“The river is a real place, it is beautiful and amazing, and it is dangerous because of the militarized border by no fault of its own existence, and its surrounding communities have been affected by the policies of empire for years. It is an endangered river, a part of our lives and people’s lives for a very long time,” Emmy Perez reminds me. A near banal fact, yet, when you see a word so frequently it’s naturally dissolved, becoming a mere abstraction. Our Texan border exists now, for so many around the world, inside a television, inside the font of headlines, dropping off the mouths of politicians. Poets have this magic way of bringing us all back to earth. Emmy’s poetry, our conversation peels the layers of today’s border rhetoric and sits us on the banks of beauty to watch reality unfold.

Emmy Pérez is the 2020 Texas Poet Laureate. She’s the author of several books, including With the River on Our Face (University of Arizona Press) & Solstice (Swan Scythe Press). A volume of her New & Selected poems is forthcoming from TCU Press in 2025. Pérez is the recipient of a 2022 United States Artist Fellowship. In 2020, she received a Poets Laureate Fellowship with the Academy of American Poets.

JUANIA

Anzaldua talks about labels such as “Chicana,” and  “border,” artist. “Labeling affects expectations. A white poet doesn’t write ‘white’ in front of their name…is ‘border’ artist just another label that strips legitimacy from the artist, signaling that s/he is capable of only handling ethnic, folk, and regional subjects and art forms? Yet the dominant culture consumes, swallows whole, the ethnic artist, suchs out their vitality and then spits them out along with its labels.” What is your relationship to identity labels? How have they changed during your career?

 

EMMY

I grew up calling myself Mexican since that’s what my parents called themselves and their children. None of us were born in Mexico or are Mexican citizens so it was an ethnic label used instead of Mexican American. Three of my grandparents were Mexican immigrants and the fourth Texas Mexican from El Paso.

 

It wasn’t until I moved to El Paso and met other Mexican American writers from my generation that I started calling myself Chicana. The first AWP conference panel proposal that I was part of had Chicana in the title and when the panel chair asked if we were okay with it, I figured why not. I was also learning from literary elders and attending the Border Book Festival organized by Denise Chávez. I remember when Denise featured Aristeo Brito, Demetria Martínez, Luis Urrea and more. And even though I had an MFA and an abundance of student loan debt already from attending Columbia, I took writing workshops with Ben Saenz and others in El Paso and considered earning a second MFA. I decided to stop taking classes when I was hired as a full time lecturer teaching first year composition. A few years later, I published my first poetry collection.

 

My life at the time was very organic. I moved to El Paso to learn more about my family history and explore the place of my mother’s childhood stories, which are very important to me as are my father’s in the Cali borderlands. My parents’ oral storytelling made me a writer. My life (and thus my work), last name, and physical, racialized presence will always make me Mexican American, and for me Chicana helps announce that I’m politicized.

 

Just prior to these experiences, I assumed that maybe we had to experience the Chicano movement directly to use Chicana/o, and I did not want to appropriate it if that makes sense. Kind of funny to think of now, and it’s interesting that when I share my experience, some rush to say I shouldn’t have felt that way, and of course I shouldn’t have, but I did. It was decades ago. I share in case others have similar experiences. For some of us, this journey is hard-earned, flawed, and ongoing. It is not always what folks assume it to be. And even now, we continue to negotiate the critiques of the term, which is important. It is also exhausting. In another part of a recent poem, I mention (from memory) something like what you call me isn’t always what I call myself, and what if what I call myself shifts… I wrote that when I was wishing we had a new name for ourselves.

 

I see younger writers of Mexican or Latine/x descent struggle with all the labels. I understand the dilemma of imperfect labels to begin with and what may be perceived as holding certain expectations of Latinidad, which are of course problematic. That sometimes comes with some resentment of not wanting to be tokenized or feel boxed in. Rigoberto González stated in one of his keynote addresses over 10 years ago that he’s “frequently dismayed by Latino writers who subscribe to the the notion of wanting to ‘just be a writer, not a Latino writer,’ as if that designation ‘Latino writer’ wasn’t true” (this is quote from La Bloga, but it’s also printed in one of his books too I believe). The policing of Latinidad and Chicanidad may contribute to these internalized feelings as well such as whether their Spanish is enough, but there is also resistance to dealing with outdated gender expectations, negotiating expectations that come with religion, being tired of colorism and anti-Blackness, and the list goes on. Here in South Texas, the term “Hispanic” now seems widespread as the default term for Mexican American. Of course I understand why. What else can be expected when this is what the state and education systems teach. Folks still need to take specialized courses to have conversations about what the terms mean.

 

While I much prefer Chicana and some version of Mexican to Latina, at times I wish we had a new name for ourselves as I mentioned earlier.

 

And yes, I have been tokenized by literary communities beyond my own to be all the things assumed I should be. And sometimes I just want to talk about aesthetics and not Texas. But my books are so much about my moving here and being in the land where my family lived and also spaces new to me. My genuine love for what I wrote about at the time, and the questions I asked about things that troubled me and things that I neglected to ask or got wrong are what they are. A person-in-progress with no final words, not yet.

 

And on the other end of the spectrum, anecdotally, I have experienced some Tejanx folks with hesitation/suspicion towards me and my writing, especially if they have since moved away from home or have not yet fully explored what they need to write about their own experiences and witnessing from when they lived home. It’s easy to try and understand that I have made my life here for 24 years now, and I gave birth to children here as well, but still I sense there is some pain that isn’t about me that I understand and try not to internalize. “When do our lives begin?” is a question that I ask in a lyric essay. Not all of us in academia moved to certain places only for a job. Some do. I know that I didn’t when I moved to El Paso. And I had a choice to move to El Valle when the time came as I had other opportunities at the time. If I couldn’t make a decent living in El Paso, El Valle was the next best choice at the time. And I don’t regret it. I wanted to live here and in El Paso and tried to live in both places for a time with summers in one place and academic school year in another. Do I sound defensive? If so, it’s because I have internalized some people’s pain.

 

This is how I make sense of it so that I have empathy and patience for what I perceive is longing being gone from home or not yet creating what they may need to create. My work does not seek to be anything other than it is. It will not attempt to pretend to have come of age in the Texas borderlands, though I have allowed myself that personal renewal as an adult. Yes, ages 0-18 are paramount in our lives but we don’t stop living or changing afterwards.

 

I wrote and write so much about the Texas border because I love my mother and her stories. Even though I miss Santa Ana, and hope to return some day, I have now dedicated a great part of my life here. I write about where I live. I never expected to be a Texas Poet Laureate. The regional aspects of my work and that title may certainly box me in, but they don’t really constrain me intellectually. The main pressure I sense is academia’s narrow labels and valuing a semblance of international and national audiences more than so-called regional ones. It is all about measuring how “important” anyone’s work is over simply reading it and determining its quality. If I am invited to share my work, I usually do, regardless of how “prestigious” a publication or venue is to academia. And I will surely disappoint some folks in the audience or reading the publication because I will not be exactly what they want or expect me to be, if they are expecting anything at all that is. And I am ok with that. I have been an outsider my whole life. Anzaldúa was always from El Valle wherever she lived. I am not, though I doubt some would read my work if it didn’t happen to be about the border. And some won’t read it for that reason as well, even Latinx folks.

 

JUANIA

You grew up in Santa Ana, CA, for half of your life, & have lived in McAllen, TX  for two decades. Both places are close to the U.S./Mexico border. Does the Chicanx literary & art scene breathe differently in these places?

 

EMMY

I feel many connections with the literary communities in Santa Ana and McAllen/El Valle as well as El Paso, where I lived before moving to El Valle.

 

Just to start off, where I’ve lived in Tejas is closer than Santa Ana is to the border, though my border consciousness developed early on with family visits to Baja California. My parents, our guides, grew up in the Texas and California borderlands back when border crossing was more fluid.

 

I never really knew about the literary or visual art scenes in my hometown when I was growing up. When I was in graduate school in NYC, I heard about a barbershop in downtown Santa Ana that sold Chicana/o (without the x in the those days) literature, so I stopped by during one of my visits, met owner Rueben Martínez and another person who recommended books that I was not encountering in my grad classes like Always Running by Luis Rodríguez, Last of the Menu Girls by Denise Chávez, La Maravilla by Alfredo Véa, Jr. and others. Martínez also lent me Chicana Falsa by Michele Serros (he said she had stopped by with a copy–this was the first edition before it was reissued with wider distribution.) Even though these writers weren’t from Santa Ana, and I hadn’t met any of them, it was important that I carried these books curated and distributed in my home community with me.

 

Librería Martínez grew in the years after and eventually closed, then Sarah Rafael García envisioned and created LibroMobile in Santa Ana. Before Sarah, I had never presented my writing in Santa Ana. She welcomed me home, so to speak, in a literary sense.

 

As you may know, Sarah has strong ties to Texas and the Rio Grande Valley since she was born in Brownsville (with family still there) before moving to Santa Ana as a child, then later earned her MFA in Texas before returning to Santa Ana. In 2016, we put together an AWP panel about Santa Ana with Sarah, Aracelis Girmay, Ricky Rodríguez (who I went to high school with), and Adriana Alexander. Later that same year, my second collection With the River on Our Face was released and Sarah kindly invited me to present at LibroMobile. The space was downtown then and literally about a mile from where I grew up. I also led a writing workshop.

 

All of this to say, Tejas and Santa Ana are intertwined for me through Sarah and LibroMobile. Her incredible work ought to be more recognized because it is a labor of love, this labor that also created the OC [Orange County] Poet Laureate and Youth Poet Laureate positions. Gustavo Hernández is currently the poet laureate and holds office hours at LibroMobile, and it just goes to show how the space is meant for community members outside of academia. The McAllen Poets Laureate and poets of El Valle and El Paso that I know have been community-leaning poets. El Paso poets such as the late and great Nancy Lorenza Green from El Paso/Ciudad Juárez, and also Gris Muñoz, Yolanda Chávez Leyva, and Carolina Monsivais. About 20 years ago, Carolina and Jeanette Monsivais, Michelle Otero, and I co-founded the Women Writers Collective there, and separately, historian and activist David Romo got me involved in hosting poets in Segundo Barrio specifically to protest eminent domain abuse/gentrification. When I moved to the Valley in 2006, I was amazed by La Nueva Onda Poets Café venue and taqueria created by Amado Balderas and grassroots projects led by community activist, poet, and zinester Noemi Martínez. Noemi, along with Lina Suarez and Daniel García Ordaz created the Gloria Anzaldúa Legacy Project around 2007. Both Lina and Daniel have since served as McAllen Poets Laureate. In 2007/2008, Daniel co-founded with Brenda Riojas the Rio Grande Poetry Festival which continues to this day. FlowerSong Press also bloomed here in the Valley, started by David Bowles and continued by Edward Vidaurre, who is from East L.A. and has lived here in the Tejas borderlands like me for a few decades. FlowerSong publishes work from all over and also our community. Back in El Paso days, I collaborated with BorderSenses literary organization to bring poetry workshops to youth in a juvenile detention center a year before I moved to El Valle. Then in 2017, I collaborated with Arnulfo Segovia and Alejandro Sánchez on a gathering of poets recording poems at the border wall that eventually turned into Poets Against Walls collective co-organized by César L. de León, Carolina Monsivais who had since moved here from El Paso, and Celina Gomez. The Valley also has the Unfolded Poetry Project led by former McAllen Poet Laureate Victoria Lopez and others.

 

So much going on. And most of what I know and do has been in Tejas. We know we need to hustle to put on programming and make meaningful work available to community members. We don’t let a lack of funding prevent us from rolling up our sleeves and making do with what we have and in particular our service and love of community. I don’t mean to romanticize this because folks do need support so that projects continue. They need more physical spaces and financial support that you see in higher profile cities in CA and TX. Here in McAllen, most poets and writers rely primarily on the generosity of various coffee shops for event space without cost. McAllen Public library hosts some literary programming as well. That said, LibroMobile in Santa Ana is an amazing space but needs support for its continuation, more book sales, even online, to help it continue. You and Infrarrealista Review colegas are doing a lot as well in San Marcos and surrounding areas. I suspect that you do a lot with small budgets. I think all of us can imagine what could be done with more space, funding, time, and support.

 

I love seeing books by El Valle and El Paso writers on the shelves at LibroMobile. Here in McAllen and around El Valle, poets and writers host events and uplift one another.

 

So there are many connections and intersections between communities, not to mention the Cali-Tejas connections with the Macondo Writers Workshop in San Antonio that also brings many BIPOC and social justice-oriented writers together, though not everyone. Some of the greatest support of my actual writing since 2008 has been at Macondo because I carve time for my own writing during that week and have also met wonderful writers there such as Anel Flores who as you know is based in San Antonio but has Valley roots. So many of us are connected in some way because we really hope to make an impact in our communities, to help create what wasn’t always there for us growing up.

 

JUANIA

I’m curious about your poem What the SB1070 copycat bills in Texas can’t abolish, & what it says about faith, or rather the language of faith, for the future, for our safety, for a cease to violence against non-white immigrants. With the reamping of SB4, the mammoth bill full of racist & anti-immigrant tactics, e.g. allowing local police to inquire & profile people they believe to be undocumented, millions of dollars for the historically racist policing institution, the Texas Rangers/DPS to terrorize the border, how do you see this faith evolving?

 

EMMY

Yes, that was a found poem about how language and thus culture survives in a community. Beyond poetry, or any literary spaces or banned books. These bills haven’t stopped faith services from serving the community in multiple languages. At the same time, I don’t think the poem can even begin to address the terror of these bills and the historical violence that we live in the shadows of in this country as well as everywhere on Turtle Island. Historically, faith-based institutions have contributed to state-sanctioned violence. In literature, I’m thinking of Deborah Miranda’s Bad Indian.

 

JUANIA

I’m often baffled at how even parks and water share a name & yet touch two countries, hold a border within them, in your poem, Anzalduas Park, joy is everywhere, on both sides, “it’s a 104, and kids with parents and parents with kids, laughing, tossing mud” then, a shift: “Border patrol drives through the parking lot. Cops. La migra rides a fast motorboat, moving border water, shifting it the way a drunk dances pushes sloppy kisses, closer to families wading, playing. Laughter stops. Waves ripple towards both shores.” There is this sense of constant vigilance, the constant threat of State violence, yet, the poem continues “Maybe the song of an ice cream truck will arrive, or a toddler riding a homemade moped.” Joy returns, & triumphs here. Your last line reads: “The bluets look like a turquoise and black beaded necklace I would buy.” Why do you choose to stay in a place embedded with the constant reminder of danger, of hate?

 

EMMY

Great question. It is hard. And has also become home. Every time I think I should leave, I get pulled back. That doesn’t mean that I won’t move some day exactly. People live their lives here beyond the more militarized spaces. It’s quite possible to not engage if we are privileged enough. Some places in the Valley look like everywhere U.S.A. with the chain stores popping up more and more everyday. This isn’t everywhere U.S.A. of course.

 

And that’s what I’m finding that I have done before and since writing these poems.

 

I don’t go to Anzaldua’s Park very much anymore. Every single time I am harassed/questioned by a constable or someone else just for existing near the river. But every once in a while I’ll go again because it’s beautiful. I admire how on the other side of the river, in México, there seems to be joy and celebration experiencing the river. They don’t let militarization on our side of the river stop them from enjoying the river. At least that is what it seems.

900-year-old tree, RGV, 2024.

JUANIA

The Texan border seems particularly scarce in places where art can thrive. In Light in the Dark Anzaldúa places border art inside academic spaces. “El arte de la frontera is community–and academically–based. many chicanx artists have master’s degrees and doctorates and hold precarious teaching positions on the fringes of universities. They are overworked, overlooked, passed over for tenure, and denied the support they deserve. To make, exhibit, and sell their artwork, and to survive, los artistas have had to band together collectively.” Does this ring as true to you?

 

EMMY

Yes, it does ring true in many ways. In some ways my response to your first question answers part of this question regarding the importance of community, but I will expand. What I experience and what I witness may be different things though they are intertwined. I have a tenured position in academia at an HSI in the borderlands. That sounds like success because not everyone obtains a tenure track position and earns tenure. These positions are few and far between and statistics alone reveal the abysmally low numbers of BIPOC faculty which can make us feel like anomalies.

 

The question remains: why, if I’m a tenured full professor, have I felt and still feel the need to be part of literary collectives and grassroots literary organizing/initiatives?

 

Maybe because I didn’t earn an MFA to become a professor. I felt drawn to the idea of college teaching after working post-MFA in an adult basic education program on a college campus. Beyond teaching, the writing was always the driving force, and the need to make community with and connect with other BIPOC writers before social media or before I started using it was a driving force.

 

A few years later (and an essay to write someday to fill in those blanks here), I held a lecturer position teaching composition in El Paso which paid very little and kept me struggling to pay my student loans. I had chosen to live in El Paso, but after a few years decided it was time to try for a tenure track position, even if it meant moving from where I had chosen to and loved to live. Whereas some go straight from grad school to academic positions, it was a much longer journey for me. Without mentorship, I had to learn about it all as I went along. Fortunately, I obtained a position at another HSI, 12 hours away, in the Valley.

 

Otherwise, I was heading down the road of teaching first-year composition as a lecturer or adjunct for my entire career. I enjoyed that work because of the students and their writing–but with my creative writing background, I would comment on essays like I do poems, so it took me a long time to complete my work, another 80 hour work week, and for about half the pay as tenure track professors, along with student loan debt burden. My work situation improved with the tenure track job in the Valley since I started teaching creative writing and poetry workshops, but tenure track positions come with a different set of obstacles and those are whole essays to write as well.

 

I haven’t always had access to funding for the kinds of activities that would help sustain my service learning, programming, and literary interests at most institutions I’ve worked at, but somehow I managed to do a lot of service early on with high teaching loads. Many of us are used to 80 hour work weeks, unfortunately, which I don’t recommend and is not right or sustainable. This is mostly invisible labor and not valued by many institutions. At the time, I also connected with similarly-minded colleagues with the same work ethic we use in community-based work. Early on, I first collaborated with colegas in Gender and Women Studies and then I worked as part of a group of untenured at the time Chicana/Latina faculty to help revitalize the Mexican American Studies program. These activities required amounts of service beyond what most untenured faculty should engage in, and at the same time, these activities were necessary for my well being and survival in academia. It’s mostly true that teaching and publishing matter more than service for tenure, but we do not do this kind of work for tenure. I was overworked and overlooked for years, but fortunately I did receive tenure and full professor promotions.

 

I have a line in a more recent poem (paraphrased) about how academic freedom and freedom of speech don’t always apply to some of us. That is definitely a feeling I have experienced in academia. Being part of off-campus writing collectives can help us reconnect. The Women Writers Collective in El Paso was my first experience and it was powerful. It was then that I realized we have to organize our own events and not wait for others to organize them for us. Then came Poets Against Walls in the Valley.

 

Back to academia… I continue to put in long work hours many years later but now with a leadership position (which is a whole other long story). I am fortunate or a token some might say in a field where only about 3% of full professors are Chicana/Latina. We all know brilliant folks interested in tenure track positions who are full-time lecturers or adjunct lecturers.

 

JUANIA

During a recent panel at AWP you talked about the title of your book, With the River in Our Face, which you had originally titled, With the River in Your Face, & how the publishing process made you reflect on your imagined audience. Can you say more about this–who was the you you had in mind in your original title?

 

EMMY

Yes, I attended a manuscript consulting session and a prominent editor gave me direct and honest feedback. They were emphatic that the manuscript title was too “aggressive,” which to me sums up a common misconception about a lot of our work. I tend to think that it was an honest presumption, for what that’s worth, though it was related to me in what felt like an aggressive and dismissive way. The session was meant to share a candid view of how editors or one editor would read our manuscripts, including first impressions, if they landed on their desks, so I guess it was what I signed up to hear. If I could draw, I would make a comic with an editor holding my book manuscript with the early title as if holding a dead mouse or rat by its tail with disgust on their face. Another workshop participant came up to me afterwards and said they felt the editor’s comments were too harsh, that the editor gave milder comments to works with less talent in their opinion.

 

We poets cannot control anyone’s first impressions of our book titles, much less first impressions of us if we are racialized in appearance, by name, and/or other markers.

 

The first impressions shared don’t really reflect the title poem in my opinion as the poem doesn’t seek to be “in your face” as the saying goes, at least not in my mind, which is why the response was telling. The river is a real place, it is beautiful and amazing, and it is dangerous because of the militarized border by no fault of its own existence, and its surrounding communities have been affected by the policies of empire for years. It is an endangered river, a part of our lives and people’s lives for a very long time, and the narrator(s) of the poems obviously feel a great connection to it to the point of obsession in the book. Yes, we can ignore the river if we live here, especially after walls are built far away from it and cut us off from it in those spaces, but my whole point was that I was visibilizing the river for myself at least in the act of writing about it, acknowledging that it is part of my family history and life and well, I’m here, witnessing and living.

 

That said, I struggled with it for a while, but ultimately decided to change the title. I made peace with it. The “you” was meant to suggest the self and loved ones and multiple others, which is more in line I suppose with “our” instead of “your.” It certainly wasn’t meant in an aggressive way. A bit humorous perhaps. The river is in my face because I am staring at it every chance I get. I cannot ignore it nor do I want to.

 

Though the poem doesn’t presume to speak for others’ experiences, the our becomes a collective face. Our face is wet in a spiritual sense instead of the derogatory “wetback” that many of us have been called in our lifetimes. I had a poem in the collection I took out about showering every day and that river water was in the pipes. Literally on our faces and in our bodies daily.

 

So changing it to “our” wasn’t a big change because in the title poem I switch between our and your face.

 

I wrote the manuscript without worrying what the editors of the world, even Latinx editors, would think. This particular editor wasn’t a person of color, and the manuscript consulting session proved to me that I had indeed placed myself in another publishing situation. I had “success” before these poems publishing in literary magazines that also featured writing by non-BIPOC folks in abundance. My assumptions were correct. I wrote the book for myself. Am I the “you” in the previous title? I don’t know. But I do know it wasn’t meant to be “aggressive” or any kind of call-out. A bit light or humorous maybe and serious as well.

 

At the same time, even some BIPOC poets and writers, early readers of the manuscript or excerpts, reacted in interesting ways to the work to say the least. The aesthetics really seemed to touch a nerve with some people, which of course are closely linked to the subject matter of the poems. Of course, I’m mostly focusing on negative responses and not the positive ones, but the negative ones stick with us more, don’t they? .

 

I knew many wouldn’t give the book a chance. How many in the literary world are eager to read about the Rio Grande unless it’s by someone who has had to cross it to survive or unless it is extremely experimental. Those are the books that win literary awards, and I enjoy reading many of these beautiful and important books. My journey is pretty atypical I think and doesn’t easily fit into the expectations of the larger literary world, and it is what it is. It’s also real. And that’s why I wrote it the way I wrote it, which looking back seems written more slant than how I write now. I think the older I get, the more my colonial training and what I had internalized about aesthetics falls away. And I thought with that book I was being more direct than previously which I was.

 

Granted, I sought out feedback to try and make the book better. Maybe it was good advice after all, but at the time I didn’t appreciate (and now I do) how that honest feedback reflected a negative first impression/assumption by the literary world that someone with my last name and that looks like me was in some way telling off the reader. Yikes. Who wants to read that book reflects the literary landscape even more so back then than now. Now post-45 presidency, there is a lot of back-tracking in the literary world as some don’t want to be associated with their previous hesitations with our work, aversion I would say and blamed on our presumed aesthetics, which were absolutely about how they really didn’t want to hear us talking about our lives and communities (in their minds, hearing us “complaining”). I would have also loved readings of the work as explorations of its aesthetics.

 

JUANIA

In Gloria Anzaldúa’s Light in the Dark, there’s an entire chapter called Border Arte, much of which speaks to identity, its manifestation through our art & the labels we give ourselves. She calls this “borrowing” of cultural & indigenous images (e.g., la Virgen de Guadalupe, la Llorona, la Malinche, & Mexica–Aztec–deities) & condemns the ways they’ve become commodified or for “sale.”

“These cultural figures inform & inspire Chicana artists who ‘use’ them to further inform & inspire others. Appropriating these figures is part of the cultural ‘recovery’ & ‘recuperation’ that Chicana artists & writers have been doing for the past couple of decades, finally acknowledging & accepting our native origins (which we denied fifteen years ago). Only now, we’ve gone to the other extreme, ‘becoming,’ claiming, & acting as though we’re more indigenous than Native Americans themselves…though our roots are indigenous, we often do misappropriate & collude with the Anglo’s forms of misappropriation.” (p.92)

 

Have you seen a shift in these symbols within our contemporaries’ work? How do you see our reiterations of these images evolving? How can we still honor & nurture a connection to our roots in a nuanced way, avoiding giving into the pressure of “selling” them to a white audience?

 

EMMY

Yes, it’s interesting to read this because sometimes when Anzaldúa talks about Chicanas’ work, she includes herself and says “we” and seems to be critiquing some of her own work prior to the later writings collected in her posthumous collection, but couched in a collective we. I think self critique is important. I am writing essays in response to earlier essays and works I have written because my learning and thinking evolves all the time and I have revisions.

 

I think it’s important that some Chicana writers and artists still have these cultural figures in our imaginations. I taught Michelle Otero’s chapbook Malinche’s Daughter for many years after it was published before the #MeToo movement. It deals directly with sexual assault and does not feel like cultural appropriation to me or written for a white audience because I remain focused on how women inherit cultures of silence and also speak out against sexual violence. This work is now part of Otero’s longer memoir Vessels: A Memoir of Borders.

 

For one, there is an anthology forthcoming this fall called Weeping Women: La Llorona in Modern Latina and Chicana Lore edited by Kathleen Alacalá and Norma E. Cantú. I didn’t think I had work to submit for it, but then I found some. I never sit down to write about cultural figures, but they are now part of my consciousness since studying Chicana/x Literature so sometimes they appear in a line or two of a poem. If we study Chicana literature and art, chances are that Malinche and La Llorona, for example, remain in our imaginations. When my children were younger, I read Anzaldúa’s children’s book about a benevolent la llorona to them. I thought here is an opportunity to teach about La Llorona in a way that is against the dominant (colonial) narrative. I was more interested in the feminist aspects of teaching that assumptions about women should be questioned, that binary thinking should be questioned, that villainizing women is wrong.

 

I think a lot about indigeneity and Chicanx identities and my views change every year it seems. The reality is that many of us live in racialized bodies. I wrote a short, lyric essay “Carried by Seeds” that will be published in the near future I hope. By the time it’s published, I may have written another one with slightly different views. I have already moved on from it and evolved. These works are just bits of a life, stages, and not the whole in just a snapshot. I didn’t write it for a white audience, but I know what you mean because that does happen. I wrote that lyric essay in a testimonio approach. I’m genuinely trying to explore ideas that aren’t automatically that popular with Chicanx folks, in my opinion because I ask questions that even challenge some of my previous values and assumptions about Chicanx identities. And at the same time, the work isn’t written for a white audience. If the essay reaches others, that’s great. Not everyone will identify with the internal struggles I write about, and that’s okay. I don’t always either by the time it’s out there. So that’s the advice I would give. If we write for ourselves, and it’s done in an aesthetic manner of our choosing, then we are writing what we need to do most at that time in our lives. We may always be called out (even if we realize our missteps later on our own and want to revise), and well, that can create a kind of writer’s block, which for me is a form of self-censorship. Then you see others writing about similar topics, no problem. I struggle not with writing, but with letting my work go because I know my views do and will change. Sometimes I’m happy to have finished a new work at all. Other times, I wish some work weren’t going to be published. For example, sometimes I look back on and revise older pieces that didn’t make it into my book manuscripts because I knew something was off about them, but they definitely hold some promise and grip on me still. And even after more time and revisions, I know deep down that the work cannot be saved and sometimes that is because they may have originally and inadvertently been written for a white audience.

 

JUANIA

 You’ve spoken some about your fraught relationship with publishing, especially in more established literary places, like the Poetry Foundation. I struggle with this notion of writing as career. How do you manage the dance between working with historically white institutions & the reality of being able to make a living from poetry? In the same chapter from Light in the Dark Anzaldúa speaks to this relationship, “the relentless pressure to produce, being put in the position of representing an entire pueblo and carrying all the ethnic culture’s baggage…Power and the seeking of greater power may create a self-centered ego or a fake public image, one the artist thinks will make them acceptable to an audience. It may encourage self-serving hustling; while all artist have to sell themselves to get grants, get published, secure exhibition spaces and reviews, for some the hustling outdoes the art making, and we concentrate more on the career than on the writing or art making. some of us are invested in our ‘image’ or our personality, doing ego-driven work. But for most, our art is our mission, a lifetime task of teaching tolerance and respect for the earth and the people of the earth, of making bridges.” How do you manage the dance between working with historically white institutions & the reality of being able to make a living from poetry, while managing output that feels true to your mission?

 

EMMY

Yes, it is a struggle. Frankly, I believe that I am “less ambitious” for what that’s worth exactly because of the publishing expectations in academia. Thankfully, I have been fortunate to work in commuter campus schools at some of the largest HSI’s in the country, with the most terrific students, and where the feeling of community-oriented teaching is possible.

 

I often tell others that the only reason I am in academia and not doing community work is because I needed to make a better living to pay my student loans. As soon as I started my first tenure track job, I realized my writing was now a commodity and job performance expectation. I tried very hard to dispel that notion and focused on writing what I needed to write, what brought me joy and relief and understanding, and began publishing in fewer spaces that I had previously sought out, deliberately embracing instead publications like Palabra, Acentos Review, Pilgrimage Magazine, and Latinx and/or social justice themed anthologies.

 

I write a lot and seek to publish only a fraction of it simply because I write to help my life and struggle with the concept of finished products. I can’t stop editing my published work as it is. A friend says ya, move on. But I am a different person by the time something’s in print. I have learned more and want to make it better, more accurate to who I am in any given day. Especially since after the second collection was published I received a lot of invites to read my work which was completely unexpected. So I was revisiting it often and crossing things out and rephrasing things. I still do.

 

I have written testimonios over the years for presentations and conferences I never look at again. Others may scramble to publish them but I feel satisfied they served their purpose. Some might say I lack ambition. Sometimes I don’t want to deal with them living in the world too. I used to have more publishing ambition when my work was more veiled, LOL, some might say more crafted, LOL.

 

JUANIA

Anzaldúa writes, “The Chicanx border writer/artist has finally come to market. the problem now is how to resist corporate culture while asking and securing its patronage and dollars without resorting to ‘mainstreaming’ the work. Is the border artist complicit in the appropriation of their art by the dominant dealers of art?” Do you think gaining sponsorship from places misaligned with our core values, like corporations, conservative foundations, etc., & maintaining our visiones/misiones intact can coexist?

 

EMMY

Yes, it’s a difficult thing. We struggle a lot to obtain funding for the literary arts, though we manage to work hard to bring literary programming and opportunities to the community. Not that potential funders are always knocking down our doors, but I like to think I’d reject literary arts funding that doesn’t allow us to speak our minds or that funds other entities we may deem very problematic. We may have stores we may boycott for certain ethical reasons and the same applies for funding. That said, many of us can’t quit our day jobs and make ends meet so it opens a can of worms about what is truly ethical and what isn’t to each of us. Personally, I would expect academic freedom / freedom of speech to be an essential component to accepting any funding situation, though I know that we may feel more unspoken pressure not to speak our minds in certain situations. I would like to think that if invited to present at any university, for example, that I would at least have freedom of speech. And there is power in that. But I think you are speaking about funding for work yet to be created. To that I will say that we shouldn’t accept funding by any entity that would censor us, though I know censorship is more subtle than that at times.

 

JUANIA

There’s a general notion around outwardly political poetry, & other creative works, holding less literary merit than apolitical pieces. Yet, so much pressure is layered onto the shoulders of Chicanx writers to speak on behalf of the community about many struggles linked to the State. Do you feel you write politically, & if so, are you consciously making a decision to speak on these issues? Do certain topics feel frivolous to write about?

 

EMMY

I think all poems are political, what is said and what is not said. I have consciously decided to speak on specific issues in my work. Some would say they don’t directly affect me, but as a witness to border wall building, for example, I do not choose to remain silent if I live here. I can choose to of course, but I don’t want to. I know that my poems won’t change the land, but I won’t remain silent, and maybe they can help open up at least my experience of the land. Same with my participation in actions beyond literary community events. I could not remain silent in 2018 about family separation in the community and beyond. The George Floyd mural vandalized in Brownsville in 2020–I couldn’t remain silent either. I don’t feel pressure to speak about the issues, but I think some do and don’t want to. And that’s too bad they feel that way. I think no one should write what feels inauthentic to them unless of course purposely writing inauthentically or commenting on the struggles of expectations, etc.

 

I once did an interview that asked me not to mention the border wall. I wasn’t planning to as an automatic thing, but I still did the interview. Does that make me a sell-out? I don’t know. Maybe some people bought the book after the interview or came across other interviews of mine they may not have otherwise.

 

Yes, at times I feel like some topics don’t have as much energy in my work, but I would say that everyone knows what moves them and to go with that energy. If at certain times in our lives, we’re deeply in love, or for me when I became a parent, or if we’re mourning loved ones, or witnessing or experiencing injustice… or responding to wars we are witnessing or experiencing… wherever our emotional energy may be, I think that can make for great poetry. I have at times geeked out about birds and flowers but if I force myself to write about them, that will be reflected in the work. And the same might be true for any topic.

 

JUANIA

Your poem, Upon Obama’s presidential interregnum a year before the opening of Anzalduas International Bridge, not named after Gloria Anzaldúa, lineates the pastoral beauty along the border wall–erected during the Obama administration–transcribing a splintering of the landscape:

“Could I return/To a canal, a chanel/Of the river, see another/Turtle shell in the same/Spot as last year?…..See the empty Cielo/Bottles, a pañal/Candy wrappers/And know travelers/With children/Crossed…And then concrete walls/Arrived in Grangejo/Backyards, Thanksgiving/

Many of your poems remind me of transcendentalists, lush with details of nature–though even what most would deem trash is beauty in your poetry. The diapers & plastic water bottles, all signs of life, stars connecting stories, & not mere waste & suffering. How do you hold both human pain & beauty, when the former seems so present today at the border (& overseas).

 

EMMY

Yes, thank you for that close reading. I mentioned in the last question that I tend to geek out over things in the world, in this case evidence of a turtle with the shell that made me wonder if I’d always think of love or desire when I see one. They’re miracles. Or to see evidence that crossers were able to make it across the river and presumably survive is hope. Seeing empty water bottles brings relief, and seeing pañales reminds me that children crossed as well and survived. I know that at the time there were border walls being built nearby and that these barriers are intended to cause harm because they do not dissuade. To only lament the harm would be turning a blind eye to the triumphs as well. After I wrote the book, I became familiar with the photography of Veronica Gabriela Cárdenas. They are the best

 

In the context of children dying overseas currently, this might be would say that an image of a child drinking water from a puddle stole my heart the most. What will children do to survive amidst unspeakable pain and trauma? Would we drink from the puddle? We likely would if we needed to.

 

JUANIA

How do you write, teach, mother?!?!?!?!?!?

 

It’s after midnight and I’m answering these questions while others sleep. For years I did not sleep enough when the children were smaller. As soon as they went to bed, I stayed up to prepare for teaching the next day first and foremost. My writing has always come last in the day unless I had an urgent deadline. Revising work takes the most time and energy and it’s amazing! But nothing else can interrupt, truly, and it becomes all about the writing. But now I mostly write before bed as well and take part in The Grind literary community to hold myself accountable to writing every day in a month that I sign up for to write, which is usually most months of the year. Sometimes I am literally falling asleep while writing. Some drafts are horrible, but I don’t care because it’s like doing laps around the track. The exercise does help and sometimes you have a winner. What a difference it makes when I write first thing in the morning some summer mornings. That can’t happen for me during the school year as there are always a ton of urgent emails in the morning, especially the past few years I have served as a department chair. But I have always been busy since I started teaching, regardless of the year, and a real urgency to serve others. I dream of the day when revision can be the priority of my days because writing is easier to begin than revising for me. But once in revision mode, it’s hard to get me to stop, and I love it. The key to parenting for me while needing to get work done is helping the youngsters become readers. My children love to read so much and they read way more than I ever did as a child. They also have access to a lot more books than I did growing up, so that also helps. One child also writes a lot. It wasn’t my intention, but that’s what they are growing up and seeing, and well, it’s happening. I always tell my children not to be like me when they grow up when it comes to working such long hours all of the time. And I hope they will write the best books. I try to teach them everything I wish I had known. I just handed one earlier a copy of David Romo’s Borderlands and the Mexican American Story and they took it to read before bed. They shouldn’t have to wait till College to learn this. I love David’s work and look forward to hearing a report back soon about it.