[APPLAUSE]
Did you have a good time?
[CHEERING]
Sandra, that was fantastic, funny, wonderful.
But I wanted to have a quick Q&A with you
to ask you a couple of questions,
but also to remind everybody after the Q&A
to invite you to a book signing, which will
be in the back of the room.
There will be a lot of people who
I'm sure that want to have some moments with Sandra.
But it will be right over to the left after the end of the Q&A.
We'll keep it, we'll keep it brief.
But I just wanted to start with one of the poems--
given the theme tonight--
puro amor-- and your phrase "what if my heart."
I called it the humble simile.
And I was wondering if you could talk about why the simile is
so important to your poetry
Oh, I didn't know that.
Yeah.
[LAUGHTER]
I don't think like that.
I just-- well, that's not true.
I do think like that, but I don't think of the question.
I see things as a one thing like another.
My whole life, even as a little kid,
I always feel things and compare them to something else
without knowing that I was a poet.
I was a very quiet child.
I was very shy.
I was the little girl that never spoke in class.
I was the little girl who thought she was ugly.
I was the little girl who didn't get chosen for things.
I was the girl who disappeared and was invisible.
So it made me so happy to hear that you all came out--
to see you all-- because I lived a childhood where
I didn't have a voice.
And then in different times in my life,
I lost my public voice as well--
graduate school, most of college.
And people think I wrote House on Mango Street
while I was at Iowa.
I did write it, but not for credit and not for my class.
It was a side thing that I did to keep my spirit alive--
and yes, to help me to find my voice and my direction.
So I think I've always been that little kid that was--
no one paid attention to in class.
My teachers wouldn't guess that I would be here.
I was the most surprised.
I'm the most surprised.
In terms of your life as a poet and for the writers
out in the room who are maybe having conversations
with their family about their life choices
in their directions, I'm thinking
about something you wrote in your acknowledgments
and got a memo.
You said, one of the most important moments of your life
is my father's opposition to my life as a writer
and my mother's support of my choice.
Can you talk a little bit about that?
Yeah, my father didn't really understand what I was doing.
But he wanted me to go to college
since the first moment I spoke and made that intention.
I was in middle school-- and I don't
know where I got the idea-- but I told my father
I wanted to go to college.
And he always supported me then--
all the way through.
Except when I finished, and he said, all that education
and still no husband.
So he thought I was going to do like the Mexican women
of his class-- he's from middle class
and Mexican middle class women go to college to major
in marriage, you know.
And so he thought I wasted all that and never got married.
So that was his idea.
My mom, on the other hand, just was always very supportive.
They both regretted that they had not
finished their schooling.
My mother never finished ninth grade.
My father never finished his first year of college.
And as a result, he had to learn how to--
he had to learn a craft.
And my father was an upholsterer,
and he was always exhausted.
He would show us his blistered hands and his feet with corns.
And he would say, study hard and use this, not this.
And so, you know, he wanted us to go to school.
But me as the only girl, he just thought
I would find someone who could take care of me.
And I had this selfish dream.
I would pray that my father lived long enough to understand
why I had made all the sacrifices, why
I had to move twice a year in my 30s and follow jobs,
and why I was poor and slept on the floor.
You know, I just wanted my father
to live long enough to understand.
And you know, my father was always saying,
oh, pobrecita Sandra.
Ojalá que se case.
If she would only get married.
Oh, poor Sandra.
And he would think I didn't hear this
because I'd be asleep on the couch in the living room.
He'd talk above me, and I could hear him.
And I just-- he just wanted me to have kids and get--
get married and have kids, not have kids--
get married and have kids.
And I was such a failure in his eyes.
My brother, the doctor, was the success story.
But when I won the MacArthur Award,
my father couldn't believe it.
He thought about-- he said, how many years I would have
had to work to make this sum.
And he told me, mija, don't get married.
He'll just take your centavos.
[LAUGHTER]
He lived long enough, but then I knew destiny gives and takes.
I knew, OK, now he's going to go.
And that's how it was.
Then he got sick and left.
Yeah.
But he's still here.
You know, my father is here tonight.
He's here in spirit.
And if you're Mexican, the dead live alongside you.
And I've written about that, and I'm
so happy that my father's love-- this is
something I've written about.
I wanted to share it with you tonight,
but we didn't have time-- that love never dies.
That's the most wonderful thing if you
have experienced a death.
You learn if you're connected to things of the spirit,
if your heart is open and you listen,
you will see that love never dies.
And that's a wonderful thing.
They should put that on CNN.
You know, that's a wonderful thing
that I learned with my father's death.
It's a wonderful segue to one of the questions I had here--
What is that?
--which is to tell us about two things-- the Macondo Writers
Workshop and the Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral Foundation.
And what those two names mean, and what kind of work
is being done under those two names.
Well, first, I have to tell you that when I moved to Mexico six
years ago, I closed the Alfredo Cisneros because I didn't want
to keep doing all the paperwork and the fundraising
and all that.
But we had a good run-- like, 15 years, something like that.
That's a good run.
And Macondo Foundation is still in existence.
It's a writers' workshop for writers who are activists.
And I learned that I didn't belong in the academy
when I was teaching at Berkeley.
And I wanted to skip class but I was the instructor.
[LAUGHTER]
You know?
That's not good.
That's not a good sign.
And I said, now why do you not want to go to class?
I don't like it.
Why don't you like it, Sandra?
Because they aren't really there to write,
they just want to raise their GPA.
I said, OK, well, one day when you can afford to,
you're going to start your own workshop
and no one will be allowed to come unless you invite them.
And you will only work with people
who are serving their communities
and making the world better.
That's who you need to work with.
You do that one day.
[APPLAUSE]
And we're going on 25 years.
25 years.
And there are two Macondo writers here.
And Diana Delgado and Marisol.
Where's Marisol?
Here you go.
Stand up.
Maconistas stand!
Yay!
Macondo!
And you could be any color, any age to apply for Macondo.
But the members, themselves, read your applications
and decide who gets in.
It's just for a couple of days in the summer,
and we have a wonderful family--
it's a-- our chosen family that supports and understands
our writing and knows it's important.
And we network, and so-- if anything happened to me,
even if I hadn't written a book, I
would be proud because of Macondo and the work it does.
It's going on its 25th year, and we're always
looking for donations.
So any millionaires out there--
On that note, in terms of thinking about the academy
and our belonging in it, I still,
again, for the students in the audience,
there were some people you met early on in your career who
were important to how you shaped yourself and thought
about yourself as a poet.
I'm thinking of people like Norma Alarcón.
Yes.
Could you talk about some of those people to those students
from the audience?
I think that we have people that come in our lives that
are like our spirit mothers and our spirit fathers, our spirit
brothers and sisters.
And Dr. Norma Alarcón, when I met her,
was just Norma Alarcón.
She was a graduate student at Bloomington, Indiana,
and I did a reading there and that's how I met her.
And I stayed overnight at her house,
because we didn't have money.
And then she said, can I come and visit you in Chicago?
And I said, yeah, you can come and stay with me.
And she did something real strange
for someone who came to visit me.
She started opening my closets.
You know?
She was opening the closet, she was like looking in rooms.
She was looking around.
I thought, what's she looking for?
She said, you live here alone?
I said, yeah, yeah.
And then she said, how did you do it?
Now she knew as a Latina woman how hard
it had been for me to live without being married,
no man around, no baby toys.
And when she said that, I just felt
the tears come out of my eyes.
And that was the beginning of my consciousness
as a woman of color feminism.
So she was instrumental.
And what she did is she invested her whole life
without really getting recognition
for creating a press--
Third Woman Press that and--
journal that published me and Ana Castillo and Cherríe Moraga
and Helena Viramontes and Gloria Anzaldu--.
Nobody knew who we were.
And she just lay down her life to do this work.
And she's in fragile health now, and I want her to know--
I always tell her that she planted the seeds
and we are her harvest.
Yeah.
[APPLAUSE]
Honoring the people who helped us along
or poets who inspired us.
I mentioned in my introduction, and you
write in House of My Own, beautiful essays
about Luis Omar Salinas and Gwendolyn Brooks.
If you could tell us anything about those two poets,
we would love to hear the [? cuentas. ?]
Luis Omar Salinas, I invited him when I became the literature
director at the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center
in San Antonio, Texas, in 1984.
I was a director, and I brought people like Cherríe Moraga,
Helena Viramontes.
That that's how I met them--
Luis Omar Salinas, Alberto Ríos.
And I brought a whole bunch of people
that I thought were at the forefront.
But unfortunately, I also had to bring people
that my boss wanted me to bring that I
wasn't so happy with bringing.
I had the position, but I didn't really have the power.
But at least I got to meet-- like half of the people
I invited were people that I admired,
and the other people I was obliged to invite.
But I still felt very proud and happy to meet these writers,
to photograph them, to--
many times I interviewed them--
Pat Mora, Ana Castillo.
I interviewed each one.
I still have those tapes there in my archives.
Now they're still on little cassettes, you know,
but they're there.
And later-- Miss Brooks on the other hand--
we always call her Miss Brooks even though she was Mrs.--
but Miss Brooks-- Gwendolyn Brooks--
I met her before she knew me as a writer
when I was teaching at Latino Youth Alternative High School.
She would have an annual poetry contest
to promote the arts to kindergarteners
all the way to high school.
And our school was like 50 students.
We didn't have any money.
If you wanted chalk, you had to bring your own chalk.
At the end of the class you had to put it in your pocket.
It was that kind of school.
And for three years, my students won the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry
Award in our poor little school.
Five of my students won, I'm very proud to say.
And she would have this wonderful luncheon
at the University of Chicago.
But then I realized, oh man, I'm getting
famous for being a teacher of writers.
And I knew it was time for me to let go and work on my own.
So that's how I first knew her.
Later, we would read on the same stage.
But I write about running into her at a bakery--
a supermarket, and she was buying a cake.
And I couldn't believe that poets bought cakes.
I said, what are you doing here, Miss Brooks?
She said, I'm buying a cake.
But you could read the essay.
I love that story.
I love that Gwendolyn Brooks story.
I wanted to see is Matt Mendez still in the audience?
Could you stand up, Matt?
Oh, Matt's here?
He is here.
He's the author-- he's the author of Barely
Missing Everything.
Because I wanted to mention that novel.
And I blurbed that book.
Yeah, and another book you blurbed,
which is, for those of you who don't know,
this is Sabrina & Corina from Kali Fajardo-Anstine, who's
a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction this year.
And the reason I mentioned both of those books
is I was wondering if you could speak to us about what
do you think has changed in the literary community
since you started with Mango Press and Bad Boys
all that time ago?
Well, I think something that's changed is that the students--
writers are taking their writing seriously and studying
with other writers.
And that's really important.
Because back in the day, I had an argument with a very famous
Chicano writer-- who will go unnamed--
and he didn't like the Chicano writing.
He just felt it was bad.
I said it's not bad, it's not finished.
It's just not finished.
And I feel as if the writers now coming up
are finishing their work.
And they're not looking at just each other's work,
they're looking at world literature.
So the writing is coming up to world-literature standards.
That's the beautiful thing that I see.
I also think that they're studying
with writers like you--
writers of color that don't baby them and kick them in the butt
and understand what they're saying and make them
work harder.
I think that's-- I don't know what you think,
but that's what I think.
It's getting to be a golden age, I have to say.
It's a Renaissance.
It really is.
And I think it's a Renaissance for poetry too.
Because when you have turmoil as we're having and division
in the world and people saying this is not true
and that's a lie, poets come to the fore and speak the truth.
Because that's what poetry is.
You have to tell the truth-- if it doesn't tell the truth,
it's not poetry.
And that's why, for me, it's an exciting time
to buy books of poetry, to read poetry.
Because you notice that when there's trouble in the White
House, they don't invite poets.
[LAUGHTER]
You know?
Because they tell the truth!
You know, Sandra, when you were here about a year ago
and we had a chance to visit, I got
wind of a project you were doing where you were collecting
some testimonios.
And you were speaking to me about why
it's important to not just tell stories,
but to start listening to them.
Yeah, I think we're in a time when nobody's listening.
And I got a Ford Fellowship, and I've been taping people--
stories of people that are undocumented, people that
hire the undocumented, people that
don't want the undocumented, people that are from and pro.
I just decided I'm going to listen, and it's a--
was an important lesson for me.
Because usually I'm just used to saying,
oh, I have to tell you this.
To listen-- and I still have all the tapes.
I'm still working on creating something with it,
but it's a good lesson for us to sit down with people who don't
think like us and listen--
and listen with a compassionate heart,
so we can understand one another and respect each other.
Yeah, con puro amor.
Con puro amor, there you go.
And really, as the last question before we
move on to book signing, it's an easy one
but I think it's a joyous one.
I want to know your favorite word in Spanish.
O, yo, yoi.
I like fufurufo.
Not guango?
I thought guango.
I like guango too.
Fufurufo is a good one.
Guango.
You know what guango is?
Guango is like when you wear underwear too much
and the elastic gets all stretched.
[LAUGHTER]
It gets guango, guango, isn't that a great word?
It's like when things get all stretched out and worn out, too
wide.
Those are Calzones guango.
It wasn't a trick question, but if you
delve into Sandra's poetry, into her work,
there's many, many, many Spanish words that you can--
Well, you know I'm living in Mexico now.
I'm dreaming in Spanish.
I talk to myself in Spanish now.
And the poems are coming out in Spanish,
and I have to translate them into English.
But I make a lot of mistakes.
Liliana Valenzuela, my translator,
she corrects the mistakes I make--
Porque si no, salen puro guangos.
Pero muy bonito.
Espero que sí, gracias.
Even though they're all baburros, you know?
I have my [? Saturnino ?] postcard on my fridge.
Yeah?
Yes, I do.
But anyway, Sandra, thank you so much for gracing us with--
Oh thank you so much--
--appreciate it so much.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]