05 Dec / Author Interview: Luis Alberto Urrea [in Bookslut]
Earlier this year at that sprawling, unnavigable, kvetchfest known as AWP – the annual conference of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs – I got to introduce and moderate the very best panel of the long weekend (the title alone was the most memorable: “I Am Not a Terrorist: The Political Writer”), which included Luis Alberto Urrea. Of course, I ended up mispronouncing his first name – it’s Loo-ees, not Loo-isss – even though I knew so much better as I had just finished his addictive, disturbing three-part memoir known as the Border Trilogy, Across the Wire: Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border (1993), By the Lake of Sleeping Children: The Secret Life of the Mexican Border (1996), and Nobody’s Son: Notes from an American Life (1998), about being born and raised in Tijuana – the blonde and blue-eyed son of a Mexican father and an American mother – and the desperate work he later did as a young missionary amidst the Tijuana garbage dumps. He writes expressively, specifically about his name in Nobody’s Son … and I had to bungle it. Still, he merely graciously raised an eyebrow. Gawww.
Had I not been asked to participate on that panel, I might never have discovered Urrea, a multi-faceted poet-novelist-investigative journalist with many more books to his name. In the months since my nomenclature debacle, I’ve gladly done my penance by reading all but two of Urrea’s titles (which remain high on the must-read pile). His displays of literary versatility include his 2005 Pulitzer Prize finalist nod for his epic work The Devil’s Highway (2004), about a brutal border crossing in 2001 that went wrong, to his lighthearted novel Into the Beautiful North (2009), to his collaborative forays into the graphic novel with Mr. Mendoza’s Paintbrush (2010) and poetry set to photographs with Vatos (2000).
I confess my literary heart beats fastest for The Hummingbird’s Daughter (2005), Urrea’s magnificent tome about a distant relative: “TERESA URREA WAS A REAL PERSON,” he writes in capitals in his author’s note. Although Urrea grew up believing she was his great-aunt, he would eventually learn that Teresa’s father was the first cousin of Urrea’s great-grandfather. As epic as Teresa’s story is, so, too, is Urrea’s goliath effort that lasted some twenty years to recreate his legendary ancestor on the printed page.
Born during the last decades of the nineteenth century to a 14-year-old servant impregnated by a wealthy philandering rancher, Don Tomás Urrea, Teresa is raised by Huila, a revered midwife and potent healer. As a teenager, Teresa is finally recognized by her father as his daughter, and she is duly trained in the ways of a proper young lady. When violence strikes Teresa’s young life, she reawakens with the power to heal. Her reputation grows as the Santa de Cabora, and as the pilgrims multiply seeking her wisdom and miracles, the nervous Mexican military accuses Teresa and Tomás of inciting seditious activities against the government. By novel’s end, father and daughter escape to the new world up north to start their lives anew…
Six years later, the Santa de Cabora’s story resumes with Queen of America. If glowing starred advance reviews are any indication, copies of the sequel should be flying off the shelves right about now. Father and daughter cross the border into the U.S. fleeing the Mexican officials, but the tenacious assassins and the endless followers prove more difficult to outrun. As Teresa grows exhausted administering to the troubled and diseased, Tomás is merely weary with their peripatetic existence. He finally insists on putting down stakes and establishes his northern homestead far away from the detractors and the damaged. Teresa is not so easily contented even after the family is reunited el norte… and a doomed, violent love affair sets in motion her new life as a traveling saint across all of waiting America. Let the mythic journey commence.
How did you “meet” your Great-Aunt Teresa? Did you always know this historical, mystical figure was your relative?
I first heard about her in family stories in Tijuana when I was a little guy. But you have to understand that my family was prone to bullshit. They were fabulous, to put it politely, but they were also given to making up unbelievable whoppers at any second. Within that matrix, I heard this story of an aunt who could fly, talk to spirits, raise the dead – part of me believed because I was a gullible little kid, but some part of me knew better. But she kept resurfacing. During my boyhood going back and forth over the border, whenever I came back to Tijuana, stories about my great-aunt would come back, but I just blew them off.
Then I began working in the Chicano Studies department at [University of California] San Diego, and found out she was real person! It was 1978, and I found her in a chapter of Carey McWilliams’s book, North from Mexico: The Spanish Speaking People of the United States. My relatives hadn’t realized anything had ever been written about her. That she had historical weight was a total shock. I didn’t do anything then, I just knew I had this information. But as soon as I started reading more things about her, really weird things began to happen to me. Suddenly people I didn’t know wanted to talk to me about her. These desert types – the kind I just assumed ate peyote, saw visions – had stories to share with me.
Then in 1985 when I was living in Boston, I discovered that Teresita’s story was actually very well documented. And that’s when I began collecting those stories as a hobby. [… click here for more]
Author interview: Feature: “An Interview with Luis Alberto Urrea,” Bookslut.com, December 2011
Readers: Adult