New Mexico Author Q & A: Denise Chávez

Photo: Daniel Zolinsky

Loving Pedro Infante, by Denise Chávez. Washington Square Press, 2001. Available in bookstores and online.

A Taco Testimony: Meditations on Family, Food and Culture, by Denise Chávez. Rio Nuevo Publishers, 2020 and 2006. Available in bookstores and online.

“I believe in the power of writing to heal lives and heal the many borders between people, real and imagined,” states Denise Chávez in her author bio in Poets & Writers. “I am a performance writer, novelist and teacher who lives and works on the U.S./México border corridor in southern New Mexico. I am the Director/Bookseller at Casa Camino Real, a bookstore and gallery on the historic Camino Real in Las Cruces, New Mexico. We sell books on Abebooks, www.abebooks.com.”

Chávez is the author of many books, among them The Last of the Menu Girls, The King and Queen of Comezón, and Face of an Angel, for which she won the American Book Award. Her plays have been staged internationally. The winner of numerous other writing awards, she was a founder of the Border Book Festival in Las Cruces.

In this interview she talks about two of her books—a novel and a memoir—as well as her activism on behalf of migrants at the southern border.

About her novel The King and Queen of Comezón, Publisher’s Weekly wrote: “Chávez’s voice is at once zany and knowing. She is la gran mitotera—a big troublemaker, stirring up rollicking mischief with wacky humor delivered in the lyrical tempo of Chicano slang.”

That zany voice comes through clearly also in Loving Pedro Infante, the story of Teresina or Tere, a young Mexican-American woman who lives in a border town and idealizes the Mexican film star Pedro Infante, while suffering through miserable relationships with men in her real life.

Ramona: Loving Pedro Infante is a brilliant novel that I keep finding more and more richness in. Feminism, the Chicana version; Mexican American relationships and cultures; Northern New Mexico versus borderland New Mexico—wow! Not to mention a primer on Pedro Infante’s films! What inspired you to write this book? Were you a fan of Pedro?

Denise: Growing up on the U.S./México border has been a great blessing for me. I am Mexican American, and like all proud Mexicanos and Mexicanas, we love our culture, our food, our music, our way of life. My sister and I would often go to El Paso, our near-by “Big City,” to shop and see movies. I remember going to double and triple features all in one day. My mother, a Spanish teacher, loved movies, and this meant she loved Pedro Infante, the great Mexican film star and singer. My mother, Delfina Rede Faver Chávez, studied at UNAM, the Universidad Autónoma, in Mexico City, and she was enamored of all things Mexicano. As I am. We would go to the Plaza Theatre to see movies in English and then walk down El Paso street to see movies in Spanish. It was a rich and colorful life. I thank my mother for giving me the gift of being Bi-Cultural and Bilingual.

Ramona: The dialog in Loving Pedro Infante is colorful and dynamic, a fusion of Spanish and English unique to the southern border that conveys so much through humor and inuendo. For example, the protagonist, Tere, says she’s desde. What does that mean?

Denise: The way I use the word “desde” is not to be found in dictionaries. One of my father’s caretakers often used the word “desde” to refer to something that was understood by those who were in a conversation without having to get to the nitty gritty of description. A word/mood/ understood. For example, she was so “desde.” Take it and make it what you will. And the speakers understand that she is how she is, without having to navigate the known language. It’s a complex and yet simple way of speaking. Something cultural you grow up with. In English you might say, “hand me that deal.” But what does a “deal” mean? The understood unstated.

Ramona: Did writing A Taco Testimony help you come to terms with your parents? Your culture?

Denise: I am not sure what you mean “coming to terms” with my parents and culture. I wouldn’t put things that way. My mother was my mother and my father was my father. Acceptance. They were not to be changed. I am a proud Mexicana/Chicana/Latina and always have been. They were children who grew up in poverty and struggle and I appreciate all they did for my sisters and me. Their lives were hard but full of joy and love.

Many wrestle with their parents and it’s part of growing up and becoming wiser, but to wish them to be what they weren’t seems illogical. I have accepted them completely and fully. Now that doesn’t mean that I may not have agreed with them or with their ways of being, but I loved them, love them still. I feel very blessed to be my parents’ child.

Ramona: In A Taco Testimony, tacos are the theme that ties together familia, celebrations, comfort, sustenance, and more. You say your family’s tacos were always rolled, not folded. And they were baked in a pan in the oven. In Northern N.M., I think that describes enchiladas, and of course you have to eat them with a fork. Were the rolled tacos of your youth also eaten with a fork? And are “enchiladas” a thing in Las Cruces?

Denise: There are rolled tacos and folded tacos. Ours were rolled. Although we do have folded and eat folded tacos. Not knowing Southern New Mexico is something you need to correct. Southern New Mexico is totally different from Northern New Mexico, where people tout their descendancy from only the Spanish, excluding the Mexican blood of the ancestors. This is a major struggle in New Mexico: the Spanish culture vs. the Mexican.

As far as tacos go, we rolled ours and we baked them in the oven (if you are doing a larger quantity) or sometimes we put them in a cast iron pan and cooked them on the stove top and added cheese at the last minute. They are very good that way. A little soft, a little hard. You can eat rolled tacos with a fork, but they are better hand-held.

You are confusing enchiladas and tacos! Enchiladas are everybody’s “thing.” Green, red, or Christmas as we say, a mixture of both green and red. As I mentioned earlier, Southern New Mexico is NOT Northern New Mexico.

Ramona: I was especially moved by your account of how difficult your college experience was, and how reconnecting with the foods of your family, tacos in particular, literally saved you. Did you have a hard time because you weren’t supported by the school or by your family? Or because you were determined to forge your own path, in a way that no one else in your family had ever done? Or something else?

Denise: I came from a small town and to move to a big town was hard. Graduate school was very hard, especially as a theatre artist. I was very poor and lived on a small scholarship. I was also working as a waitress the last year of graduate school. The school was intense, fierce, and top-notch. To be a theatre artist is no small thing. To be a Chicana in Texas was also no small thing. Sometimes overtly racist, sometimes not, it was hard to find my role in the world. 

Ramona: Tell me about your plan for the anthology We Are Here to Represent. What kind of stories and whose stories are you seeking?

Denise: Since the summer of 2018 I have been distributing books to Refugee, Migrant, and Asylum-seeking families in my hometown of Las Cruces, New Mexico; El Paso, Texas; and Juárez, México. I received a grant last year from New Mexico Writers for a project called We Are Here to Represent, which will be an anthology of stories, poetry, photographs, and artwork depicting the voices of people we worked with whose stories have not been told. We are now in a submission period, collecting stories of people who come from different parts of the U.S. in Border Immersion groups to see what is happening on the border, as well as those who have worked locally and regionally with our families and children on both sides of the border. I know it will be a powerful testimony to the resiliency, beauty, and power of the human spirit.

Ramona: Please update me on your project Libros Para El Viaje. Have border closures and the pandemic affected your efforts to get books into the hands of migrants? What would you like readers of this blog to know about Libros Para El Viaje?

Denise: I have not been to Juarez personally to deliver books since the U.S. border has been closed, although members of other sister organizations travel back and forth on a regular basis. I look forward to visiting our distribution sites soon and working with our children and families. At present, my bookstore, Casa Camino Real, donates books, notebooks, and school supplies on a regular week basis to various shelters in Juarez. There are many, and we rotate our donation schedule. The books have been donated by hundreds of bookstores, organizations, readers as well as the American Booksellers organization, The Children’s Reading Foundation, etc. etc. We have distributed thousands and thousands of books since the summer of 2018. It’s been a labor of love for our Book Stewards and all concerned. And we continue to collect Spanish language books, bibles, Spanish/English dictionaries, and all types of books for babies, children, youth, and adults.

If anyone is interested in our program, please visit this page: https://www.newmexico.org/nmmagazine/articles/post/libros-para-el-viaje/

Please contact me for more information at:  comezon09@comcast.net.

Ramona, thank you for this invaluable opportunity to share my thoughts and world with fellow writers. ¡Adelante!

New Mexico Author Q & A

Images by Elaine Querry

“In 100 years, someone will open The Death of Bernadette Lefthand and still be consumed by the wisdom, the different cultural beliefs between tribes, and struck that love and jealousy are the poles from which evil comes. In my top five favorite reads.”

—Jo-Ann Mapson, author of Blue Rodeo, The Wilder Sister, and Solomon’s Oak

Bernadette is one of those rare books that leave you stunned, wondering what hit you. Because it’s the story of a crime—the brutal murder of a beautiful Navajo powwow dancer—as well as a tale of clashing cultures, of systematic evil, of personal tragedy, it comprises several layers of narration.

“What?” you say. Yes, there are five point-of-view characters, plus an unnamed speaker who steps in with background commentary. This should not work. It breaks all the rules for fiction writing, rules that are pounded into every aspiring fiction writer. Yet somehow, it does work in Bernadette. Which goes to show, a writer who’s truly consumed by their subject can break the rules and get away with it.

When asked how he pulled it off as a first novel, author Ron Querry shrugs (figuratively) and says, in effect, he doesn’t have a clue. He just sat down and wrote it, following his gut.

Winner of the 1993 Border Regional Library Association Southwest Book Award and the 1994 Mountains and Plains Booksellers Association Regional Book Award, Bernadette was reissued in a 25th Anniversary Edition in 2018 by Cinco Puntos Press, El Paso. It’s been published in French, German, and Bulgarian as well. 

Ron Querry, a member of the Choctaw Nation, has been living in New Mexico off and on his entire life. As a child he spent summers at his grandparents’ home in Montezuma. After a stint in the Marine Corps, he earned several degrees, eventually getting his PhD at UNM. He’s taught in academia and since 2006 has lived in Las Vegas with his wife, Elaine, a photographer. He’s also the author of the 1998 thriller Bad Medicine.

Here’s our recent interview:

Ramona: Bernadette is written in multiple voices: Gracie and Starr (first person), with additional shorter sections in close personal third person or omniscient point-of-view (Tom George, Bernadette, Emmett Take Horse, and an unnamed narrator). Using multiple points of view is challenging even for very experienced writers, yet you accomplished it in a first novel. Did you have an overall vision of how the different voices would cohere in a plot?

Ron: I had no plan at all for the novel. It was my first ever attempt at such a thing and I simply began writing and I found I was telling the story from the point of view of a young Indian girl—Gracie Lefthand. Gracie is telling us about that terrible day when the tribal police came to her house to tell her father that her older sister, Bernadette, had been killed.

It was only when there came a point in Gracie’s narrative that I realized that I needed to let the reader know something that Gracie would not have known, would not have been able to articulate, that I understood I needed to introduce a second narrator . . . a second voice to tell us what Gracie (16 years old) would not know or would not have the appropriate voice with which to tell.

And this happened again when I discovered that I needed someone else’s point of view, or someone else who would know what others did/could not. I was always surprised at what direction things would go.

I should tell you that if in reading the book you find yourself surprised by some turn, you can be pretty certain that I was surprised as well. I appreciate you saying that this use of multiple narrators or points of view is challenging and that you feel I accomplished it.

My late author friend Chuck Bowden told me once that he was given Bernadette and that he really didn’t favor fiction but that he kept after it because he didn’t think I could possibly maintain a young girl’s voice throughout. I was pleased that he thought I did so.

Ramona: The personas/voices of Gracie and Starr, the former model who employs Bernadette, come across quite convincingly. Do you have a knack for getting inside the heads of your characters?

Ron: I prefer to think that Gracie and Starr got into my head. In any case, because I imagined these characters, I suppose it would be fair to say they are me. I can tell you that I knew the sounds of their voices and what they were thinking at all times. Funny, but what they looked like . . . not so much. Only later would I see someone and think, “That could be Gracie,” or Bernadette, etc. Because I had a real individual in mind for Starr, I always had a picture of her in my head.

Ramona: The voice of Gracie, Bernadette’s grieving younger sister, is especially poignant and consistent throughout. Her description of Bernadette’s last powwow dance is heart-breaking, since she and the reader know already that Bernadette will die. Was this scene hard to write?

Ron: I don’t know . . . I’m sure it must’ve been hard. I know it broke my heart. And when Elaine came home from work that evening and I read to her what I’d written—as was my habit—she wept. And the fact she did so made me think I’d gotten it right.

Ramona: One of the most striking aspects of the novel is how deftly you portray the Navajo and Apache cultures. Do you think the fact that you are Choctaw gave you any insights into the Navajo or Apache culture? Or perhaps an ability to perceive aspects of Navajo or Apache culture that white people aren’t likely to notice?

Ron: The fact that I am Choctaw probably didn’t afford me any particular insight into Navajo or Apache lifeways, other than possibly an awareness that these different tribes or nations are as different as any other nations are or can be from one another.

I’m probably more like Starr is in that respect—that is, I have read and studied the extant materials having to do with the people about whom I write. I have tried very hard to make sure that I don’t make silly mistakes—some readers will always write and point out errors. Or what they perceive to be an error, anyway. 

Ramona: You say in your Afterword that you assumed the book would find an audience, but it wouldn’t be Indian, especially not Navajo. Who are the readers of Bernadette? How it has been received over the years in the Navajo community? I’m thinking of a similar example: the mysteries of Tony Hillerman have been popular among Navajo readers. He also wrote about Navajo spiritual beliefs.  

Ron: Over the twenty-five-plus years that Bernadette has been available, it has enjoyed popular appeal with all kinds of readers. Navajo and Jicarilla Apache readers, especially, have expressed to me admiration and enjoyment. My comment that I didn’t expect a Navajo audience was based on the fact that the book has to do with witchcraft and other aspects of Navajo lifeways that I anticipated would not appeal to traditional Navajo people. Indeed, I’ve had younger Navajo people tell me that their parents might not be comfortable with the book. I don’t really know.

Ramona: The cover photo of the second edition is perfect. Kudos to Elaine Querry!

Ron Querry: I love that image and the design of the cover. The image is one Elaine took at Taos Pueblo 30-some years ago. She calls it “Dream of Bernadette.”

Ramona: Is Bernadette available in bookstores?

Ron: The book is distributed in those mysterious ways that books get to booksellers. I have nothing to do with that. Of course, Amazon is a huge bookseller, but I’ve seen the book in bookstores and gift shops. I’m always happy to see it, as you can imagine.

Ramona: What about the book’s reception (both editions) has pleased you? What has displeased you?

Ron: I am pleased with the book’s reception in all its various editions in every way. If I’m displeased by anything, it would be the lack of promotion and distribution that I reckon every author feels. I confess that I have a hard time with self-promotion, and that’s clearly not a good thing for writers and other artists.