[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
Thank you, Ben.
Thank you everyone.
This is my Phil Donahue moment.
[LAUGHTER]
Ben did agree to answer a few questions.
But I have the microphone here, so patience
while I run to you so that everyone in the room
can hear the question.
That'd be great.
Just a couple of them.
Ben's books are for sale here from the bookstore.
Thank you for coming.
Kentucky Club included, and he's happy to sign them certainly
after our questions, our Q and A. Anyone?
Don't be shy.
I did want to say something about this story
and why I wrote it and it's because Juarez and the drugs
and the drug discourse in our country
is all in the newspapers, and they're all nonfiction.
And I'm not a reporter.
I'm a writer.
And I wanted to write about people who do drugs
and who sell them because they're real people.
They're not animals.
And they're not and they're not even that mean.
They're just people who do this and they make a living on it.
And it's terrible.
It's terrible.
But no more terrible than people who are
like Halliburton who make a living on selling
guns and ammunition for wars.
And those people even hurt more people, frankly.
And so I just wanted to write from the perspective
of a human being, of a family, of a man, who sells drugs
from the perspective of--
and that's what I do.
I create these characters who are in this world.
because I feel close to the ground on this living,
in El Paso.
And I think all my stories come out of that space.
See the hands coming over here.
[LAUGHS]
Look at this.
They come.
This has very little to do with the story itself.
But if I'm not mistaken, El Paso is
rated as one of the safest cities in the United States.
Yet, Juarez is one of the most dangerous places in the world.
How does that happen or is that--
That is absolutely correct.
And El Paso has been rated for a city of its size
as one of the safest cities in the United States
for the last 15 years.
So it's not like an outlier.
It's not like just one year.
It's a really, really safe city.
The DA actually is a good friend of mine
and I ask them about, what are your theories about that?
One of them is that El Pasoans, generally speaking,
are not very violent people.
They're not.
And I don't think people in Juarez
are either, frankly, on some level.
But when you have a corrupt social system and a system
that, a judicial system that is totally broken,
it creates social chaos.
It really does.
And that's part of the problem in Juarez.
People can attribute all of the violence to the drug wars,
but nobody knows that.
Nobody knows.
Two percent of the crimes are actually investigated.
So how can a public official tell you
that we are the violence in Juarez is
attributable to the drug wars?
Now obviously, a good part of it is.
But when you create that kind of social chaos,
you can go off someone.
You can do that.
In my first story, I write about a man who disappears
and it's a mistaken identity.
He may be collateral damage, but he's dead nonetheless.
And that happens.
I have friends of mine who have lost friends
and they weren't involved in drugs at all.
And so it's a system that has to be fixed,
has to be addressed in order for kind of a social normalcy
to return.
And I don't see that happening.
And that is the one thing about the United States,
say what you will.
But we have a judicial system that more or less works.
It's not perfect.
But it more or less works.
And that also helps us not to have a social chaos as well.
I read that you curated a show with the photographer Julián
Cadorna.
And I was wondering if you often collaborate with other artists.
I do.
And I love to collaborate with other artists.
I collaborate often with the artist James Drake.
I don't know if you're familiar with his work.
And Julián Cardona, I was particularly,
I really have always loved his work.
And they call him, a lot of people
consider him a journalist, a photojournalist.
And I always considered him an artist
because I loved his work.
And I was given the opportunity.
There was a gallery in New York.
And I don't remember the name of the gallery right now;
it's been a while.
And they ask writers to curate the show.
And the rules are this: the artists
you pick can't have had a show.
He couldn't have been in a big major show at all.
So my hands were a little bit tied
because you like artists but you realize, oh, yeah,
but they've had this big show.
Or they've been in this big show.
And with Julián, because he wasn't considered
a photographer in the artist sense, I picked him.
And we, together, Julián and I, went through all of his work.
And then we picked.
And we did a narrative of it and we set it up.
And it was really a beautiful experience.
And he's still doing fantastic work in Juarez.
He is an amazing photographer.
As payback to me he gave me one of his photographs,
which I treasure.
Because the photograph is actually taken here in Arizona.
There's a group that was working and finding
people in the desert who were crossing
and they saved this one young man
and he was eating his first meal.
And the photograph is of the young man's hands
as he's holding this plate of food
in the black and white photograph.
And I look at it every single day.
And I think it's so beautiful and it reminds me
of everything we have: food, water, safety.
And I look at it and it's probably to me to me
it's a very holy photograph.
So I'm glad you asked me about that.
Yes.
Hi.
I've always lived in border towns
and I loved your book because the dialogue
felt very familiar and honest.
And I was just wondering beyond the concept of Spanglish
how you think about the nature and flavor of language
on the border?
I think that because I lived on the border
and because I lived it between two languages I always
felt it made me fall in love with language, period.
Because I was like, wow, look at that word.
And then sometimes I even now, there's
a word I have and it's in Spanish
and I can't think of like what's the word in English?
You know.
And there's certain words that don't exist in English at all.
There's a word that comes to mind.
Velados.
There's no concept in English for that word.
I can explain it because it comes from a religious context.
Vela is a candle so that often people
will pray all night like for [INAUDIBLE] de Guadalupe or one
of those big events and they'll pray all night.
And so they're tired.
So that comes from the candle, Vela.
And so they haven't slept all night.
So they're velados.
And so now it doesn't necessarily
have to have a religious context anymore.
I can explain the concept but there is no word in English.
And sometimes it's the other way around as well.
And also because my father was, I loved the way he spoke.
He manipulated language.
He really felt more comfortable with Spanish
but he didn't speak a really correct Spanish.
He didn't do that.
And my grandfather would be furious with him.
He just hated the way that my father spoke Spanish.
And a lot of Mexicans really hate the way
that we pochos in the United States manipulate the language.
We destroy the beauty of the Spanish language.
But you how would they?
[LAUGHTER]
They want a border.
And my father would say, in Spanish you say--
in English you say, the telephone is ringing.
In Spanish you'd say, está sonando teléfono.
My father would say, está ringando telefono.
[LAUGHTER]
I thought that was beautiful.
I love that kind of stuff.
And even though, because I'm an educated man,
I grew up on the border listening to Spanglish,
when I went to school I learned correct Spanish.
I learned how to read it and I learned how to write it.
And I was very proud of myself that I could do it correctly.
But I was still in love with the border slang.
It's just like, I don't know.
It's just like so fucking cool.
You know?
It's great.
[LAUGHTER]
I'm going to check you out for one more question.
One over here and then like I said,
there are books available for purchase and for signing.
And as you can tell from Ben's lovely energy,
he's more than happy to speak with you at the table right
after.
You've written several young adult novels.
When you think of the audience that you're
writing for what inspires you to write for that audience?
You know, I never think of an audience when I write a book.
I just don't.
I can't.
A part of it was that when I first started writing,
I'm really a mama's boy and my mom was a really good,
nice, sweet Catholic lady.
And I would have my mom sitting on my shoulder right here.
And I thought like, I can't do this.
I just feel bad.
I just feel guilty.
My mom would not, she's not going to like this.
Of course she did love my writing.
She just said, she just told me like, you really like to cuss.
And I said no mom, I really don't.
My characters like to cuss.
[LAUGHTER]
So I can't really think of an audience that way
because it kind of really gets in the way.
I can't.
So what I do is I just write to the boy in me.
I write, I mean, there's a lot of boy in me.
And my friends will tell you, that Ben's
that's kind of an adolescent in a lot of ways.
So it's kind of easy for me to write to that boy
or out of that space.
And I love, and it's great because what
happens is having been an adolescent
and having really screwed up my adolescence, as many of us did,
then I can create a character that I wanted to be.
All my adolescent teenage boys, that's who I wanted to be.
And I can create them and I can be them for a while.
And then, of course, they're much better looking
and they're all much more gracious
and they're smarter than I ever was.
But that's OK.
It's fun.
It's and it's and it's not hard for me.
It really isn't hard.
Not at all.
You also had a question.
I know you struggled with a lot of lines in your life
as you lived on the border and other cultural changes
and just who you are.
So identity politics, do you find yourself being
called the writer of color?
This is how I'll answer that.
I don't.
I've always considered myself, I've
always been very proud of the fact
that I was Mexican-American.
And I'm very proud of the fact of being a son of a people who
have never been properly thanked for making this country great,
frankly.
And I'm very proud of that.
And I'm very proud of my parents I'm very
proud of being my mother's son.
But that said, you know when you go out into the world,
you're going to get labeled.
And you just kind of deal with it.
You negotiate those places.
When I won the Pen Faulkner, El Paso Times:
"El Paso Writer Wins Pen Faulkner."
The Dallas Morning News: "First Texan Wins Pen Faulkner."
Out Magazine in New York: "Gay Man Wins Pen Faulkner."
[LAUGHTER]
And all of the Latino outlets in the country,
"First Latino to Win Pen Faulkner."
I don't mind.
You know why?
Because look at all those communities that love me.
[LAUGHTER]
That's very cool, actually.
So you know, I'm kind of grateful for that.
Because there's a group of people that are claiming you.
And I think that's beautiful and I think that's lovely.
And I don't think that we can live
without those kinds of negotiations in our identities
in the world that we live in.
It would be nice.
It would be nice that I would say, well, I'm just a man.
You know, I don't live in that world.
It matters that I'm gay.
And it matters that I'm Latino.
And I live in that world.
And so I would live in it and bathe in it.
And it's not always easy.
But I'm good with it.
[LAUGHTER]
Thank you.
Gracias.
Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]