On Taking Up Space in White Artistic Places
Margaret Elysia Garcia
One of my biggest gratitudes to the universe is living in California. Californian by birth: Southern Californian by the grace of the Goddess/La Virgen. This, of course, holds true for many aspects of life in the golden state: weather, biodiversity of our geography, and best of all, we humans that inhabit this space.
I love California for its opportunity, its solidarity, its commitment to keep trying to fix things even as one out of ten Americans calls us home. It’s a tall order. One of my favorite hallmarks of living in northeastern California was the live and let live attitude of the place. I carry that with me wherever I go as if the mantra imprinted from the decades of living—me, the Chicana hippie goth girl next to rifle-racked hunters who like their women rights-less. I educated their children; they plowed my driveway. Truce be told.
I don’t get out of here very often, and in these fraught times, I’ve never been happier to call the Republic of California my home (I fly the Bear flag, not the other one). I feel safe here—like I don’t have to explain myself, like I don’t have to be the representative of a people because we are legion here—and in particular Southern California where I live. I have always been adamant however that rural spaces, our national parks, our recreational wilderness is ours too.
We’ve too long surrendered rural spaces to an entitled white population who see it as solely belonging to them and that—we—are visitors. In my first few years in the Sierras, I got this a lot and I’d stop to talk to people who, turns out, had only been there a couple years longer than I had. If you want to live by ownership of land, then those of us who have lived in the northeastern Sierra know that the land belongs to the Maidu, the Paiute, the Washoe, Shoshone, Miwak, Concow.
But when we come down to it, living or visiting the rural spaces as a member of the global majority is necessary for all involved. For us, it’s a chance to be in the outdoors, to commune with nature, to experience a different part of ourselves. For those who feel entitled to those spaces, it serves as an opportunity to remind that they are not first peoples and have no more claim on it than anyone else. A decentering, if you will.
I feel the same about artistic spaces.
Last summer I applied and was accepted to Macondo Writers’ Workshop—the dream retreat for Chicanas/Latinas—and it was absolutely nothing short of amazing. It was the very first time I ever did a workshop (fiction that time), where critiques didn’t come back exoticized. I didn’t get words shaken over my manuscript labeling it “colorful” and “saucy” and “fiery.” I got an honest critique that concerned cohesiveness and character development for which I am so grateful. It took me three tries to get into Macondo and now I have a family of Latina/Chicana writers I can call upon in two different countries if I need them and I am in turn there for them as well.
Macondo was a wild who’s who of Latino literature. And an absolute bucket list moment was running into Sandra Cisneros at a traffic light just as she was crossing the street after listening to our reading. I had read my poem “Leave Frida Kahlo Alone,” and Sandra said that she thought my delivery was great and that she really enjoyed the poem. I saw stars and could barely speak. It was a life-changing honor to be there, and I wouldn’t trade it for the world and I loved how the organizers fed us well, encouraged us to use the pool, do laundry (why do we Latinas love to do laundry every other day), participate in spiritual ceremony, and had mariachis play at the opening ceremony. But my poetry professor had nominated me to go to the Juniper Summer Writing Institute at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. I couldn’t do both, but Juniper said I could defer for the year.
I disappointed an organizer for Macondo by not coming back this year, but I helped read fiction applications and I will attend next year as alumna. It’s easy in places like Los Angeles, to be in a closed artistic world. We thrive here as Chicanas in a literary world because there are relatively so many of us here. But we also should, in my opinion, experience and move within white artistic space. This doesn’t mean representing as the sole Latina (there was a Brazilian fiction writer, an Afro-Latina Puerto Rican poet, and an amazing Salvadoran American young man that I swear is the reincarnation of Federico Garcia Lorca). I have no patience to teach culture to those who chose cultural illiteracy. But it’s vital to art itself to see what others are doing; to see how they are addressing this moment.
To Juniper Institute’s credit, it had already decentralized cis white male writers as the focal point of the institute. We didn’t have a single white male presenter among the faculty for the week. We had instead, award-winning alumni of the institute who happened to mostly be women of color based on the east coast.
The student body for the week however was probably about 85% white—something I’m no longer used to in artistic spaces probably because I live in southern California now where no one ethnic group has a real majority anymore. That’s how I like things and that’s how I feel comfortable. But art needs un-comfortability to thrive at times, and I was there for it. It wasn’t just in my head. I spoke to the two east Indian writers and Asian Americans who felt that same difference in this setting.
I took an eco-poetics workshop with Craig Santos Perez who hails from Guam originally and now teaches ethnic studies at a college in San Diego. I was workshopping poems that I am editing for a manuscript of fire aftermath called Conflagrations After (anyone want to publish it for me?). I got to hear poems from Chicago poets, New England poets, Caribbean poets, Asian poets. I was reminded of the interesting ways we can present a poem on the page, cut that fat of extraneous words, do interesting things with line breaks. I got to hear what they were writing poems about: family/grief/climate change/the destruction of both soul and land that capitalism is so good at doing.
The same themes that I write about.
But more importantly, by interjecting myself into that space, they got to witness my work as well. They got to learn about California and drought and fire, and the diaspora of fauna and humans caused by wildfire—informed too by my identity. I realized it been quite a while since I injected myself in such a space. It reminded me that I’m a good poet—not just a good practitioner of Chicana poetry, but a kick-ass poet who can hold her own at another excessively hard summer writing workshop to get into. It was good for me; it was good for them.
I highly encourage all of us to step into those spaces.
I am on my way home. I spent the day editing poems for a new chapbook addressing this crazy fascist regime we are collectively facing. I am marking down the atrocities in print, less people forget or gaslight their behavior when it’s all done. I am telling our history in it at a time when Texas board of education is voting to erase us. Eleven other poets besides myself went home with my perspective—ten of which were not Latino. I’m coming home having learned more about the American destruction of Hawai’i and Guam. The Ozarks. The DeSantis grip on Florida. All of us artists are in this together.
There is so much to witness; there is so much to fight.
For me, it was important to go into a nearly all white creative space too.
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