Cover Artist: Ramiro Rodriguez
2018 Editor’s Choice Selection
AVAILABLE FROM WILLOW BOOKS, HERE
WHY I AM LIKE TEQUILA is a collection of poetry spanning a decade of writing and performance. This collection exists in 4 parts – each a layered perspective, a look through a Mexican/ Mexican – American voice living in the Texas Gulf Coast. Set within spaces such as Galveston Island, Houston, the Rio Grande Valley and Jalisco, Mexico, these poems peel away at all parts, like the maguey, drawing to craft spirits, quenching a thirst between land and sea.
Originally from Galveston, TX, Mendez (Writer//Educator//Activist) works with Nuestra Palabra: Latino Writers Having Their Say, Brazilian Arts Foundation and other organizations to promote poetry events, advocate for literacy/literature and organize creative writing workshops that are open to the public. He is the founder of Tintero Projects and works with emerging Latinx writers and other writers of color within the Texas Gulf Coast Region. Lupe co-hosts INKWELL, a collaborative podcast on regional, national and international Latinx writers and other writers of color. Mendez is a CantoMundo Fellow, a Macondo Fellow and an Emerging Poet Incubator Fellow.
Mendez has close to 20 years of experience as a performance poet, having opened up for such notable writers as Dagoberto Gilb, Esmeralda Santiago and the late Raul Salinas. He has shared his poetry across the country in places such as the Holocaust Museum Houston, the Jung Center, MECA (Houston), the Mission Cultural Center For Latino Arts (San Francisco), the National Hispanic Cultural Center (Albuquerque) and the Mexican American Cultural Center (Austin). A keynote speaker/poetry performer across Texas, Mendez hosts writing workshops across the country, most recently as a teaching artist for the Poetry Foundation’s Teacher Poetry Summits.
I wanted to start our
conversation with a quote from your site:
“Si me quedo dormido con un lápiz en la mano, no me lo
quites - podría estar escribiendo en mis sueños.”
- Terri Guillemet
How does that reflect your life and work?
Hijuesu, I love that quote.
It serves as both a bit of a reminder and a focal point. I have been an
educator roughly around the same amount of time I have been a writer and so the
Guillemet's quote speaks to me in both ways.
I used to have that quote painted on butcher paper on the front wall of
my elementary school classroom when I was a writing teacher. It was high up,
because I knew my kids' ojitos would eventually gravitate to the ceiling and I
wanted it to seep into their subconscious: always write, always explore, always
dream. I am fond of it for other reasons. I use it remind myself that I was
more than my day job. I never resented the time I spent creating lesson plans
and teaching kids the writing cycle. I was building a well oiled machine in these
young readers and writers. It takes a sense of creativity to build up
curriculum and access points where you are encouraging the body to engage in
speaking about language and craft, to think about these patterns, to emulate
them in writing and to read with corazón. But I did go through periods where I
felt a longing to get back into my own writing or sometimes fearing that if I
took too long a break from it, I'd get rusty. I giggled to myself the first
time I read this quote - it is a truth. I have fallen asleep with a pen or
pencil or a laptop in my hands. I used to post this quote in 2009 - 2013. I
still stay up and write in the dark well past midnight. Now I do it because
it's sometimes the only quiet time I get (I have a two year old, so no way can I
write when she's got my full attention).
This quote keeps me grounded. Me hace recordar que hay que seguir
adelante.
Talk a little about your book, Why I Am Like Tequila.
How does it reflect your own journey as a writer?
So I had worked on the poems in the collection for well over a decade. Some of the pieces were poems I used to perform with at venues across Houston and Texas for a bit. I write about the worlds I belong to. The landscapes and communities I am a part of. I kept thinking of home in Galveston, TX, of home in La Pareja, a rancho just outside Atotonilco El Alto, Jalisco, MX. I kept thinking of playas and cerros. I kept thinking about the rising/receding tides, the hectares of maguey, and the rhythm in the poems and it all started to come together.
I kept going back to my time as a 5th grade Science teacher. When I taught the life science unit, there was always one factoid I used to throw into the unit that amazed the kids, but also amazed me - that every 7 years the human body has completely replicated all the cells in the body. You are practically a whole new being. And it was this notion that always had me make a comparison between my worlds. I thought of tequila as well. I have always been around and known of the process by which tequila is made - Don Julio happens to be made in Atotonilco El Alto and its a given fact that it takes seven years to cultivate a full maguey to harvest the root to then make tequila.
It was also this notion that got me thinking of how everyone is like
tequila: we are always being pressed,
chopped at, boiled, pressured, fired, into something refined. The world comes at us, in whatever order, and
cleaves at us but in the end, every once in a while, we are an elixir. We are
the best, most new, refreshed, refined thing we can be at certain time, just as
often as we are in the ground, tumbling and mixing it up with the dirt. The
human experience is full of the highs and the lows and this became the perfect
analogy for it all. I am like tequila because the world remakes me every 7
years, every 7 thoughts, every 7 breaths into something better than I was
before.
A Chicano?
You know, to this day, I don't know if I am Chicano. I didn't grow up with the identity. I didn't discover Chicano understandings until my twenties in college. I knew Mexicano. I knew Tejano, but a Mexican - American identity didn't always sit well. I always felt on the outside. Even in Texas, Even in Jalisco. Most gente from Jalisco don't move to Texas.
I used to laugh when I would go out to norteño spots and
hear the DJs do a shout out "para todo la gente de San Luiiiisssssss"
and the crowd would go nuts, or "para todo la gente de
MOOONNNTTTEEERRRRRRREEEEYYYYY" and same thing, a roar. And with most of my
friends when the occasional "para todo la gente de Jalisco" they
would laugh and I would jump in the air and did't give a shit "a su pinche
madre!" and it never failed, I would look out across the room para que
veas - I would see one or two paisas and we would wave to one another. My
friends would giggle and say "vez, no 'stas solo." Even though this
is just a jovial moment, I have always been cognizant that there are
differences between what Mexico looks like, what it sounds like, what it prays
like, what it tastes like for me. The same geographical and cultural nuances
that happen in the US happen in other spaces - Mexico is no different. I
remember hearing banda as a kid well before it became prevalent in the US. Well
before it became such a major genre in Mexico. Banda has always been in Jalisco. The same can be said about my life in
Texas. I didn't grow up with many a
Mexican role model in a space like Galveston. There was no poetry scene there
when i was growing up. There is a small community that is a mix of 3rd and 4th
generation Mex-Ams and Mexicans present, and this was my community. I was still
the outsider. I went to school with Mex-Am kids that didn't know Spanish and
they would make prejudicial remarks about "being too Mexican". And
then there was always the geography - being from a barrier island, one already
knows what it means to live in isolation. My writing was a way to push into all
this understanding. I am still looking inward in this regard. I want to be able
to stand up and provide space for the brown writer who lives a coastal life,
who lives in two worlds, whatever those worlds may look like.
Are there core themes you return to, and if so, what are
they and what is their power in your life?
So I think in a way I alluded to this in the end of the
previous question - I look at both space and time, history and culture in my
writing. I look at social issues and hope I serve as a decent observer of
events. I know that time is fleeting and am aware of how ethnic and racial
histories are vital to the growth of historically marginalized communities. I
keep looking at the Latinx condition. I keep looking at what the counter
history has told us for years. I keep going back to the sea. I try to go back
to Mexico and to the RGV as much as I can.
I used to listen to corridos, just for the story, just for the bajo
sexto or the acordeón. But that was before I realized that these are part of a
brilliant Mexican form of poetry. The corrido is all things subversive. It is cutthroat. It is infinite. It is both
non-academic and story of witness, narrative and legendary. It is consumable and linguistically profound.
When I am writing, i am thinking along those lines. I want my work to be as
infectious as a corrido. I want for my
work to work in you in some ways that you don't even know it is changing your
understanding of "world". I
want it to work like the corrido: so ingrained in you that you don't even know
you are reciting poetry.
You are involved in several incubators - Tintero
Project, among them. What about this juncture in time fuels that work?
As I read this now, I think perhaps, one day, Tintero Projects can serve as a full on incubator program, but we are not there yet. Wouldn't that be something? I am a long time member, partner, producer, you name it - in Nuestra Palabra: Latino Writers Having Their Say. The org has been around for over twenty years and shows no sign of slowing down. It was in this community that I began to see what community can create for itself. Tony Diaz, novelist and political commentator created NP to respond to the statement we heard time and time again "Hispanic people just don't read."
So Tony helped build a community
of readers and writers here in Houston. When I was a novice writer, I was also
a volunteer, licking envelopes, mailing flyers, setting out chairs and folding
them back up at the end of readings. I was boxing and boxing books, helping
people purchase books and sometimes, even selling books out of the back of my
car. But I also got the perks - I got to sit at dinners, or have coffee or have
drinks with visiting writers from all of the US and America Latina and got to
listen to them, even ask them questions about both craft and the lit biz.
I remember what it was like to run and host and provide
space for established as well as rookie writers, even before I ever got on the
mic as a poet. NP grew up: it went from monthly live shows to hosting the
Latino Book and Family Festival to hosting a still current radio show to
eventually participate in an ethnic studies movement with the Librotraficante
Caravan and the Librotraficante Movement.
I knew that there was still room to hold some of these
things current and with Tony's blessing - I worked to establish Tintero
Projects, trying out the old formats but expanding in ways NP talked about. So
Tintero Projects works to provide a platform for newer and established writers.
It's for all POC writers, but we always maintain a heavy support for Latinx
writers. We've provided time and space for performance, for workshops and for
collaborative opportunities. I don't even know if I responded correctly - but
in the end, what fuels this work is community.
If we want to see Latinx writers and POC writers, then we have to make
sure that there is space for them to do their thing.
Where do you clock in on the "What is Latinx
literature" discussion?
Is there a discussion? If there is one, I need fellow
Latinx editors, writers, publishers, to begin to widen their understanding that
the labels that are present weren't created by those of us the labels seek to
identify. "We" are not a
monolith. We are every race. If we somehow hide or make invisible the Black
body or the Indigenous body, then we are doing the work of colonizers before
us. Somebody reading this might even have a fit because we are saying
"Latinx" and I can already hear people speaking out "I am not
Latinx, I am [add in Nationality name]!" and I already have a response,
ARE YOU REALLY THOUGH?
I have been a part of the conversation where Spanish
purists say that Latinx was made by Caucasian folks and it isn't a word in
Spanish like "Latino" and frankly - that's an ignorant response.
People forget that Spanish/SPAIN was just a vulgar a colonizing force as the
English, the Dutch, the French, the Portuguese, etc.
It has taken me a whole life time to figure out that my
roots tie back to the Wirikuta (Huichol) peoples of Jalisco. So much of all of
our beginnings are lost to false comfort in "history". Hell just now,
in these last few months in the pandemic, in conversations with a cousin (as HE
is working to piece together side of the family tree), I learned where our
grandmother was born: San Carlos, Tamaulipas, Mexico.
It took me til I was 35 to figure out that my father's side
of the family is connected to the lands of the Kauyumari and the Huichol
tribes. No telling how long it will take me to learn of my mother's people. I
am eager to begin this learning and unlearning of names and systems, people and
places. And this is where language must take us. Language changes and the links
to language and people give us the tools and the means to collect and birth
counter-histories that need to be told.
I'm not here to make this comfortable for gente. But I am
here to learn and be taught, to grow with and to guide as much as I can. As far
as I know, I support books in all Spanish, in Spanglish, in Portunol, in
Portugues. I support books in indigenous languages. I support books as much as I support stage
performances. Spoken word and threate is as noteworthy as the book, because
they are EQUAL FORMS OF PUBLICATION. Anybody that tells you otherwise has never
tried the other. I support books and performances created by Afro-Latinx
writers. I support self-published work. I support gorilla theatre. I support
including Hatian writers in Latinx canon. I support ethnic studies. You with
me? Good. Let's go.
Who were your influences/mentors?
My grandparents. My parents. My theatre teacher in high
school (S/O to Mrs. T), my Government teacher and track coach, Tim Cotton. Tony
Diaz. Luis Omar Salinas. Martin Espada, Sasha Pimentel, Lorna Dee Cervantes.
Carmen Tafolla. Patricia Smith. Norma Elia Cantú. Raul Salinas, Robin Davidson,
Jonathan Moody, Stephen Gros, Tim Z. Hernandez, Lucille Clifton, Miguel Piñero,
Lex Wiliford, Gil Scott Heron, Sylvia Plath, Roque Dalton, Mario Benedetti,
Jose Alfredo Jimenez, Chavela Vargas, Nina Simone,
How does being a husband and father inform your
work?
Being married and a father has morphed when I write. It
informs how much focus and tension to the work I create. I look at mortality in
a different way. My partner and fellow
writer, Jasminne Mendez, a Dominican-American writer lives with Lupus and there
have been complications to her condition a different points in our journey
together. I once took part in an MFA poetry workshop while she was recovering
in an ICU. She was on the mend, and got the ok from her to participate and I
asked my classmates and prof. if they were ok with hearing the occasional
"beep" of a heart monitor.
And now as a father, I have learned that I am definitely
not on a time clock to get this work done. I published my first book in 2019.
We have a photo of my daughter at 10 months old holding a copy of the book in
her little hands. Me dio orgullo. She just stared at it for a while. I am more
confident than ever that I have something to say.
What is something not in the official bio?
I am a good cook and used to play in a samba band.
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