 Good evening, everyone. It's wonderful to have all of you here. My name is Luis Serrera. I'm the city librarian here in San Francisco, and it is indeed my pleasure to introduce the program. Let me introduce Oscar Villalon. Oscar is a book review editor for the San Francisco Chronicle and a proud USC alumni. He's involved with Litquake, San Francisco's one city one book steering committee and selection committee, the California Book Awards, and the National Book Critics Circle Board, so he's quite active. And I just found out today that he's also published a small book on thumb wrestling, so we're very anxious. Very small. Very small. And he's actually a champion thumb wrestler, so that's a whole other story. To your left is Luis Alberto Urea, and Luis is a very prolific author. He's written 11 books. He's also an acclaimed poet. He was born in Tijuana, Mexico, to an American mother and a Mexican father. He is a recipient of the 2006 Kidiyama Prize for Fiction, the Lanin Literary Award, an American Book Award, a Western States Book Award, and a Colorado Book Award. He's also been inducted into the Latino Literary Hall of Fame. He's the author of several volumes of poetry as well as nonfiction works, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize at the Devil's Highway. He's a winner of the Christopher Award, and is currently teaching creative writing at the University of Illinois in Chicago. Let's give a warm welcome to Luis Alberto Urea in conversation with Oscar Villalom. I should point out that I am a very proud USC alum until they lose. I'm going to assume a certain familiarity with the book during tonight's conversation, but for those of you who have not read the book, this first question, I think, will open it up for you to understand exactly what we're talking about. And it's this. Luis, even though the Hummingbird's Daughter is a novel, it's based on a true figure. You're a great aunt, Teresita, and it's set in northern Mexico, or central northern Mexico in the early 20th century. So my question to you is, when did you first hear about your aunt, and when did you decide I need to write about this? I heard about her as a kid. I don't know if you've heard this story, if you've seen me speak at a couple of these libraries, but I was born in Tijuana, and at about five, my family moved me to San Diego. We had an outbreak of tuberculosis in the barrio. I lived in La Independencia, up above downtown Tijuana. And I had tuberculosis, scarletina, German measles, all this stuff, all at the same time, poverty diseases, and they thought I was going to die, so we moved to San Diego. But we'd go back and forth across the border regularly, and it didn't occur to me that the border was a presence aside from an interesting journey to Tijuana. So we would go back to Grandma's house, which is still there, and it was sort of the family center for Tijuana. And we'd hear these stories all the time, you know, and we had a tradition where we would gather at Christmas time. And that was one of the times I think the scattered urea could come together. I have all these siblings. If you've read the book, you know Tomás Urea is a perfect template for most of the urea men. They produced many families, and so these scattered siblings would gather, and it was an interesting situation. Some of you might recognize from your own childhoods, but it wasn't a heated house. So they had kerosene heaters, these glass towers that you'd fill with kerosene and light. There would be a fire inside that would make a loud whooshing noise, right? So there'd be this whoo in the background, and the house would be very dark. And we had an aunt named Tia Letti, and Tia Letti's nickname was La Flaca. And La Flaca was skinny, I mean skinny woman. And La Flaca was a really outrageous woman. Much like the character of Wila in the novel, Tia Letti was one of those kind of women. She had the eye glasses that went up like that, that had glitter in them. And she was blind in one eye from the diabetes, you know? And she smoked, she liked menthol cigarettes, like I guess Newport maybe, whatever it had in menthol. She was always smoking, and she would tell us these things to terrorize us all the time. For example, she didn't like us playing in the street. And if I was out there playing marbles in the street with one of the neighborhood kids, and she'd come home from work, she'd work in the tuna cannery, and she'd come home smelling like fish, and she'd have blood all over her shoes, and she'd walk by me, and she'd say, shouldn't play in the street. I'd say, postia, you know, estoy jugando canicas aquí. And she'd say, marijuana farmers steal blonde children and hold them as slaves in the mountains, cabrón. And go inside, and I'd be like, I think I'm going to go inside now. She used story for control, right? So we would gather, and forgive me if you've heard this story, but it just sticks with me as I talk about this book, but we would get our Christmas stories, right? But the problem was they were from Tiaflaca. They weren't any kind of like, you know, Father Christmas, Chris Kringle stories. They were these stories of abject terror, you know, like Yorona and Kukui carrying children off to their doom, and you know, I remember when Christmas, and we're all gathered in this dark room with this heater going with that noise, and the light is lighting her from below, and she's smoking, you know, and she's saying things like, you know one time your grandfather was riding a horse, and he was going by a cemetery, and there was a beautiful girl there at night time. And he said, oye, señorita, don't be out here, it's very dangerous. Allow me to give you a ride on my horse. And she said, gracias, caballero. And so your grandfather picked this woman up and put her on the back of the horse, and he started riding, and he started thinking, I'm very lucky to me that a good looking woman like this. And so your grandfather decided to turn around and say something to her, but when he turned around, she had turned into a skeleton and wanted to suck his blood. It's a classic Christmas story. You know, as I was going to say, it followed no doubt by, you know, Merry Christmas, cabrones. And we would look up and just awe at my aunt, and among those kind of tales came these stories about this aunt. Que tiene una tía yaqui, you got a yaqui aunt, and you know what, she can fly, what do you think about that? She can heal the sick, what do you think about that? She could raise the dead. How do you like that? You know, we're like, wow. Did you believe her? You know, she told us that my grandma had a demon living in the closet that protected her underwear so nobody'd go mess with her. You know, so I believed everything. You know, one of my problems is I believe everything. But after a while, you get more sophisticated, you know, and then you become ashamed of your family and folk ways, and you're like, yeah, whatever. Part of the myth of Teresita at the time was that she had been around during the Conquest. They didn't know much about her. They didn't know she was a fairly modern person. They thought she'd been there during the Conquest and that she had died and that the yaquis kept her on a crystal throne in a cave in Sonora and that her clothes actually rotted off, but she never rotted, and they put fresh clothes on her and that they have warriors who give their entire lives to guarding this body. I mean, you know, the legends were well thought out. And one of my half-brothers and I made a pact to go find the body, risk death to find our aunt. And, you know, we got interested in other stuff and forgot about it. So when did you get back to your aunt wanting to go to school? I was the first one in the family to graduate college. You went to UCSD? UCSD. And I graduated college and my father, unfortunately, was killed my senior year in Mexico, sort of at the hands of the Mexican police and that's a whole other story. But, you know, I did not want to go to graduate school and I wanted to do other stuff and I did all kinds of stupid Southern California things. You know, I was a movie extra in a Chuck Norris movie. Ooh, that was cool. And I did all this stuff and somewhere in there I began working with a missionary group in Tijuana who were taking food and water and medicine and so forth to the Tijuana garbage dumps. And I did that for years. And to support myself, barely, I was a bilingual TA at a community college in San Diego, San Diego Mesa College at the Chicano Studies Department teaching Mecha kids or helping teach Mecha kids or ESL students or whatever. And the professor that I was working for said one day, you're related to the saint of Cabora. And I said, who? Because I had never even heard that phrase. He said the saint of Cabora. And I said, oh, you mean my Latia? No, I said she's not real. He said, of course she was real. I said, well no, she's just a family legend. And he went and got up north from Mexico by Kerry McWilliams. It has a chapter about her. I was flabbergasted, man. I was like, there's a chapter about her. So I Xeroxed it. You librarians will appreciate this because I suddenly became the family researcher. And I started distributing my findings. This is the story of our aunt. So I was the great scholar then who had accessed information. And that was sort of interesting, but nothing life-changing. But a couple of months later, I was at a Mecha party with all the late 70s radicals. We were all looking for some cool t-shirts. We were going to march someplace. We didn't know where, but we wanted to sit in somewhere. And there was a guy there who had gone to Sonora and Chihuahua to study with Coranderas, who was a Carlos Castaneda fan. So he had gone and eaten plenty of peyote. And he was one of those guys who looked like he was floating all the time. He smiled like this. And you'd see him go through a party without, like, he wasn't actually walking. He was just... And he cornered me in the kitchen and he started in with the same thing. You're a son of the saint of Kubota. And I said, how did you know that? And he said, I'm reading your aura. And that was the first time I'd ever heard that, you know. So that really gave me a sense that she was alive and vibrant to people. But again, you know, it didn't really occur to me that this was something that I would make a life pursuit. And then I was miraculously, perhaps, to this intervention, I don't know, hired to teach writing at Harvard in 1982. I'm not quite sure how that happened. But I went to expository writing. So then I was in Boston for the first time and I was in a used bookstore. And I saw a book called Teresita by William Curry Holden. And I jokingly said to the people with me, ah, there's a book about my aunt, ah, you know. And I pulled it down and it was. And that was when I felt my fate was sealed. It was 1985. And I thought, you know, this guy wrote a book about her. I read it. And I started pursuing his footnotes and looking for his sources. And those sources led to other sources. And that just began this sort of long campaign of research. And it kept building and building steam over the years. Was there a lot of documentation, history and the sort of stuff about your aunt? Lots. I have about, I would say, at this point, probably 58 single-spaged pages of bibliography research on her. And plenty more to go. Were you just more or less sitting on this for a while while you were writing your other books? Or your poetry and this sort of thing? Everything else I've ever done has been a distraction from trying to get this book finished. So much so that I felt like when I got this book finished, I was probably going to die. I thought, I've completed my work, right? Right. And you, at one point, I guess you went down to Mexico to do research on this. And the reason I bring it up, because I think we talked about this before, some time ago when the book first came out, Hardback, that you had these sort of supernatural encounters. I had a lot of strange, the stuff you see in the book, I had a lot of that happen to me. I wasn't exactly prepared for it. What sort of things? Oh, my goodness. For example, the story that's in the back of the book, if you've got the paper back, they put in an editorial I wrote for the LA Times about apparitions and stuff. But one of my many research trips was a group of curanderas in Cuernavaca who revere her and actually work with her as a guiding spirit in their healing work, knew somebody, sort of peripherally, a cousin of half-siblings, kind of peripheral family connection. And they said, oh, yeah, he's working on a book about her. Bring him down. We want to talk to him about her. And I thought, what a great opportunity, you know, to enter their world and talk to them one-on-one about what goes on. And I went down there, and you can read about it in the thing. There was an amazing event. But after the amazing event, which was hair-raising in its own right, just to show you how I had entered into a different kind of universe than I was used to, we were sitting there at this table talking. And it was a very homey scene. There was a Mexican Norteño band playing at a wedding party in a yard next door, really bad accordion tuba stuff going on. And the healer woman brought out Jello. Gustas Gelatina. Ah, sí, por favor. So she brought out Green Jello. So we're sitting there with Green Jello in plastic bowls and listening to this band. And it was very good, the Jello, no? It was very good. And there's a knock on the door, and they got up and opened the door. And it was another healer woman, Hermanita Panchita. And she was walking across town. She had done some kind of a healing and was walking home and was hot and tired and said, could I have some water? And they said, oh yeah, sure, come on in. You know, she came in and sat down and they introduced her. This is Hermanito Luis. So we're eating the same little, you know, nice Jello, huh? Yeah, it's very good Jello. And she looks at me. I've never seen her before in my life. And she says, excuse me, Hermanito. She says, do you have a job where you disseminate information to the public? And I said, yes, ma'am, I do. She said, what job is that? I said, I'm a writer. And she said, oh, God has great work for you to do. And I said, really, what work is that? And she said, telling them about Teresita. This is the first five minutes I've ever seen her in my life. I looked at her, you know, I was like, how do you know about Teresita? And she said, oh, I talk to her all the time. I said, she died in 1906. And the woman said, so? She's got a lot to talk about. And then, as if that weren't bad enough, then she says to me, you know, she's very busy. She's very busy in the afterlife. So what do you mean busy? She said, a lot of work to do. And I said, oh, wait a minute. I said, you mean you got to work in the afterlife? And she says, pardon me, if you speak Spanish, you're not going to be a lazy bum in heaven. They work. I was like, no way. I said, after I get through my life, I want to be in a hammock. There's work. So I say to her, I felt like I was walking into a comedy routine. I said to her, so, okay, what does Teresita do in heaven? And she says, she works in the hospital. And I said, oh, come on. I said, you've got to work in heaven and there's a hospital. And I was being kind of, you know, funny with her. And she looked at me and she said, don't you know that a lot of times when people die, they die alone or they die afraid or they die confused and they don't know where they are and they don't want to be there. And she said, and when they arrive, she's one of the people that helps them. So then I was, you know, not the first time and certainly not the last time, totally convicted and hunched over at my own arrogance, you know. It was something so beautiful she was trying to tell me and I was sort of joshing with her. Are the, you know, is it because of these sort of incredible incidents that you chose to write the story of Teresita as a novel or were there other considerations for what, for why you wanted to do it? Because it seems to me you could have written this as nonfiction as you did with the Devil's Highway, your book about the Mexican migrant workers who died in the Arizona desert. So why fiction and not nonfiction? You know, part of the reason it took 20 years, I think, was trying to figure out what the heck, how to tell it. And it just started seeming to me that fiction, good fiction, is more real to you in a lot of ways than a nonfiction book. But, you know, fiction has some kind of, to me, almost mystical access to deep, deep responses, almost deep tissue response to story. And it started occurring to me that after spending so many years with these characters in this milieu, I knew them in ways I couldn't footnote, but I, I, I intuited things about them. And I really wanted to write one of those books that you make you dream, you know, one of those books that can hypnotize you. And it started to me that that was, that was the way to go. And the other thing is I'm, you know, I'm from the generation that still believes in the novel, you know, still the great American novel or the great Chicano novel or the great Mexican novel. I don't care what it is. I'm just... Is there such a thing even as the great American novel? Yeah, I wrote it, man. I don't know. Is there? I don't know. You know, is it? I don't know. But it, to me, the pinnacle of what I could accomplish as a writer would be to try to write, you know, a big, complex, serious novel that's also something people would enjoy reading. And I thought as, as sort of my temple, my honor to her, somebody that I respected so much, I would try to do the best I could do. And that was the novel. If I had known it would be so difficult and so painful for such a funny book, it caused me the most torment of anything I've ever done. Now, is, what was your thinking behind ending the book where it does? Because essentially the book ends with almost her new life beginning with the Debussy de Flem, you know, from the Mexican government going up into the north. Is it because were you playing on continuing the story, or was there something about that sort of optimism, I suppose, that you chose that you thought would be a good way to end? Well, you don't know if it's optimistic or doom laden, and neither do they, they're going to the dark American, you know, night. There are a couple of things. I was, of course, always trying to find a place to end it. Her story, even though she died young, was so insane and so complex that the second half of her life is wilder than the first half which I wrote in this novel. And I realized that for sheer kind of weight-bearing, you know, load-bearing structure, I don't think you could make it through. I realized it would be like trying to wash down some cheesecake with a chocolate mall. It was so much. And so I was trying to find a graceful place to exit the story, and I wasn't intending to go on, you know. It was a marathon with cactus in my shoes to do that book, so I didn't want to go on with it. But in my research, there was just a short passage in one of the historical texts that said that as the train was leaving Mexico, these warriors had gathered to ambush it, and when they saw her, she had come out on the car so they could see her, and they chose not to shoot but stood and saluted her with their weapons as she went by. And that scene stuck with me. I thought, wow, that's kind of, you know, that's kind of cheesy California movie making, you know. That's like Scarlett O'Hara. Tomorrow will be another day. But it just seemed like a really good place to stop it. Where she had been through this stuff, they were fleeing. I think it represented so many of the journeys that I've written about anyway. And it was a dramatic moment at which I could stop the book. Now, of course, Little Brown, very interested in the sequel, and so we're going to carry on the story in the United States. And, you know, that's something I've been wrestling with a lot. Like, what is that story about? Because this story is rural Mexico with magic and healing and the indigenous element. But the next book is Turn of the Century, Industrial America. You know, so I always had this running thing with my editor. Kind of a joke between us, but I think it was true. And that, you know, Hummingbird's Daughter is sort of my lonesome dove book. But the Hummingbird's Daughter, too, is ragtime. It's a heck you write ragtime. But it's been hitting me the last few months that I finally understood that really the sequel is the culmination probably of everything I've worked on in that. I realize this is, for me, this is the Mexican immigrant novel about what happens to her and Tomas when they come to the United States and have this experience that neither of them are prepared for. It seems to be like the structure, or I should say the skeleton for all great American novels. It's the immigrant novel, right? It is. It is. It's, you know, I'm going to do my Philip Roth book or my doctorate. Roger March. Yeah, right, yeah. Yeah, another thing that occurred to me while I was reading the book is that, you know, often when people think of like Latino literature or literature from Latin America and the sort of thing, they always characterize it in terms of it's magical or it's exotic. And I want to ask you two questions. One, I mean, do you see the book that way? And two, do you, if you don't, do you think it's because, or what I think maybe, if you agree with me on this, do you think it's because maybe we have a culture that seems to be blind to its own sort of exoticism and spirituality? I mean, you think of the novels and the stories from the South or New England. There's plenty of tales of apparitions and the otherworldly and, you know, a life beyond the one that's visible here. Oh yeah, sure. Absolutely. You know, first of all, I don't see it as a magic realist book. Though, I mean, you know, if you look through the paperback review after review, you know, like it's me to Garcia Marquez, which is great. You know, I paid each of those reviewers five bucks to say that. But, you know, on some level, I feel that that's because that's who they know. Right. In fact, I was talking earlier at the little hors d'oeuvre gathering with somebody and saying, you know, they liken me to Garcia Marquez. And then second place is Isabella Yende. And then third place, a little more distant is, you know, like Water for Chocolate, Lauda Esquivel, because that's what people know. And people are always telling me, you know, you write. This is so reminiscent of those other Mexican books like Garcia Marquez. I'm like, well, he's a Colombian, man. So, you know, that's like saying that The Stand is the same book as, you know, for Whom the Bell Tolls, because both are in English. They're different books. So that being said, there are elements certainly that one would consider magic, but I think partly I have to say that those elements are, on the one hand, indigenous elements. And on the other hand, things that are actually documented in every miracle in the book is documented and observed. So, you know, to me, the funny thing is it's not really magic realism. It's sort of the reverse, whatever that would be, real magicism, perhaps. And when we were editing the book, there was this one moment when my editor was happily cutting out all the crazy woo-woo stuff. And I finally said, you know, it's okay if you want to take out all the mysticism, but it will no longer be a historical novel because you've cut out all the history. All the stuff you think is history is what I made up, you know? I don't know what kind of horse is on the last road or what they ate. You know, I don't know what the house looked like because it no longer exists. I made the real stuff up, but the mystical stuff is real. And certain other elements, for example, there's a series of dreams that show up throughout the book culminating in this one dream, which I won't say if you haven't read it. I don't want to spoil it for you, but a vision. And those dreams are in sequence. They are the dreams that the shamans I was studying with gave me. I was given these dreams, including the dreams, if you know, of the three men who keep showing up. I will spoil it for those of you who haven't read it, but the plug your ears and hum, but the three men that keep showing up in Tennessee does dreams and we list says don't be silly. You're not dreaming them, they're dreaming you. That happened to me so much so that when I left Arizona, I had a teaching job in Louisiana and Cindy, my wife now, she wasn't my wife then, but went with me. And I woke up one morning and they were standing in the bedroom. They were watching us and I set up and one of them gave, like he does in the book, and they faded out and disappeared. And I called my cousin, the curandena Esperanza, and I told her and that's what she said to me. Ah, no seas pendejo. She said, you're not dreaming about them. The yakis are dreaming about you. And I said, what? She said it could be 1873 or it could be right now. I don't know. They heard about what you're doing and they're watching you to see if you're worthy of the story or not. And the last dream, anyway, that's in the book was the final dream of the series. And talking about coming to San Francisco on these trips, this came up, Cindy and I were talking about it and she said, you probably don't remember this, but the night you had that dream, you woke up sobbing in the morning and you told me it's over. That's the last one. It's all over. So I thought, I don't know what she dreamed, but I knew what I had dreamed. And they were all related to some of these medicine people and shamans. And they would tell me, you're going to have a dream. And I'd have a dream. Well, I think you just freaked out the audience. No, I didn't. No, I didn't. Which is fine. Which is fine. No, that's good. That's good. Don't apologize. That's good. We will all levitate now. No, but you were talking about people's culture. And over and over again, I will hear, like, I'll go to, you know, I live in Chicago. So people consider themselves pretty practical in Chicago. But, you know, I'll meet people at readings and they'll always say, gosh, I don't have any mystical thing like that. And I say, really, where are your people from? Well, we're German. Oh, you got a lot. What? You're Germany? You don't have mystical? You know, well, we're Irish. I was like, whoa, you know, we're Polish. Wait a minute. We're Russian. It's amazing to me. And every people on the planet, if not this current generation, one or two back, has got a connection to the earth, or what I consider this matrix of sacredness that's out there, that, you know, we do have connections. We just forget it. And, you know, one of the secret things going on in this book is there's a very strong Asian influence in it. You know, people don't know that, but a lot of the reading in Zen poets and things that I did when I was writing really had an effect. And I'll share what I mean about the matrix of sacredness. I was invited to teach writing workshop in France, okay, in Provence. Ooh, I know. I thought, how am I going to ever get Tijuana Boy to go to Provence? I'm going, man. And, you know, my wife and I, we went, and I said to them, I can't go unless you take my wife. And they said, okay. I thought, whoa. The French are good that way. The French are awesome that way. And, you know, it was France, so we did come back pregnant, you know what I'm saying. But anyway. But we were in this, this aubergine, and that's where Tennessee Does Bedroom came from in the book, because the house is gone. No one's ever seen what her room looked like. But I was lying in this aubergine looking around and I thought, oh my God, this is the house Tomas built, you know, with the seven mismatched walls and the beams. That's our bedroom. And one of the guys who was there was a ninth degree martial artist who had been brought over to teach the writers Tai Chi, yoga, and martial arts moves as part of this thing. And the more he and I started talking, the more I started seeing some of what Tete Sita was doing in terms of sort of Chi energies. And, you know, it's been really amazing to me that often, if there's an elder Asian person or an older Chinese person, which happened at City Hall, but it happens in a lot of readings, they'll come over to me and say, this book's about Chi Gung, isn't it? This book's about Tai Chi, isn't it? They recognize some of the things I put in there. There's some, you know, I think... The planting of the feet. Yeah, yeah, the planting of the feet. And the way she healed, if you see some of the old newspapers about her, she didn't actually touch people, but she actually would move her hands near them and she had these ritualized things she would do with her hands. And so, of course, Reiki healers are all like, oh dude, she's a Reiki, you know, people recognize these things across the cultures, which I think is really interesting. All right, I think at this point we're opening it up to questions from the audience, if I'm not mistaken. If you're not too freaked out. And it looks like Rosie back there, she has the microphone, so just... Oh, you have to speak into a microphone. Can I switch over to the devil's highway for just a quick second? Sure. Did you go down and spend time on the other side of the border and actually associate with the folks, not the folks in the actual book, but the constant flow that comes across for the research for your book? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And, you know, the hardest part for me, because, you know, devil's highway is my fourth border book. So, you know, the Mexican milieu is natural to me and those folks are natural to me and I'm around them a lot. You know, I have a relative, which I won't name, who actually paid coyotes $2,500 to be delivered to Washington state and he now has a job on the Canadian border as a gardener for the border patrol. Border patrol is hiring illegals. So, you know, you get a really ironic view. The complex part for me on devil's highway was actually getting in with the border patrol and I, you know, have to confess that I had a lot of stored up attitude about the border patrol and at the time, the federal defender's case to protect the coyote was that the border patrol caused the crisis on purpose for nefarious ends, possibly their own entertainment and because I was prejudiced, as only a true liberal can be, I believed it. And then, of course, it turned out not to be true and the border patrol guys were not eager to let me in and it took four months of courting, four long difficult months and at the end of fruitless four months I had about given up and my wife is an investigative reporter so she actually knows how to do the stuff I don't know how to do and I always tell people my response to something like that is the poet's response, you know, I was like, whoa, is me, my career is over, the book's dead, I'm going to go to bed now, I can't. And her response was a reporter's response which was, well, let's just call border patrol guys and see what they say instead of dealing with Washington. So she started calling around and she called Yuma border patrol, the station there in Yuma and they said, yes, send them down and she was like, excuse me and they said yes, send them down. So we thought, well, I better get down there before they hear from Washington and Washington tells them no and I went down there and they weren't cuddly guys they weren't thrilled to have me there but finally one of my agents I was talking to said what you really need to do is go out to Welton station who are the ones who actually did your rescue basically because they just didn't want me hanging around I want to get rid of me and they took me to Welton station and those agents took me in and the supervisory agent who was basically running the patrols and stuff took me in with some pity and started training me and showing me how to cut for sign and so forth and I've told this story before I've told it here but you're out in the desert and you're on the devil's highway and you're looking at the places and you're talking about your feelings as a human being and you realize suddenly that you love the guy and all the alarms inside of you say you may not love the border patrol nope, can't love him but you're thinking this guy's I love this guy and you turn to him and you say I love you man and the border patrol guy looks at you and says what kind of luck you to buddy and in that moment you realize that you can write a better book than you thought you could because I thought I didn't realize that this was a book about three different groups of human beings all aliens in this territory so yeah, I've spent a lot of time with the other side probably one of the greatest things for me ever as a writer is to have experienced their side and it's an interesting thing for me because those guys even though a couple of them have said you're kind of critical but it's okay because you're mean to everybody in that book but they send me presents they get border patrol presents still and some of it's so touching to me I'm not sure what to make of it they'll cut their patches off their uniforms and mail them to me or I was doing a reading and a guy showed up and I knew he was some kind of cop because this guy was, you know he was the size of an army tank and he was all in black and I thought what have I done and he came up and he was a now homeland security agent and he pulls out a border patrol service medallion and says I have to present this to you and I said I can't take that and he said you've got to take that and he pinned it on me and you know it's really interesting because I also attract a lot of rassa there's always a couple of guys who are undocumented those guys who come up to the signing line are like so they were but that's a really touching thing to me to feel like, you know, we can do this and it's been my lesson I think because I always talk about unity and I always talk about, you know my big catch phrase I always use at these things is that there's no them, there's only us but I was very happy to have them in me That would seem to be the point of literature the idea that there is a sort of humanity regardless of what you think you may bring the surface details of your life the trappings are there's this unique human experience and it's not alien to anybody Yeah, I don't think it should be alien to people and, you know, having grown up on the border, you know, divided by the border my mom was American, my dad was Mexican they didn't like each other they didn't like each other culturally or personally so, you know, where do you go, right? It's like we had the border fence in our house so I go through life just not really understanding fences and I always feel like, you know we're losing an ability in the United States to speak to each other about stuff you know, to have rational conversation even if we don't agree and, you know, sometimes I get slapped in the face with it I was touring in Missouri and I was at Truman State College in Missouri and Rush Limbaugh's family was there Colonel John Limbaugh and his wife, Paulette and people said, watch out, that's the Limbaugh's you know, I thought wow, you know and they gave a barbecue for me and Colonel Limbaugh came up and I knew, you know, this is a Army man, a Colonel I knew how to speak to him my dad was an Army man, a Mexican Army my mom was a Red Cross woman from World War II, you know so I walked up to him, I said Colonel Limbaugh, it's an honor to meet you, sir I put my hand up and he looked at me and he shook my hand, he said, call me John I said, no, I feel better calling you Colonel Limbaugh, sir and he kind of liked that and he said, you know, I read that book at yours, Devil's Highway I said, oh really? he said, I was looking for an agenda in that book, he said, I don't know I don't think I found one I thought, well, I said well you know, I was just trying to tell the truth as I understood it and we spent the whole weekend it couldn't be more polar opposites you know, but I always feel that spark of hope when we can talk as Americans about stuff that's you know, that concerns us I think he wished you were his son Luis Limbaugh I think we get one more question yeah, there's somebody there the microphone will make its way I seem to remember that she wrote that Teresita was dead and laid dead for three days was that an exaggeration or okay, over there nope, it's all true yeah, I mean, you know, you can't you take the historical data with a grain of salt right, so you know, there's a lot of documentation of this thing that happened to her and there was an American doctor and a Mexican doctor both she was pronounced dead they had death certificate they did make the coffin and all that you know, and there are varying I mean, one of the things any of you who do research know this but you know, you get varying takes on things you know, some people there's one text that said she had an epileptic fit that she had taken psychoactive drugs of some sort which was not the case her tribal tradition, in spite of what Castaneda says, didn't deal with things like peyote and drugs but the preponderance of the reporting at the time talked about Mian and this assault whatever happened, I don't say what happened in the book because I can't prove it either way and there's no need to be gratuitous anyway but she was in fact pronounced dead and laid out. Again you know, you can see different interpretations of she was laid out for an evening she was laid out for a couple of days you know so there were several that essentially had a three day thing and it felt good to me for the novel and I believed them but you know, you can find a lot of stuff about her there's one in the Overland Monthly magazine Contemporary Magazine and I quote it in the novel her dad reads for the chapter but you know this guy has her going to be executed by a firing squad and she opens the earth and a hundred Mexican soldiers fall to their death in the lava and it closes up so people wrote a lot of really crazy things about her but that seems to be an actual thing you can document I mean there are reports about it and you know it's not all just journalism either I have you know military reports letters interviews so there's a lot of different sources that particular thing is across the board you can find it and a lot a lot a lot if not all of the research material so far about her I think I do have time that's it two more no more two more questions two more up here in front could you tell me which book you received the Landon Prize for the Kiriyama I got the Landon for the Devil's Highway and the Kiriyama for Hummingbird's Daughter and the Devil's Highway was a Pulitzer Prize finalist finalist for the Kiriyama that's right you know it's funny about the Pulitzer thing you know it always sounds I always thought it sounded really suspect when someone said oh it was enough to be nominated but you know the amount of attention that got for being shortlisted blew me away well they say it was nominated yes you should be suspect because you could pretty much nominate everybody's nominated but finalist yeah that's the tough part that's good and you know I was I was at a signing and the chairman of that committee came up to me he said if I had been up to me you would have won it and I said well you know what's really weird to me I've spent my entire career not winning it nobody's paying the attention but you know it's that amazing so you know and I have to say too I mean Luis and the Friends of the Library and so forth talked about this program but I've just got to say about this you know San Francisco the way the city has responded to the book and the way the city has planned the way this book has happened you know the city put some well placed pressure on the publisher to make sure the Spanish edition came out for Spanish readers and they wanted to do it next year and they went into overdrive and did it now and the city made it fairly clear that it would be nice to have an audio book for people who couldn't read and that's happened and I don't know what geniuses you guys have marketing this thing but I got a call today we were in the seventh printing of the paperback and I think I may be speaking out of whoa thank you so much but I believe that is three printings in a row because of you which is just unbelievable to me so thank you or maybe in three yakis visiting the publisher yakis doing trust me just do the translation don't ask questions they're changing the numbers on the computers okay and I think one more one more yes thank you speaking of Spanish seems obvious that you were able to you know find out stuff in Mexico by being bilingual speaking Spanish do you think it's important for you know all Latinos to be bilingual like I'm just curious if you think it's important for your children to speak Spanish and how are they doing in terms of being bilingual yeah I'm in an interesting situation in that my two biggest kids are step kids so there is you know there is why it can be my little girl who says she's from France um is named Rosario Teresa named after my godmother and Teresita and you know we live in probably the most comfortably Anglo middle class place she could live but she's very proud I'm a Mexican so I put her in Spanish class and she's into it so I think she will learn I find it's difficult I mean you know you can see me okay I'm half Mexican my mom's American my dad's Mexican but now my little girl she's a quarter Mexican you know what I mean so you know I'm willing to go with her where she wants to go culturally but I do think it's important I think it's a good thing I think being bilingual was a really good thing for me in my mind and my soul I didn't at the time you know a lot of the things I thought were shameful because people told me they were turned out to be great things I can't tell you how much of my life people were telling me don't ever acknowledge you were from Tijuana that's terrible but it's it actually is kind of cool gives you some street cred yeah I'm from Tijuana man you know and I think it's important I think you see a lot of Latino writers from this country learning Spanish sort of backward you know they don't know it but I know a lot of poets Chicano poets and Chicana poets who learn it phonetically so that they can start you know so I think it's a good thing I love having that extra access okay and I think we'll end it right there thank you very much couple of quick announcements I wanted to take a moment to acknowledge someone when Luis mentioned about the San Francisco support for the program and the nudging of the publisher to get the audio book and the Spanish language book a person that's responsible for a lot of that coordination and the wonderful success of the program is Marcia Schneider public affairs person and she's back there to acknowledge that thank you Marcia and on that note Luis thank you for a wonderful experience and making our one city one book such a terrific success and Oscar wonderful interviewer let's give them all one more round of applause and absolutely Luis will be signing books and books are available for purchase in the back row back room if you want to line up along the edge we'll be able to make the line go as quickly as possible thank you and have a good evening