of the struggle for survival
among 26 men crossing the border in 2001, a Pulitzer finalist (and his biggest
seller so far), is headed into a 23rd printing. But most of his novels — and
much of his work — addresses the relationship of working-class Mexicans with borders,
real and metaphorical. “Luis has a million impulses co-existing, a constant
awareness of possibilities, which is part of having lived on the border,” said
Steven Schick, music director of the La Jolla Symphony in San Diego; last
month, they collaborated on a reworking of Stravinsky’s “Soldier’s Tale,” using
Urea’s writing to tell “a story of people who cross the border daily.” Even
“House of Broken Angels” — set in San Diego, and not a border tale — is full of
characters marked by it, including a U.S. veteran without citizenship.
It was only “eerie
coincidence” the book was released the day after the Trump administration had
planned to rescind the DACA program for young immigrants brought to the country
without legal permission, said Ben George, senior editor at Little, Brown. “But
I do think because of this administration, there is an urgency, so it’s become
the right moment for the book.”
Urrea was born in
Tijuana in 1955, into severe poverty.
His father, a personal
assistant to the vice president of Mexico, and a military man, had fallen from
favor; Urrea says his father refused to assassinate someone. His mother, a
Staten Island native, served in the Red Cross during World War II; she took part
in the Battle of the Bulge and returned with post-traumatic stress disorder and
severe injuries. Her family owned an antique store in Manhattan; Albert
Einstein was a regular. The Mexican side was stranger: Urrea had a spiritualist
grandfather, and a great aunt, Teresita Urrea, “the Saint of Cabora,” “the
Mexican Joan of Arc,” celebrated for her supposedly healing powers; she became
the basis for his 2005 best-seller “The Hummingbird’s Daughter.”
His parents met and
married in San Francisco. “My dad looked like Errol Flynn, and I think my mom
thought she was moving into a hacienda,” Urrea said, “but they lived on a dirt
street in Tijuana, a house jammed with relatives, nobody speaking English, she
didn’t know a word of Spanish. She grew up well and was appalled and
humiliated, terrified of anyone ethnic.” They moved to San Diego in the late
’50s, to treat Urrea for tuberculous. The family stayed and lived in the
barrios, where he grew up “the mixed-race kid, the oddball,” according to the
best-selling author Jamie Ford, a close friend.
Urrea describes a
neighborhood where pets were casually preyed on by street gangs, and where he
once took a brass-knuckled kidney punch walking home from school. His parents
were unhappy, financially strapped. Luis withdrew into monster movies, ghost
stories and books. “I was torn between the Americanness my mom wanted for me
and the Mexicanness my father wanted — they were wrestling for cultural
influence over me.”
He was an arty kid,
headed for the University of California at San Diego, but things got worse:
Before he graduated, his father drove to Mexico to withdraw $1,000 saved in a
bank there (like many immigrants, he regularly sent money to his extended
family). The money was a graduation present. But on the trip home, he was
killed by Mexican police. Urrea — who says details remain “nebulous” — was sent
to retrieve the body. The police, expecting a bribe, forced him to buy back the
corpse. He did, using the $1,000 his father was carrying.
Later, police sent the
family a bill for damages caused to the road when they ran his father off the
road.
The unexpected did not
cease: He went to college as a theater major and found himself working as an
extra for months on “The Stunt Man” with Peter O’Toole, now a cult classic;
director Richard Rush had heard of his father’s death and kept the young Urrea
on the payroll. Later, his writing had attracted the attention of Le Guin, then
a visiting scholar at UCSD (she died in January at 88); she included his work
in an anthology, and his career began.
But first he worked as
a missionary in the dumps of Tijuana, where entire neighborhoods resided. “I
was looking for something to alleviate the darkness in my family,” Urrea said.
He met a pastor who brought him to an orphanage near his grandmother’s home in
Tijuana. “The pastor would seduce kids with doughnuts and chocolate milk then
hit them with Bible study, and I was having a personal religious resurgence.
There’s this little girl on the floor at my side who looked related to me. I
mean, could be — my family are copulating fools. This girl, she’s tough. Her
name is America. Seriously. She begs me not to leave, said nobody spoke Tijuana
Spanish in the orphanage like I did. I told her I’d return, and the pastor’s
waiting for me outside: ‘Don’t lie to my kids. That girl will wait years for
you, wondering the whole time what she did wrong when you never show.’ ” So, he
ended up staying in the dumps, on and off, from the late 1970s until 1987,
translating, washing feet, combating lice.
And from there? He
taught at Harvard.
Urrea says he
contacted Lowry Pei, a former UCSD professor who was working at the Ivy League
school, and begged for a janitorial job, anything to get out of the Tijuana
dumps. Pei told him to send published work, so Urrea told friends that even
janitors at Harvard need to be published. He says he misunderstood. Pei, now an
English professor at Simmons College, says “Some of Luis’ stories are hard to
believe, and I don’t remember if that story is true, but he did call, he was
out of prospects — ‘You got to help, I got to get out.’ ”
Today, decades
later, Urrea lives in Naperville, on a middle-class street, minivan in the
driveway, a house full of folk art; a statue of Bigfoot, purchased from
SkyMall, occupies the living room. He has three kids (his son, Eric, is the
drummer in the indie rock band Marina City) and pets. He has a spotty scruff,
and a barrel chest. He wears “Hamilton” sweatshirts.
He is an image of
suburban contentment.
Then he plops on a
couch to listen to himself on “Fresh Air.” Gross describes him as a
“distinguished” professor, and Urrea, in his living room, pumps a fist. He
says, proudly, “That’s actually part of my title — ‘distinguished.’ ”
He sounds genuinely
surprised, still.
He moved to Chicago in
the late ’90s, to teach creative writing at the University of Illinois at
Chicago. Now he’s tenured. He counts literary stars (Neil Gaiman) and rock
bands (Wilco, Los Lobos) as friends. Author Dave Eggers says Urrea gained a
reputation as “one of our most important American public intellectuals,” the
kind of all-purpose man-of-letters “who can bring both humor and gravitas to
any proceeding, who can explain the relationship between Mexico and the U.S. in
all its tragedy and beauty.”
But Urrea himself
sounds restless.
He says “House of
Broken Angels” — largely inspired by an older brother who, before he died of
cancer, had a vast, melancholy birthday party in his final days — will be his
“farewell to the border.” His next book is inspired by his mother’s Red Cross
service. “Luis chafes at being placed in an ethnic box,” Cindy said. “He wants
to pull people up, but everyone wants him to be their Mexican, explain Mexico,
the border, and Luis — Luis just wants to be Mark Twain.”
For the moment, UIC
remains a perfect fit.
He’s a draw to the
English department, but “still feels like an outsider,” said David Schaafsma,
an English professor at the school, “always the kid from the dirt road with no
plumbing.” Indeed, the school, said department chair Lisa Freeman, is mostly
populated by Pell Grant recipients, many are first-generation college students,
like Urrea. Besides, Cindy tells him he has a Jesus complex. He doesn’t
disagree. In a writing class the other day, a student said she didn’t want to
get too revealing.
He said she was not
obligated to.
But then, lightly
pressing, he said writing can exorcise the past. He told her he named his
personal demon Mr. Smith, after a vile manager he once had. “Mr. Smith stands
too close and cusses you out. He’s the voice saying you’re talentless, your
voice is shrill, you’re poor and screwed up.”
The student’s eyes
moistened in relief.
Sometimes, he told
her, your writing will be a moral act. “Remember that. People will take umbrage
with that, but so? Writing is outreach, and writing — it can be your ministry.”
cborrelli@chicagotribune.com;
Twitter @borrelli
How
Luis Alberto Urrea honors his mother’s WWII service in ‘Good Night, Irene’
The author, who was raised in Southern California, says his
latest novel is inspired by his mother's wartime experiences as a Red Cross
worker.
By Michael Schaub
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