A great Chicano forebear of mine in writing is Rolando Hinojosa-Smith. He was writing good border mysteries for Chicano readers back in the '80s and '90s.
I was deeply infected with storytelling from the get go, and I truly love it.
I've been told not to tour down in Mexico. I am too well-known now. The kidnappers may think that my publisher will pay a ransom.
It's almost easy for me to write about a magnificent tropical village with orchids and dragonflies. That's intoxicating, but the United States is magical, too. We just forget this.
I'm interested in the eternal soul. That's what I write about.
I'm always fascinated by the disjunct between what's really happening on the ground and the propaganda machine that feeds America alarmist news about immigration.
It became really important to me if I was going to write 'Hummingbird's Daughter' to try to do honor to women.
We're all funny. Humor unites us.
When I was doing missionary work when I was younger, which started this obsession of mine with the literature of witness, I was a translator for a missionary group, and I spent years in a Tijuana dump. People were really thrown by the fact that the Mexican poor, many of them pureblood indigenous people, seemed happy.
Writers write without support.
During grade school, we moved to a white, working-class suburb in San Diego, and there were no Mexicans.
A lot of our family was undocumented. My mom and dad were both super conservative. My dad had a green card; my mom was an Eisenhower Republican who did not approve of all the 'illegal people.'
Masculinity is kind of a toxic curse, isn't it? The expectations of it were hard on me.
I believe God is a poet; every religion in our history was made of poems and songs, and not a few of them had books attached.
I came to believe the green fuse that drives spring and summer through the world is essentially a literary energy. That the world was more than a place. Life was more than an event. It was all one thing - and that thing was story.
I used to approach writing like a football game. If I went out there and aggressively saw more, I'd know more, and I'd capture more, and I'd write better. Hut, hut, hut: First down and haiku!
