…for saying that bombs are falling in El Paso and then trying to cover up your ignorance by claiming you were just referring to what’s going to happen in the future. I hope El Pasoans show you the boot at election time.
Archive for the 'U.S.-Mexico Border' Category
My essay, “The Red Coat,” appears in Rough Copy today. Here’s a teaser:
When I was eight, my family moved from Albuquerque to El Paso.
An adventure! my mother said. Why, if you want to go to Mexico, you just walk across a bridge, and there you are!
We learned how to count in Spanish, celebrated Christmas, packed the U-Haul, and moved south during the worst snow-storm the area had seen in decades. My parents rented a house with aqua blue and pink shag rugs in a Mexican-American neighborhood and, just after the New Year, I entered third grade at my new school.
As the classroom door clanged on my mother’s departing back, I glanced shyly at my classmates, an ache in my chest, the kind of ache you have when you haven’t slept long enough. I shrugged my red coat closer and tried to sort through the excited chatter, Spanish and English mixing into one glorious smattering of unintelligible sound as the classroom absorbed the presence of this white girl, the only one in the class.
I’ll be celebrating 2 1/2 years of The Confessional’s release at the Livermore Public Library on Saturday, December 12, from 1-2:30 p.m. Come talk about immigration & border issues, school violence, and racial tension among today’s teens. Everybody’s invited and the event is free.
Two guys. Classmates, enemies. Each reacts to the other on impact–knows just where to jab, then twist the verbal knife.
Big Fight. Friends and Enemies all on hand to watch and take sides. One ends up in the hospital with a broken arm and a fractured ego. Hours later, the other ends up dead.
And in the reverb, seven guys are forced to face who they, and their friends, really are.
After all, everybody’s guilty of something, right?
“Powers’s first novel powerfully combines timely story lines regarding illegal immigration, school violence, and racial tension….The structure Powers builds is ambitious, and she manipulates it for maximum surprise.” — Publisher’s Weekly, starred review
“Powers confronts issues of anti-immigrant prejudice and antiterrorist hysteria with brutal honesty, describing a world not often depicted in literature for young people.” –The Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books
“Readers…will appreciate Powers’s approach to the psychology of school violence, and fans of books with multiple narrators will be fascinated by the differences in each character’s experience of the same event.” –Voice of Youth Advocates
“The six distinct voices used to examine the tension between adopted country and ethnic pride rarely falter; the fast pace of events ensure the narrative remains compelling. Convincing friendships and feuds create a sense of the long-standing relationships between classmates and reflect the transitive nature of the high-school social structure.” –Kirkus Reviews
“Teens will see themselves in these realistic characters, each struggling with unique challenges….The residual effects of religion, immigration, and dysfunctional fathers crowd these boys’ minds….These characters will reach mature teens eager to hear their own preoccupations echoed and, perhaps, clarified. They might also notice how this distinctly modern vision of adolescence morphs silkily into a clever noir adaptation….Murder, mystery, and detection pulse through this complex book, keeping readers feverishly wondering who done it and why.” –School Library Journal
As another procrastination technique this morning, I’ve been doing a search on google to find out what people consider to be the world’s most dangerous cities, as well as the world’s most dangeorus countries. Admittedly, this is not a scientific exercise. There seem to be many opinions out there, and several newspapers report varying statistics. Maybe somewhere, there’s a very official list, but in lieu of discovering that, it’s fun to speculate.
Most Dangerous Country
South Africa always ends up on the list as #2 for world’s most dangerous countries. (#1 spot seems to usually go to Colombia or Jamaica.) This is very comforting, as I’m not going to either Jamaica or Colombia, but I am about to leave for South Africa.
Most Dangerous Cities
I am not surprised that Johannesburg always makes the list of the top ten most dangerous cities in the world. Jozi is a city that scares the hell out of me, too, which is why I stay with a family when I go there. I don’t have any interest in hotels, renting a car, travelling without purpose, not knowing where I’m going.
But I did find several other surprises. Ciudad Juarez–a city I know well because I grew up in El Paso, a stone’s throw away from Juarez–has started creeping up to take the #1 or #2 spot. It even outranks Baghdad! Joburg seems to hover around the bottom middle of the list. And thank God, neither Cape Town nor Durban show up at all.
The most surprising list of all was this one. Maclean’s apparently ranked London as #10 and Saskatoon, Canada as #9. Really???? Detroit was #5, beating Johannesburg by 2 spots, which is listed as the 7th most dangerous city in the world. This website tries to explain why the cities received the rankings they did. London has apparently had a huge increase in knife violence in the past couple of years, while Saskatoon has a lot of aggravated assault and robbery, sexual assault, and homicide problems. The world’s #8 most dangerous city, Norilsk RUSSIA, has been closed to foreign visitors since 2001. Crazy. Oddly, the world’s #3 most dangerous city, Linfen CHINA, is dangerous because of air pollution. Yes, not crime. But if you go there, your lungs will get fouled up and you’ll never be the same. Interesting….This list ranks Ciudad Juarez as the world’s #2 most dangerous city and that, of course, has to be because of the drug war tearing that city apart. The world’s #1 most dangerous city is Mogadishu. Okay, glad I’m not going there!!!
Now, to stop procrastinating and to get back to work….
Lately, I’ve been longing for a mentor, the kind of kick-ass mentor that doesn’t exist in real life: somebody that I talk to a few times a month, who can guide me not only through the various genres in which I write (nonfiction, y.a. fiction, the occasional bad poem) but also has the knowledge and wherewithal to help me navigate the business of writing, that is, meeting the appropriate contacts, how to get publicity, where to submit, etc.
When I was in Chicago this past week for the annual AWP conference, a fellow writer asked me, “Who do you read?” Continue reading ‘Kick-ass writers’
My previous post about The Cool Kids reminded me of the panel I organized for REFORMA’s National Conference in September. The panel consisted of the only 3 y.a. writers that I am aware of who have ever had a published young adult novel set in El Paso, Texas–J.L. Powers (me), Benjamin Alire Saenz, and Claudia Guadalupe Martinez; more depressing still, or perhaps more exhilarating still if you want to be unique, we are among only a handful-and-a-half of y.a. writers who have set our novels on the U.S.-Mexico Border. We were discussing why there are so few novels for teenagers that are set on the peripheries of our nation. Now, by peripheries, I don’t mean necessarily the borders, because teenagers in Minnesota are still growing up in mainstream society, whereas teenagers in El Paso are definitely not!
Benjamin Alire Saenz began to get quite excited as he discussed how the gatekeepers in the book world–agents, editors, publishers, and then librarians, teachers, and booksellers–have ghettoized literature about latinos set in a predominantly latino world such as El Paso. He mentioned how one of his books received a review that said something like “even though Saenz’s novel is set in El Paso, its themes resonate with the human condition, with things people everywhere grapple with.” (I’m paraphrasing.) Ben wanted to know why nobody ever writes a book review that says “even though so-and-so’s novel is set in New York, its themes resonate…etc. etc.” Ben sure knows how to stick it to The Man! I love the fact that he has remained faithful to his values, of writing about Latinos, of writing about El Paso, from El Paso. That fame and fortune aren’t why he writes.
I’m still young enough that fame and fortune seem elusively tantalizing. But when I really reflect on it, it’s nice not to be completely in the limelight. I remember remarking to Sara Zarr once that I wished my books sold as well as hers, and got as many reviews as hers, and she just said, “Careful what you wish for.” Touche!
Here is the text of the speech I gave at REFORMA’s national conference last weekend, for those who are interested.
When I was a teenager growing up in El Paso, I was a voracious reader, consuming on average a book every day, most of them young adult novels. In all those young adult novels I consumed, I only encountered the world I was growing up in once, in a suspense novel by Lois Duncan. In the novel, a teenager’s sudden and mysterious death in Albuquerque draws his sister into a world of danger. To fulfill one of her brother’s debts, she ends up smuggling drugs across the El Paso/Juarez border. Okay, so….the world portrayed in that novel was not EXACTLY my world, my border, since I never encountered the harsh world of drug smuggling. But it was the closest I ever came to seeing my world in a book as a teenager. And it made it seem–well, exciting. Different.
My parents rather unusually chose not to live in the neighborhoods where other professionals gravitated. Continue reading ‘Facing Two Worlds: Growing Up On La Frontera’
I might not make any friends with this observation, but I’m also *really* not trying to piss anybody off when I say that lately it has struck me that so many children’s writers are middle class white women. There is a class, race, and gender correlation that is hard to ignore and hard to explain (though maybe the answer is obvious to everybody else?) I think part of it may be that middle class white women have at least enough spare income and spare time that they (we?) can afford to take the time to write. Maybe also the idea that  literature promotes a certain cultural and intellectual and moral reality that is important for children to imbibe through story is an idea that middle-class-white-women are particularly susceptible to.
I know quite a few children’s writers, and almost all of them (including myself) have been and are white middle-class women. I say this, but then I just looked at wikipedia’s list of “important” children’s writers and it’s true that there are an awful lot of men on that list. Still, I would venture to say that most of the writers on that list are white. Jacqueline Woodson isn’t on there. Neither is friggin’ Mildred Taylor, for God’s sakes, and if she isn’t on the list of important children’s writers, then there’s something wrong with the list. (Not that wikipedia is the end all be all! and yet! and yet!….)
I would like to see more publishers willing to take a risk and publish men and women of color who write for children. Hell, I would like to see more men and women of color write for children, which is in part the subject of my panel, Y.A. YA!: Writing Y.A. Fiction for Latinos, featuring Claudia Guadalupe Martinez and Benjamin Alire Saenz and moderated by me, to be presented at the Reforma National Conference this coming September. Â
I just got off the phone with a good friend of mine who was telling me a story about a lady she knows, a naturalized citizen, who only recently got the visa approved for her son, whom she adopted from Mexico. She kept him in the U.S. for five years, illegally, because it took that long for the U.S. to approve the adoption and grant him a visa. And it took a letter from my friend before the U.S. would finally grant the visa.
My friend was at the immigration offices when the visa was approved. She said it made her cry to hear the immigration officers refusing to speak Spanish to people trying to get their visas approved; she said it made the entire experience confusing and upsetting: “Until that day, I didn’t understand,” she said. “But now I know why so many people hate us.” I wish I’d been a fly on the wall. But I’ve been down to the DMV to get my driver’s license. Take that kind of bureaucracy, multiply it by ten or even twenty, and throw in a language barrier and tons of suspicion–and yeah, it’s got to be pretty bad. Getting a license at the DMV is bad. The other, it’s got to be hellish.
“They wouldn’t leave without their Chico’s” by Ramon Renteria is tale #1 in the Chico’s Tacos chronicles. El Pasoans love their Chico’s so much that, during an electrical fire, customers wouldn’t leave because they wanted their tacos. The owner had to call the cops to get them to leave.
As my mother says, only in El Paso! I’ve written about it before but I have a friend who broke up with a girl because she didn’t like Chico’s and if she didn’t like Chico’s, she would never fit in, in El Paso….Yep, we love our Chico’s.
