Hello, everybody.
Maritza, thank you for that very beautiful reading.
I know how hard it is to be here because we've had such
a tragic couple of days here.
But the lights here are really for the ancestors.
And they're with us always, whether it's
Pedro Infante, our own relatives, or the people that
are out there in the world that are circling in those places
that they circle.
It's great to be here.
I spent the day with Maritza, and it's so important
that we're here together.
Because creativity is light.
And it's important that you're here.
It's important that we're here.
And so, thank you so much to the university.
Dean Tatum, who's a good friend from Las Cruces.
I don't know where you are, but thank you.
Thank you to Aurelie and the English
and the Spanish departments, the Creative Writing Department,
Alison Deming.
All of you, thank you for coming tonight.
I'd like to read from Loving Pedro Infante.
The candles up here, there's four for Pedro
because he deserves his candles.
And there are others for other people.
I have a photograph that I'm going to put up here.
I don't know that you can see it.
It's very dark, but we'll take it out there.
This is Pedro Infante.
And I'd like to talk a little bit about him.
You can see that, perhaps later.
Pedro Infante was more than the Dean Martin of Mexico.
He was the Elvis and the Rudolph Valentino,
but he was even more than that.
I can think of no actor, singer, probably
in the history of the world, I don't know,
for Latinas, I mean there's only one Pedro Infante.
He was born in Sinaloa, and rose through the ranks.
He was a carpenter and became a singer and song--
well, he didn't write songs--
a singer and actor in the '40s and '50s, what they called la
Época de Oro.
And my protagonist, Teresina "la Tere" Ávila,
is a member of a fan club to Pedro Infante.
And they still exist in Mexico and different parts
of the world.
On my book tour, I met somebody from Venezuela
that, they have a festival every year in a small little pueblito
in Venezuela for Pedro Infante.
He's an incredible person because he's like Elvis.
You still have sightings.
[LAUGHTER]
Yes, you do.
People have seen Pedro Infante.
He's still alive.
I've met people that said, yes, he still lives.
He's in un pueblito in Mexico.
The Univision went to this little village
to find a man that had a metal plate in his head
like Pedro did from the very first plane accident.
He died in a plane accident, supposedly, in 1957.
But we're not sure about that because maybe he survived.
Maybe his face was messed up like ground meat,
and he went into hiding, or he's living in Europe, or who knows?
I'd like to read from the very first chapter.
Funny that you should mention you started with chapter 7.
This was chapter 10.
But then, now it's chapter 1.
And it's amazing how you shuffle those cards of your chapters.
And I'd like to begin with a little quote from García Lorca.
¡Ay, qué trabajo me cuesta quererte como te quiero!
Oh, what an effort it is to love you the way that I do.
This is a book about the illusion of love.
Teresina is in love with Pedro Infante on the screen.
And we can only reflect on these days of hardship and struggle,
on the illusion of hate.
So I'd like to begin with this first chapter, "Hijole!
In the Darkness."