The Chicano Studies Interview (2008)

INTERVIEW WITH KATE BRAVERMAN

QUESTIONS ABOUT PALM LATITUDES

1.       What’s special about Los Angeles that made you use this city as a setting for your novel? 

Los Angeles is my hometown. I have written about this at length in my newest book, the Graywolf Non-fiction Prize “Frantic Transmissions to and From Los Angeles”. The descriptions of L.A. as a sleepy Mexican fishing village rocked by an Oakie beat. We were poor and marginalized in a terrifying city that was always an illusion of a city. As I have dealt with this at length and in the full grandeur of a book GW described as reminiscent of Daniel Defoe’s “Plague”, I simply can’t put it any better than at your command, easy to get “Frantic Transmissions to and From Los Angeles.”

Beyond that, I wanted to make legitimate my experience., mi tierra, at the edge of the implausible Pacific, hanging on, inches from the sea. I came when I was seven. My father had cancer, my mother worked, we looked for bottles to exchange for 2 cents for bus and lunch money. My classmates spoke Spanish and Japanese. Racism was the norm. When I told my advisor in high school that I wanted to study Spanish, not French, he was appalled. There’s been nothing written in Spanish since Cervantes. Spanish is the language of maids and bus boys. Are you planning to be a maid? (See my third novel, “Wonders of the West”

And “Frantic Transmissions” which deals precisely with this).

The scream of the bougainvillea, the scorched canna, all vegetation opening with a seductive Spanish mouth. I listened. I heard. I used L.A. as Joyce did, that my intention was that the century would open with an Irish man in exile writing about a Jew and end with a Jew writing as a Mexicana in Los Angeles.

This question is completely dealt with in FT.

2.      Do you have a general notion about how Los Angeles has been represented in Chicano fiction and films?  Has there been a clear evolution as to how the city has been represented in Chicano fiction and films? How about the way in which Chicanos have been represented in Los Angeles fiction?

There is no evolution. When I was younger, Mexicans were disparaged and demonized in silence. One didn’t think of it, of them, the dark ones, who weren’t even the right kind of Catholics (who wore Italian shoes like in NY) and were probably heathens. I was told to never tell anyone we were Jewish. My younger brother was often beaten for this, as was my husband, in another town, in another region. There was always a sense of the two cities, the city of the future they were building to lure the beautiful white ones, and the real city, where I spoke Spanish and went to Buddhist shrines. It was clearly not “American” and the whitening and Americanizing of L.A. always surprises me. See “Frantic Transmissions.”  Then, suddenly, America discovered Mexicans and the deluge of Chicano/a writing was a torrent. It buried “Palm Latitudes,” because the new books were far less literary and ambitious, easier reads, had the right Spanish name of them, got picked up by the Chicano academic machine. There are terrific reviews of PL in Philadelphia Inquirer, Chicago Trib, NY Times, etc. In L.A. Times, it was reviewed by a Chicano “filmmaker” It was his first (and last) review. He spent the review beating me up for saying Chicano men weren’t gentlemen. A Chicano filmmaker should not have reviewed that book for L.A.  It took me 4 years to get it published, people laughed at me, I went broke, lost my house and eventually had to go on the run.

There was a time of my life when I went native. I became a Chicana, with my daughter, in the barrio of Silverlake, where the artists went after Venice was “developed.”

3.      In your writing, do you try to represent white anxiety and fear about the massive arrival of Latinos to the city? Are there echoes of the xenophobia and nativism against Latinos in the metropolis?

In the grand plan (see Frantic Transmissions) we were bulldozed out for the freeways. We were all like extras. L.A. evolved into a company town from the red neck ignorant pseudo-intellectual last-ditch second chance at the very end of the trail. We were infrastructure for the Entertainment Establishment, or we were invisible.  It went without saying that Mexicans didn’t figure. With the non-city sprawl of SW cities, it was easy to consign the population to areas of their own, out of our sight, east.

In fact, the LA Times political people commissioned my first piece on this. I called it “psychological apartheid”, that was in the early 70’s. That would be an excellent Op Ed piece to unearth.

4.      How important are hybridity and mestizaje in your novel?

I lived like a Chicana in the barrio, writing and reading Spanish. I knew Carlos Almaraz, Cheech Marin, Los Lobos, etc. I had my baby in the barrio. Now that she is grown, I can speak of these things. I wasn’t asked before and didn’t offer. I had my by raza ejia. I felt completely indigenous to the real tierra where I lived, loved, birthed. I was in love with the grandeur of this other L.A. with vegetation so Mexican, the Santanas, the names of the streets themselves for warlords and saints with a taste for extreme behavior. It was this L.A. I desired. It should have been built as a great tropical capital, with terraces and plazas, not as another American city. We are of the earth and sun and sea, a colossus of the unblessed, the invisible. Really, I have dealt with this in Frantic Transmissions, please give it a read.

In part, and I began PL the day I returned to the barrio with my daughter, alone. It was my attempt to figure out how my daughter, love child of la reina de Los Angeles, might see the world. It was a time of fusion in writing in L.A. It was my Golden Age of Experimentation, when I believed in the sacred page and justice and that all would see that L.A. was the northern capital of Mexico, that borders on maps mean nothing. I could see the birth of the Military Industrial Pharmaceutical Entertainment Complex. It consolidated in L.A. I watched the monster hatch.  I was still in the Venice Poetry Workshop, a founding member, and the translations were coming north, and after Garcia Marquez., the concept of a magical American realism was exciting.

Of course, to be a poet in L.A., one knows the name of the plants the winds and they howl with a Spanish mouth. The Great Los Angeles novel would have to be about Mexicans.

5.      Do you try to deconstruct racial power and hierarchies in relation to the distribution of urban space in your works?

I destroy these assumptions by suggesting alternatives to the accepted gender/race hierarchies. My women have a collective intelligence. They know they are the enemy, as females and Mexicanas, and they move with guerilla tactics. They know the shadow of the palm falls like daggers and they are perfect in dodge, slide and hide. They have instincts for camouflage. There is more mystery and splendor, revelation in the back garden on a Chicana grandmother than in all the costume rooms of Hollywood.

6.      Do you focus more on Latino sociopolitical and economic empowerment or on disempowerment?

I would say there is an ineluctable trajectory to the movement of people. I would say we are defined not only by what we know, but more importantly, by what we refuse to know.

There is an alchemy of refusal and reinvention, of not any dialect but the words of blood and history, which can be known and translated at certain junctures.

7.      In the novel you offer an ecological perspective of the degradation of nature in the Los Angeles metropolitan area.  Is it related to social justice and environmental racism?

It is a holocaust, to use the lands in American/Globally Accepted Modern Style. Recently, riding a train through China, from the southern cities to the country, I was sickened and wept. Americans and Hawthorn’s dark forest and the Puritan heritage that has nothing to do with me as an L.A. woman.  The CEO who runs the SW is not our enemy, we do not fear the jasmine scented night when winds blow cactus in our mouths.

8.     Your work reflects the recurrent natural and social disasters that plague the city. Do they imply the message of an imminent apocalyptic obliteration?

They sure do, dude. The barrio where I lived was not only Mexican, but filled with the many fleeing the American wars in Guatemala and Nicaragua, etc. Writing friends would stay with me before going to Nicaragua, where the cool action was, and didn’t recognize that where they were, in the barrio of L.A. was far more significant and instructive than where political correctness was telling them to go. They looked, but they did not see.

9.      The basis of the three protagonists’ sisterhood seems to be their deep resentment against men. Does the novel condemn the machismo of Latino men or of men in general?

Look. I don’t get along with anyone. I am solitary by nature. I never get social points. Most of my men in all my stories, poems and novels tend to betray and disappoint.  While these men are Latino, the distance between them and my women is always vast, whatever the cast of characters their culture, religion (many of my new short stories should be published as “Christians & Jews”, as I explore this also unpopular topic) or circumstances. At the time, I was being sued by a Chicano man for child custody and palimony, and I based my feelings on my own experience. Collecting betrayals and disappointments was my hobby for most of my life.

10.  Although he praises your novel as “an impressive achievement,” the critic David Fine has stated that the novel offers a “reductive view of Mexican-American males (all her Chicanos are ignorant, unfeeling machos; the only sympathetic males are the Anglo gay couple).” What’s your take on this comment?

The easiest way to review something you don’t understand is to find the most obvious weakness and base your review around that assumption. Women have never inhabited the page with the same arsenal of weapons men have. When men lead lives of drug abuse, madness, domestic chaos and suicide, they’re called heroes, proof positive of the poet in them, etc. When women live a poet’s life, they call her insane and a whore. Nothing has changed in that regard and I’ve been on the barricades for 37 years now. America does not want to hear about women addicted to drugs and dangerous men. America does not want to hear about Mexicans. America does not want to hear about my experience. They want women like their wives. It makes me sick, physically sick, to see the conventionalization of behavior, thought and action women bring to the page. I was asked at a job interview (for a job I didn’t get) if my feelings about feminism had changed with time. I said no. When my women go out on the barricades, I don’t want them waving brooms, I want them waving Uzis. Women must be able to give death as well as birth or they are second-class citizens in the world

of literature. The killing of Barbara Branden by Gloria Hernandez is one of my favorite sections of PL.

Some one really ought to comment on that murder. A Mexican woman stabs a white women, some dozen times. What greater crime can there be? I shatter gender. I demolish the known universe. Woman to woman, white on brown. I sometimes read that section at lectures, etc. and whenever I read it out loud, as I must, the construction of the LANGUAGE is such a fillagree, I must practice it first out loud, thus are the rhythms, each syllable, like Plath, (our Lady of the S, L and T. The basic chord structure of her verse/voice/fuel.) they must be hit exactly right, like notes when playing music.  * Let’s talk about this. Anyway, I have nightmares. When I read the part about Gloria walking across the yard, “and at that moment, the horizon stopped swaying.” It was another border that didn’t exist. Gloria is a criminal of existentialist interest.

Music was the primary driving force of my literary period. Writers older, say, of a generation or so beyond me, they of Didion and Mailer’s time, film would be the influence, cuts, flash back, the techniques cinema opened up to the writer. I currently find the most interesting literary experience I have is the director’s commentary with films, to hear about the process of assembly and accommodation.

There are always several stories, of course. I just explained how to end a novel to

Diane Johnson. She thanked me.  Yes, the story you may have set out to tell and what the page will allow. It’s a dynamic, a dance. Most writers don’t even know this, that you don’t impose. Patience, the hunt. * This feeling of utter mastery, is well described in the Best American notes, 1990. I think it’s on my web. The metaphor of writer as hunter.  Stalker, killer, etc.* Let’s talk about this. My most recent course was Outlaw Techniques or something.

To someone who came to the computer at 40, most of my work still isn’t even scanned. To work as it has always been done, with grotesquely tedious and truly back breaking, yeah, I be a pack animal bitch for this thing called art. I be bark if it does ask that of me. I be less.  Thus, PL covered my entire floor, all the revisions in first one color, red, then blue, black, green, purple, and the additions taped on all sides with arrow and staples, it couldn’t be contained in by conventional methods. It was always too luminescent and insurmountable.  It was like a tapestry.

Writers now, with word programs, don’t even know that in the walking to the dictionary, in the pause, there is discovery and revelation. You open the dictionary not to find your word, but into the world of galaxies, where in the pause, in the search, one always finds a better word. These kids, programs only give you a few choices. They can’t improvise, and I’m a method writer, I’m a rifer, I’m all jazz.

I say, you keep saying big. Can’t you find a brilliant word, instead of the most obvious. They stare. Is it big? Or enormous? Insurmountable? Inevitable? Raw as a night of teeth, no moon, fox with eyes like lamps. * I think the way literature has always been written and how it has been affected by the computer has not been examined, and it is interesting.

11.   Prosopopeia and pathetic fallacy seem to dominate the plot of Palm Latitudes. Are the parallelisms between urban landscapes and the female body a symbol of the recurrent abuse suffered by both of them?

I don’t know that words mean, actually, so I was a bit put off. It was if you’d read them from a list and you a person of lists and I’m about improvising. I’d look at this in terms of the alternative alchemy I suggested in a previous question.

Marta is Mother Earth. She can, in fact, alter time and matter, space and consequence. The rumors were true.

12.  In some of the passages Los Angeles becomes an eerie hallucination, a hellish underworld: “I considered hell, how brittle and hot it must be, parched, seasonless, incessantly whipped by winds pitted with the needles of cactus and the orbs of sharpened sand.” (99). Although Francisca states that she does not hate Los Angeles, the novel seems to offer an overall negative image of Los Angeles. Do you agree?

Actually, the best answer to this is in the interview with my Marilyn Monroe in Frantic Transmissions. It’s just a few pages and answers this directly. Yee, but a yes of an infinity that must be defined.

13.  In Palm Latitudes one of the city’s flaws is its lack of (a sense of) history: “This incomplete city which seems to have no recognizable past, no ground that could be called unassailably sacred” (33).  “She is grateful for the absence of history and its physical manifestations, the granite cathedrals of the imported God, the wide tiled plazas and the assault of church bells” (33). In contrast, several passages mention precisely Los Angeles’s Spanish and Mexican pasts: “The city which was once an outpost of Spain and once a region of Mexico.  This city webbed with boulevards bearing the names of Spanish psychotics and saints” (33).  Is this a contradiction?

The contradiction is the history we were taught, which had nothing to do with the history being built over us and the history we were living. Palm Latitudes is an ANTI-AMERICAN BOOK. It’s a political book and a book of transforming language and a novel is millions of truths woven into an illusion of narrative. Narrative is a white male invention.

14.  I also found a sort of contradiction in the novel’s insistence on the arbitrariness of national borders. First, Gloria Hernandez comes to the conclusion that the location of the real border is not in Juárez, Mexicali, or Tijuana; the real border, for her, is of a linguistic nature. Yet just three pages earlier, the same character had stated that, when her mother took her to live with a cousin in Tijuana, she could sense the proximity of the United States as a very distinct entity: “When winds blew from the north, I could smell America.  It was an odor of clean tin, clean metal, clean sun and tamed rain. America smelled like time structured and welded into place” (107). Did I misinterpret this passage?

***** YES. In other words, America smells artificial, abstract, not of our earth, and is dedicated to money. That Gloria refuses to learn English is to define what she refuses. It is an act of strength, to reject the obvious.  She says the border is in her mouth, as I recall. She is saying that a woman can choose her own destiny, her own geography, in the alchemy of imagination and intuition and collective knowledge. That Flores Street is a kingdom, unique, with its own currency and climate, time boundaries, rules and order. It’s not simply linguistic. As I recall, Gloria says English hurts her mouth. I was speaking and writing in Spanish then. I would read Neruda and Paz daily, out loud. The ugliness of English compared to Spanish was obvious. That’s why I called this book an experiment in making English tropicalized and feminized. Just say out loud courtyard church steeple. Then say plaza with cathedral. One is rain. One is metal. See Time Mag interview on my web.

15.  In contrast with other novels published at the time, here Chicana characters are presented as educated and eloquent. Was this a sort of protest against stereotypical literary renderings of Latinas?

When I read from PL at a University in L.A. the whole faculty walked out. They were outraged. They said, why would anyone believe that uneducated Mexican women can think like this? Can express themselves like this? During the 4 years of struggle to get PL published (I was told to change my name--) I received rejections that said, this may be a literary tour de force, but nobody wants to read a long, complicated book about Mexicans. Then the avalanche of I’ve got a Spanish name and a book I wrote in crayon and on to the best seller list for them and all their friends.

All my women are brilliant. They all have special powers. They are creatures of grandeur, eloquent. I am interested in the tragedies that occur to all women every day.

These are the headlines that don’t make the news.