Death is alive, they whispered. Death lives inside life, as bones dance within the body. Yesterday is within today. Yesterday never dies.
The tone of 'Into the Beautiful North' is really the way I write. 'Hummingbird's Daughter' was the anomaly. It was a once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon.
My dad looked like Errol Flynn, and I think my mom thought she was moving into a hacienda, but they lived on a dirt street in Tijuana, a house jammed with relatives, nobody speaking English. She didn't know a word of Spanish. She grew up well and was appalled and humiliated, terrified of anyone ethnic.
We want to ascribe a kind of tragic grimness to people, but people are funny.
When 'The Hummingbird's Daughter' came out, there was a certain backlash - 'Well, this isn't 'The Devil's Highway.'' That's just the way it goes.
It's the most absurd story. I grew up in the dirt streets of Tijuana, dying of all kinds of diseases - tuberculosis, fevers, all that - and it somehow turned into this charmed life. I don't know exactly how.
I saw 'The War Wagon' with John Wayne and Kirk Douglas, but it was dubbed into German. And it had Japanese subtitles and then this little strip with some Spanish words, and I've never forgotten that weird image. It was so magical and funky.
The stupidity of militarized fences between two worlds is a metaphor for all the things that divide us as human beings.
I used to approach writing like a football game. If I went out there and aggressively saw more, I'd know more, and I'd capture more, and I'd write better. Hut, hut, hut: First down and haiku!
Poetry is how I feed the soul, and it's how I fire the furnace of writing.
I came to believe the green fuse that drives spring and summer through the world is essentially a literary energy. That the world was more than a place. Life was more than an event. It was all one thing - and that thing was story.
During grade school, we moved to a white, working-class suburb in San Diego, and there were no Mexicans.
A lot of our family was undocumented. My mom and dad were both super conservative. My dad had a green card; my mom was an Eisenhower Republican who did not approve of all the 'illegal people.'
It's not like Mexicans have an illegal immigration organ in their body and at 14 kicks off a hormone and shows them how to come to the United States illegally. It's a question of desperation for a vast majority of them.
When I was doing missionary work when I was younger, which started this obsession of mine with the literature of witness, I was a translator for a missionary group, and I spent years in a Tijuana dump. People were really thrown by the fact that the Mexican poor, many of them pureblood indigenous people, seemed happy.
Spanish was my first language. Honestly, I learned to first speak in Spanish, not English, because my poor mother had to go to San Diego every day to work and then come back. And she would come home when I was an infant long after I was asleep.
I was deeply infected with storytelling from the get go, and I truly love it.
It's almost easy for me to write about a magnificent tropical village with orchids and dragonflies. That's intoxicating, but the United States is magical, too. We just forget this.
I am actually a 'Seven Samurai' fan.
Writing went from being a calling to being a job. Business ruined things. It became like making sausages in a sausage factory.
