CHICANA SPECTATORS AND MEDIAMAKERSOsa Hidalgo de la Riva, editor, Spectator 26:1 (Spring 2006): 107-112

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OSA: When and where were you born?

LUCHA: I was born in Mexico, in a small town called Jaltipan in the State of Veracruz. I lived there until I was nine and then we moved San Luis Potosi. I just turned sixty last year.

OSA: Do you remember when you first started writing? What inspired you?

LUCHA I came to Berkeley in 1964. Five years after that, more or less, 1969, my husband and I went through a very difficult time and decided to separate and divorce. I had already learned enough English to navigate the locks and canals of my new culture, and to ensure the survival of my son and my own. I had very few friends, so going through this very traumatic experience that divorce is for most people, and having no family and few friends to confide in, I started writing. I was already twenty-three or twenty-four at the time. At the beginning it was “confessional”, but at some point in the future became something else. As I transcended my own personal experience and moved to another beginning, I also moved onto the beginning of poetry beyond the “confessional.” My first poems that I myself consider “poems,” true poems, were the Marina poems. Those were the ones that speak about La Malinche, and they’ve been anthologized quite extensively.

At some point I discovered that writing and in particular poetry was my true call in life. I wrote poetry in a manic way for ten years, every day. Writing poetry was as important to me as sleeping and eating. I knew that I was a poet. I didn’t know that I was a writer. That came much later after a poetic silence, of years, that almost drove me to insanity

Interview:Jan. 21, 2006 – Oakland, CA via cellular phone

Lucha Corpi is a poet, novelist and children’s book author; in addition to her four detective fiction novels, she has published Delia’s Song (1989), Where Fireflies Dance/Ahi, Donde Bailan Las Luciernagas (1997), and two collections of poetry. She received her BA in Comparative Literature from Berkeley and her MA in World and Comparative Literature from San Francisco State University. Corpi has received numerous awards for her writing, including the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Prize and the Multicultural Publishers Exchange Book Award of Excellence in Adult Fiction for Eulogy for a Brown Angel.

LuchaCorpi

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and physically to a stomach ulcer. Then I just began writing stories to keep myself centered, to continue doing something that I liked and that made my world work. Then I discovered also that I had a small, but good enough talent to write stories as well. And that’s it; ever since 1969-1970, I’ve been writing almost every day.

OSA: What is your next novel?

LUCHA: After Delia’s Song, then comes a mystery novel series, my Chicana detective. The first one is Eulogy for Brown Angel, followed by Cactus Blood then Black Widow’s Wardrobe. I’m now writing another Gloria Damasco mystery.

OSA: Can you describe the detective in your novel?

LUCHA: Gloria is a Chicana detective. But I am not Gloria. I mean, people immediately jump to the conclusion that I was Delia in Delia’s Song – that it is autobiographical. I don’t think that I have earned the privilege of writing my autobiography yet. One of these days I might write my memoirs. All the characters of course speak through me including the murderers. And I often find myself looking at things from their perspective as I write the novels. But there isn’t one character that I identify myself with. I write fiction. Of course people think that my detective Gloria dresses like me, speaks like me, or speaks for me. But it isn’t so.

Gloria is more like – closer in personality, in talent, in everything to my sister. She and I have had a very good relationship over the years although we don’t see each other that often unless I go to Mexico.

OSA: Is your sister older or younger than you?

LUCHA: She’s four years younger than me. And she also has, well the thing with

Gloria is that she has what she calls the “dark gift.” That is the gift of clairvoyance. My sister has very much proved to me that those kinds of gifts exist, although I myself don’t have it. I have a heightened intuition that comes from being a writer and a poet, I think. And it has nothing to do with extra sensory perception. I certainly can’t foretell the future the way Gloria or my sister can. Because I have a high intuition, sometimes people think I’m reading their minds, but I’m not a mind reader. I’ve developed since I was a child, a very keen observation of people and things around me. I take in all this information around me wherever I am and at some point my mind puts it together if it needs to.

OSA: Don’t you think that might be a form of media?

LUCHA: Yes, in a way I guess, but I think it shows problems with being a poet. I think poets internalize a lot of the stuff around them and I just think that my intuition is pretty much the intuition of a poet. There’s nothing extra-sensory about it. It’s a different kind of gift. I started my research on the character because I had no idea what kind of psychic Gloria was – she just told me that she was a psychic at the beginning. I thought, well, what does that mean? There are the mantic arts and all kinds of things like the occult. Many kinds of psychic phenomena. I went on to research different kinds of psychics. Norma Alarcon was my partner in crime then; well, she’s been my partner in crime for almost all the research that I do for all my novels. So, she and I have had some very interesting adventures.

As I was saying, the mantic arts are arts of people who can tell the future by different means. For example, the fortune telling part of it, but it’s more than that. You have the palm readers; they can read your palm and tell things about you. Astral projection

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is when your soul leaves your body and travels places. I mean, it’s a wide field. In Gloria’s case she is clairvoyant, which is different from being a palm reader or a fortuneteller. Actually, there is a professor in New Mexico who has an essay called “The Different Ways of Seeing.” She talks about the work of Ana Castillo, for example, So Far From God, and also about Gloria Damasco my Chicana detective and about her clairvoyance. The topic is not well accepted by the academy (laughs). So, it’s interesting.

OSA: These are different, truthful ways of knowing. They come from our ancient traditions and we believe in those forms and variations of things like that. And it’s more powerful that you would put that gift in a Chicana, because she is a woman?

LUCHA: Yes, yes, she was born in Jingletown in Oakland where she also went to school. And her ties to Mexico, itself, are through her grandparents. She is second generation. That is what she told me she had this dark gift of clairvoyance and I had to go with it (laughs). I tried to be faithful to my characters. I let them be who they are.

OSA: How does she come to you, Lucha?

LUCHA: It’s interesting. Because my novels have a historical background of events in the Chicano Civil Rights Movement, I have to do a lot of research before I start a novel. It can be a year between novels and I don’t hear her voice at all. When she’s ready, she starts telling me you need to do this, you need to look into that and then I make a list of all the things I have to research long before I sit down to write.

OSA: Can you talk a little bit about your research?

LUCHA: Well, what happens is this. Even if I participated in some of these things that I’m writing about, my memory is selective. You know how you remember some things and you don’t remember others. And in order to write about it, about a time or an event in the past, I have to make sure that I have all my facts, right, that I have all the information that I need. It’s amazing how much you forget or omit…your memory omits.

OSA: When you write do you ever think of an audience?

LUCHA: I think of an audience only when I am going to publish something. I also think about what’s going to cost me, personally, for people to look at that work. As long as it doesn’t leave my hand, it’s private. But once it is published, people are going to read it, hopefully, and are going to have their own opinion, criticisms, both negative and positive. When I began to publish, I struggled with myself on whether I wanted my life out there, people looking into who I am and what I am and what that means. So at the time I pretty much dealt with my fears in that respect and I decided to go ahead and accomplish whatever I felt I should or could. I sort of became fearless. First of all, I like to please myself. And then write about things that also interest me, not just in the fiction and the poetry, but in personal essays. I look at it this way because I’m always asked whether I consider myself a Chicana writer because I was born in Mexico and educated in Mexico and I write in English – my novels – and my poetry in Spanish. I was, I am and I will be a Chicana writer by choice, but also because I have two cultures that equally determine who I am that have formed me and that are going to be reflected in my work in one way or the other.

OSA: How many books have you published? Novels? Poetry?

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LUCHA: I have two full collections and a short collection of poetry. I have a children’s book and I’ve just finished another children’s story which I sent to a publisher, we’ll see what happens. I have five novels and I publish stories here and there.

OSA: You’re quite prolific! What do you feel is your most acclaimed novel?

LUCHA: Eulogy for a Brown Angel, but the last one is always the best. I am addicted to writing; I don’t have a choice.

OSA: As a Chicana spectator, in relationship to the Quinto Sol mythologies, what do you feel or sense is going on in the world right now?

LUCHA: I’m not sure what the future holds; it depends a lot on us, and what we do now. I think, in terms of disasters and all that, there have always been disasters, and there have always been all kinds of phenomena going on in nature – we call it phenomenon because we can’t quite understand it. In terms of that I think it’s also the fact that we haven’t been very kind to this planet we call our home. I think global warming has a lot to do with it. In that sense, I think people are becoming more and more aware that we have to take care of the planet or we’re not going to have a world to live in. And so I think people are becoming more conscious of that and of saving our resources, doing what we can to preserve the earth for future generations. Now in political terms, it’s a time of repression, a time of world conflict, that might well bring doomsday before we know it, if we are not careful. I think there is a lot of repression, internally, in the United States, a lot more than there was or perhaps it has surfaced more now because of the people in power. I’m not sure exactly where to go from there.

OSA: You’re a recently retired Adult

Education teacher. Diversity is an important part of change, what are some things that you have seen or experienced?

LUCHA: I can tell you about Oakland in particular because I think in some ways it’s a city of the future. It is a tough city because what I see in Oakland is that it is an ethnically integrated city. Which is different from San Francisco, where you have the Mission district where all the Latinos live, you have Chinatown where most of the Asians live – so they are kind of neighborhoods. But in Oakland you have everyone living right next to each other and that’s what I mean by ethnically integrated. Very different from San Francisco and all the cities that have a large “minority population.” In Oakland you have about eighty major languages spoken everyday and of course all the cultures that come with languages – everyone trying to live together in an integrated neighborhood – it’s quite a unique problem. We’re educating each other about each other’s cultures. If you’re interested in how, it’s a lab where the American Dream is being tested every day. It remains to be seen whether we’re going to make it as a diverse, multi-cultural society, which we’re becoming very quickly. We’re not already there. If you want to see what hasn’t worked or what has worked, you come to Oakland. OSA: What do you see in the future for yourself, something that you would like to do in this life?

LUCHA: I don’t know if I would like to do anything different from what I’ve done. We need change, or we question what we’ve done with our lives as relevant or significant – every so often I would go through that, the housekeeping of the soul. And before I used to think that I should go out there and change the world in a more direct way, maybe go save the children somewhere or that kind of thing.

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I think that now I pretty much realize that the only way that I want to contribute or to bring about justice, even if it is poetic, is through my novels, through my writing. That is what I was born to do and I have finally accepted that pretty much, and that probably the day I die, I will die in front of a computer with a pencil in my hand. Before I used to think that I was going to die in front of the blackboard in front of my class with chalk in my hand. But now I am retired; now I think that probably death will find me in front of the computer or with a pencil in my hand ready to write something. That is my life and I have finally accepted it. I’m not going to go out to Africa or go gallivanting around the world trying to do this or that for humankind. This is the way that I contribute to the world and it’s the way I like to do it

OSA: Your future is your present, in a way?

LUCHA: Yes, my future is my past and my present. I’ve been doing this for thirty-five years. So, if in some ways my work is able to bring about change and have others look at injustice and justice and all of those issues it’ll be through the writing, through the mystery novels. They are very good vehicles to deal with these issues. That’s what I do and I love doing it.

OSA: You’ve been invited many times to share your work. Where have you traveled?LUCHA: In the United States, I’ve been

to many, many cities…either to promote a book or being invited by many different universities and colleges. I presented my work in Germany. I am going to Naples, I am going to Spain this May to the International Conference of Chicano Literature and precisely the theme of the conference is Chicana literature in the new millennium, which deals with the future of this literature and that is why I’m participating. I’m writing a paper, researching and writing a paper on the future of the Chicana mystery because there aren’t many Chicanas writing mysteries. I mean as soon as the door is open to that genre to go into, a lot of Chicanos have walked through that door and they are now publishing with major publishers. But not the Chicana writers who are basically Alicia Gaspar de Alba with her new novel about the Juarez murders and myself. I think we are the only Chicanas, writing mystery, and I’ve been wondering for a while why that is. And I think the thing is about being a spectator or being a participant. I think a lot of Chicanas have a lot of trouble with being public. The genre is also considered not literary. I think there are other reasons Chicanas in particular prefer to be readers than writers. And so I am exploring all of that for my paper to present at the conference in addition to reading from my work if they let me, (laughs).

I think I have a lot to learn yet. With every novel and every poem and every story, I learn more, I learn my craft better to be the best writer that I can be. But I do like what I do and it’s my passion, my life.

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