Raymond, a 9-year-old boy, lives in a trailer on a remote, barren mesa in New Mexico with Molly, the partner of his now-deceased uncle. Through bitter experience, Molly has learned to trust no one, yet she tries to nurture Raymond’s imagination and love of nature. Other than that, they have almost nothing to live on. This is a story of small miracles and heartbreak, and I swear you will never forget Molly.
A Hundred Cups of Coffee, by Miriam Sagan. Tres Chicas Books, Española, N.M. 2019. Available in bookstores and online.
Longtime Santa Fe resident Miriam Sagan is the author of thirty books, including three memoirs, Dirty Laundry: A Hundred Days in a Zen Monastery, Gossip, and Geographic: A Memoir of Time and Space. She’s won numerous awards for her writing.
Miriam’s concept for this slim book was “to drink a hundred cups of coffee and record them, with my thoughts and surroundings.” It took her two years, and as she writes, “many things happened.”
I almost didn’t pick up the book because I’d been put off the concept of daily blog or journal posts after reading the Facebook posts of a new acquaintance. People LOVE her posts, so I was looking for the “there,” but trying to read them nearly drove me mad. They were all sweetness and light. Some people require the happy ending. I’m not one of them, though I do believe in redemption. Which you’ll see when you read my book The Dry Line: A Novel.
Back to Miriam, who embraces the contradictions, the pieces that don’t fit. The shadows. She observes in the moment and lets it be, without judgment. Instead of reading one or two of the “cups” entries per day, as I’d planned, I devoured multiple “cups” at one sitting.
Ramona: You can say so much—in a few words! Do you think this comes from being foremost a poet? And how long have you been writing poetry?
Miriam: Yes, I do think it comes from practicing poetry. I started writing poetry in high school, so let’s call it fifty years. Of course lots of people write poetry as teenagers—for me the trick was to keep at it and develop the craft and an adult voice. I also started keeping a journal in 1972. Journals tend to be short forms and daily. That also influences my approach to prose.
Ramona: In A Hundred Cups, you had me at Cup #7, where you wrote: “I am a bad daughter, and we both know it. Yes, I call my demented mother frequently, I send her cards and flowering plants. I visit every season. But I live thousands of miles away. And we do not like each other. I do not like her, but she started it. She has not liked me since we met, at my birth, sixty-one years ago. I loved her desperately for my first twenty-five years or so. I wanted her to stop saying I was fat, with horrible hair, a failure. I wanted her to stop saying I was a torment to her. Then I learned to get over it.”
How many mother-daughter relationships does this nail? I could’ve written it myself, about my own mother. I so much appreciate your writing so honestly about this matter. Did you write hundreds of journal pages about this before you arrived at “learning to get over it”? Anything else you want to add?
Miriam: I’m glad it seems accrete and relatable. Not hundreds of pages—more like hundreds of hours in therapy! And uncountable hours spent talking to other women, a lifetime of talking, and of listening. In retrospect, some of it does seem generational, or generational in my immigrant family. That is, many mothers my age seem to have better relationships with their own daughters, and less mania for control and criticism.
Ramona: In Cup #32, you write of “the terror of hanging suspended in the instant,” contrasted with “what remains, a husk, the carapace of a cicada, the paper wasp’s nest,” and how our feelings about those things don’t survive with the things themselves. How much does your Buddhist practice inform your writing? (I’m assuming you still practice Zen Buddhism, though your bio in the book doesn’t mention it.)
Miriam: Thank you for noticing and asking this question. My relationship to Buddhism remains somewhat conflicted. On the one hand, encountering its central ideas no doubt saved my life. On the other, I don’t do well in hierarchical, dare I say patriarchal, settings. Some years ago I had the opportunity to work with koans with a woman roshi at a time when I was very immersed in trying to use my writing to perceive things directly. This combination did open my mind, and hopefully it has not shut yet! My relationship to the “moment” comes out of a shared practice of Zen and writing—but the Zen is pretty informal—more domestic than monastic.
Ramona: I’m totally unqualified to review or write about poetry. So I’ll ask you instead to mention your favorite of your poems (and use it here if you like). How many collections of your own poetry have been published?
Miriam: If I add up the full-length volumes and the smaller chapbooks, it is probably upwards of twenty books of poetry.
My favorite poem always tends to be my most recent. It’s not that I’m improving that obviously as I go—just that I like what I feel close to.
Here is one from September, written because my husband had to go back east on a family emergency:
Ramona: In Cup #34, you say the first draft of a novel is finished. Dated May 16, 2016. Please say more about this work.
Miriam: Ah, I’m always tormented by writing a novel! This one is called Future Tense of River, and is a utopian novel about a low-technological future and a community of potters. Who are menaced by drought, war, and more. About halfway through I realized I was writing about Santa Fe! It is still unpublished. A novella, Shadow on the Minotaur, was started later but is forthcoming from Red Mountain Press next year. My fiction writing is erratic and often tortuous. I’m glad it isn’t my only pursuit!
Ramona: On Cup #44, you write: “Dusty hollyhocks. It was so hot yesterday that my car’s tires went a little flat. I don’t know why I’m so happy. A pink hollyhock petal falls before my eyes.”
This reminded me of a poem by Li Po that I loved when I was in college…
Are moments like these, in nature, your refuge from the craziness of society?
Miriam: What an exquisite poem! Since the pandemic started, I’ve been reading the classic Chinese poets in translation—book after book. I even took one of those open online classes from Harvard on Chinese thought and poetry. It isn’t coincidence. No one can describe how an individual feels in a time of social chaos like the T’ang poets. Yes, nature is a respite, but nature can also be violent, and in today’s world full of destruction and crisis. I think the key is the level of perception in the poem, and how the sense of self is located “not among men.”
Ramona: How has your life changed now that you’ve retired from directing the creative writing program at Santa Fe Community College? Did you find that young people are passionate about writing?
Miriam: Young and old, people love to write—and benefit so much from expression. At Santa Fe Community College many students were older, but still just starting out. That’s a delicate balance—life experience, but being a novice. The young, I think, are more fearless, but also tortured by the worry of being unoriginal. To settle down, to write what you want to express, to explore—it is a huge adventure. I was lucky to share that with so many people over the years.
Ramona: Do you want to say more about your joint creative project with your daughter? (My daughter created my author website for me, going in a direction I wouldn’t have thought of, but I love it.)
Miriam: Probably the greatest unexpected excitement in my life is working with my daughter, Isabel Winson-Sagan, a multimedia artist. We did numerous projects over the years, but really committed to working together as the creative duo Maternal Mitochondria four years ago when I retired. We went to Japan and were in residence in Kura Studio in Itoshima and created a poetry and suminagashi (Japanese ink marbling) video installation in an old abandoned grain silo. The whole experience was very inspiring, and remains a wellspring.
Right now we’re studying book arts together. You can see our sculptural text pieces, community teaching, and installations at our website: maternalmitochondria.com
I’m so fortunate to have the opportunity to work across disciplines and generations with an incredible woman who is also my daughter! The process isn’t always smooth—it’s good to know who is the leader on a project—but it has really extended my range, helped my thinking, and created amazing pieces.
Editor’s note: On the website Maternal Mitochondria, check out Miriam & Isabel’s latest project, Fairy Houses, inspired by their experience in Japan. Here’s a photo of one of the spirit houses created by Tim Brown. You can visit the installation in person at Santa Fe Skies RV Park.
And here’s Miriam’s blog, which she’s been writing faithfully for at least ten years. Must be a record, and even more of a record to keep it fresh every time.
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!
La Llorona haunts New Mexico's arroyos, cemeteries, even the PERA building in Santa Fe. But you probably have heard only a tiny fraction of all the stories about the Wailing Woman. Check out my NM Author Q&A with Judith Shaw Beatty, editor of this spine-tingling collection of La Llorona tales from around the Southwest.
As a horse trainer, Ginger Gaffney spent her days “teaching horses how to feel comfortable in the world of humans.” Then she was offered a task that truly changed her life: work with a small group of recovering addicts on a prison ranch in northern New Mexico. The situation on the ranch was dire: the horses that lived there were out of control, ganging up and attacking residents, trampling them seemingly without provocation. The residents were terrified.
Half Broke is the story of how Gaffney brought these groups—horses and humans, both coming from situations of abuse and trauma—together again. Gaffney’s the master of her material, using finely honed language to show readers all the subtleties of equine and human behavior, subtleties that determine whether one will be trusted, whether one will be a friend or an enemy. This is one of the most astonishing memoirs I’ve ever read, in that it exposes a way of perceiving the world that I hadn’t imagined.
Ramona: How long have you been writing, and why did you decide to get your MFA?
Ginger : I’ve been writing since college, and soon after college I did a 2-year apprenticeship with a small poetry press that published first chapbooks of unpublished poets. After that apprenticeship I considered going back to school but a voice inside me kept saying, “You need to live in order to write.” So, I did that living and built a great life around horses. Then I was asked to help at the re-sentencing ranch I write about in Half Broke. That worked changed my life.
I went on to get my MFA about three years after I started working at the ranch. I was seeking out some way to keep growing. My horse work was wonderful, but there was something missing. My partner, Glenda, always had belief in my writing. She kept encouraging me to write. She is the one who supported me in making that decision.
Ramona: You wrote in Half Broke: “I learned to listen with my eyes.” Would you call this a skill or an instinct? Can anyone learn it?
Ginger: There are many people like me, I believe. We are watchers, not talkers. We “listen” to gestures, to small body movements, wrinkles in the corner of mouths. I don’t think of it as an instinct or a skill, really. It is just what comes naturally to me. And yes, I think it can in part be learned. But mostly, I think it is something people are born into. I don’t think we know everything about how we inherit traits from our DNA, from ancestors we never knew. But I think this approach to listening/communication, I think it comes from something far back inside us. As far back as when we were a bit more like an animal than human.
Ramona: After your experience at the ranch, do you think it is easier for a horse to learn to trust than it is for a human?
Ginger : I think trauma does a number on both horse and human. So, if you are a young colt, in the hands of a gentle and knowledgeable horse owner, trust will come easy for you. And the same thing can be said about a child. But if the situation is not like this, not supportive, not honest, traumatic—many things will remain difficult for a long time for both human and horse.
Ramona: One of the things that struck me about Half Broke is how honest horses are, and how in handling horses you found your place to stand in the world. Do you still find it challenging to deal with the deceptive nature of human relations, in contrast to that of horses? It must be difficult also for the recovering addicts who learn to work with horses but still have to succeed in the world of human relations.
Ginger : Working at the re-sentencing ranch with the residents for over seven years has given me a lot of hope in our human condition. I find I can open up and be myself around people much more easily. I have more confidence in the good inside people. There are still people who can be difficult for me, but I get less and less affected by them. In general, being among a group of people trying their best to be accountable for their actions, who treat each other respectfully, who no longer live out the patterns of their old addictions, I feel like this experience has given me one of the biggest gifts of my life.
When the residents finish their term on the ranch, they go back into the world looking for work and for a safe place to live. What I’ve heard them say frequently is how so many of us here on the outside (those of us who have never been to prison) have no respect for one another. Have no work ethic. Have no gratitude for the lives we have been given. They are shocked at how undisciplined we are. How we don’t hold ourselves accountable to our family, work, and relationships. This kind of fresh witness to of our “normal” world should be listened to.
Ramona: Do you know what the long-term effects of interacting with the horses have been for the residents? Recovery rate? Employment? Having stable relationships?
Ginger : I do know quite a few people who are now finished with their time at the ranch and are living wonderful lives. Some have married, others have stable friendships and relationships. This ranch in particular has a great rate of recovery. Much, much better than the standard 30- to 90-day programs.
You have hit on some key areas with this question. A person who is truly in recovery can have relationships again. People can learn they are trustworthy. They can reunite with family. They are able to hold down a good steady job, and often become a key employee for the company they work for. People who are truly in recovery are some of the most beautiful people to spend time with.
Ramona: How do you stay centered in your writing despite the wrenching problems of the people and horses you work with?
Ginger : That is easy for me. I try to write from the center of my emotional memory. And if I stay there long enough, hope is never very far away. Because even when some devastating things occur—say, we get word someone who has left the ranch overdosed or committed suicide—the thing is we look to each other and we pick each other up. One person, one day at a time. I try to keep my writing that close, too. One person, one horse, our simple daily failures, our simple daily triumphs. For me, that’s the only place I know to write from.
Ramona: After reading Half Broke, I tend to think there’s no such thing as “recovered,” that every day is a recovery day for an addict. Would you agree?
Ginger : I’m not an addict so I can’t fully say. But I know quite a few beautifully recovering people who do talk about how difficult it is day to day. But also how grateful they are now to be sober and clean. I would say, yes, recovery is a verb. It is ongoing, yet as time goes by, it is a blessing to be truly sober, to be alcohol and drug free. There are not too many people who live this way. When you meet one, they just shine.
Ramona: Are you still working with people in recovery?
Ginger: Right now, I am not. I worked at the ranch for seven years. After that I spent two years developing a long-term recovery farm nearby my home for a different organization. I’m back to working horses every day and absolutely loving it. I think I need the break from working in recovery right now. I’m busy working on my next book. It has similar themes. And it is also a book about what recovery can really look like. So it’s good to not be working and at the same time writing about recovery.
Ginger Gaffney’s book Half Broke, is available from independent book stores(on line as well as brick and mortar) also on amazon.
Coyota in the Kitchen: A Memoir of New and Old Mexico, by Anita Rodriguez (2016: UNM Press), is stuffed with fascinating information. Such as how can you determine the temperature inside an horno oven? (Buy an oven thermometer.) What’s a delicious way to cook a freshly caught rabbit? There’s a recipe that involves cornflakes. How do you prepare chicos? You’ll need two days and garden hose. How does a woman establish herself in the hard-core macho world of adobe construction? The answer is worth a book in itself. Taos resident Anita Rodriguez managed to do it and even earned the grudging respect of her male rivals.
Rodriguez has crossed many borders in her life: both material and nonmaterial. Her recipes and stories can serve as metaphors for those borders: Indian, Hispanic, and gringo borders, the border between the U.S. and Mexico, the border between life and death. And the border is where incompatible worlds clash, and create anew.
I adore this book! Reading it was like being tossed into a simmering cauldron of magical ingredients, a soup that can change you down down down through many layers if you let it.
Ramona: Your family was most unusual: your mother a Southern belle and your father a Mexican pharmacist from Chihuahua. That kind of family situation may not be as unusual today, when people travel and move around much more. Do you think it’s easier now for a “coyota” child to avoid prejudice growing up?
Anita: I think that now there is a great deal more intermarriage, and it is more acceptable, although still charged. When my parents married there were still people living who had seen the American conquest, the cannoning of the Pueblo church, the hangings on the Plaza, and the bitterness was very fresh.
Ramona: As a child, you were acutely aware of these different worlds, yet you felt you didn’t fit into any. Do you think that status gave you unusual insight into the different worlds?
Anita: Absolutely. Lots of people live their entire lives and never realize that there are infinite, utterly authentic other cultural universes and believe that the particular bubble they live in is the “right” one or even the only one. From the cradle I was told I was “neither fish nor fowl,” and it was tremendously formative, and in retrospect a gift, a blessing, a rare opportunity.
Ramona: You wrote you were born just after that “historical crucible” when Anglos from the East invaded New Mexico, championed Indian causes, and either ignored the Hispanics or took their land through both legal and illegal deals, all while inventing tourism. Your mother was actually a tourist who met your father on the Taos Plaza. Now that nearly every corner of New Mexico is dedicated to seeking tourism dollars, do you think tourism has helped or hurt New Mexico’s Hispanic population?
Anita: Well, tourism is just another stage of conquest and colonization, and although the conquered can adjust and find ways to circumvent the harms and even profit marginally, I think that far, far more tourist dollars end up in Indian pockets than in Hispanic ones, precisely because Natives are more profitable to promote, more exotic, etc. Born in the interface between old enemies gave me a ringside seat on cultural confluence and conflict and how racism in New Mexico is selective.
Ramona: Your paternal grandmother was no sweet storyteller. Instead she terrified her grandchildren with lurid tales of La Llorona, the devil, haunted places, her people being scalped by Apaches and Comanches, so much so that you were afraid to visit the outhouse at night. And your maternal grandmother maintained a long list of forbidden topics from her Southern upbringing, including any talk about race. In villages and Pueblos across New Mexico, old grievances fester in the dark. As a child balancing between these worlds, you realized how harmful keeping secrets can be. Do you think our society now still keeps too many secrets, or have we gone too far in the other direction?
Anita: Until all the dirty secrets of our country are told, processed, admitted, and reconciled we will never be at peace but will only repeat the same mistakes again and again. My family just happened to encompass almost all of the country’s atrocities, slavery, genocide, conquest, AND racism. And white people will resist, complain about the discomfort of having to know terrible truths and their fragility will be wounded—but it is the only way—the truth has to be fully told.
Ramona: You wrote that remote Taos was the isolated frontier of mestizaje, where the European root was grafted onto the Indian root. When you were growing up, other children taunted you by calling you “coyota,” meaning the offspring of Hispanic and gringo parents. Would you say this kind of bullying pushed you deeper into your own imagination, forcing you to rely on your courage? Did you have to learn not to be bitter?
Anita: All of those things. My imagination became a refuge, then a tool, a source of inspiration. My isolation became my creative solitude, it honed and polished my courage. And the moral choice to not be bitter, but as the Dalai Lama says, “Lose—but don’t lose the lesson,” has enriched and empowered me. Bitterness is its own punishment, and rejecting it leads to understanding and compassion.
Ramona: Grandma Coyota, the imaginary magical persona you created to counter the teasing of other children, was a figure of power and cunning. She was your “real relative,” who embodied all the amazing qualities of coyotes, and you made up stories about her exploits. Thus you turned a badge of shame into a badge of bravery. I think you should write a children’s book about her! Did you ever tell anyone about Grandma Coyota?
Anita: Grandma Coyota was my secret until I began to write, then she came loping into the studio, flopped down on the floor, farted, and said, “Why do you hang with those two-leggeds anyway? Let's go kill chickens!”
Ramona: You spent a summer traveling around to villages to find enjarradoras, the women who had formerly comprised half of the construction crews who built adobe structures--from houses to churches. These skilled women did construction, maintenance, and repair of adobe walls. You learned that “collective, cooperative building had been woven into Native and Hispanic culture.” These women, now elderly, were so happy that you sought them out and interviewed them. And you started learning how to make a living with these skills in the modern construction business. You met a lot of resistance from the male-dominated culture, but you persisted, and eventually your 15 years of work were recognized by architects and others in the industry. Did your efforts make a lasting difference in the adobe construction business? Is it any easier now for enjarradoras to work in the Southwest?
Anita: I know of no traditional enjarradoras who are practicing today—it is very hard work. And I know of no book that tells the whole story and details all the processes in one place. However, I believe I changed the thinking of the industry and a lot of people regarding the material. My formulas are all over the net, my work is featured in various books, but most important the qualities of mud as a building material are now valued.
Mud is universally available, biodegradable, non-polluting, infinitely sculptural, and it can be adapted to any cultural style. The energy it consumes is human—meaning jobs—and the best thing about it is that when no longer needed, it melts back into the earth from which it comes. None of our industrial building materials have these qualities.
Ramona: You started painting at age 47 and a year later had a show and sold half of it. Many artists struggle for years to make it. What inspired your confidence in yourself? And how did living in Guanajuato affect your painting?
Anita: I started painting at 47 and it’s true I have made a living at it, but my work has never received the blessing of a major gallery—only five percent of the world’s major art collections contain the work of women, and if one can eat from her talent it’s a triumph. Guanajuato enormously enriched my painting; one of the reasons I chose to live there is because it is one of the most paintable cities in the world.
Ramona: How would you describe your painting style? It seems unique to me.
Anita: How would I describe my style? I'll accept the mantle my friend Linda Durham, icon of the Santa Fe art world, gave me and claim at least kinship with magical realism.
Ramona: I’ve seen from your posts on Facebook that you take an active role in community life in Taos, especially working to educate newcomers about the culture of the town. Taos is attracting so many ultrarich people now. Has it become a playground for those who can live behind gates and high walls? Do you see any signs that these people want to be integrated into the community?
Anita: Migrants, whether rich or poor, are never welcome. The destructive impact of gentrification on old communities is well known, and so is the sadistic cruelty and corruption great wealth can cultivate. This extreme degree of income inequality is proving to be unsustainable. But I have known and know good rich people.
Among newcomers to Taos there are a few who are sensitive and educated, they WANT to preserve the same things us indigenous New Mexicans do, and as I write some of them are knocking themselves out with considerable expertise and moving dedication to protect Taos from the coming crisis.
And lastly I think everyone craves community; it’s hardwired into the species. And Pueblo and Chicano people have time-tested, historically based, authentic community. Money can’t buy that—but it can destroy it. We will just have to see how things turn out—all we know is that it won’t be the same.
Morada
Ink-jet prints of Anita Rodriguez's artwork are currently carried by Fine Art New Mexico; see https://www.fineartnewmexico.com/anita-rodriguez. From her artist bio on the website: "Her work reflects her very diverse background, exploring her 'Hispanic-Chicano-Mexican-Mestizo-Indian-Jewish-Gringo virtual country.'"
After nearly thirty years living in a remote New Mexico village, Charlotte Plantz (aka Claudia Clavel) had a prodigious collection of stories to tell. During that time I was a frequent visitor to Mike and Charlotte’s adobe home and heard the stories as they happened.
The initial question of course is how do a couple of Anglo artists from California fit into a traditional Spanish village? Many small social signals are given when people are getting to know each other.
Charlotte laughs when she says her neighbors must have figured she and Mike were okay when they had huge shouting matches in their yard. (This was during their early years there, when money was tight and many survival decisions had to be made as they worked nonstop to make their small adobe house livable.) “They heard us fighting and must have decided we were normal people!” she says.
In the early colonial days, life in these N.M. villages was really hard. Today, some of the problems have changed, but life remains hard. In the modern era, Spanish settlers and Native Americans were no longer waging gun battles over territory, but many small land holders lost their land to unscrupulous Anglos who knew how to work the new U.S. legal system. Poverty, alcohol and drug abuse, and other ills followed.
Charlotte and Mike got to know the village’s families as babies were born, grew up, and had children of their own. While hosting their own grandsons during the summers, Mike and Charlotte offered village kids acceptance and new experiences, such as tasting Romaine lettuce for the first time and swimming in the Blue Hole in Santa Rosa. They hired locals for construction projects at their home, realizing these men had artistic and craft skills that the wider world had overlooked.
For many months, Charlotte agonized over whether to publish Accidental Anthropologists, even though she’d changed all the names. Finally she sat down with some neighbors and read the book aloud to them.
“Have I gone too far?” she asked.
The response from “Perfecto”: “I tell the same kind of stories when our family gathers. I want my children and grandchildren to know this is the way life is here. It’s part of our culture.”
And “Pilar” said: “I could listen to your stories all day. This was better than watching a telenovela.”
(Disclaimer: I edited early versions of both books.)
Accidental Anthropologists was published in 2014 and continues to sell steadily, especially in N.M. bookstores. Why do you think it's so resilient?
Charlotte: The feedback I continue to receive comes from the fact that it is the only book written about a specific time frame that includes Vietnam vets and their relationship with their neighbors in a Spanish Northern New Mexico village.
Ramona: I know you've gotten some unexpected responses from readers far and wide. Do you want to share any?
Charlotte: A number of readers have found their way to my door, in spite of my changing the names of people and places, including my pseudonym as author. A San Diego couple emailed via my publisher to ask about place names. They were connecting mileage to cities and villages, to no avail. We began a correspondence. The couple flew out to meet me and we became friends. The Pfaffs visit twice a year, timed around Las Vegas cultural events.
A recent couple found me via my acupuncturist, who has bought around 30 books to give to clients. By now, I’ve agreed to meet folks who enjoy Accidental Anthropologists because I’m curious to know what they have to say about it.
One of my favorite stories is Chapter 10, “It took a village,” in which you describe how people go up to the cemetery on the hill when they need a break from their problems. Do you think they might be connecting with their ancestors there?
I also loved reading about how you drove in circles around the church as various people approached to find out why you were distraught. Do you want to say anything more about that experience?
Charlotte: The people here stay very connected to those who have passed on. I’m pretty sure parking at the cemetery has that connection. Over the years, Mike and I have experienced the same feeling. We lost all the “drinkers,” and they rest in peace in the little campo santo, so we continue to feel their presence whenever we are near there.
Times have changed in the village. We have lost so many neighbors it’s hard to imagine I would have that same experience (driving around the church). Though those of us who remain still care for one another.
You and Mike faced some pretty scary situations over the years. Do you think fearlessness is necessary in order to be accepted in a different culture?
Charlotte: The biggest change for us came early on, when I stormed the village over an ugly rumor that I was on the “take” from a movie company. I knocked on every door in the village and gave a frantic speech about honesty. From that day forward my neighbors nearly bowed when they met me; I had everyone’s respect for standing up to gossip. The people here have great respect for fearlessness. I continue to wear that like a shawl!
Accidental Anthropologists opened my eyes to how our society judges disadvantaged people so harshly. For example, I saw how easy it is to get on the wrong side of the law enforcement and legal structure if you’re poor. Do you want to say anything about this?
Charlotte: Landing in the middle of a group of Vietnam vets with drug and alcohol problems touched the core of my being. I have always been sympathetic to down-trodden folks so it was natural for me to interact. The “drinkers” made it easy for us, as they respected our privacy and space. They knew we couldn’t enter their world of self-medication, and were grateful for our respect as human beings. They were hard workers and helped us in a number of ways throughout the years. We feel privileged to have been a part of their lives.
Has life in San Ignacio changed for you since Accidental Anthropologists was published? Are you happy you used a pseudonym?
Charlotte: I am happy I used a pseudonym for a couple of reasons: I was so insecure as an “author” I had a hard time writing my name over and over. The minute I changed my name to Claudia, my brain opened up and words flew out of me. My new name gave me distance and allowed me to feel free to write whatever came out of my head.
The other reason the pseudonym worked for me had to do with the village and our neighbors. I did not want to bring attention to San Ignacio or myself. I was pretty sure readers would be checking us out, and that proved to be true. I can’t tell you how many readers have told me they drove around villages trying to figure out where the story took place.
Someone in the real San Ignacio, north of Las Vegas, told a friend that people knocked on doors there asking about the book.
Me and My Magical Life begins with your life before you arrived in San Ignacio. A lot of people throw off the conventional life, but many of them crash and burn. You, on the other hand, discovered your true calling as an artist and have thrived. What was the hardest thing you ever had to do?
Charlotte: The hardest thing was to walk out the door of my old life. If it hadn’t been for my daughters, and Mike and Murray (a close friend), and the Abeyta family, I’m not sure I would have succeeded. Although, survival is a powerful force, so who knows how it might have played out.
Did you wrestle a lot with what to tell and what to leave out of Me and My Magical Life?
Charlotte: I probably have enough untold stories to fill another book. I often wake up with that thought. It was easy to leave out negativity, and sometimes too much information. With both books I automatically wrote a chapter of equal length every time I sat down to write. It was like automatic writing, and self-editing. Very strange!
Writing Me and My Magical Life was a wonderful experience. I felt free to use my own name, and those of my friends and family. I felt like I had things to say of importance: mental health, women’s rights, belief in oneself. I hoped my book would be inspiring and educational. Most of all, I now trust the subconscious part of my brain completely. From that place, all the connections came together.
I’m about to start another book: My Two Felons and a Misdemeanor. This book will tell the stories of our three grandsons and how they got into trouble, and how they found their way out. The three of them are doing well and finding success in their lives. It’s a story worth telling.
***
Accidental Anthropologists and Me and My Magical Life are available at Tome on the Range in Las Vegas, N.M., and on Amazon.
Candelora Versace and I have never met, though we have mutual friends in Santa Fe. So I read her debut book, Traveling Light: a novelita, last year with keen interest. Here’s what I commented about it in an Amazon review:
“Unput-downable until the final-page plot twist! Versace gets the details right on Santa Fe culture and ambience as she pulls the reader along with her rich prose. Appealing, though broken, characters pursue mezcal-fueled dreams from New Mexico to Oaxaca, abandoning their pasts like so much loose change. I can't help wondering, though, how things might have turned out had Camelia actually eaten her green chile breakfast at Tortilla Flats. THAT is la medicina.”
Ramona: Where are you from? How did you happen to move to Santa Fe?
Candelora: I was born and raised in Detroit. In my twenties, I bounced around quite a bit: Key West, Ann Arbor, East Village, Brooklyn. In the late ’80s I was in Seattle, and a friend of a friend of a friend mentioned Santa Fe; this was right about the time Santa Fe Style was hitting the mass consciousness, and I was smitten. Eventually some tenuous connections were made, and I packed up my car and drove to New Mexico. To be honest, I thought it would be like Tucson. I was ready for that hot dry air and the wide open spaces of the desert. I was surprised to find myself in the Rocky Mountains. (I have since become an ace googler on everything I ever even think of doing before I even leave the house, but in those days I was just kind of “go with the flow, figure it out when you get there.” I never even cracked a guide book.)
I have always been attracted to fringy, counterculture types of towns, and on first glance Santa Fe felt a lot like Key West had been for me a decade before, minus the palm trees and the ocean.
Ramona: Back of your book cover says you covered SF arts and culture as a freelance journalist. What publications did you write for?
Candelora:For a while there my byline was everywhere; I wrote consistently for several years for the Santa Fe New Mexican, as well as New Mexico Magazine, the Santa Fean, GuestLIfe, Albuquerque Journal, and a bunch of local independent papers and tourism publications, and I collected a few New Mexico and National Press Women awards. I did a lot of arts writing for regional art magazines, the occasional newsletter article for local colleges and art galleries, all kinds of stuff. I also founded and published a book review quarterly, Southwest BookViews, from 2001 to 2005, and did some ghostwriting for a couple of nutrition and wellness books.
Editor’s Note: I was arts and entertainment editor of the SF Reporter around 1987-1990. We probably crossed paths more than once back in the day!
Ramona:In your acknowledgments, you mention you learned to “travel light” from several women friends. What does this phrase mean to you?
Candelora:It feels like my daily quest these days, to lighten up not only from the deeply serious and often despairing and melancholic take I tend to have on life in general, but also to feel less weighted down and sometimes burdened by my attachments to place, to people, to things. I long for the kind of simplicity in living situations that lets you make fast decisions, pivot to new adventures, pack up and go in a moment’s notice. Note I say this as someone who has been in one place now for 30 years.
Ramona:The acknowledgments also allude to the book being a long time in the making. Can you say more about how the book was born and grew?
Candelora:I started noodling around with some ideas about these characters and the locations many many years ago after multiple visits to Oaxaca, both the city and its coastline, which made a big impression on me on a number of levels. The writing, though, was mostly bits and pieces that I dipped into now and then but didn’t have time or focus to really finesse in any way. I was so absorbed in the way the characters and the locations evolved that it took a long time for a plot to gel; I’m just not that interested in classic plot arcs and twists in storytelling, I much prefer figuring out the characters, their motivations, their responses, and letting the story sort of develop organically out of that. Needless to say, it’s kind of a backasswards way to write a novel.
Ramona:What was the hardest part of writing it? The easiest?
Candelora:I went through a bunch of life changes—got married, had a child, started a business, etc.—all in a short period of time, and it took me quite a while to find my footing again with my writing, which had always been part of a very solitary life. I also find 21st century life—9/11, wars, recession, the rapidity of technological changes—to be exceedingly draining. Writing my little stories seemed at the very bottom of the list of daily priorities, even as I tried to carve out time and space (internal and external) for it. It was hard to stay focused on it when my life was so full.
I also realized I lacked a certain kind of technical knowledge about how to get from point A to point B and beyond, so a lot of it was kind of shooting in the dark. The easy part was that no matter how long it was between committed work periods—and sometimes it would be years before I could pull it out of a drawer again—I found that I still loved the characters and the overall cycle of the story, and it became easier to go deeper and to find the authenticity and the truths about what I was trying to do after coming back to it.
Ramona:Your voice as a writer comes through well in Traveling Light. How hard was that to achieve?
Candelora:Thank you. Coming back to it as a work in progress periodically over time was really interesting, because as I matured and changed and worked over time, so did my approach to my writing on the page. I ripped it apart multiple times over the years, and in the last few years before I published it, I really began to feel a gelling of my voice and my self-editing style that was a much cleaner, much more direct, more focused version. I’m very comfortable with my voice as a writer now, appreciating it for being less clever and tortured, perhaps, and more authentic.
Ramona:The characters seem to make it up as they go along, without a clear idea of how to be adults. They have options but they don’t use them in a mature way. Do you think this quality is typical of many people in their early thirties, or just a set of bohemian types? Do you think Santa Fe attracts this type of person?
Candelora:I think it’s maybe reflective of the sort of people who don’t follow the mainstream canon, who live a bit outside the norm and therefore don’t have the underpinnings of some kind of externally imposed structure to keep them on track. It’s probably less about their age than about that bohemian streak or maybe just a lack of maturity regardless of age. And yes, Santa Fe does seem to attract its share of dreamers and schemers and people who have a hard time being realistic.
Ramona:Did you live in San Miguel de Allende? If so, when? Did it influence Traveling Light?
Candelora:No, I’ve never been to San Miguel; I had visited Oaxaca several times in the early 1990s and had some interesting experiences there, which I drew on for the book. But my experience living in Key West in 1979 when I was 20, on a solo extended break from college at Michigan State University, was a major influence on the novel and also on the trajectory my adult life has taken. The idea of walking away from whatever your life has become and into something entirely new is a lifelong fascination for me, and I continue to believe that we all have the power to change our lives in the extreme with that one decision. And I love hearing about people who have created second chapters in their lives, who move across the country or across the globe, who leave stability and predictability in favor of adventure and spontaneity. Of course, you can also see in the book that I make a pretty thorough exploration of the dark side of that decision, its potential consequences and collateral damage.
Ramona:What has the book’s public reception been like?
Candelora:I’ve been thrilled to read really amazing and wonderful reviews, especially on my Amazon page, and many many people have told me particularly how deeply the characters and their situations touched them. Overall it’s been very positive, including the requests for a sequel.
Ramona:Do you have a sense of who your readers are?
Candelora:Hahaha, not at all!
Ramona:Do you think some non-New Mexicans have a tendency to romanticize Santa Fe? (Note: I’ve been accused of this!)
Candelora:The contemporary manufactured image of Santa Fe is explicitly designed for non-New Mexicans to romanticize it. Part of my frustration and challenge with this book was to try to see this mythical, tourism-industry “Santa Fe” with the kind of critical clarity that someone who came here with that romanticized vision in mind might have and over time learned to see beyond the illusion, complete with regrets and self-blame.
Ramona:Are you thinking of writing another novel?
Candelora:Not at this time. The lure of revisiting the characters with a “what happens next” openness is sometimes compelling, but I’m more interested in why people do what they do than in what happens to them, so I’d have to really work on that sequel plot. I do have a couple of other little projects that have been tucked away for a long time and perhaps someday when my life feels less complex I might find my way back to them. All my writing now is mainly about me working out some deep questions about life, using character and story to explore and explain things to myself. So that of course means it’ll happen when it happens and it’ll take as long as it takes. I worked on deadline for a long time and I don’t want to do that anymore, even self-imposed. It’s not a race.
Note: Traveling Light is available in Santa Fe at Collected Works and Op.Cit book stores. Also at any indie book store by asking them to order from IndieBound.org. Readers can also order via GoodReads and Amazon.
