 Good afternoon. I'm President Garnett Stokes, and it is my pleasure to welcome you to this unusual and very special University Libraries Willard Lecture. Unusual, the haas, for obvious reasons. We can't hold the lecture in the Willard Room of Zimmerman Library as we would normally do, indeed as the endowment requires us to do, except in the most unusual of circumstances. And believe me, the last seven months certainly qualify as that. But as I mentioned, this is also a very special lecture, for it's an opportunity to celebrate the life and work of a very remarkable woman and extraordinary New Mexican, a graduate of Highland High School here in Albuquerque, who attended the University of New Mexico and went on to make her mark in the New York City art scene, the political and literary movements of Cold War Latin America and the art and culture of the Southwest. I'm talking, of course, about my friend and fellow Lobo, the writer, scholar, artist, poet, and activist Margaret Randall, one of the boldest and most influential voices of her generation. Here at the University of New Mexico's Center for Southwest Research and Special Collections, we're very fortunate to house Margaret Randall's manuscript and photographic archive, the crown jewels in our collection for those studying Cold War Latin America, US and Southwestern poetry, immigration law, or photographic art and portraiture of the Southwest and Latin America. Thanks to the efforts of over a dozen campus units and outside donors who worked hard to bring it here, the collection is now yours to enjoy and explore, a resource to both educate and inspire. And now this afternoon, you'll have the opportunity to be inspired by Margaret Randall herself, on whom I was proud to bestow an honorary UNM Doctorate of Letters in 2019 as we present her in conversation with the writer, poet, and activist, Gio Cando Belli, titled Two Poets, Two Revolutionaries, Two Friends. I hope you're ready to be captivated by this discussion between these two dynamic and powerful women who have much to talk about. My thanks to the University Libraries, Feminist Research Institute, and other departments and donors for bringing us this program. And to all of you who are joining us from wherever you may be joining us for this year's lecture. And now, volume up, lean in, and enjoy the conversation. Good afternoon and thank you President Stokes for that introduction. I'm Dr. Liz Hutchison, Professor of Latin American History and Director of the Feminist Research Institute at the University of New Mexico. The 2020 Willard Lecture at University Libraries features a conversation between two remarkable women, Margaret Randall and Gio Cando Belli. Before I introduce our speakers, I'd like to thank Thomas Jane and Fran Wilkinson of the University Libraries for supporting today's events. I'm also very grateful to the many UNM units and donors who have supported the acquisition and processing of Margaret Randall's papers and her photography for the UNM Center for Southwest Research. In today's conversation, you'll hear a great deal more about the life of Margaret Randall, a US-born lesbian feminist artist, activist, and scholar who grew up in New Mexico and at age 24 moved to New York City, where she interacted with some of the great creative minds of the last century. Writers, musicians, dancers, avant-garde theater people, and most predominantly abstract expressionist painters. In 1961, Randall moved to Mexico City, where she founded and for eight years co-edited the iconic bilingual literary magazine, El Corno Emplumado. And from there she moved on to live in Cuba and Nicaragua, returning to New Mexico in 1984, when she famously contested US deportation orders against her. Randall has published over 40 collected works of her own poetry, along with works of essay, translation, and memoir, scholarly works of the Cuban Revolution. Recognized as one of the most important US poets of her generation, Margaret Randall has received many accolades, including her selection in 2006 and 2018 as the sole English language poet for the Festival de las Lenguas de América in Mexico City, a lifetime achievement award by the government of Chihuahua, Mexico, the poet of two hemispheres prize in Quito, Ecuador, Cuba's Idea Santa Maria Medal, and, in 2019, an honorary doctorate in letters by the University of New Mexico. We welcome Margaret Randall back to UNM. We're also honored to be joined today by Nicaraguan Diaconda Belli, a sandanista, a feminist, and an internationally renowned author of multiple works of fiction, poetry, children's literature, and political essay. After joining the sandanistas in the early 1970s, in 1975, Belli was forced into exile, and until 1979, victory traveled throughout the world, representing the sandanistas, particularly in Europe. Occupying a number of important cultural and political positions in the new Nicaragua after 1979, Belli quit the party in 1994 in protest of Daniel Ortega's policies and leadership. Belli's work as an important literary figure began in 1988 when she published the novel The Inhabited Woman, which has been translated into over a dozen languages and put her on the world literary map. Her 2000 memoir, The Country Beneath My Skin, shook the world of Latin American Revolution and remains an essential text for those who hope to not only understand the sandanista movement, but also the misogyny of male-dominated revolutionary movements. Among Giaconda Belli's many, many honors, we can list the prestigious Casa de las Américas Prize for Línea de Fuego, the Premio Biblioteca Breve and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prizes in 2008, and in 2018, the Oxfam Noved Pen Award for Freedom of Expression. Giaconda Belli comes to us today from her home in Managua, Nicaragua, and it is both an honor and a pleasure to welcome Giaconda Belli to speak now with Margaret Randall for the 2020 Willard Lecture at UNM. Thank you very much, Liz. Well, I am thankful to Margaret for trusting me to introduce her book and have a public conversation about it. I was all ready to come to New Mexico on April 19th. I was ready to be in a crowded auditorium, even missing the coughing of people. Yet here we are. A tiny virus has stopped the world, and we have taken refuge in the virtual world. I am in Managua. It is the rainy season, our spring. Everything is alive and green. Thanks to Elizabeth Hutchison, to the University of New Mexico for your help and tireless work to put this together and honor your doctoro honoris causa, Margaret Randall. I am humbled and happy because Margaret Randall, one of the phenomenal women in my life, has revealed in her own words the many facets of her journey to become the force of nature she is today. I finished another path at Margaret's memoir. I never left home with gratitude and tears. Authenticity in this day and age is becoming a lost art of being. It was so much of our lives when we were young. I did not mean because a friend pushed me to write, but I felt I would have never written poetry. I would feel things and think that to use them, so to speak, and not let them just fly like exotic birds excelling from my breath would rob them of their authenticity. So to read of a life led in authenticity was a nostalgic, profound, was a religious experience. Margaret Randall drank the cup of freedom she has sculpted for herself, even when at times she knew it could poison and kill her. Not many humans dare do that. How many human nights and days have been spent making decisions between a preconceived understanding of duty and what our own sense of self, our pursuit of happiness and fulfillment compels us to do. How many of us have fallen in those words, wars, fears could be covered, especially with women's bodies. Follow Your Bliss is a magnet I often see on refrigerators of people who have chosen, like Thoreau said, to live lives of quiet desperation. But it would not be fair to qualify Margaret's search as just following her bliss. It would be more appropriate to say that she went on a search for her own humanity and the humanity of others. A search for a way to quiet her heart, telling her things had to change, that life had to have more purpose and more generosity. She went on the road as a young woman, found the sixties energies, the poetry within her, but did not stop there. Her journey of discovery took her from her home in New Mexico to New York to Mexico to Cuba and the Nicaragua. For 23 years she embarked in a quest and her quest allowed her to discover her abilities to see and taste her own life and the life of others from the lens of a camera, the sound of a tape recorder, the vibrations of her poetry and her prose. She built communicating vessels between cultures. It became a chronicle of her time of revolutions. In the process she also gave birth to her children, found and lost loves. She kept searching within herself and found Barbara, found a home for her love and a port to anchor without folding her ship sails. It is indeed rare to come across a wheel such as hers. She followed a straight and committed path to find a vision of a just and fair society with freedom, equality and solidarity. She confronted one of life's more contorted dilemmas. Is it selfish to go after calling an ideals to submit one's children's, one's parents, lovers and friends to the topsy-turvy life one has chosen for oneself? Margaret dealt admirably with these contradictions. Through the guilt and heartbreak they often entail only an absolute belief that one is doing the right thing, precisely the less selfish thing one can do with one together. Towards the end of her memoir, Margaret tells us about the children she took with her in this journey. They are all adults, a man and three women. By now they have realized what an enriching life they had and the results of their mother's wanderings and commitments are four strong principled, good, solid human beings. To further introduce our conversation I will read a stanza, a veritable self-portrait of this uniquely brave woman. It is a poem called, like a flower's pollen. From her more recent collection, I starfish at the beach, the pandemic poems. She writes, I have stood with the few against the many, played my part in her cullian wars as comrades fell about me. I have battled a government trying to deport me because it didn't like what I wrote or that I was a woman who wouldn't say I am sorry. To not repent of one's life, to not feel sorry, to tell it as it is and be proud and humble at the same time is the spirit that inhabits Margaret's memoir. It is beautifully written, interspersed with what I think are some of her best poems and you most read it. And now for the best part of the evening we get two questions. Margaret, discovering destination as I move you say has been my modus operandi. Reading this memoir I had instead the instinct feeling that there was an instinctive agenda that you even with its contradictions had developed a solidarity with the other, a curiosity even that propelled you in the quest you take us along in this book. Am I right? Had you discovered something about yourself that pushed you into this quest? Yes, Joconda you are absolutely right. Before answering your question though I just like to say how moved I was when I heard you talking a moment ago about what we felt 30 years ago, 40 years ago, how not just the two of us but so many people we knew and loved the hope that we had for humanity, for social change, for making a better world. You know as time goes on and we're sort of having to contend ourselves with less and less and less and less it's a good thing to remember that time, that world. And it's also exciting and a little bit amazing to be able to sit down with you for this conversation. It's been more than 30 years since we've seen one another in person although I followed your work of course and I've read some of your books during that time and now still grappling with a pandemic that's ravished the world, that's ravishing the world and made international travel almost impossible and forced us to replace live events like the one we wanted to have with virtual ones like this one. I'm grateful that we can have this public conversation and talk about things that I know mean a lot to both of us. To answer your question I think that I knew from very early on that I needed to find something better, a better world, help make that world but I don't think that I knew that I knew that. I grew up in a middle class, upper middle class family, white family in New Mexico, in the provinces of the United States, a pretty protected upbringing but something had happened to me as an infant. I was the victim of sexual abuse on the part of my grandparents, my maternal grandparents. I write about this in the book. I had completely blocked out memory of that incident of those incidents because they were more than one but I think intuitively, subconsciously, anyone who is victimized as a small child somehow searches for justice because you know that you have experienced something that is unjust and you may not understand it, you may not even remember it. I didn't remember it for many, many years until I was 50 years old in psychotherapy but I always knew that somehow I wanted to know how other people live. I wanted to know what their problems were. I wanted to try to understand them better. I wanted to learn from them and I think that that motivated my move from New Mexico to New York and then to Mexico and to Cuba and Nicaragua and finally back to the United States. So I think that I've only come to realize that very recently in my life, when people used to ask me 10 or 20 years ago, where I got my interest in social justice, I used to say well maybe from my father who was a very just man and you know some of it may have come from him but I think the deepest part of it came from that experience that I had and couldn't understand as an infant. Wow I think you know because I was going to talk about your father a little bit because I think he was also a person who gave you a lot of you know love for the others. I mean I loved your father in the memoir. He sounds like an amazing guy. He was an amazing man, yes. Yeah and he gave you know part of your strength I think, bumps from having had that father because I had the same experience you know. My mother was like yours, a little aloof and my father was instead a very loving, he was my accomplice. Exactly, the same for me yes and I'm glad that he comes that you found that he came across like that in the book because he wanted to I wanted to be feared of both of them and to you know to draw them as accurately as I could. I think I got some very nice things from my mother as well. My mother was more complicated she was she unsure had been abused by her father who was the man who abused me so you know she had those things to contend with and my father was just an extraordinary human being. We were lucky yeah because my mother was like yours she loved the theater I mean she had I she gave me so much I mean but she didn't give me the affection that my father gave. But so I wanted to ask you this you are we are talking about these all these places you have been these times you have lived but yet your title of the memoir I mean you lived 23 years in Latin America you came you kind of came into yourself but you tell us that you never left home what do you mean by that? That's an interesting story I should say to begin with that I had an original title for the book which was workbook I wanted to give the sense that it was an unfinished even though I'm almost 84 that it was an unfinished life an unfinished memoir and so you know I thought that workbook would be a good title for it unfortunately or fortunately I don't know Duke University Press did not like that title and they wouldn't accept it and so as very often has happened to me in recent years I had to go to Barbara my wife to try to figure out because she's very good with titles so she was the one who came up with the title I never left home and I think it works because what I hope it says anyway is that although I did leave home many many times I never really left the home that you spoke about in your first question or in your introduction which was the home inside of me or you know we're always sort of searching for that home that lies within us that's center no it's what I feel about Nicaragua yeah I was fascinated by the woman you kept dreaming of that turned out to be your great great aunt Hannah Pollack made me think of a therapy called constellations where one is invite invited to take a journey into the past and connect with the ancestors because supposedly there are things that these relations are still solving through us could you tell us why it was important to find her and what was this kinship about what did you feel that's an interesting point there's actually a photograph of her in the book I didn't know her name I didn't know who she was but I frequently dream things that are useful to me in terms of my writing or even in terms of my thinking and feeling back in the early years of coming back to this country with the immigration case and all the all the bad men in terms of my life I began to have these dreams in which this woman would appear and she didn't tell me her name I wasn't even that clear on on what she looked like but I was very clear on what she was telling me I had a number of dreams one after another and she would always come she would always stand there she was clearly from Hannah Pollack's generation the way she was dressed and so forth the way her hair looked and she told me a lot of things about her life as a woman back in the in the in the late 1800s so basically what she was telling me was you're lucky not to have been born when I was born and she made me feel grateful for the kinds of changes that women were able to struggle for in my generation in my life but at the same time realize how much we have to still struggle for how how how much of the journey is yet to come and then I went to teach at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut shortly after I a couple years after I came back to the United States and I taught there for nine years and in Hartford I found relatives that I had no idea I had they were cousins of my mother aunts and uncles of my mother in my mother's family my parents had never mentioned these people to to me and I was giving a poetry reading one one evening at Trinity and I read a poem about this woman and without naming her just saying you know this is this woman who comes to me in my dreams and so forth and one of my mother's cousins was at this reading and after the reading she came up to me and she said I know who you're talking about and she looks very much like you and I have a photograph of her so a few days later she brought me this photograph and that's how I learned her name and you know what relation to me she had been and so for many many years I kept a photograph her photograph up above my desk just reminding me of the the women who came before us because we stand on their shoulders you know absolutely no one is very fascinating you know when I went I went once to this constellation workshop and I was writing about an ancestor of mine and I went and it's unbelievable because they really make you see some things you know that are it's a little bit like new agey but it's it has a point I mean you you do with a with a roll of of thread you throw it back and back and back and you realize that there is a link between us and those who came before us it's really interesting so tell us a bit about the experience of discovering that Randall came from Randall and that your parent paternal grandfather was Jewish he decided to start a new life and the same thing was true of your mother I think side no did you find this acceptable I mean this the dad did do you ever identify yourself as a Jewish person or you caught all the ties with that that's a very good question it's also very complicated and it's one of the questions that I tried to answer in most detail in the book um of my brother and sister and myself the three of us the three siblings I was actually the only uh one of my parents children who was born with the name Rhynthol and I have a copy of my birth certificate in which Rhynthol is crossed out a few years later and Randall is put in its place so I I asked my parents from a very early age I would ask them why is this you know I had seen a copy of my of my uh of my uh birth certificate and I wanted to know and I also wanted to know why my paternal grandmother was named Rhynthol but my father was named Randall so um I found out that my parent my parents had changed their name uh basically it was my mother's idea my mother was also from a Jewish family not just my father they were both from Jewish families but my mother was uh really anti-Semitic as she would not have said that of course she would not have admitted it but she was she had been taunted as a child uh because of being Jewish and she claimed that she never wanted us her children to go through that and so forth so she was the one behind the name change and in my in in terms of my parents what my mother wanted was what she got my father always sort of went along with it so I'm not sure that he would have made the name change if it hadn't been for her but um throughout years and years as I grew up um and I would periodically ask my parents to tell me why they did this why they made this change in our in our last name they would always say thing you know the typical things it's easier to spell um this that and the other thing until very shortly before my mother's death she finally admitted to me that she just didn't want anyone to know that we were Jewish so you know as in terms of your question do I feel Jewish I don't really feel Jewish because uh I didn't grow up in Judaism I'm um also completely non-religious in terms I don't really feel a part of any religious expression but I do feel Jewish um in the sense historically I mean I identify with the victims of the Holocaust I identify always with the oppressed so in that respect I do I do feel Jewish but um not religiously now you set up in this memoir to talk about time and place but before we go with you to New York I would like you to talk about the restrictions you felt as a woman but also about the liberal attitude of your parents with their bodies and sex you say your mother told you that she preferred you had sex at home better to do it in a safe place that's fantastic and she even took you to be fitted your first diaphragm when you were a teenager I did that exactly with my daughters three decades later uh so you didn't grow up with a negative idea of sex and I have wondered if that made us break through the conventions of womanhood uh having a healthier attitude about sex because I am convinced that female by biology and sexuality are the foundations of discrimination and patriarchal domination and I think having had that sense of acceptance of our bodies of our sexuality might have helped us in kind of understanding feminism and understanding our power I don't know if you agree with me it's really interesting to hear you say this it's giving me it's giving me a lot to think about that I must admit I haven't really thought about before um I think you're right that uh it was important that my parents were very liberal in that sense not just about sexuality but really about everything I can remember as a teenager my friends would come to the house and talk with my parents and with me because about many things they couldn't talk about with their own parents and so my house was sort of a nice place for us to be in that sense and yet it was complicated because my parents didn't have a good marriage sexually or in any other way and so I also received that message which was a kind of um which was a difficult message as a young woman and especially as a young woman growing up in the 50s which was such a repressive period in the United States and I think around the world so I had a lot of mixed messages in that respect I think that I really learned a lot I mean I think that I hear you say that you did this with your with your children and I can imagine you doing it and I can imagine because I know you that you did it very authentically but I don't think that my parents did it that authentically I mean it was humiliating for me when my mother took me to be fitted for a diaphragm before I had any desire to be physical with a man you know um it was also humiliating for me to think that she wanted me to be making love with somebody in their house I mean it didn't happen you know she she encouraged it but it didn't I rebelled against that I think where I got my my first image of a really strong woman sexually and intellectually and creatively was when I began to uh have mentors the first one was Elaine de Kooning uh who was a painter in New York in the in the abstract expressionist movement and we became very close when she came to New Mexico and I later followed her to New York and I think it was it was women like Elaine rather than my mother who really were models for me in that respect and I've tried to model that with my children I don't know if successful or not you'd have to ask them but yeah I think I think you've given me something to think about good because I think that's it's a very mysterious area once my mother was amazing that way but it was the same thing she was she would tell me about how to be a woman was wonderful she made me feel so good about having my period that I felt sorry for my brothers who were never going to have their period and uh you know but at the same time she gave me all these mixed messages you know a program so you got married and I did the same to become independent basically and then you traveled to Spain after that you left your husband and went to New York your friend you're just talking about her Elaine de Kooning introduced you to that world you were obviously influenced by the 60s 60s and the place and the people you met you also began writing poetry was it there where your consciousness and desire to change the world were born tell us a bit about that time and place and some of the amazing people you met I loved your story about Allen Ginsberg about asking Allen Ginsberg for you to come and meet him so what I want you to do is we already talked about you becoming you know where did your consciousness came about but I imagine living through the 60s it must have been even you know really become part of a different you know a more adult kind of consciousness so what uh tell us about a little bit about what happened in New York it was it was very good yeah it was very very important time for me um not just the people I mean the people were extraordinary and it was the first time that I lived among people who saw art as work who saw politics as work who saw social changes their work not something you did you know parents in those days and I think still today often say to somebody to a child who wants to be a poet or a painter yeah but what are you really going to do you know what you can do that in your spare time because they see those things as secondary and and primary is making a living or if you're a woman getting married and having someone take care of you and so forth so New York was extraordinary for me in the sense that I lived among all these people for whom their creativity was the main thing that they did what I saw and what I experienced was that you could do that you could make that be the main thing of course you had to have a job at something you know you had to work to to eat and pay your rent and so forth but that was secondary so it was reversed and of course the 60s I mean you mentioned the 60s and I tried to give the sense in this book what an extraordinary period that was I think it's very misunderstood these days there's very few books about the 60s that satisfy me that that really make me feel what I felt back then we had such a sense of change and you did too in Nicaragua I mean all throughout Latin America and the world it was a period when we believed we could change the world when we believed we could do things I learned in terms of of art of my poetry I started to write seriously in New York I learned discipline from these people I learned that it wasn't all about inspiration you know that you had to work at it but I also had some very fortunate experiences I got a job I I worked as a waitress and a secretary and things like that for a while but then I got my first job that really meant something to me it was at a small organization called Spanish Refugee Aid and we we aided the refugees the Republican refugees of the Spanish Civil War who were in detention camps in France or in North Africa so it was a a charitable organization but it was also political and I think they're beginning to understand what the Spanish Civil War had been was very important to me my boss was Nancy McDonald who was an extraordinary woman also a mentor to me but the board of Spanish Refugee Aid had Hannah Rent on it it had Dwight McDonald it had Margaret DeSilver it had a number of really great minds and so as a very young woman I didn't understand half of what they were talking about but I began to absorb those ideas especially from people like Hannah Rent and Mary McCarthy was also on that board so that was important and then just you know knowing some of these great artists and and theater people musicians jazz musicians Thelonious Monk and you know people like that was was extraordinary so I think those four years in New York were just fundamental for me in that respect you know it just sort of opened me to the world and I I think I'm producing the book my first poem about my first political demonstration you know it was about a cause that nobody even thinks about anymore but you know it was it that was important to be able to know that you can get out you can demonstrate for things you could raise your voice you can make yourself heard did it change your relationship to men was it a where you will be a well-behaved girl during that time well I wasn't well behaved I wasn't well behaved but like all the women of my time and that generation I went from man to man and had many many short affairs and so forth but um so it didn't really change me with relations in relation to men but I think it did leave um a knowledge in me a deep knowledge that the way men and women related to one another at that time was just wrong it was it was it was not and and it's interesting because the few relationships that I have with men still who I met back then that mean something to me were not lovers they were friends friends and then a another important milestone that happened in New York was the birth of your son Gregory you chose to be a single mother was it a very hard decision in what way did it change your understanding of what it meant for women to be a mother for women to be oh it changed it completely it changed it absolutely and it was not a hard decision for me it was hardly a decision I don't even know what the word decision means because in my life I've been I've had the impulse to do this or to do that and I just sort of follow some kind of innate deep knowledge that I can't often even articulate in words so um I had been married as you said before it was a bad marriage and marriage to get out of my parental home and that didn't work and I didn't know whether I would ever find a man who you know would make a good husband where we would make a good relationship together but I very much wanted a child and so I just decided to have uh Gregory and um it wasn't a hard decision it was almost an automatic decision and um living in that world with painters and poets and so forth you know they just loved Gregory and it was uh completely natural and wonderful sounds like uh Cortasa Rayuela you know where there there is a the manga has a child that she brings around like a package but he has a bad ending I'm glad Gregory had a good ending yeah and Cortasa and I actually used to talk about that oh really yeah yeah I love that that that chapter of Rayuela is unbelievable it's one of the most amazing chapters where the little boys with all of them know what made you decide to move to Mexico you mentioned you wanted to spend more time with Gregory and also the ease of to find child care I was very happy to hear Biden and the Democrats include into their program and their platform for affordable child care but because I think uh those we all women uh great debt you know because the values of society have not taken into account child care and we need we would have needed child care that would be state of the art well staff programs available for working women I would say that it's a major cause for women's advancement that they help our whole back because of the lack of child care that very I was nice in decision many women who work have to make that you know you either work you take care of the children because you cannot afford child care so that pulls women back from whatever career or something they might have so tell us about how Mexico changed your mothering mothering and and did this influence your decision to have more kids well that's a very interesting and also contradictory story when I when I mentioned that it was just so easy for me to have Gregory in New York and it was so natural that's absolutely true in the sense that Gregory was my situation is a single mother and Gregory is my son were accepted by all my friends and they adored him and so forth but it was very very difficult in terms of child care as you say and if child care today is a problem for working mothers imagine what it was like in in the late fifties and early sixties in New York City it just didn't exist Elaine of course so Linda Cooney was you know always had these wonderful ideas and she found this very expensive school called the Dalton school where the high school students the high school girls not the boys were had a class where they they took care of three infants and the school received these infants in daycare as a way of you know teaching their young women their young high school women had to care for children so Elaine got me into that program when Gregory was six months old when no when he was six weeks old and then it ended when he was six months old so that was that was wonderful although I had to take two subways and a bus and then walk and take him uptown and come down down to my job and go uptown in the afternoon to retrieve him but um so you know that solved it until he was six months old and then I didn't know what to do and so I found out about something called Jewish child care and I went and I um tried to convince them that my son was Jewish although he hadn't had a bris and that was a problem and I threw a tantrum in the office I for many years thought that that tantrum was what had gotten them to accept Gregory into this Jewish child care program but I later discovered and I think this was partially behind my wanting to move to Mexico leave New York City is that um although Gregory was very well cared for by a family in Jewish child care um I I discovered I sensed and then I confirmed the fact that one of the goals of Jewish child care was to take these children for Jewish parents who couldn't have children and they were of course they didn't steal the children but they began to tell the mothers you know imagine you're a single mother you're you're not wealthy you can't give your child opportunities and we can place the child with a family that would really give them opportunities wouldn't you like to have that happen and when I realized that that was the goal I was just terrified uh I mean I knew I guess that they couldn't take my son away from me but I just didn't didn't want to have anything more to do with that and so I I remembered because I had been in Mexico that in Mexico you can have a home help you can have a maid working for you I hadn't yet gotten into the whole issue of the problematic aspect of that but um and so that was one of the reasons that I went to Mexico and I also think that you know I was a little bit tired of New York by that time I realized that I was a poet that I was a writer but that I could do that any place I didn't have to be in New York to do that yeah that's a great thing about our our job you know that we can do it anywhere well now we come to the Corno and Plumado which is such an important part of Latin America history and also of your history and Sergio Mondragon this became one of the most important chapters of your life what did you want to accomplish how did it came to your head to do that there are so many letters in your memoir artists giving you know a high valuation of the magazine and and I know it is still considered I think the most prestigious and significant cultural vehicle ever that bridged you know those that that served as a bridge to from Latin America to the United States and other cultures so tell us you know how was it how did it begin I mean a little bit for to wet the appetite of the people who are going to be reading your memoir yeah I'll just say a little bit about this because actually my chapter in Mexico is the longest chapter in the book it's 70 pages long and a lot of it is dedicated to El Corno when Gregory and I arrived in Mexico I had been given the telephone number of a beat poet in the United States Philip Lomantia who lived in Mexico and he said you know when you when he was visiting in New York and he said when you come to Mexico here's my telephone number look me up and I did and that was where I met Sergio and I met a number of other poets from different countries in Latin America there were quite a few Nicaraguan poets actually there Ernesto Cardinal was part of that group and Beltran Morales wonderful Mexican Nicaraguan poet who who died tragically quite young and then Fernando Valle and he has Sanchez. Right exactly and so there were quite a few Nicaraguans there were of course quite a few Mexicans there was Raquel Hulerowski from Peru although she and I were the only women once again almost everyone were men but there were two women and we would meet at Philip's house in the evenings and read to each other and I think we soon realized that we couldn't really understand each other's work even if we understood the language even if the Latin Americans knew a good amount of English and we knew some Spanish we had never read Vallejo or Neruda or Guidobro and they had never read Whitman or Williams or Pound and so we just didn't know each other's influences and we began to realize that we really needed some kind of a vehicle a magazine or some kind of a form where we could do a lot of translation good translation and where we could make Latin American poetry accessible to North Americans and vice versa. I guess the two of us who really took that idea to heart were Sergio and and I and of course as was always true has always been true in my life my intimate personal life was very interwoven with my public life for professional life creative life and so we fell in love we got married we had I had two more children two daughters Sara and Jimena with Sergio and we then gave birth together to this extraordinary project which was El Corden Plumado in eight years that the magazine existed I think we we published more than 700 poets from 30 countries we weren't able to really fulfill our dream of making every issue bilingual that was just too hard it took too much time to raise the money and walk the streets and read the manuscripts that were coming in and and you know shepherd the magazine through the print the printing and distribution we did everything by ourselves with a little bit of help sometimes but basically it was the two of us and the magazine had an average of about 200 pages every every three months you know it was a quarterly so we did have a few issues where we were able to have them completely bilingual one of Mexican poetry one of Cuban poetry but mostly it was just um the poetry in Spanish and the poetry in English which wasn't always the same poem and then also essays and letters our letter section was just great because poets would write to us from India from Finland from Greece from West Ray and they would tell us to be a young you know it was it was as you say a wonderful wonderful experience it's a magazine that is still being referenced today I just did an event yesterday as a matter of fact with Mexico's Library of Congress in which we spoke for an hour about El Corno El Corno was you know and especially now where all those magazines at least in Latin America we have some I think in Colombia they have the best that are still paper you know but well there is still I think critica in Argentina or Uruguay uh crisis I don't remember exactly a name so you mentioned that you felt at home in Mexico and it also and you also tell us about breaking up with Sergio and meeting Robert you dedicate little time to your different relationships that that caught my attention you skip writing about the emotional repercussions of the endings and new beginnings and men come and go and seem to live like props seem to live no trace in your memoir I imagine you make that choice you know so I want I wanted you to talk a little bit about that did you make that choice or that's how they are kept in your archives a little bit I did make the choice I um I certainly hope that they don't come off as props because I don't think of them as props and in fact today I have a very good relationship with Robert with Sergio um with the men I've I've been married to or lived with um and I think we get along much better now than when we were married I think probably I I didn't want to dwell too much on the drama in the relationship or what eventually broke up the relationships because um it was important uh for me in this book to tell the truth about my relationships not just with men but with everyone uh and I think there is enough about each of these men so that it can be obvious to the reader why the relationship ended but you know breakups are um they're due to both people uh they're not just due to one and I'm sure each of my ex-husbands has I know they have their own stories so I and I'm happy that these days and especially I think my my children are happy that we get along their fathers and mothers get along their mother and fathers get along so I think um I just didn't want to I I never wanted in this book to for it to be gossipy or or vindictive in any way you know I didn't want to dwell on um unresolved problems I wanted to lay the problems out I didn't want to hide them but I also didn't want to uh to dwell on that part of my life it was interesting I was thinking that you got married you know do you think there was a little conservative little girl still within you that may you get married because you know I had many men but I didn't marry all of them oh I didn't not all of them but you married a lot of them no I didn't actually I married Sergio because it was um important for us not just to live together for me to get Mexican residency but uh I did not marry Robert uh of course I didn't marry uh uh wait yes I was romantic perhaps in with my very first husband with Sam but I don't think that any of my uh later marriages were had anything to do with conservatism on my part I think they just uh sometimes I had some kind of legal reason to do it um but it was very important though for Barbara and me to get married because marriage equality was an important political statement but you married somebody when you came to the States yes I did uh and again we could have lived together but it was helpful to my immigration case that we were married we didn't get married for that reason but it was it was helpful and that's why that decision was made now let's talk about the your escape from Mexico it's it's like a thriller that part of your memoir my god and you sought to seek refuge refuge in Cuba but tell us about your escape and then tell us why did you decide to go to Cuba after that well I'm glad you asked that because when I was thinking of what I would like to read today from my uh memoir I thought that since I knew your questions were going to be about places countries Mexico Nicaragua Cuba etc um I thought that maybe it would be interesting for me to read precisely from this chapter which is the only chapter in the book which is not about a place it's about sort of being stateless uh suspended between Mexico which I was escaping and uh and Cuba where we went to take refuge um I don't tell me about it because people are going to listen to it when you read it but I do want to situate it by saying that um I was um I was the victim of of political repression after the Mexican student movement in which I took place part in 1968 and so in 1969 I was forced underground and had to um find my way out of Mexico and I'm going to read just uh some I'm not going to read the whole chapter but I'll read some excerpts the chapter starts with a wonderful quote by the Mexican novelist Elena Ponyatowska she says there where you don't understand in the white spaces in the emptiness right I love you so uh the chapter starts like this interlude as in limbo a place no longer mine I had been evicted but not allowed to leave and I was not yet anywhere else it wasn't like having one foot in one place and one in another more like not being able to feel the ground beneath my feet no longer in possession of place in the summer of 1969 a cordon plamada was forced to cease publication and I was forced underground when my youngest daughter Ana was just three months old armed paramilitary operatives came to our home I was upstairs in bed ill with what would turn out to be severe kidney disease and I never saw their faces Robert handled the intrusion alone but in the intervening years I came to imagine that I had seen those two men one of them wielding a pistol I could describe them physically what they looked like what they wore how they sounded and moved the threat they brought into our lives they came to our home accusing me of being a foreigner who was running a sweatshop and wasn't paying social security benefits to my employees Robert naively invited the man explaining that we had no sweatshop or any exploited employees and assuring the intruders that in any case I wasn't a foreigner but I had become a Mexican citizen he would get my passport as proof as soon as he handed it over one of the men said he had to go out to his car for some paperwork he would make this right he insisted the next thing I knew Robert was running up the stairs toward our bedroom shouting they have your passport they have your passport they got away I roused myself Gregory was traveling with friends but our first impulse was to collect their two older girls from school if the repression was upon us he wanted as much of the family as possible together waiting for Gregory to come home was agony a week later he did meanwhile I reported the passport theft at our local precinct and was told to apply for another when I did so it was declined waiting characterized this time waiting followed by more waiting Robert had to leave his job he was the one who went out tried to make contacts acted as a liaison with our friends at the Cuban embassy and others and I mostly stayed behind closed doors and curtain windows who could we talk about about what was happening to us only a few close friends we thought we had to be careful as well with visitors from outside the country it was hard to know who to trust I remember a visit from Solando and Nina Serrano at first we hesitated to give them a full accounting of what was going on and then we heard ourselves pouring the story out in all its messiness we waited and waited some more I must have wondered if this was it if I would die in this unexpected trap set for me by who knows who knew which antagonistic forces because at one point I found myself writing with a sort of feverish desperation attempting to set down a record of what my life had been to that point where the unspeakable to happen I think I wanted to leave my story my version of events for those coming later without doubt our greatest problem was hiding with four young children it was hard to explain to the oldest three why they had been taken out of school so abruptly why they couldn't no longer play with beloved friends why it was even important for them to peer out the windows from our various hiding places Anna was an infant but certainly intuitive something within a couple of weeks Robert and I made the painful decision to send them all to Cuba the revolution was taking in thousands of youngsters at the time sons and daughters of leftist activists who were engaged on the front lines of a variety of third world struggles the parents of some of those children were imprisoned or dead others were still fighting Gregory was eight soda five he meant a four and Anna a newborn we believed that putting them in the revolution's care was the only way of keeping them safe too many bodies of movement children had shown up on the pedigal the city's volcanic outskirts macabre warnings to their activist parents so then I go on to say we made our arrangements I had to wean Anna for one day to the next I vividly remember watching barb Robert depart with her and the older children as they left from Mexico City Airport where the Cubans had arranged for them to board a flight to Havana in that more humane time Robert was able to accompany our kids to the plane itself even board it get them settled and kiss them goodbye in the depths of her cellular memory I know that Anna has never forgotten that moment in my last image of her she was wearing a pale pink onesie with a white collar as the car disappeared I tasted a mix of anguish and relief those two and a half months during which I attempted to buy my way out of Mexico remain surreal in memory I needed to obtain a replacement passport fake or real it turned out to be much more complicated than I could have imagined with our movement in shambles old channels that might have handled such problems no longer existed a month passed and then two a third began I was starting to feel numb as if the impasse might go on forever my longing for the children my uncertainty around when we would be reunited periodic kidney attacks and nicotine withdrawal because I had stopped smoking were the outward signs of inner anguish finally an acquaintance introduced us to someone with contacts in the Mexican mafia he assured us he knew a man who could help it seemed to me we were about to find a solution to months of frustration I left my hideout and went to a beauty parlor in a part of best Mexico City where I wasn't likely to run into anyone I knew I think my husband is seeing another woman I told the attendant as she placed the plastic cape about my shoulders I want a complete makeover when I emerged from the salon several hours later my long brown braid had been cut and my hair dyed a shiny blue black and teased into a fashionable bob my unruly eyebrows were tweezed pencil thin lip color and nail polish completed the disguise I don't think my own mother would have been able to recognize me on the street had we run into it one another that day I got some very conventional looking clothes a navy and gold striped knit dress and I went to one of those little uh those little stools where you get passport pictures taken I opened my eyes as wide as possible and then had pictures taken for what I thought would be a viable passport Robert and I then purchased uh airline tickets under false names and we flew north my department my departure from Mexico City is summed up for me in the taxi ride Robert and I took from our last hiding place to the airport from where we would fly to the city of Chihuahua where the comrade who helped with my escape would be waiting I remember looking at the window of that taxi wondering if I would ever see those from in your streets again a terrible nostalgia filled me our Cuban comrades had assured me that once outside Mexico they could help me get to the island via Czechoslovakia this was one of the only viable routes at the time and the safest given my situation in Chihuahua City we were met by Senor Garcia we've been told we would recognize him because he was missing half the little finger on his left hand but when the plane rolled to a stop at the small provincial airport we didn't have to guess he was waiting on the tar mark and then I uh write about how he was supposed to take me the next morning to this to this uh official who was going to give me a false passport but when we got there our hopes were shattered because it turned out that the the passport that he was able to provide for me was just some kind of a strange document that uh residents of Chihuahua used to cross the border if they had to work in the United States I had no other option though so um I paid the 200 and um that he asked for I took the false document and then had to figure out how I was really going to get out of Mexico City because I knew I couldn't use that document um that was so gentle yeah and Garcia figured it all out uh he decided to smuggle me out of Mexico in the back of a refrigerator meat truck so that's how I actually get out of Mexico with the sides of beef uh shivering and so forth and then uh got into the United States and from there um took a bus uh up into Canada and then flew to Paris uh stayed on the outside of the security uh line and then flew to Prague um Robert on the other hand who was legal and had legal papers was able to just fly to New York and then legally to Havana via Madrid so I'm going to end by reading um just uh this incredible scene in Prague um I I got to Prague I was met by a Cuban comrade from the embassy I was taken to a hotel um and then days passed I thought I would be going right on to Havana but in fact I ended up spending 19 days in Prague for reasons that I described in in this chapter um but I was in the hotel where um there were a few other Cubans and we gravitated towards one another um some of them were students Cuban students who had been studying abroad some of them were musicians who had been um who had been performing in Europe and one of them was a a pilot I the pilot of a Cuban plane so we began eating dinner together and um at this hotel and this is where this scene that ends the chapter took place I say uh or I write the story about the pilot is as good a prelude to any as any to my years in Cuba we'd introduced ourselves a few days before Francisco was as frustrated as I his replacement part had been promised for several weeks and waiting was getting tiresome one night at dinner he asked me what my story was I mentioned my children and the fact that they had proceeded me to Havana Francisco stared at me do you have photographs I pulled out the fraying images I kept with me over the preceding months and pushed them across the table Francisco looked at the pictures and began to laugh I can't believe this he exclaimed your youngest peed on my trousers when the stewardess brought them into the cockpit the boy wanted to look at the controls it took me a moment to realize that the man sitting across from me has seen my children more recently than I he had flown them from Mexico City to Havana immediately our interaction became excited overflowing with a complicit exchange of details and images others at the table stopped talking was stunned by our conversation I knew they were traveling alone Francisco said the four of them were being taken care of by the plane stewardess and a government official met the flight he looked at my pictures again I'll bet you missed them he said so I think I mentioned that and and you also mentioned that the book has a number of poems inserted here and there I would before getting back to your questions I'd just like to to read the poem that ends this chapter it's called with gratitude to buy a hole one day it will be my term luck of the draw even for me one day almost certainly not in Paris a chance and seven on a Thursday the door that burst open on December 6th 1936 will close it will slam shut door settle like velvet until it's like dims completely the rhythms of its tongue gone still my turn not because I have tied my wrist bones on braided anxious fingers stumbled into the abyss or laughed when I might have cried I breathe available air loved in every way I knew followed my map to a place beyond canyon walls after the door swung open between my mother's thighs and before my turn's arrival my children and their children will reach for places I cannot know while I am warmed by a love that dares speak its name black words on white pages this nest woven of numbers and sky amazing you have such beautiful poems in that book I mean I was moved so many times I love one towards the end I feel very identified that is called everyone lied I can identify with that with now that we're going to talk a little bit you know I don't know how long we can go on but I will try to shorten the questions I remember you in Cuba so well when I went I think I went for the Casa de las Américas jury because or something and I went to your house and your house you had a nice flat in el vedado and I remember Ernesto Cardinal have told me that he had met you and in in that book of his called en Cuba he mentions you know you have a passage there that you have no idea the impact that it had in my life that because it said you know we don't have many shoes or I only have a pair of shoes but I I know that everybody in Cuba has a pair of shoes and I thought that's such an amazing simple way to put you know what this search for justice is about and for equality you know but at the same time with time I began to think do we have a discourse you know that a quasi religious tendency to equate poverty with virtue because that's very part of the of the revolutionary movements you know if you have to be kind of a saint you have to leave everything behind you have to be willing to sacrifice and especially material things like are considered like you know not very good for you and I think that goes against the the way we are work our creative spirit a human being and also it tends to leave it to the state to change your circumstances no it's like you become of course you can enjoy art culture etc but you become like somebody who is super dependent on the state and who has to have this discipline of spirit to renounce to you know to understand poverty as a as a as a kind of saint who know a virtue and did you feel that in Cuba you know this is really a such an interesting and important question I didn't really feel that in Cuba because the Cuban revolution when I lived there in the second in its second decade which I think of as the glory years of the revolution everything was great at that point still it was never emphasized that we the people must be poor or must sacrifice what they had or not have beautiful things in fact just the opposite was emphasized but they wanted everybody to have more not some people to have less but I think the problem in Cuba and certainly in Nicaragua and in many other places comes when the revolutionary movement becomes a state and then you know so many other things have to be taken into consideration and certainly we've seen that in Cuba I remember actually the book that you mentioned that Ernesto did called in Cuba I had a chapter in that book or I mean he had a chapter but it was about me it was called to the supermarket with Margaret Randall and it was based on the fact that I was taking him to our neighborhood supermarket and showing him how we bought things uh everything was rationed at that time how we use the ration book and so forth and I remember having discussions with Ernesto we didn't agree about this I saw him as being um because of his religious belief much more um much more involved with the idea that poverty was a good thing was saintly I didn't agree with that you know and we had some discussions about that of course it was his book and it was a very successful book um I think that this is the great problem that revolutionary movements haven't solved is how you combine the economic opportunities for everybody education for everybody health care for everybody those big issues work for everyone who wants to work etc with the more spiritual side and when I use the word spiritual I'm not using it in a religious sense but I'm using it in the sense of we all have our own spiritualities our our need for beauty for art for uh creativity for uh for asking questions I mean and the discourse as you say can become very initiated I can remember uh the moment in Cuba and I write about this in the book where I stopped believing everything the leadership said and it was the moment that I discovered that um the genocide being committed in Cambodia was really a genocide and not an invention of western journalists which was what the revolution said at that point so to learn to to be uh furtively committed to change to revolutionary change and yet at the same time to be able to ask questions uh is I think incredibly important to the future of humanity well you know I love Gramsciu and he says that you know if you don't let the intellectuals be critical you know revolution is going to become bureaucratic and that's what has happened in many places I mean and and what did you think about because you met the creme de la creme the Cuban intellectual scene and we're welcome and embraced and then something turned and you uh became you know we're we're feeling isolated uh do you think the state uh began to feel that you are too dangerous to be left free independent is because that's the feeling I get about the the limits of freedom you know absolutely yeah I you know I I lost my job uh people some friends uh sees coming around other friends came around always um and and it wasn't easy for them but they did that um I found out more about this in recent years um I was not going to leave Cuba and move to Nicaragua until I could get an answer for why this was happening for me to me and it turned out it was really I think because uh my my home was a magnet for many Latin American revolutionaries and artists and writers some of them were Trotskyists some of them were Maoists some of them didn't follow the Cuban line um that was certainly uh looked down upon I think by the Cuban orthodoxy um and and you know uh I my I was very very feminist by that time a very outspoken feminist and that probably didn't help me either but you know um there were always people in Cuba like Eide Santa Maria like um uh Alfredo Gavara uh like close friends Victor Rodriguez poets uh and writers like um Arturo Arango and so forth uh Reina Maria Rodriguez who remained friends who remained close and um who did so you know the the revolution as you know very well in the Garaga revolutions are made by human beings there are bureaucratic human beings there are narrow minded ones and there are visionaries and um you know sometimes one side wins temporarily or permanently and sometimes it's the other well you know in Nicaragua we have had that experience because well I think that most of the visionaries of the Frente Sandinista were dead when the revolution triumphed I mean the the national director that we have was not the best people or the most intelligent people and you know the the more a abesado the more manipul the better manipulators the Ortega brothers were the ones that gave themselves the credit for having won the revolution or you know having won the struggle and they began to take positions of power you know in the gobierno in the army and but yes they were not the brightest and they and we are seeing now in Nicaragua the level of malice and intrigue that we are you know sorry it's just so very yeah when we started this interview by um talking about the hope that we had so many years ago um it just uh you know it made me remember that and and how how innocent we were I mean we thought that you know we knew that the United States was going to do everything in its power to wreck the revolution but we couldn't have imagined that our own comrades would uh be so power hungry and and and criminal as you see today with uh with Daniel and Rosario so it's it's tragic and unfortunately a lot a lot of sandinistas are still you know fighting that kind of thing but uh sandinismo has become a bad word in Nicaragua I mean the young people really to have been a sandinista has become like a like a guilt that you cannot get rid of it's very sad it means a lot to me jaconda that my memoir uh seemed right to you seemed good and and was readable and so forth and I'd like to just mention your um memoir which came out um 20 years ago uh but the country beneath my skin I think is one of the great memoirs of Latin America and you wrote it at a time um when it was much more difficult to write some of the things that you wrote than it is for me today I mean 20 years have passed and you know we can now talk about things that history has shown that we were right about but you wrote your book at a time when your voice really needed to be heard on certain subjects and you wrote with such courage and such integrity and such dignity uh about not just your life but what it was like to be a woman in a revolutionary movement led by powerful men um and it just it was it was extraordinary for me to read that book I read it first in Spanish then I read it in its English translation which I think is very good I bought I must have bought 20 or 30 copies to give to people I can remember that certain people I knew in Nicaragua were very angry about the book um and I understand why because they didn't have the kind of courage to to confront difficult subjects you know everything for some people back then for so many people was just black and white you know it was either good or bad and you were able to evoke the Sandinista movement and the Nicaraguan revolution in a way that uh told its stories of valor and and and beauty and and and significance but not shy away from telling other truths and I think that your book was one of the first that made me understand that um you can do that we can do that we don't have to be you know all for something or or not for something um those are for uh less courageous people so I just want to thank you for that publicly yeah they would not forgive me that I said I had made love under Somoza's desk that was so scandalous but you know I I think a a lot of people like like you the same experience you have had about having people calling you about your memoir a lot of people have told me that they have come to Nicaragua because of my memoir so it's so nice that you have touched somebody's heart in Nicaragua what I think it was important for you was the women no you came in contact because I think that was a very revolutionary thing that happened in Nicaragua the participation of women the strength of women for me for example that was what I felt was the more authentically a a change that came over this country that was more authentic and more profound and I you know you wrote Sandino's daughters so what did you think about do you think I absolutely agree with you I think it was one of the great gifts of Sandinista women to the world you know I had been writing books oral histories with women since I started since I got to Cuba actually and I had written several before Ernesto invited me to Nicaragua just after the victory to interview women for Sandino's daughters the book that would become Sandino's daughters those stories were they remain today so so energizing and so inspiring I mean I I think of all of my books I have 150 published books and I think of all of them it's the book that's still today I may get a letter from somebody saying that they read this book and it meant it changed their lives it it made many people go to Nicaragua it wasn't me it was it was you it was the women their stories and then as you know um after the the Sandinista the defeat of Sandinista Sandinismo in 1990 I went back and I and I did another book Sandino's daughters revisited which was very interesting because all of the women in in the second book credited the Sandinista movement for awakening them for giving them political consciousness for giving them agency but they also once the defeat was there could talk more honestly about how some of the men acted and um and it wasn't pretty the other thing I wanted to say is that I remember you so well when we worked together how tireless you were how incredibly you worked so hard but also I remember you being very sad I I think that was the when you talk about going back home because I remember once you told me you had gone to get your license and when the guy took your hand to get the fingerprints that you realized that nobody had touched you you know you had not had human touch and and you began I think to to want to live you know to want to to and then I thought well all these circles in your life at the end when one realizes is the search doesn't have to be in different places you know because the amazing thing is that the places help you go into yourself you know and cover things about yourself but in the end it's such an intimate look you know like the center of power where do you find and you found your center of power in New Mexico and you found your lesbian identity you found love it was an amazing journey Margaret it's really this book is really so important and you represent so many aspects of the life of a woman you have had so many experiences that are extraordinary and also with a I loved your you are humble in the book it is it's not a book of somebody bragging about you know their life it's you really reveal your struggle I I really congratulate you on this book it's really beautiful and I hope many people read it and the only thing we have left is but I think we have done it it's been quite long it was the fight for to regain your citizenship that you know you have the McCarren Walter sack I also had a very hard time you know I found a relationship through Michael Majo who was also my lawyer because of the McCarren Walter sack yes and he was my lawyer and what a great loss when he died um you know I agree with everything that you just said um one no matter where one goes if you're authentically looking for yourself you eventually find yourself and it probably doesn't matter whether you've left home and lived in other countries or not at the same time I feel so fortunate to have lived in Mexico and Cuba and Nicaragua to have worked there to have had my children go to school there um you know not to just know about these these places these extraordinary places from a newspaper or from a history book but to really have experienced them so I feel very grateful for that and yes I remember that time that you described when we were working together I really had I guess what we might call a nervous breakdown and you probably remember that the contra war was heating up we were all working very long days I remember the number of cups of coffee we used to we used to drink at our office like I would drink 10 or 12 cups of coffee a day you know everybody did and I was a lot older than the rest of you I mean you were my immediate boss um but I remember that you know I was in my I was in my 40s and you all were in your 20s and um so in that respect it was also probably harder for me I needed to get home I needed to come to my language too I needed to as much as Spanish is the language I speak with three of my children um it's a language I speak a lot it's a language I love but I've never been able to write poetry in Spanish so I needed to come back into contact with my native language with my landscape in New Mexico I had no idea I was going to fall in love with a woman or come out as a lesbian um I had no idea actually that I would have to fight so hard to to remain in the United States but all of that is told in the book and um I guess we should leave something for people who want to get to meet the book absolutely I'm so grateful for really this session uh Chaconda it's been wonderful absolutely wonderful and uh I just thank you for your thoughtful questions and and and for your spirit because I feel that our spirits are very much aligned yeah well thank you you thank you yeah I told you already that for me the book was very moving very I don't know I just I am very happy we have lived through these times and very often I think about you know when I get very depressed I think about the French Revolution because the French Revolution after the revolution went through the terror you know it was a hundred years before they really had a republic and so I think maybe this these processes take so long and we only live a very short time so yeah a very big kiss to you thank you Margaret thank you for the university thank you thank you Chaconda thank you so much