 Welcome, everyone. Thank you for joining us for our program at Mechanics Institute online on Zoom. We're very pleased to welcome you to White Space, Essays on Culture, Race and Writing with author Jennifer DeLeon, poet Norma Liliana Valdez, and our moderator, Sara Campos. I'm Laura Shepherd, Director of Events at the Mechanics Institute. And we are very pleased to cosponsor our program tonight with Latinx in Publishing, the Mesa Refuge, the Puente Project and Cinnamon Girl. These are four incredible programs that offer resources for writers of color for all ages and backgrounds. So we're thrilled to cosponsor with these organizations and promote writers across the country. Before we begin, I just want to say we will have a Q&A at the end. So please hold your questions and put them in the chat. And also, if you would like to purchase books by our authors, White Space is available at Alexanderbook.com and also at any independent bookstore near you. So we're very pleased to welcome two acclaimed writers to talk about how to forge one's identity as an immigrant in the landscape of whiteness. And what it took for them to cultivate their creative potential as artists. Before we begin our program, I'd like to introduce our very special guests. Sara Campos is a writer, lawyer and program officer at a private foundation. Her work has appeared in a number of publications, including two anthologies, Basta, an anthology of Latinx and gender violence, and Wanderings, The Wandering Song, Central American Writing in the U.S., and also another of other journals and newspapers, including Porter House Review, Rat Valley Review, St. Anne's Review, Five Fifty Split Color Lines, Alternate Media, and the LA Review of Books, and also the San Francisco Chronicle. She has received an Elizabeth George Foundation grant and residences, and fellowships from Las Letras Latinas, also from Bono, Wakando, Hedgebrook, the Anderson Center, and the Mesa Refuge. Jennifer DeLeon is author of Don't Ask Me Where I'm From, and editor of Wise Latinas, Writers on Higher Education. DeLeon has also published prose in over a dozen literary journals, including Plow Shares, The Iowa Review, and the Michigan Quarterly Review, and is a rub street instructor and board member. She is a currently assistant professor of creative writing at Framingham State University and makes her home in the Boston area, and we're very pleased to welcome you, Jennifer, for the first time. Thank you. And with her, our poet, Norma Liliana Valdez is a member of the Wakando Writers Workshop, and a Kanto Mondo Fellow. And her work appears in The Rumpus, the Los Angeles Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and the anthology, Latinas Struggles and Protests in 21st Century USA, among others. Norma earned her BA in Psychology and MS in Counseling and the Graduate Certificate in Ethnic Studies from the San Francisco State University. She is also an alumna of UC Berkeley Extension Writing Program, and has been awarded residences and fellowships from Hedgebrook, under the Volcano International, community of writers, and Vona, in addition to others. She is a founding member of the Chingonda Collective, a women's writing group whose mission is to nurture a sustaining writing practice for its members through mutual encouragement and writing retreats, and she also lives in the Bay Area. So please welcome our special guest. Thank you. Thank you, Laura, and thank you to the Mechanics Institute for inviting us to put together this program. I feel really delighted to be in conversation with these two fabulous writers to both Latinx, both women, both educators, SAS, although one is primarily a fiction writer of young adult fiction. And the other one's primarily a poet. Although their work is distinct, I think they share common themes involving womenhood, womanhood, and the immigrant experience. And these are themes that I want to explore today with them. Their work has a lot of power and vitality. And the narrators in both their books seek to gain agency over their circumstances. Something that I truly appreciate. I'm going to start with you, Jen. I think of white space as a journey. I think of it both in a real physical sense, because the centerpiece of the book is this trip that you took as a young woman to Guatemala. But the book is also a journey about the writerly life. It's your process, you know, beginning when you're a girl really doing, you know, taking, you know, keeping a journal to the point where you're, you know, you're teaching, you're mentoring other writers, other young people. So I'd love to ask you just how, how formative that trip to Guatemala was, even if, you know, you didn't write that novel that you intended to write. How did they, how did the trip inform your writing and how, you know, tell me, tell the audience about, about what that meant for you. Yes, I'd love to thank you so much for, for guiding us in this rich discussion that I know we're about to have and thank you everyone for being here I feel so welcome by the mechanics Institute. I just want to mention briefly that I was born in Boston and grew up outside of Boston, but after college I moved to California to the Bay Area to do the Teach for America program, and I taught third and fourth grade in San Jose. And went to the University of San Francisco. So the Bay Area is just has a special place in my heart I know lots of people say that, but it's true. The white space, the essays, as you mentioned, are pieces where I really reflect on the white spaces that I've been a part of my whole life, friend groups, schools, workplace institutions like college higher education and even the gym as a white space that I write about but it's also about the white space of the page and how I learned to really take up space on the page fill that white space and grow into my identity as a writer and an author. For me, going to Guatemala when I was 28 years old is absolutely at the crux of my development as a writer. Growing up, I heard stories about Guatemala constantly both my parents were born there grew up there and they moved to the United States when they were 18. So my sisters and I were just like doused in stories growing up. And it was always this mythical place like wow what's Guatemala. I went there for the first time when I was nine years old, and that was a very impactful trip. And we would go back and forth. In the back of my mind I always knew that I wanted to live there. I wanted to go there alone without the invisible leash of my parents, and without their, their protection, because every time we traveled there. We, I joke but we would go on these living room tours, we would just go from one living room to another living room to another living room, and I'm like, there's a whole country out there, you know, and my parents just they wanted to see people, see the landscape, etc. So, when I was 28, I was in the middle of an MFA program and creative writing, and I was familiar with school, I was good at school, I had done school. I wasn't looking for any more, though, I realized after one semester in the program that what I needed to do was to fill the well to go to the motherland to take that route strip, and to really learn more about the history of the country, improve my Spanish and start a novel. My parents, their response was a little surprising, because they actually, my father was worried, he didn't want me to go alone as a woman, he thought it was very dangerous, even though I had lived in other parts of the world, like Vietnam and Nigeria and France and, but he, so he flew down a week before I arrived, and he met me at the airport, and for a week, he took me to great family members, and we took, we rented a car and drove to get something angle. And during that week, he was my guide, and he really introduced me to the country in a new way. I have never heard him talk as much, joke as much, share stories as much as he did that week. All of which is to say that I can't imagine being a writer without having spent that time in Guatemala. And it wasn't all roses, there were some thorns, but that was part of the experience as well. And I have so much to write about, I feel like I can fill books and books with essays after that trip. But this, this trip really is the center of the book. Wonderful. I wonder if you could open that book and read to us from that book. Yeah, so I'll read a short essay called a map of the world. When I was in ninth grade, my father ran away from home. One frost but in New England morning, he climbed into his great Toyota and drove toward Guatemala. He left a letter for us written in blue pen on a single sheet of my school notebook paper somewhere around DC, he turned back. I have always wondered how his life and mine would be different, had he kept driving his longing has haunted me ever since. It's why I am here in Guatemala, living day to day page to page. I want to understand how my father could possibly love a country, more than his family. I am sitting in a library in the Western Highlands, tattered spines of paperbacks line the locked doors of the wooden bookshelves, Paulo fray, the government to john up dykes rabbit run. The library is one room with three square wooden tables and posted on the white wall, a map of the world. On my down map, North America is in the southern hemisphere, Australia trades places with Europe, a window the size of the door places afternoon light in clean strips across the cool tiles. Outside clouds cast shadows over the mountains. The one librarian's name is Araceles. She is rosy cheeked and wears a pearl white sweater with a fur collar. Her black hair is thick and long like mine. Her shoulders over my desk examines the black marks I have scribbled between the thin tan lines in my leather bound journal. She leans in my shoulders tense. I have seen her before. I returned to this library like I returned to this country over and over. But today, it's as if my face has a sign that reads, tell me your story. My father lives in the United States in Arkansas city. And when I was three, he left Guatemala to work, but he always called and said he had gifts for us, my mother, my sister and well, my father for me. He was just everything hope a hero until one day when it was my sister's birthday and we had the cake ready the food everything and the telephone rings and it's him. She tells me in one long black hair of a sentence. She talks with her hands and her eyes dart left to right. She speaks as if we pencil this conversation in our calendar weeks ago, like she'd been practicing it while walking along the narrow cracks sidewalks in the pink light of sunrise and the orange light of sunset. So he says, look, I'm only calling to say that I have another family now. I don't love you anymore and I'm not returning. Aracelyce and I both nod, me side to side and she up and down. I didn't want to say anything to my sister. So I waited until my mother asked me what was wrong. I had to tell her, my mother sat down and cried, then my grandparents, my sister and me. Maybe he was lying, I say, sometimes life is hard in the US. People can't find work. A man can feel like a failure. No. Aracelyce pulls down her sweater. After that, I didn't want to have anything to do with him. Joseph free. I even had to go to the hospital. Yes. Through the window, I spot an old man pushing a rickety wagon full of empty gas tanks. The shade from his cowboy hat hides his face. The high son has moved his attention to another latitude, another longitude seated at the wooden table. I want to cry, not for Aracelyce, not for her father, but for mine. He could not do what other men did. My father, who has been homesick for 40 years. But a feeling of gratitude swarms me. Thank God he didn't have the guts. Thank God my father came back, and that I, his daughter can relish the warmth of both sons. That is what I felt as I listened to Aracelyce that afternoon in the library, when I stared long and hard at the upside down map. Thank you. Thank you, Jen. It was really beautiful. And I'm really glad you read that part because it, it reminds me that throughout your writing, and I've read a couple of your books and some short stories. You've got this theme about family separation. And I, and I think I even recall you're saying in that you're writing in white space that the issue haunts you. And, you know, it's a few years ago we saw, you know, family separation in a really tragic way, and the kind of family separation that you're writing about is perhaps not as, you know, dramatic, but it's no less, you know, tragic and devastating for families. And, you know, it's also the issue in your, in your book. Don't ask me where I'm from is the setup for, you know, the, this girl whose father gets deported. So what is it about this issue for you personally, and that composure to write about it and, and has it changed since you've become a mother. Wow, that's such a rich question. Thank you. I mean, it does haunt me. It's, I don't know which famous writer said this, but there's this idea that writers all have wounds that we return to, and and try to process through our writing and try to address and I guess for me that is a wound, you know, I was young 14 years old when when my father just up and left to go to Guatemala and what's what's interesting is that I remember when he came back, it was just a few days later, and so maybe a week, and I was getting ready to go babysit, and I was downstairs and my younger sister was watching cartoons, and my father came back into the house, and he hadn't even taken his jacket off and he sat down on the couch. And my little sister was like boppy, you know and she was hugging him and cartoons are like blaring they're so loud and this is the first time I'd ever seen my father cry, you know, the tears were falling down his face and, and he was back, and we never talked about it ever. You know, we didn't go to family counseling like on TV, like none of that we just it was a hole under the rug that we just stepped over every single day. As I grew older I just wondered like how I was so fascinated actually by his quest to want to go home, and then by his pull of his family to come back, you know, and I think I keep writing about it because turning it over and under different light sometimes I really do feel bad for my father because he wanted so badly to go home, and he didn't. And then other days I think how could he even consider leaving the family you know how I wouldn't do that. But then I think about his own father and how he left his eight siblings when the eighth baby had just been born you know I mean, stories some of them are inherited some of them are sort of passed on and I think our job as writers is to kind of untangle some of those thoughts and make meaning from them. At least that's what I enjoy doing that's my art form so I'll be writing about it for a while. The main theme that I saw running through white space is the straddling of cultures that occurs between immigrants and their and their children and children often act as a bridge between mainstream culture and parents, address that kind of navigation. And, and do you see that examples of that as an educator. Yes, absolutely. This concept of being the bridge that went there is very prevalent I think many times for children of immigrants, which is the case by case you know both my parents, even though they became us citizens and spoke English and you know they bought a house in a neighborhood like that was great schools all of that. They still didn't have this fluency in the culture. And I think for my sisters and I that's a big part about of what we brought home. Some of it they accepted and some of it they didn't you know they were like no you still can't have a boyfriend and you still can't sleep over other people's houses and other parts they welcomed with open arms like yes you will go to college. Absolutely you will learn to drive you know these are. These are parts of living the United States and the bridge component doesn't ever end, I think I still feel like I'm operating as a bridge for my parents after they've been in this country for 50 years. You know, still kind of explaining things or introducing them to things, but they're also a bridge for me, you know, and they are constantly connecting me back to their childhoods, their home country. I love that. I love that we can go back and forth. I hate the idea that to assimilate means to give up, you know where you come from or the parts of history. And that's part of why I write to. I really want young people or all people I guess readers to see that we're not a monolith, you know that our culture has many different identities and traditions and it's exciting to me to open up that window through literature. So, Norma, I'd like to invite you to join our conversation and also to begin with, I'd love to hear, and for the audience to hear your, your writing journey and how you begin as your primarily a poet, but also an essayist. So first of all, Sarah Sarah, thank you so much for inviting me into the station. First as a as a writer and Amiga who I just have so much respect for, and introducing me to Jen's work. Actually, as a writer as a poet is very, it's a very non traditional path. I don't have an MFA I was not one of those young people who at a very early age knew she wanted to write. I grew up in a household where there were three different types of books in my home as a daughter of Mexican immigrants and I want to also say that because I think it was important with Jen said about, I was not born in Mexico but I was made in Mexico. My mother was six months pregnant with me when she came to the United States on a tourist visa and she was already married to my father. She came as a single person and so when she got on that bus from Tijuana with my father they sat apart they didn't want anyone to think they were a couple because she was entering the country as a single woman and she covered her belly to cover up her pregnancy. She was afraid to enter the country and for it to be known that you know she was planning for me to be born in the United States. And all that to say that you know the immigrant experience that I understand is, is that through my family through my parents, it's a very strong presence that is important to me. Going back to my trajectory as a writer. There weren't very many books in my house there were many that is which was a, the Cosmo magazine, you know, in Spanish is equivalent of Cosmo money that is there was a lot of bad my mom loved to read that. My father used to love to read these little cowboy western back pocket little novels that were always that were translated into Spanish they were originally like like these cowboy stories. And he always had one in his back pocket he had a closet full of these little books which none of us could read we were not allowed to like really read those stories. And then the third type of book was sometime when I was in like fifth or sixth grade my parents bought an encyclopedia, which was an investment. So I didn't actually realize that I really love to read until I was in college and I discovered novels, and I just could not get enough of novels, but I never saw myself as a as a writer or much less a poet. My trajectory into into poetry came much later in my life when actually in my late 30s, when I was doing a lot of personal writing journaling. As a way to try to navigate a very difficult time in my life, which was my youngest son was diagnosed with an incurable disease. And at that time, the only way I really knew to kind of process what I was feeling is to go into my journals and to go into my journals and at a point a professional development workshop. We happen to be sharing our writing with each other and our colleague, Kenneth Chuck on who was a poet from Fresno said to me you're, you're a poet. No, I'm not he says yes you are and, and this was the first time somebody said, you should sign up for a poetry workshop I mean what is that I don't even know what that is where can I go do this, and this is how two years later or a year later I ended up taking classes that you see Berkeley extension to, and I found one of the most amazing instructors Laura Walker, and I've, and I studied with I've studied since then with many, many renowned poets, wonderful teachers and I still go back to Laura Walker as my true poetry teacher she taught me so much about how to read and write poetry, even poetry you don't like or you think you don't like how can you really enter poetry, even when you think you don't like it. And so, from then, this new creative life force another way to understand and filter my life experience came to me, and that's how I started writing poetry, you know, a little over a decade ago. Wow. So I, I'd love for you to read some of that poetry. Yes, thank you. I, I, and we should say you know this is you, you're a published poet. You've got a book called preparing the body and from yes yes books. So I hope people will run out and get it. Absolutely gorgeous. Thank you and you can order it through yes yes books, which is a wonderful indie press based out of Portland. You can also go to my website normalilyonabaldes.com and you'll find the link to where to order the book. And to start off, I think, I'm going to start with a poem kind of speaking to Jen, what you know what I resonate so much in Jen's work, which is this, oh my gosh, this desire for my motherland, which is Mexico, and a place I cannot really have the way I wanted. So I'm going to start with this poem titled De postlan blues. Orchids hanging from the patio ceiling. When no one is watching I will take one and put it in my pocket as if I could own something of this place. By morning, it will be dead. I will walk by a funeral home with child size caskets and cry. The air will belong to firewood. Night will return cold to my bones. I'll be a little bit he have woman half moon on the feast of San Sebastian fireworks rise and fall like us all. Orchestras will be spark and ash. Nothing here is tame. I am high and disoriented pulled by my entrails. I'll dance miscal blues. His hand inside my thigh will be a hovering question. How can we do this and where. I don't know if I'll be enough for the way I want to swallow this country. Oh, the next poem I'm going to read was actually written in the postline the postline is in the state of more loss and I was at under the volcano international which is a wonderful writing residency and workshop you can look and look them up online and I was taking a class with a renowned Mexican poet who shall not be named. And I read this I am intriguing. And I read this poem I invited him to attend, but I gave it to him ahead of time so he wouldn't be shocked. I didn't want him to be upset at me. What you need to do when you're renowned Mexican poetry teacher points out exactly where in your poems, you sound like a tourist in Mexico. Go to the nearest taqueria and order three because the costilla and a Victoria by a tejuana we feel in cobalt and black. Make plans with your friend Donatio to eat more at a stranger's house on Friday night. Back the side of a mountain and visit an Aztec pyramid. Remember you speak Chicana fluently. Remember you shaken Dolores Huerta's hand and drunk mezcal with Sandra Cisneros read Gloria and Sardua again. Remember your grandfather was a Bracero, which means there was not enough food. Remember your pregnant mother wrote a bus for two days to get to the Tijuana border. Remember your father was deported at least once. You did not speak English when you started kindergarten. Remember you know how to clean the spines from no palace, how to palm corn into tortillas and tamales. Remember your unborn brother buried under the milpa. Remember your great grandfather, your grandmother. Say their names. Nieves or Nellas Romanita or Nellas say your name. Norma, Liana, but this who you come from Maria de los Angeles Ramirez and Juvenal Valdez and where. Thank you. Thank you. Let me read a couple more. Um, you know, one of the things the other things that I'm really drawn to you. I was writing in this book in a way a lot of a lot of death in Mexico that the narco violence that has happened in the last few years and and there's this. This really for a long time was really drawn to that. And so this next poem, how to search for your child. Colinas de Santa Fe, Veracruz, Mexico. Drive a six foot metal rod into ground with each click click clack of hammer dig the cross shaped bar deeper into soil. Pull out the rod. And close to your nose. Inhale. Wet earth or remains. Exhum 253 bodies, none of them yours. Yellow your skin. Grow your hair. Link waist link. This is this speaks to there's a group of mothers a story many years ago, a collective solicito in Veracruz, where the authorities were not in any kind of way helping them find their disappeared children and they developed this method of excavate or looking for the remains of their lost children. When there were rumors of mass graves. Okay, so would you like me to read one more, or shall we continue the conversation with Jen would you like to do. One quick one. Okay. Let me get a very, very short one which is very new. Very, very new. It's called Nacimiento, which means birth. Find the only hands my body knows wilderness, these thighs, these lips between my teeth, the grief beast moans hopes first snout and eyes. Beast is how I birth myself, again, and again. Thank you. The work is so sensual and achingly beautiful. And I, when I reach her poetry, I read a lot of pain, and it made me wonder. You know, and I asked this of both of you, like, what, what do you think it is about pain that serves as great fodder for writing. I think I will. The way I want to answer this is poetry has been a vehicle to really filter the understanding of that pain for me, right when I it's, it's in some way. It makes sense of these things. And it can become for me, both filter and microscope and self study, right, of these things that I that I consumed by these these whether it's my personal pain or, or universal pain. I'm feeling though, in my writing trajectory. I was, I have a writing mentor who I feel like, you know, my, my writing is changing. And, and he said to me, you know, you are refashioning your wounds. So I have a kind of what I'm really looking more towards where a lot of my poems were looking more in a way like death. Right. I'm looking more towards life and how to refashion those wounds and to think about my writing in a different way. That's where I am right now. And what's to add to that. Well, even your answers are so poetic. It's amazing. I just love love love your hearing you read your work. And there are so many common denominators of like, are the, you know, themes in our work, the longing for that motherland and pain. What's inherent in pain is, is conflict and tension and drama, and that is fiction, you know, it's like that's the, the, the kind of bread and butter fiction in that way. And so I guess it helps to, yes, turn it into art and story but it's also on a practical level, very ripe for, for writing, you know, plot, I guess in essays it's a little bit different. The pain becomes more of like a hotspot in the essay that I kind of circle, and then slowly get the courage to like approach like a fire I guess. And it's in that process of essaying right like the French verb essay means to try. And that's why Montana named the essay essay. It makes sense. I love the essay form for that reason it's not like you start out with an answer. It's, it's a quest. And for that reason I think I'll always write essays because sometimes there are just these situations or questions or someone will say something in a reading and I think, Oh, oh yes. I want to explore in an essay, you know, I was doing a reading earlier this week and someone in the Q&A asked, you know, do you ever think about how your life would have turned out differently if your parents stayed in Guatemala, and you were born there and you grew up there do you think you'd be a writer do you think you'd be. I responded, but I have not stopped thinking about that question. So I'm like, Oh, okay, I have to bring that to the page, bring that to the white space, you know, and just kind of see what what comes of it. So I don't know if I answered your question, but it is so fun just talking about writing. I want to ask you both. You know, something that I, you know this common theme this push pull of, you know, mother country. I read it in, is it tepots land blues I, you know that essay that you, you wrote, wrote and read just now Jen to about your father. You know, and I am just wondering what you think about that in terms of the immigrant experience is it something we all, you know as immigrants, children of immigrants. We, you know, we all we all have it and where, you know, how does it manifest so differently in people just what, what do you think about that. Is it inherently part of the immigrant experience I guess that. I guess the other question is like what, and does it get passed down to kids. You know, I think when when you ask this question I think of course the phrase that is commonly used media, media, you're neither from here nor there. And of course we can go. The liminal space right that we inhabit. One of the last few times I was in the postline my friend don't know who I mentioned in this poem who is a real person. You said to me, do it is the key idea. You know you are from here and from there. And that's the first time anybody have ever told me that. When I think about my longing for Mexico. It has, it has to do with. Something that feels, you know, so unattainable like in the way I want to experience and now it form both my Mexican that you'll get a say is as Mexican as I want to be and and inhabit that that that space. I'm never really going to quite understand it. And yet, when I think about what draws me to it. It's those experiences when, when I was a little girl and my we traveled to Mexico, almost every summer. And when I was like an elementary school and, and I remember the first time ever went horseback riding and my grandfather, I'm the oldest granddaughter, he put me on a horse and he just took me through down by the Rio and just, it was so different than the experience I had here in the States and they're like there is something else out there that is also mine. And I knew here. And I think that that's always what I'm, I feel like there is also that something there that is mine. And that I want to reach for, and I am continuously drawn to that. There's not a wholeness there, you know, to be only American. And as a, you know, light skinned Latina, I can pass as, you know, gringa, but that is not the wholeness or my identity so so to me the longing is a striving for wholeness. That's how I guess, speak to it. Yeah, yeah longing for wholeness absolutely. I always think about it as like, you know when you're when you're little and, or when I was little, I would have a sort of bedtime, you know, but I would go to sleep and then I would sometimes like sneak out of my room and creep down the hall and I'm like, I could hear my parents talking, laughing, eating panulse with their coffee every night, watching TV, maybe the phone was ringing like it was like life was still happening. And I felt like I had FOMO, like I was missing out. And I remember I would always tiptoe and I would just stand in the doorway I think I was like becoming a writer even at that age because I was like the peripheral narrator just like in the doorway looking at them and they could just be chatting, dipping the panulse, you know, and I felt this, like, almost like a jealousy like I want to be in there and I feel like that's what their whole lives before I was born, and their whole experiences in Guatemala. I felt like I want to go in there I want to be in there I want to know all about it. I want to to be the peripheral narrator for that experience or their, their, their upbringing in ways that are impossible to reach that I can't I mean I can't time travel all that. But through stories, I feel like those are those are some pathways that I'm able to go go into those spaces that I'm not allowed. And that's what so much of it is for me I just I maybe deep down feel like I haven't been allowed to be Guatemalan, or to be someone who can claim being Guatemalan, you know I wasn't born there. I have lived there now at this point I can say that I just like I write in the essays, you know, I always felt like I wanted to be more Guatemalan, more Latina, I just wanted more and the image that comes to mind is just kind of like their nostalgia. I was kind of wanting some of that like a bite of that. But not all immigrants of course have those sweet memories, you know, some of them are like shutting that gate and we are not opening it is iron tight. That sometimes is important to remember you know it's it's not all like we're leaving behind the beautiful countryside and coming here it's a lot of especially Guatemalan immigrants like flee violence and civil war and so much more so. I want to add just a little bit more to that this reminded me of my my oldest son, who is 21 now, when he was in high school he asked me, Mommy, do you think when people see me do they know I'm Mexican or do they think I'm white, and I looked at him and I'm like, oh baby, you do not look white. You clearly are saying in the way you carry yourself the way you dress that you are Mexican. And this to me like, how is it that my son is also picking this up and part of it is, is it's American society. It has some clear racial and ethnic divisions that no matter how I look, no matter that I was born in this country, how I speak that I am not ever going to be considered fully white American, even though I may look it. I am not, and I'm not going to be embraced by American society in that way and so I grew up as an other, I grew up in the margins, even though I may look a certain way. Where I grew up, where I live, where I work. No, there are clear divisions in this country as to who fits where, and no matter how much we would want to I actually never have felt like, Oh, I want to be white American and I want to fit in like that. It just has not been attractive to me, right. And so I think that that's part of also that identity, you know, knowing that you are also and you are more and you are whole in this other way. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, riffing off that I'll say to that like with students I don't know if you feel this way nor am I like with students in the point a program but now there's this generation, and there probably was before too but I'm seeing it more now, where young people who look Latino are seeing that right, and are therefore judged in that way or treated in the world as such. But they inside they don't they might not speak Spanish, or they might not know much about the country of origin that their parents or grandparents or great grandparents are from. It's this kind of conundrum, you know, and they say like, I'm, I want to know more about my family's history and culture and language but I'm embarrassed to ask where I'm ashamed, like people come up to me and talk to me in Spanish because I look like they speak Spanish and they'll talk for five minutes and then I just say like, I don't speak Spanish, and then they're like, and walk away you know and so they're like, how do I. It's a unique intersection of being right because you're being addressed and judged and stereotyped and treated for being Latin X Latino Latina and then. At the same time you you actually aren't even embracing or holding a lot of that culture and identity. So, it's interesting I'm curious to see what's going to happen but I think that's why we need more texts more, more, more, more stories to pass on. And in some cases to straight up like teach like this is, this is what it is like. Yeah, I think that it will be interesting, but I don't know like in point that are all the students. You can't of course, comment on all of them, you know, but in your experience working with my students like do you do you find that there's that longing to understand more about one's culture. Yes, absolutely and and I want to I want to shout out Michelle Gonzalez who's in the room and in the chat because she is one of our point the instructors you're at Las Positas Michelle I believe. Yes. And so, the point the project is a transfer preparation program there's also a high school component. It's at over 60 colleges in California, over 50 high schools in the state it's been around for over 40 years. And so now expanding to Texas and Washington states go sponsored by the University of California and the California Community Colleges. I've been teaching with the students. Oh gosh, you know for the last 15 to 18 years of my career on and off. And so yes as Michelle is saying yes, went that they're the longing is real. I've seen a shift in it. In my students, you know, there's a lot of Mexican students but now there's more Central American students, a lot more students who have come from Central America as unaccompanied minors and have made their way, we're now making their way into my classrooms and so we can't as Michelle says in the chat we can't be scrutinized to this monolithic lens as Latinx peoples. And so that's the experience I'm having in Fuente as a point the educator. But for those that are like me, children of immigrants, or maybe those who don't speak the language there, there's such a longing and desire because again we live in a country that does not accept you as a whole person unless you are ex a certain type of person right. And so we have to seek our own survival and our wholeness in any many ways to our multiple identities this being just one one slice of that pie. I notice that there are lots of questions in the chat and we probably should transition to Q&A. But before we do that, I'd like to quickly say something about the sponsors for this program. And we've talked about point they Jen I'd love for you to talk a little bit about Latinx and publishing. And then I'll talk about miss and cinnamon girl. And then we'll go to questions. Okay, definitely. So Latinx and publishing is a phenomenal organization. It's a few years old. It started with a group of Latinx professionals and publishing just kind of hanging out after work networking. And it's grown into this 501c3 it's a wonderful organization that has mentorship programs, you know, conversations on Twitter social media, Instagram lives. And I think their main goal is to pull the curtain back on what it, what it takes and what it's like to be a professional in the publishing landscape right now for for Latinx people. The numbers of Latinx editors and agents are very low abysmal. So this program really helps to nurture and mentor this community so that you can not just survive in New York publishing right but thrive and really help pull your Latinx voices into the landscape so they're they're a great organization definitely check them out Latinx and publishing. And a couple of additional sponsors cinnamon girl is a leadership development organization that empowers girls to be visionaries in our for our world today. And cinnamon girls, cinnamon girl provides guidance supports girls of color to prepare for college and graduate school. And finally, Mesa refuge, which is a writing residency and beautiful point race station. It provides solitude and space for writers want to write about social equity and the environment and social justice, and it offers its own programs as well. So check them out. I just want to shout out to my condo and Vona, because these are writing programs, if there are young people or old people, whoever is out there who wants to write people of color, check out these programs. So I'm going to give you guys voices of our nation and that's where I met Jen, my condo is a writing program out of Texas where I met Norma and started by Sandra cisneros. It's a, these are wonderful programs to engage in, engage in writing, learn on and thrive. So I'm going to give it to Laura to, you know, to deal with some of the questions in the chat. Pam is going to read out some of the, all right, thank you. Great. We have a, we have a question from Elaine Ellison, as bilingual authors, how do you decide when to use Spanish in your English essays and poetry and English in your Spanish works. How do you provide enough context for readers to understand, or just assume they will, or should understand what goes into those word choices. I mean, I'll share that I, for me it's, there's a couple factors. One is the sound in the map of the world that I read tonight. It's clear that I am speaking in Spanish with Araceles in the library. And so but the text is all in English the dialogue, but there's a moment where she says, you're so free. And I thought about writing that in English, I suffered, but I couldn't, I couldn't commit to that in my mind and in my heart, it's Josephine, and the sound of that is what, what factored into that as well. Other times it's, for instance, if a daughter, if a mother is saying to her daughter, Miha, right, which is very common. I hear it as Miha, I can't be any other way and she says literally my daughter passed me the ketchup or whatever it is. It's like so literal that it just is like, it hurts my ears so I make choices off that and lastly I'll say that there will be times where I think readers who don't understand Spanish might not get it entirely. But I hope that from context clues they'll be able to from, but also, there are many times where I've read words in French or German or, you know, peppered into the English landscape that I, I don't get. But I feel like I still absorb the meaning of the passage if that makes sense. In poetry. Well, I'll speak for myself when I use. I, I, I very rarely will translate I speak English and Spanish and so when I write a poem. I write it as I hear it in my head. As it comes to me as a bilingual speaker and so, you know as a poem I wrote, I was thinking about the other day. Where, you know, and then he asked me about yes it is as if asking me, can it is right. That's how I hear it. That's how I write it, I do not italicize my Spanish, I think it's pretty clear if you're reading an English text that this next phrase is in Spanish I can italicize it for you. I'm more of a, as a poet, I'm thinking about words and the use of language and they how they sound. And as Michelle, again, my point they calling and actually Michelle's also writer she's a memoirist. She's the author of spit boy rule like you want to learn about her life as a female Chicana in a punk band. And she says, as she says, so, so right. I, if you, if you poetry requires a kind of engagement with it that I feel is different from prose. I feel like when I read a poem, even if it's half a page. It's, it's asking me to spend time with it. And some poems. So, I mean, it's going to require me to spend time with it. And if there are words in there in another language, we're going to Google them. It's going to be worth it for me to look it up and I do this often you know when I read Vietnamese poets or African poets or that these other languages are in there and they are just as valid and I don't feel any kind of need to translate because my audience is very wide. And, and I hope that if my poem engages you, you will spend a little bit of time with it and have curiosity for any words that that might not necessarily be familiar to you. But you know, but there's enough context that you'll, you'll get a feeling for it but that's my approach to using Spanish in my writing and using both languages. We have time for one more question. Well, could you talk perhaps so I know you did mention mention it earlier, but perhaps you could talk a little more about how your children or younger generation are dealing with these issues. You meant I think one of you mentioned son who felt like it sounded so he felt like he was worried that he did not look like he did not look Latino enough. Yeah, and is this something is this something that is that many do you think a lot of people in the younger generation field they feel defensive about who they are, how they identify. Do you want to guess that Jim. Yeah, sure. I mean, our older son older is eight years old and when when he was 15 months, we, we put him in an immersion Spanish immersion daycare preschool here in Boston, and we were so proud of this decision right we had researched people and all the teachers were mostly Latinas and we felt like so proud. He immersed in this language, and we were surprised because when he started all of the he was the only Latino boy there. And all the other kids were hot and red haired and white, and it was like, Oh, I didn't think about that, you know, because these were families who were really valuing Spanish bilingual children and their parents professors or doctors and use Spanish in the workplace and they thought we'll put our children in this Spanish inversion. So at that moment, I had to really think about how languages yoked to culture and identity. And I, I had never crossed my mind that my son would learn Spanish in the school and not be around Latino children. And that's when it kind of first came up for us. He and my other son do not look alike. Our eight year old has dark skin dark eyes dark hair like me, but our three year old looks like my husband, long curls, blue eyes, fair skin. And it's going to be very interesting. It already is to see how they both are treated and navigate the world. And, you know, I've been like looked at as my younger son's nanny, and but not the older one you know he's mine, and they're both mine. I was there, you know, so it just feels like we're to write about, but I don't know what you think. I mean, I don't think there's one clear answer to that. What is it, I can't speak for the younger generation. I mean, I know that in my, in my point they class, you know, students are attracted to be in the project because, you know, they want to learn about themselves. And, you know, fortunately, California has now passed, you know, ethnic studies will be a high school graduation requirement the California State universities are making ethnic studies a graduation requirement community colleges are as well. Why because our previous generation is my generation current generation, we are still not seen. We do not see ourselves we do not see a mirror in our educational system. And so, you know, we, we, we have to create media to see ourselves and, and I do believe that that social media has created this opportunity for content for for everyone of any age not those young people. Who is who is pastor what's his name was on his roller skates I love him to create contact where we can see ourselves. I remember going to the library when I was in high school, I was a senior in high school and I had never read an author. Yeah, yeah. And I went to the Richmond public library in Richmond, California, and I went to the section that this was teeny tiny, and I the only reason I picked up this book was because we shared the same last name and it was this new suit. Right. And I don't know which book to pick of these 10. I'm going to go for the one that has my similar last name. I don't know where to start. Listen, as human beings. We have this desire to know self to explore and understand self, and we need those mirrors and if the mirrors are not there. We create them and a lot of young people are doing that. Now, the dreamers movement, the undocumented students created a very interesting narrative over, you know, 15 years ago, however long it was, they claimed American this because claiming American this meant maybe we can get a dream past may and here we are 20 years later and there still is no dream on the DACA is still in danger. Okay, so our undocumented youth are still fighting to say I belong here, I belong here. And so there's a duality in saying I belong here. That does not mean I don't also belong there. Yeah. Yeah, I love that both and not either or. Yeah. Great. Well, if there are no more questions in the chat, I just want to say this has been such a rich conversation and both of your writing is just gorgeous. It's such a treat and an honor to have you all with us today at Mechanics Institute. We are celebrating this month, a national Hispanic Heritage Month. And I think this has just been a great way to explore identity heritage that informs us in our present moment and our present selves and also moves us forward into the future. And this country has got a long way to go in terms of understanding and accepting the diversity that we are that we are a country of so many different groups, heritages and identities. And that's what makes us a great country as far as I'm concerned. I also want to invite the pointe students to come to Mechanics Institute we are the libraries open we do have tours and anyone that's new to us. I see a lot of names there on the zoom so please look at the website we do have in person tours of the Mechanics Institute we have this gorgeous library in international chess club we have ongoing programs, some of which are on site and some still on zoom, but we do offer free tours. And we'd love to invite you to come and see us and see our website and see what other programs we have for writers, and also for enjoying literature. And I want to thank Jennifer DeLeon from Boston, and Norma Liliana Valdez who's in Oakland, and solid compost from San Francisco, who's been our wonderful moderator today and host, and all of you out there that have joined us so thank you again, and we'll, we'll see you next time. Thank you. Thank you everyone. Bye.