Review: The City of Palaces. New Books. Chicago Pics. A Random Thought.

 Review:  The City of Palaces by Michael Nava

The City of Palaces
Michael Nava
Terrace Books, University of Wisconsin Press, 2014




Michael Nava published his first novel, The Little Death, in 1986. That book marked the debut of Henry Rios, a gay Chicano lawyer/detective who has become an iconic character in the crime fiction genre. The seven books in the Rios series, hailed as groundbreaking, have won six Lambda Literary Awards. The books recently were reissued in the Kindle format. In recognition of the excellence and popularity of Nava’s writing, he was the recipient of the 2000 Bill Whitehead Lifetime Achievement Award in LGBT literature. That year also marked the publication of the last book in the series, Rag and Bone, along with Nava's announcement that he had retired as a mystery writer. Lucha Corpi, one of the cornerstones of Chicana/Chicano crime fiction and a person obviously qualified to judge, has noted that many consider Nava to be one of the “grandfathers” of the Chicano mystery genre (along with Rolando Hinojosa, who published Partners in Crime in 1984. See Lucha’s Confessions of a Book Burner, page 55.)

The City of Palaces marks Nava’s return to book-length fiction, much to the relief of his many, many readers. And what a grand return it is.

Nava’s explanation of how he came to write this novel is worth repeating. Here are a few paragraphs from the author’s website:

Beginning in 1995, Nava started researching a novel about the life of silent film star Ramon Novarro, a Mexican immigrant who came to Hollywood in 1915 after his family fled their homeland during the Mexican Revolution. Novarro was one of the first generation of internationally famous movie stars, like Rudolph Valentino, Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin. Nava was drawn to Novarro not only because of their shared ethnic heritage but also because it was an open secret in Hollywood that Novarro was gay.
 
At the same time, he became interested in the Yaquis, an Indian tribe that inhabited the northwest state of Sonora along the border with Arizona. In the late nineteenth century, the Mexico government began to forcibly evict the Yaquis from their ancient homeland, a lush river valley at the edge of the Sonoran desert, to make way for Mexican settlers. But the Yaquis put up a fierce resistance and the Mexican government ultimately pursued a policy of extermination against the tribe that resulted in its virtual extinction. Nava’s great-grandparents were among the few Yaquis who had survived by escaping to Arizona where his grandfather, Ramón, was born in 1905.
 
Eventually, these interests converged and he began to write a novel that would tell the story of the Mexican Revolution, the near-genocide of the Yaquis, and the rise of silent film. Midway through his first draft, he recognized that this undertaking was too vast for a single book, so he conceived a series of novels called The Children of Eve, after the line in the Salve Regina addressed to Mary, the mother of Jesus: “To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve.” The first novel in that series is The City of Palaces, which is set in Mexico City in the years before and at the beginning of the 1910 Mexican Revolution.

At its heart, The City of Palaces is the love story of Alicia Gavilán and Miguel Sarmiento. Alicia is wealthy, religious, saintly, and beautiful but scarred (from smallpox.) Miguel is an atheistic doctor with a long family history of involvement in Mexico’s political scene. Miguel feels something like love at first sight when he encounters Alicia, but he struggles against his “manly” aversion to her scars. Alicia, on the other hand, may be spiritual and otherworldly, but she is sensual and most pragmatic. The two star-crossed lovers overcome obstacles put in their way by their families, the social stratification of early twentieth century Mexico, and their own inhibitions, fears, and prejudices. Yes, love conquers all.

A sure sign of excellent writing is that we read the words but see the images created by the author. As I read this book, I saw not only the decay and corruption of Mexico City at the end of the Díaz dictatorship, but I also met the people – the poor and oppressed masses that struggled together in the colonias and slums of the city, the wealthy elite hanging on to their fantasies of Europeanization and ostentatious glitter as their world collapsed, the passionate and somewhat naive revolutionaries who courageously rallied around the doomed Francisco Madero. The images are clear enough, and the writing is so direct and on point, that it does not take much to imagine this story as an HBO miniseries.

The novel sweeps through sixteen years of Mexican history. Nava has done his research, so the details are perfect. He hits high notes with his descriptions of neighborhoods, cafes and churches, references to historical figures such as Huerta, Zapata, Orozco, and Madero, and the sense of tumultuous change that was inescapable no matter how hard some tried to ignore it.

At the end, the book has transitioned to include the story of Alicia’s and Miguel’s child, José, described as a beautiful, sensitive boy who steals away from the safety of his grand “palace” to feed his secret desire for the new moving pictures, shown in dark and dirty alleys where only the most common people enter. Although there is tragedy at the end, there also is hope. The story finishes with these thoughts from Miguel: “[T]here appeared in the desert darkness an archway lit up with electric lights. It spelled out a greeting so simple in its unintentional arrogance he did not know whether the tears that filled his eyes were tears of anger or gratitude, but he wept them all the same as he spoke the words aloud: ‘Welcome to America.’” How many times has that scene been repeated by our own families?

Michael Nava tells a timeless story, a literary jewel waiting for La Bloga’s readers. I can only patiently anticipate the second novel in this series.

For another review of this book, see Michael Sedano’s post on La Bloga at this link.


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New Books

[Un]framing the "Bad Woman": Sor Juana, Malinche, Coyolxauhqui, and Other Rebels with a Cause
Alicia Gaspar De Alba

University of Texas Press - July, 2014

[from the the author's website]

I'm very proud of this collection of scholarly essays. You'll find pieces on Sor Juana, on la Malinche, on Chicana feminist artists and lesbian theorists, on the murdered girls and women of Juárez, as well as a rewriting of the Coyolxauhqui myth, and an opening letter to my paisana from the border, Gloria Anzaldúa, in gratitude for her lenguas de fuego. There are also 8 color plates and 37 black and white photos. Artwork includes different images by Alma Lopez, beginning with that fabulous cover she created for the occasion of the book's publication, as well as pieces by Ester Hernández, Yreina Cervantez, Liliana Wilson, Patssi Valdez, Laura Aguilar, Deliliah Montoya, Alma Gómez-Frith, Miguel Gandert, Alfonso Cano, the "Saint Jerome" of Leonardo da Vinci, the iconic "American Progress, 1872" by John Gast, and a painting of Juana Inés by my very own mother, Teyali Falcón that she created for the publication of Sor Juana's Second Dream.

Upcoming book talks/book signings for the author:

Bookworks Albuquerque

July 29, 6-8pm

BookWoman

Austin, TX, August 28, 7pm

Hearts & Hands: Creating Community in Violent Times, Second Edition
Luis J. Rodriguez
7 Stories Press - July, 2014

[from the author]

Join us in celebrating the book release of Hearts & Hands: Creating Community in Violent Times, Second Edition this Saturday, July 26, 2014 from 5pm to 8pm.

Live art by Rah Azul and silent art auction fundraiser during reception beginning at 5pm followed by author reading at 6pm. The event is free to the public, donations welcome.

The event will begin with a reception that will include live art by Rah Azul, a self-taught painter, muralist and poet based in the San Fernando Valley. Rah Azul's work is featured on the cover of the new Hearts & Hands book. There will be limited prints available of the book cover artwork for sale. The silent art auction will feature a special edition by this featured artist.

"Hearts & Hands is a book that belongs in the hands of any person or organization wanting to understand and work with youth and community in a respectful, meaningful way."

-Trini Rodriguez, Co-Founder of Tia Chucha's Centro Cultural & Bookstore

Tia Chucha's Centro Cultural & Bookstore | 13197 Gladstone Ave., Unit A | Sylmar | CA | 91342
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Chicago Pics

Many of you know that as part of La Bloga's 10th anniversary commemoration several bloquistas participated in a panel at the International Latina/o Studies Conference. See Amelia Montes's most recent post for more info about and photos of the event. The panel invigorated and inspired all of us, and many of our readers and friends gathered to talk about and help us celebrate La Bloga. Seven of our eleven contributors made it to the Windy City, and we had a great time together. We hope to do something similar again. No rhyme or reason, here are a few photos taken in Chicago. 

Toddlin' Town

Palmer House Stairwell

Millennium Park - Selfie

Millennium Park - Face

Millennium Park - Heads

Dessert at Zapatista - Free for La Bloga!

Long Live the Blues!

From the Galería Sin Fronteras Exhibit at the National Museum of Mexican Art

Wrapping Up the Panel

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Random Thought While Jogging Around Sloan's Lake

One of the regrettable things that has happened to Denver’s North Side, where I've lived for more than thirty years, is the rise and victory of the “suburban aesthetic”: boxy, boring housing lined up in rows; a uniform “non-conformist” style from clothes to music; restaurants that are destinations rather than good places to grab a bite to eat; an obsession about “making it,” a flaccid, common denominator cultural perspective. A great neighborhood has to be more than that.



Later.

Review: City of Palaces. Mail Bag.

Review: Michael Nava. The City of Palaces. Madison, Wisconsin : Terrace Books, a trade imprint of the University of Wisconsin Press, 2014.
ISBN: 9780299299101 (cloth : alk. paper)0299299104 (cloth : alk. paper)

Michael Sedano

I was prepared to be unfair to Michael Nava, knowing The City of Palaces wasn’t going to be another Henry Rios detective novel, and I really liked those Henry Rios stories. But then I read The City of Palaces, an historical novel set among Mexico’s elites in the declining years of the Porfiriato through 1913. Sorry, Henry.

Mexico’s in steep decline. Marble and steel on the buildings, decay inside. Excess collapsed onto itself, the old ways become increasingly effete. Despised Indians with their brown skins and Nahuatl-speaking ways pack into barrios that sweep with disease. Government jobs safeguarding public health go to friends of friends. An angel of mercy infiltrates the prisons and barrios to offer hope and a few coins from her family’s shrinking treasury.

Ends justify means but they can’t buy anteojos to read the handwriting on the wall. The handsome doctor meets the veiled woman inside the prison his pamphleteering father refuses to leave. She’s hideously pockmarked from smallpox. They hook up. Chisme has them beauty and the gorgon but they truly are love. Not "in love." This is a book about Love with the big L.

Their marriage prospers in the course of the novel and the characters' humanity. Their son is two spirit, his mother wishes him happiness. Dad takes him the heck out of Mexico for the United States.

Effete societies can barely reproduce themselves. Mexico in 1897 sees a tiny aristocracy held together by the glue of appearances and free room and board for indian servants. I wonder if Nava cut out a section on casta discrimination. An inbred prejudice lurks just beyond the characters’ ken but not their vocabulary, their attitude and idiom effectively constructed by Nava to display the subtle infection of the culture.

Nava makes sure to bring out Mexico’s Indian-killing history. There’s a parade of captive Yaqui warriors, marched past looking angry, not subdued. Early on, father Cáceres tells Sarmiento,

“We are the aggressors. The Yaquis are only attempting to defend their ancestral homeland against Don Porfirio’s army. It is no different than when the Mexica resisted Cortés.”
“Would you have had the Mexica prevail” Sarmiento asked, genuinely curious.
“What’s done is done,” Cáceres replied. “My concern is not with the Indians who were killed three hundred and eighty years ago, but with those who are dying today.”

Porfirio Diaz makes a cameo appearance as a distant ghost of his former self. Francisco Madero, affectionately called Don Pancho, and Victoriano Huerta play significant roles. Nava pens a defense of Madero as a noble but Pollyanaish bumbler controlled by his minions. We see Huerta passed out face-down drunk in an upscale café where the doctor unmans Huerta, making a lifelong enemy.

The love story between the scarred Alicia—she wears smallpox as her nopal en la frente behind heavy Kabuki-like creams and opaque veils--and the soul-scarred Dr. Sarmiento has magical moments. There’s a lifelong tension between the couple that begins in the man’s hang-up on appearance. More tension grows of her unabiding faith in her Catholicism and his scientist’s training—he studied at the Sorbonne and Heidelberg—and his soulful atheism.

Readers will recognize the set-up of the mutual confession scene that kicks the novel into high gear, but will want to sit back and see how the skillful author handles the material. He pulls it off without too much “show me yours” corn.

Though the confessions fashion mutual absolution for their pasts, the effects linger over the novel. His cowardly criminal act shrinks compared to his career. Her sin was her love for a stable indio clashing against society’s conventions. Alicia sees her smallpox and mother’s cruelty as penance for sinning against generations of costumbre. The doctor fumes that it was preventable but crap like propriety keeps doctors from touching their patients. But this is what it is. War, slaughter, disintegration, death.

Henry Rios is safe. If Michael Nava wants to resurrect the guy. The City of Palaces, according to the author’s afterword, is number one of four novels; It's to be Michael Nava’s Mexican diaspora saga. It’s something completely different, certainly in Chicano Literature. Gore Vidal’s US history novels come to mind as precoursors to this series in US Literature.

To be fair to author Michael Nava, The City of Palaces stands as a constant—or for as long as you have to wait for the second novel—reminder that there’s nothing like a good historical novel to wrap yourself around this summer. At 359 pages, it’s a satisfying and thought-provoking escape into today’s yesterday.

Mail bag
Cinco Puntos Author in Publisher’s Weekly Op-ed

Blogueros Rudy Ch. Garcia and Ernest Hogan recently shook the conscience of publishing professionals by pointing to the de facto exclusion of raza writers and raza characters from speculative fiction publishing.

La Bloga recently reported on the day UC Riverside brought together nearly every living chicana chicano sci-fi/speclit writer. Garcia and Hogan were joined by Mario Acevedo, Beatrice Pito, Rosaura Sánchez, and Jesús Treviño.

There are others, but not many more. Garcia observes, In 16 years from 1976-91, 2 latino novelists were published. In the last 2 years (2012-2013), 11 latino spec authors were published, equal to the 11 published in the prior 16 years (1995-2011).

One solution these authors come up with, they’re going to keep writing and looking to help others looking to break into genre publishing. Similarly attuned, Marcela Landres says raza need to seek careers as gatekeepers--editors, readers, factota, at the big publishers.

Désirée Zamorano is the latest Latina author to catch a wave on the rising tide of inclusivity in United States publishing. And, like the consejos coming out of her fellow genre writers, the new Cinco Puntos author recommends jumping into the churn with your own stuff.

Writing in the current Publisher’s Weekly, Zamorano says:

We Latinas read books, write books, buy books—I wish I could buy more! Very often, instead of finding a vibrant tapestry—similar to the neighborhoods I live and work in—I find a monochromatic world on the page, not very different from that already displayed on the laptop and the movie screen. It is more than disheartening that my demographic remains invisible, this population that was here in so many states before statehood, the dominant ethnic group in California, the emerging dominant group in the country. It is infuriating, enraging. It fills me with so much anger that I become inarticulate.
Then I take a deep breath. And get writing.

Zamarano’s first trade novel, The Amado Women is a recent addition to Cinco Puntos catalog. Her 2011 Latina detective thriller, Human Cargo, makes a worthy addition to anyone’s summer reading list.


Mail bag
Heartland Writers Organized

From Kansas City MO, news of a leadership change at Latino Writers Collective. Gabriela Lemmons retires, Miguel M. Morales steps up to President the group. Joining Morales are Gustavo Adolfo Ayabar – Vice President; Maria Vasquez Boyd – Treasurer; Gloria Martinez Adams – Secretary; Jose Faus; Chico Sierra; Sofiana Olivera.

The group holds a general membership meeting on June 18 at The Writers Place. The same venue hosts a June 28 reading featuring Linda Rodriguez & Sergio Troncoso. For details on the group visit them on Facebook.

An Opportunity. New Books From Old Friends. Good News Bit.

From Robert P. Moreira - riverSedge Literary Journal

Friends and Colleagues,

riverSedge, a literary journal that some of you may remember, is poised to resume publication through the English Department and MFA Program at the University of Texas Pan American. With a 37-year history, riverSedge has a proud past and, I hope, a bright future publishing art and literature from the best writers and artists today.

To do so I would appreciate your help. Please help spread the word that riverSedge is seeking the best unpublished short fiction, poetry, scripts, art work, creative nonfiction and graphic literature. We begin with contests for best fiction and best poetry with $1,000 prizes in each category. All submissions in these two categories will automatically be entered in the contests.

The fine print: persons currently affiliated with UT Pan American, UT Brownsville, and South Texas College are barred from submitting to riverSedge. Only submissions sent through the online service Submittable will be considered. Deadline for submissions is May 10, 2014.

Submission guidelines and instructions on how to submit can be found at https://riversedge.submittable.com/submit.

Thanks in advance for helping make riverSedge a success!

Sincerely,

Robert P. Moreira, Managing Editor

For the contest, send up to 3 poems or 1 short story (5,000 words max); simultaneous submissions are okay; submissions in Spanish are okay; anyone affiliated (staff, faculty, student) with the University of Texas Pan American, University of Texas Brownsville, or South Texas College is ineligible to participate; all poetry and fiction submissions will automatically be entered in their respective contests. 

riverSedge is also accepting creative nonfiction, script-writing, graphic literature, and art. Our editors will consider work in Spanish and English and anything in between.
 

Deadline is May 10, 2014
 

Upload your submissions at riversedge.submittable.com. 

New Books From Old Friends

The City of Palaces: A Novel
Michael Nava
University of Wisconsin Press/Terrace Books - March, 2014

“An extraordinary portrait of one of the most critical periods in Mexico’s history. Nava breathes life into the stories of political, cultural, and social revolutionaries as they navigate change in their country and within themselves. This is a breakthrough novel.”
—Rigoberto González, author of Autobiography of My Hungers

[from the publisher]
In the years before the Mexican Revolution, Mexico is ruled by a tiny elite that apes European culture, grows rich from foreign investment, and prizes racial purity. The vast majority of Mexicans, who are native or of mixed native and Spanish blood, are politically powerless and slowly starving to death. Presiding over this corrupt system is Don Porfirio Díaz, the ruthless and inscrutable president of the Republic.

Against this backdrop, The City of Palaces opens in a Mexico City jail with the meeting of Miguel Sarmiento and Alicia Gavilán. Miguel is a principled young doctor, only recently returned from Europe but wracked by guilt for a crime he committed as a medical student ten years earlier. Alicia is the spinster daughter of an aristocratic family. Disfigured by smallpox, she has devoted herself to working with the city’s destitute. This unlikely pair—he a scientist and atheist and she a committed Christian—will marry. Through their eyes and the eyes of their young son, José, readers follow the collapse of the old order and its bloody aftermath.

The City of Palaces is a sweeping novel of interwoven lives: Miguel and Alicia; José, a boy as beautiful and lonely as a child in a fairy tale; the idealistic Francisco Madero, who overthrows Díaz but is nevertheless destroyed by the tyrant’s political system; and Miguel’s cousin Luis, shunned as a “sodomite.” A glittering mosaic of the colonial past and the wealth of the modern age, The City of Palaces is a story of faith and reason, cathedrals and hovels, barefoot street vendors and frock-coated businessmen, grand opera and silent film, presidents and peasants, the living and the dead.

Michael Nava is the author of an acclaimed series of seven crime novels featuring Henry Rios, a gay Latino criminal defense lawyer. The series has won six Lambda Literary Awards. In 2001 he received the Bill Whitehead Lifetime Achievement Award in LGBT literature. A native Californian and the grandson of Mexican immigrants, Nava lives near San Francisco.
“A magnificent epic about family, politics, art, revolution, and hope. This is a masterly work of old-fashioned storytelling, rich and spacious and moving, a novel that deserves to be compared to The Leopard, Love in the Time of Cholera, and Doctor Zhivago, but with its own intimacy and grandeur. I fell in love with these people and did not want to say goodbye to them.”
—Christopher Bram, author of Exiles in America 

Confessions of a Book Burner: Personal Essays and Stories
Lucha Corpi
Arte Público Press - March, 2014


La Bloga recently reported on Lucha's new book, but I want to give this book and my friend another shout out.  I know Lucha has been working on it for some time and, personally, I am eager to see the finished product. Hope to get it soon. In the publisher's words: "In addition to examining a variety of topics relevant to today’s world -- including race, discrimination and feminism -- Corpi relates riveting family tales of mountain men and cannibals, preachers and soothsayers, old-style machos and women who more than hold their own. These confessions offer an intriguing vision of the rich and complex world of an acclaimed poet and novelist."

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A while back I hinted at some potential good news. Turns out that what I thought would happen didn't. But, something much better did. I just signed a contract for the publication of a collection of my short stories -- working title is White Devils and Cockroaches.  I'll have more details soon. 

Later.

Guest Opinion - Latina/o Literature and the Literary Establishment: A Study in White Privilege

The first time I read today's guest article I knew that it belonged on La Bloga. Michael Nava's perspective mirrors and expands on many of the positions taken by La Bloga's contributors over the years. In fact, it can be said that La Bloga was created as one response to the problems described by Nava that, unfortunately, continue to plague the Latina/o literary world. Thank you, Michael, for allowing us the opportunity to offer your analysis and observations to our readers.

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Michael Nava is an attorney and writer. His debut novel, The Little Death (1986) introduced readers to Henry Rios, a gay Latino criminal defense lawyer. Six Rios novels followed — Goldenboy (1988), Howtown (1990), The Hidden Law (1992), The Death of Friends (1994), The Burning Plain (1996), and Rag and Bone (2000). The books were awarded a total of six Lambda Literary Awards and in 2000 Nava was given the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement in gay and lesbian literature. With Rag and Bone, Nava announced the end of his career as a mystery writer.

When Nava began a novel that would tell the story of the Mexican Revolution, the near-genocide of the Yaquis, and the rise of silent film, he quickly realized that the story was too big for a single book, so he conceived a series of novels called The Children of Eve. The first novel in that series is The City of Palaces (2014), which is set in Mexico City in the years before and at the beginning of the 1910 Mexican Revolution.

Nava has had a distinguished career as an appellate lawyer in the California court system. He has been a tireless advocate for greater diversity in the legal profession.

He currently is at work on the second book – as yet untitled – in The Children of Eve series.
The following essay is adapted from a keynote speech Nava delivered in San Antonio to a sectional meeting of the American Literature Association on the Latino/a literary landscape in February 2014.
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My thesis is a simple one: the literary establishment rests on structures of white privilege — which in turn reflects white supremacist beliefs — and, accordingly, neglects, ignores and trivializes the work of Latino and Latina writers. In the process of doing so, the literary establishment is closing its doors to an enormous audience of potential readers — the growing Latino and Latina population. Like the Republican Party, the literary establishment seems willfully unable to understand and adapt to the dramatic on-going demographic shift that will, by 2043, see whites lose their majority status and Latinos become the largest population in a “majority/minority” America. Consequently, just as Republicans appear to be doomed to political irrelevance, the literary establishment seems intent on achieving cultural irrelevance.

Let me begin with some definitions. Latinos/as are not a monolithic group and neither are their writers. When I speak of Latino/a literature I am referring mainly to Latino/a writers descended from the immigrants of Latin American countries that are the most racially mixed, particularly Mexico. It is these communities — Mexican, Puerto Rican, Dominican and Central American — that, in this country, are the most impoverished and which suffer the greatest discrimination because, simply, they are visibly the most “non-white.” Also, because I am the grandson of Mexican immigrants and Mexicans comprise the largest group of immigrants to the United States from any country, I will be speaking in detail about Mexico and Mexican-Americans. By literary establishment, I refer to the New York publishing industry, the New York Times book review section and its echo chambers, libraries and MFA programs all of which, collectively, continue to exert enormous, if decreasing, influence on which writers and which books are published, reviewed, distributed and read.

Let me speak for a moment about race. Race is as much a fiction as national borders, but like national borders, people have come to believe that race is a real thing that demarcates human beings into specific categories and that one racial category -- the so-called white race – is intellectually, morally, and perhaps even physically superior to other races. This latter belief is the false but pernicious and persistent doctrine of white supremacy. Let me quote Samuel P. Huntington, the chairman of the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, who writes: “American was created by 17th-and 18th-century settlers who were overwhelmingly white, British, and Protestant.” According to Huntington, these Northern European immigrants created a culture whose key elements were “the English language; Christianity; religious commitment; English concepts of the rule of law . . . individualism, the work ethic, and the belief that humans have the ability and the duty to try to create a heaven on earth, a ‘city on a hill.’ ” There you have it; the archetypal white self-definition at its most self-congratulatory — fair-skinned, hard-working, God-fearing, Northern Europeans infused with a sense of fairness and self-reliance. This definition of white virtues can only exist in contrast to the perceived lack of these qualities in other races. Professor Joe Feagin writes: “The system of white-created racism divides human beings and separates those defined as the ‘superior race’ against those subordinated as the ‘inferior race.’” We have seen florid examples of this white supremacist doctrine in the recent statements of Donald Trump and in the positive response to those statements from a sizeable portion of the Republican Party.

The charge of racial inferiority against Mexicans and Mexican-Americans probably first originated in the nineteenth century doctrine of “manifest destiny” whereby the white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite set out to fulfill what they asserted was God’s plan for the United States to appropriate the North American continent to its greater glory. What was called in my grammar school history books the Mexican-American war is known in Mexico, more accurately, as the U.S. Invasion. Much like George Bush’s war against Iraq, the war against Mexico was invented on a pretext. Its purpose was to annex what were then the northern states of the Mexican Republic. As an editorial in the newspaper, El Republicano, thundered: “A government . . . that starts a war without a legitimate motive is responsible for all its evils and horrors. The bloodshed, the grief of families, the pillaging, the destruction . . . . Such is the case of the U.S. Government for having initiated the unjust war it is waging against us today.”

The shamelessness of the American invasion of a peaceable, non-threatening neighbor was justified in part by white supremacist beliefs in Mexican inferiority. For example, Stephen Austin, a founder of Texas, viewed Mexicans as a “mongrel Spanish-Indian and negro race,” while Senator John Calhoun worried that annexing Mexican territory would mean the incorporation of a “colored and mixed breed race” because “ours is a government of the white man,” and “in the whole history of man . . . there is no instance whatever of any civilized colored race, of any shade, being found equal to the establishment and maintenance of free government."

These beliefs in the racial inferiority of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans continue to this very moment and are, of course, most dramatically reflected in the xenophobia that surrounds undocumented Mexican immigrants. That xenophobia is clearly propelled by white supremacist beliefs expressed with only slightly more subtlety than they were in the nineteenth century. For example, in his book Alien Nation, Peter Brimelow writes that “the American nation has always had a specific ethnic core. And that core has been white.” He contrasts this with what he characterizes as the “alien” immigrants pouring in from Mexico. More to the point, a California legislator justified denying the children of undocumented immigrants public education because such immigrants “are perhaps on the lower scale of humanity.” I could go on but I think I’ve made my point: there remains a persistent belief among whites that Latino/as and, specifically, Mexicans and Mexican-Americans are racially inferior.

Of course, individual whites will, with absolute conviction and in utter good faith, deny they entertain this belief and maintain, therefore, that they are not racist. They would be appalled to be grouped in with Trump and his followers. This is the sticking point in conversations about race between whites and Latino/as and other people of color. Most whites view racism as a matter of individual beliefs while most people of color see racism as the product of deeply held and persistent attitudes that infect the entire structure of American society whether or not individual whites consciously entertain those attitudes. But I would go farther and challenge whites who say they do not harbor racist beliefs to ask themselves, truthfully, what are the first images that spring to their minds when they think about Mexicans or Mexican-American?

Do they see someone like me, a Stanford-educated lawyer and published novelist, or do they see maids and gardeners speaking pidgin English or a cholo, tattooed gangbanger or perhaps small brown people picking tomatoes? I would put my money on the latter; for these stereotypes are so deeply ingrained in the culture that even those whites who sincerely believe they are without prejudice against Mexicans subscribe to these narrow and ultimately racist depictions. As Professor Feagin explains: “Throughout United States history, ordinary white Americans have usually learned their stereotype views of the racialized ‘other’ from those in authority, including parents, politicians, teachers, clergy, business leaders, and media authorities.” To judge people based on false and negative stereotypes whether individually or institutionally is racist whether you do it consciously or unconsciously. White racism is never that far below the surface, particularly among so-called progressive or liberals; witness the controversy over the confrontation between Black Lives Matter activists and the Sanders and Clinton campaigns.

And this brings me to my point about the racism of the literary establishment which, in turn, is based on the principal of white supremacy. This principle is expressed in various ways: by the racial composition of the literary establishment which is overwhelmingly white; the unspoken but very clear assumption that the experience of white, middle-class writers is universal while that of people of color is parochial and of limited interest to publishers, reviewers and readers; and attitudes that expose the establishment’s belief that Latino/as are constitutionally inferior to whites.

With respect to the first point, let me start with some statistics. The first come from The Culture and Commerce of Publishing in the 21st Century published in 2007 by the Stanford University Press. Looking at 2002 data from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the authors found that 81.8% of people employed in book publishing were white and only 18.2% were people of color; of this number only 6.2% were Latino/as. The authors observed: “What is clear is that . . . minorities are underrepresented in the industry relative to their proportion of the population, which is 30.9%.” Moreover, “whites tend to be more represented in the higher-paying, decision-making categories, while minorities are proportionally more represented in the operative and laborer categories.”

The under-representation of people of color in editorial positions in publishing reflects, in part, the fact that entry level wages are so low. Thus, those entry level workers require family financial support that is simply unavailable to a Latina from a poor family who is the first in her family to graduate from college. The authors of the book quote the-then CEO of Henry Holt who said, “The system of assistant editors is a self-recruiting system for the cultural establishment of this country . . . . You can only get a job if your parents subsidize you or pay your rents.” Then, too, of course, publishing is an old-boy and old-girl system where contacts are crucial; the authors quote the director of a program at CUNY dedicated to bringing diversity to the industry who said, “it is hard to place interns because the business is so clubby . . . The children of editors and writers get most of the internships.”

The same situation prevails among librarians who are, of course, crucial to book sales. In a February 2013 editorial entitled Diversity Never Happens, the editor of the Library Journal wrote: “African-Americans and Hispanics are some of the strongest supporters of libraries, and yet they continue to be thinly represented among the ranks of librarians.” He noted that while data shows blacks and Latinos are more likely to use libraries on a monthly basis than whites, of the 118,666 credentialed librarians in the country, 6,160 are black and only 3,661 are Latino or, collectively, about 8 percent. “That number,” he wrote, “is lamentable,” and “hurts the profession and, more important, hurts our society.”

Now, let’s look at who gets reviewed. In a 2012 study of book reviews published by The New York Times in the preceding year, African-American author Roxanne Gay concluded that 90% of books reviewed in the Times in 2011 were written by white writers. Gay was attacked for her unscientific methodology even though she herself acknowledged that her data was incomplete but no one has seriously challenged her underlying conclusion: white writers are vastly over-represented both as reviewers and as the subject of book reviews in proportion to the percentage of whites in the population to the detriment of reviewers and writers of color.

It is interesting that except for librarians, evidently no other branch of the literary establishment keeps statistics about the diversity, or appalling lack of diversity, in its composition. I was unable to find any statistics about the racial make-up of literary agents except for an anecdotal study from the late 1990s in an article called Dearth of Hispanic Literary Agents Frustrates Writers by Ivan Diaz. Diaz reported that neither the literary agencies listed in the Literary Market Place nor the roster of agents in the Association of Authors’ Representatives listed a single Latino/a agent. I was also unable to find any statistics about the racial composition of students or faculty at the nation’s MFA programs in creative writing. This statistical silence is itself an indictment of the literary establishment which purports to be more than just a collection of affiliated professions but a cultural gatekeeper. Diversity is not, ultimately, simply about numbers but it begins with numbers. The failure of the literary establishment to submit to any kind of self-examination regarding its racial composition is, to my thinking, simply an aspect of its unwillingness to look at its own systemic racism and the effects of that racism on the larger culture.

Nonetheless, I say with complete confidence, that if such statistics were available about agents and MFA faculty and students they would demonstrate that those groups, like editors, librarians and writers who get reviewed in The New York Times, are overwhelmingly white.

The racial composition of the literary establishment has two profound consequences for Latino/a writers and other writers of color. The practical consequence is obvious: if virtually every agent, editor, book reviewer and librarian is a member of the white middle-class, then Latino/a writers are going to have a much harder time at getting representation, being published, reviewed and recommended because their experience will not resonate at a visceral level with these agents, editors, book reviewers and librarians. A secondary consequence is that, to the extent these white members of the literary establishment relate at all to the Latino/a experience, it will be to stereotypes. Thus, Latino/a writers who do not treat their material in stereotypical manners to which white people relate – for example, the big, happy Latino family saga or magic realism – will not find sympathetic readers in the white literary establishment. Laura Atkins, an editor of children’s books who worked at American and English publishing houses, touches on both these issues in her on-line essay: What’s the Story? Reflections on White Privilege in the Publication of Children’s Books. She notes that what drives the acquisition and publication of children’s book is the “perceived market requirements” that led publishers – even those who were ostensibly committed to multicultural children’s books – to alter texts “often by making them conform to a more general market: one which represents the dominant and traditional expectations of children’s literature.” She concludes: “The question here is not about particular racist individuals who work in the publishing industry, rather, this is an institutional problem. The way in which the acquisition, development, distribution and marketing of children’s books currently takes place is a system based on patterns so pervasive they seem to become natural, inevitable and justifiable. I would argue that most children’s publishing houses currently exist to serve the interests and the needs of the white majority culture.”

Although Atkins is writing about children’s publishers, I would argue that her observations are true of the publishing industry as a whole and of the other branches of the literary establishment. Indeed, the appeal to the perceived market is a frequent justification by white editors for rejecting works by writers of color.

My recent experience with my last novel The City of Palaces is not unusual. Now remember, I had published seven novels, the last five with New York houses, and my books had been widely reviewed and won awards. The City of Palaces is an historical novel set in Mexico City between 1895 and 1913, the years just before and at the beginning of the Mexican Revolution. The central characters are a married Mexican couple as are all the important secondary characters. There are no Americans in the book except in cameos. The book traces a particularly complicated period of Mexican history, which saw the collapse of the 40-year dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz, the election of the liberal president, Francisco Madero, and the army coup that deposed and killed him. It is, shall we say, extremely mexicano in theme, scope and message.

My former agent, a long-time respected figure in New York publishing circles, tried for a year to interest various New York editors in publishing the novel. Half of them did not bother to reply; the other half turned it down. They didn’t turn it down because it was poorly written or uninteresting. They turned it down because they could not imagine anyone who would want to read such a novel. Or, as one of them said in his rejection letter, “While the novel’s conceit is smart and Michael Nava is an insightful writer . . . I simply can’t say that I see the readership for this novel . . . ”

There are 33.7 million Latinos of Mexican descent living in the United States so I must assume that what this editor meant was that he couldn’t see a white readership for the novel. The view expressed by this editor, who undoubtedly and in good faith would reject the label of racist, is, nonetheless, racist. First, it reflects a view that Latinos do not constitute an audience for serious literature, which, in turn, is based on stereotypical and racist views of Latinos. Second, it does a grave disservice to white readers by assuming they would not be interested in works that do not cater to their immediate experience. My story had a happy ending: I was published by the University of Wisconsin Press, which has a deep and serious commitment to Latino/a literature. Moreover, the novel was a finalist for the 2014 Lambda Literary award for best gay novel and won the International Latino Literary award for best novel. But there must be many first time Latino/a writers who are simply unable to penetrate the systematic racism of the literary establishment and to get a fair hearing.

The white supremacist foundation of the literary establishment is also evident in the belief, unspoken but clearly pervasive, that the experience of the white, middle-class writer has universal significance while that of Latino/a and other writers of color does not. On this point, let me quote an interview that Pulitzer-prize winning novelist Junot Diaz gave a couple of years ago when he was asked the question, “Do you think you’ve gotten through and away from that marginalized ‘immigrant’ [writer] niche?” He said: “ I don’t think you transcend white supremacy. You don’t need to be a cultural anthropologist . . . to understand that systems of aesthetic evaluation are over inscribed by white supremacist ideologies. White supremacy does everything possible to erase its own . . . tiny minority status by attempting to argue that this is universal, that this is indispensable; when in fact it is just another minority literature.” He goes on: “What we are talking about is racialized privilege. The invisible hand of inequality, which turns the pages, which cranks the movies . . . mixes the ink. A writer like [Jonathan] Franzen, with each coming generation looks more and more . . . like exactly what he is . . . a white minority writer.”

Finally, the white literary establishment harbors attitudes towards and beliefs about the Latino/a community that seem superficially paradoxical but are, in fact, motivated by the same racist attitudes. The first is the one expressed by the editor who rejected The City of Palaces in the letter I quoted above: Latino/as don’t read, therefore, publishers assume that books with themes of interest to that community will inevitably fail. This in turn seems to be based on the notion that Latino/as are poorer and less well-educated than whites are. While it is true that many segments of the Latino/a community face economic challenges, it is not true that we are a simple race of maids and gardeners whose main entertainment is the telenovela. Among the millions of Latino/as there is an emerging middle class. Indeed, a 2013 study by the Pew Hispanic Center reports that 69% of Latino/a high school graduates in the class of 2012 enrolled in college, two percentage points higher than their white counterparts. As the first person from my family to attend college, I do not minimize the many financial, psychological and cultural challenges that lie ahead for these students, but this trend underscores the determination of the Latino/a community to achieve what used to be called the American Dream. Yet the literary establishment persists in its stereotypical beliefs that we are an uneducated people who do not read.

At the same time, publishers wring their hands about how to appeal to the Latino/a market. Often, the question becomes how to appeal to Spanish-speaking Latino/as using the Spanish-language media in the United States. But this itself reflects a profound ignorance of the Latino/a community. Although the retention of Spanish is a point of pride for millions of Latino families, the fact is that English is the main language for the Latino/a community. For example, a recent Pew Hispanic Center study revealed that 82% of Latino/a adults consume their news in English. Both these beliefs – Latino/as do not read, but if they do they read in Spanish – demonstrate the underlying racism of a literary establishment that cannot be bothered to examine its assumptions about the Latino/a community much less to bring them in line to the facts on the ground.

What should be the response of Latino/a writers and readers to the racism of the literary establishment? Well, one response is to keep calling it out, as I have tried to do here. The kind of flaccid liberalism that prevails in the precincts of that establishment does seem to respond to guilt. So, yes, we should shame them at every opportunity, hold them accountable for their choices and demand explanations. On the whole, while this might result in some expanded tokenism, I am pessimistic that the literary establishment can reform itself so that it starts to look like the emerging, multiracial culture. This is because real diversity requires an actual and meaningful surrender of privilege. One column of review space in the New York Times Book Review section devoted to a Latina writer is one less column available to a white male writer. It seems unlikely to me, when push comes to shove, that that’s going to happen.

What we Latino/a writers and readers need to do is to create an alternative literary establishment that brings together writers and readers. The outlines of this alternative establishment already exist, some in more embryonic form than others. There is a young generation of Latino and Latina scholars at the country’s colleges and universities who recognize in a visceral way the importance of Latina/o literature and who are and will produce important studies of that literature. There are on-line Latino/a writers groups and literary festivals that celebrate Latino/a literature. There are a handful of publishers like Arte Publico in Texas and academic presses like the University of Wisconsin Press that give Latino/a writers a place for their work in the face of indifference from the NY publishing industry.

I would also like to see the Latino/a equivalent of the Lambda Literary Foundation. The LLF nurtures, promotes and preserves LGBT literature in a number of concrete ways. It annually presents the Lambda Literary Awards; it sponsors an LGBT Emerging Writer retreat where young writers come to be taught and mentored by established writers; it publishes a monthly on-line magazine that comprehensively reviews LGBT writers; and its Writers in School program brings LGBT writers into the public schools. A similar Latino/a literary organization could become a clearing house for all the individual efforts that are now slowly creating our own literary establishment.

When I think of my Latino/a community I am always reminded of the passage from the Gospel of Mark where Jesus says: “Have you not read this Scripture: ‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.’ ” We Latino/as are the stone this culture has, in so many ways, rejected but our time is coming, indeed in places like California and Texas, it is already here. We will be the cornerstone of a new and invigorated United States. And, as part of that new and invigorated country, and, notwithstanding our treatment by the literary establishment, we are and will continue to create a literature that reflects, celebrates and explores our culture and our history. It is a great honor to be a Latino or Latina writer at this moment in history; now let us go out and do our work.

_______________________________________________________________________________

Thanks again, Michael. 

I've said it before -- Latinas/os will save the U.S.

Happy Birthday, Feliz Cumpleaños to La Bloga.  A grand 11 years old on November 28.  ¡Ajua!

Also on Saturday, Nov. 28 - Indies First - part of Small Business Saturday. Support your independent bookstores wherever you are. I'll be at the Tattered Cover, Colfax store, Denver, Saturday morning as an "honorary bookseller." Drop by - promote literacy.

Later.

The Coiled Serpent: An Interview with the Poetry Anthology’s Creators

As already discussed here on La Bloga in a lovely review by Olga García Echeverría, Tía Chucha Press will publish this week a landmark poetry anthology, The Coiled Serpent: Poets Arising from the Cultural Quakes and Shifts of Los Angeles. I am blessed to be one of the editors of this new book along with the very talented Neelanjana Banerjee and Ruben J. Rodriguez. The Coiled Serpent includes a powerful, eloquent introduction by the press’s founder, Los Angeles Poet Laureate Luis J. Rodriguez. Of course, without the vision and poetic reach of Luis, this anthology would not have been born.

Of this anthology, Ohio State Professor Frederick Luis Aldama observes: “The dexterous hands of this high-octane trio of editors pull together in one exquisite volume LA’s finest of polymorphous polyglot poetic voices. The 150-plus poets disparately drop us into the sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and touch of our planet’s capital: the megalopolis of LA with its hybrid, polylingual, and interstitial peoples. As we brush up with and enter into the lives of the young and old, workers and artists, border crossers and code-shifters…. Persians, Asians, Latinos, African Americans, and all sorts in between, great seismic quakes of creativity invite us to feel life at its most sand-dirt blasting harshness as well as its most soothing and sweet. With The Coiled Serpent we feel the cyclonic force of poetic talent at the epicenter of change in the making of tomorrow’s planetary republic of letters.”

The Coiled Serpent will have its formal release event on March 30 at the Ace Hotel in downtown Los Angeles the week of AWP’s annual conference (more on the conference below).

In honor of The Coiled Serpent’s release, I posed two questions to Neelanjana Banerjee, Ruben J. Rodriguez and Luis J. Rodriguez. Here are their responses:

Which poems particularly touched you and why?

NEELANJANA BANERJEE: There were so many poems that touched me in this anthology. As an editor, anthology work is always about the lovely surprise of discovering new writers through the submission process and the joy of curating writers that you admire. In terms of the surprise, one of my favorite poets that I discovered through the anthology process was Yago S. Cura, who writes a series of LA Country Jail Sonnets, which come from his time as a teacher there. Of the poets whose work I was already aware of, I was especially moved by Xochitl Bermejo’s work about Chavez Ravine, and also her “The Boys of Summer” which draws connections between young people globally—from LA to Palestine. And I was proud to bring writers like the amazing Douglas Kearny to the anthology, since he is one of the poets putting LA on the map as a center for creative work right now.

 

Neelanjana Banerjee 

RUBEN J. RODRIGUEZ: Of the many poems about earthquakes that we received for this anthology, “The Valley and Family Tectonic” by Haley Laningham stands out to me as a particularly powerful one. Laningham equates tectonic shifts to familial breakdowns, such that both an earthquake and a father’s hand slamming an alarm clock can “halt the orbit of breaths through the rooms and rattle the whole home.” As a child there is no difference between the literal ruptures that occur underground and the emotional quakes that occur within—both shift one’s world. And Laningham’s piece, with a backdrop of the Northridge earthquake of ‘94, takes me back to the earth-shattering fears of childhood: of a father’s impending anger, of home’s ever-receding comfort, of two parents drifting apart. Many in L.A. share these fears—of cracks in soil as well as families—and by the end of the poem, Laningham touches upon how these fears can bring the fearful together as much as tear them apart. For that, I find Laningham’s poem to be a poignant reminder of all the various “quakes and shifts of Los Angeles”—both explicit and subdued.

Through extensive free-associative lines, from the abstract, “before no one answered the question,” to the deeply personal, “before somebody took my sister’s fa-sol-la and made it a nightmare,” Gail Wronsky’s “Dolphins are People, Too” takes the reader back through deep time with grace and beauty. Thus it lingers on my mind. It is a piece that resonates with its blunt displays of historical atrocities, accomplishments, trivialities, and platitudes, listed back-to-back as if in a rush to a punchline. By the time the punchline strikes it elicits less a chuckle than a breather, a pause to reflect on the vastness of all that came before (within the poem and without).

 

Ruben J. Rodriguez

LUIS J. RODRIGUEZ: All the poems work in their own way. I love the ones with a twist in the verse, a word that springs out of common language, an arresting image. I don’t want to say if any are better than others, but just contemplate these lines: “You carried the night with you...,” “Her nasty field of energy was the polar opposite of the magnanimous blind teenagers. I left it alone but it reminded me that the city is also filled with sour souls. The range is infinite in the urban electromagnetic spectrum,” “Past the neon signs raw as splinters,” “All nerve, this city / ferocious, it chews / and spits out / exhales blue / smoke and steel / and I am like this city / edging toward oblivion....” “We are 99 percent in this world off-kilter / more than flies drawn to sugar / more than this constant running, / more than fears driving men to cars.” “Large tokes and small conversation,” “Dive into my bones….”

I can go on and on. Lines that wake up the sleeper, forcing synapse surges in the brain; lines that re-imagine a city block, a bleeding sunset, an earthquake morning.

This is Los Angeles, in the only way this city can speak, and also about the multitude of voices, each in their own style, with their own music, arising from their own abysses of thoughts and feelings. From William Archila’s “Three Minutes with Mingus” to Tina Yang’s “Why My Mother, the Bald-headed Nun, Rejected Me” you know you have walked into a dreamscape of concrete, palm trees, and ghetto birds. This anthology is about the L.A. that erupts forth every day, every hour, yet only striding the foam and lava stones of its settling magma. Yes, we need more poetry, more anthologies, more Los Angeles. As co-editor Ruben Rodriguez points out, there can never be enough of these.

 

Luis J. Rodriguez

In your estimation, what is the importance of this anthology?

NEELANJANA BANERJEE: It is interesting to be at work editing a poetry anthology in the 21st century, to think of those hours we spent reading these poems last summer, that we spent discussing them—and now, in the Spring, there is an election going on that seems deafening, which is churning so much hate and anger. Right now, The Coiled Serpent anthology seems important in relation to all that noise, in relation to the idea that possible future leaders of this country are talking about closing borders and deporting Muslims. Los Angeles itself seems important in relation to all that noise—the diversity here, this city of immigrants and visionaries and dreamers and lost dreams, and as Luis puts it, of multiple uprisings. So, to be able to put together all these voices of Los Angeles, what a salve to the violence being spewed in this election. I think a poetry anthology is important as a snapshot of people, ideas, images, thoughts, and dreams of a city’s poets, and that is what this anthology gives us at this moment.

RUBEN J. RODRIGUEZ: Because sometimes the traffic is too much to go out and we just wanna sit away from a screen—to have a book in hand that brims with a plethora of voices, that neither conforms nor necessarily comforts, that speaks of L.A. from L.A. It is necessary to anthologize the poetry of this city and to do so often. Poetry is all-access story-telling without the restrictive syntax of prose. In just a few lines a poem can incite and frustrate and inspire and illuminate—but these poems do not silence, they do not ignore. And so the more anthologies the better. There aren’t enough pages in any one book to encapsulate the richness of this city.

LUIS J. RODRIGUEZ: Los Angeles is a largely made-up city—Hollywood lights, flat-head skyscrapers, billboard limbo. More images and sounds of L.A. have entered the homes, movies houses, and psyches of most people in the world than any other city. But, what of its multi-layered stories, its ardor, its poetry? That’s why we have to fill in the many sides of the mismatched L.A. puzzle.

This is riot town after all. It’s taco trucks, Venice shore bikers, Valley strip malls, Century City towers, Bel-Air opulence, and Skid Row squalor. It’s the iconic Watts Towers, nowhere in the world is there such structures, and Mariachi Plaza. It’s San Pedro and Long Beach ports, which combined does more business than any other U.S. harbor. It’s Griffith Park Observatory and crumbling Hollywood sign; its well toned and tanned walks near rising tides and sleeping broken next to graffiti-scarred concrete river slopes; it’s murals on the walls of federal housing projects and Asian lettering on cluttered business signs. Where cars are the medium and dried out hills the landscape. It’s low riders, leather-clad bikers, skaters, surfers, Mexica dancers, Korean drummers; it’s Thai food palaces, pupusa joints, the best chili dogs in the world and, arguably, the best hamburgers (In-And-Out, anybody?).

What poems can possibly sing such a city? The Coiled Serpent is our contribution to that question. The Coiled Serpent touches the heart of all this, yet also skims the dense surfaces.

***

IN OTHER LITERARY NEWS…

  

We here in Los Angeles are delighted that the annual AWP Conference & Bookfair will be held this week at the Los Angeles Convention Center and JW Marriott. Many of us will be participating. You may check out the schedule to find your favorite authors and topics (I will be moderating a Latinos in Lotusland panel and participate on a Los Angeles magical realism panel, as well). There are also wonderful offsite events including the Con Tinta Pachanga & Award Ceremony. Hope to see you there!

Open Road set to reissue Michael Nava’s Henry Rios series in e-book format this month

Michael Nava is the award-winning author of seven novels featuring criminal defense lawyer Henry Rios.  The Little Death (1986), the first book in the series, completed while Nava was in law school, was followed by Goldenboy (1988), How Town (1990), The Hidden Law (1992), The Death of Friends (1996), The Burning Plain (1997), and Rag and Bones (2001).  He is also the co-author of the nonfiction book, Created Equal: Why Gay Rights Matter to America (1994).

Nava is a six-time recipient of the Lambda Literary Award as well as the Bill Whitehead Lifetime Achievement Award for Gay and Lesbian literature.  Nava lives in San Francisco, where he works as an appellate lawyer.  He kindly agreed to sit down with La Bloga to chat about the reissue on February 19th of his Rios novels in e-book format by Open Road.

DANIEL OLIVAS: How has the publishing industry changed vis-à-vis gay protagonists since the publication of the first Rios novel?

MICHAEL NAVA: It’s gone full circle.  The first novel, The Little Death, was rejected by 13 publishers before a small, gay press, Alyson Publications, took it on.  Several of the rejection letters commended the work on its literary merit but said, in varying degrees of frankness, that a book with a homosexual protagonist was not saleable.

After the first two books, I was picked up by HarperCollins and then Putnam during that brief period in the 1990s when mainstream publishers believed there was a vast gay readership waiting to be tapped.  Of course, there was an audience but it needed to be cultivated with skillful marketing, something that mainstream publishing isn’t really geared up for.  So when a number of high profile gay books – not mine, by the way – failed to deliver, mainstream publishing basically stopped publishing LGBT books, particularly LGBT fiction, and that’s where things stand now.

I sense the same dynamic at work with Latino/a books and authors.  Particularly after the recent election, Latino/as are the hot new thing and I’m sure there are people in New York publishing wondering how to exploit that market without understanding that Latino/a readers, like LGBT readers, like readers of any traditionally underserved community, have to be reached in specific ways and by particular avenues.  The mentality of mainstream publishing seems to be: if we build it, they will come.  But that’s not how it works.  Latino/a or LGBT readers have to be identified and reached and the straight, white, overwhelming female middle-class readers who are the biggest consumers of fiction also have to persuaded that, for example, a novel about a gay, Mexican criminal defense lawyer might have some resonance for them if they would give it a chance.

Fortunately for us writers and readers from “minority” communities, the New York gatekeepers have less of a literary stranglehold than they once did.  There are small and university presses that publish our fiction and the internet allows for a kind of self-publication and distribution that was quite impossible when my books were being published in the 1990s.  That’s one reason I am so excited to have the Rios novels in e-book format.  E-books are the future.

DO: What do you hope will come out of the e-book publication of the Rios series?

MN: My hope is that they will now reach both a new generation of readers, particularly LGBT and Latino/a readers and that older readers who may have missed the books the first time around will have a second and less expensive chance to read them.

Although the last book of the series was published 13 years ago, I know that they continue to have relevance to young and new readers.  Rios is a strong, intelligent, self-aware and introspective outsider who when, confronted with society’s condemnation, chooses to trust his deepest experience of himself as a decent and moral human being.  That still describes the situation of many other “outsiders” whether they are LGBT or Latino/a or members of any other disenfranchised group.  All of us have had our “coming out” experience where we elect to defy the stereotypes and biases of the mainstream culture and stand up for our humanity and our human rights.

Plus, to clamber off my soapbox for a second, I tell good stories with complex and compelling characters and no shortage of snappy dialogue! If I hadn’t hooked readers that way, the books would have long since been out of circulation.

DO: Do you see another Rios book in the future?

MN: No.  Henry and I have parted as friends, but we have parted.  For the last 15 years I have been working on a massive project that has turned into four novels set in Mexico, on the border, and in Hollywood from 1895 to about 1929.  I am still writing about outsiders and the place they make and made for themselves in America.  In these novels – I call the series The Children of Eve – I hope to illustrate, again through compelling narratives, how the United States’ prosperity and self-perception has always been in large part the work of the very groups and people who were the object of the various “isms” – e.g., racism, sexism – that have permeated and continue to permeate the culture.

The first novel in the series, The City of Palaces, is completed and I am searching for a publisher (interested readers can download the first three chapters at my website: http://www.michaelnavawriter.com). The City of Palaces tells the story of Mexico in the years just before and at the beginning of the Mexican Revolution as seen through the eyes of an upper-class Mexico City family.  I am hard on work on the second novel which includes silent films, Buffalo soldiers, the Mexican Revolution and the tragic history of the Yaquis among its themes.  I figure I will be working on these books for the next decade.