Ibis: You were then an activist who wrote mostly in Spanish, right?

Mariana: Yes, and I think that Cuentos changed this for me, in a way, reintegrated my creative and expressive process, because in going from one language to another I had compartmentalized myself. The writing of political necessity, the expression of a reality as a Latina immigrant in the U.S. was expressed in English. I went from writing poetry and fiction in Spanish, to writing primarily in English because my readers would be reading in English, both readers of color and white, and Latinas/os. Initially, I felt a tremendous artistic conflict in having to decide which language to write in, if I expected to share my work and receive critical feedback. Cuentos was such a unique literary space that even in that explosively creative climate, it had no parallel publications. I wonder if we could even say that it exists now, because we can look at grassroots publications where the co-existence of languages is not questioned, in fact code-switching is normative, and we routinely find a wealth of material that is progressive, and formally inventive, but here there is no critical dialogue, no participation in a broader literary discourse, right? And then, in academic publications of a more literary tone, as lesbian writers-- as women writers!-- we are systematically marginalized.

Ibis: Does that explain why so many of the stories in Speaking like an Immigrant-- a collection of your work to be released later this year-- which were written around that time and in the years that followed, have a Chilean background. Were they written mostly in Spanish?

M: Actually, the fiction in Speaking like an Immigrant represents that process of finding an immigrant's voice between cultures, the Borderlands that Anzaldua named so aptly, and for me it became a book that was written in the language of my immigration experience: first in Spanish, then in the Spanish of culture shock, then in Chilean English, and finally in immigrant English. That's it: speaking like an immigrant. Only La virgen en el desierto and Gabriela were written in Spanish originally and then translated into English. Through the 80s, I settled into English and only occasionally wrote in Spanish, following an artistic and political choice to write in whatever language the work emerged from me, and translating only infrequently. As an editor, I joined the editorial board of Conditions: Feminist Journal, worked with Juanita (Ramos) Diaz, editor, in the making of Compañeras: Latina Lesbians, as guest editor for The Portable Lower East Side anthology, Queer City, as co-founder and managing editor of COLORLife magazine with Lidell Jackson, and publishing in various periodicals, journals and anthologies.

Ibis: Your first novel, Living at Night, which was published last year was also written in English. How do you make the artistic choices?

Mariana: Could we say that sometimes these choices find us? It has so much to do, I think, with being bilingual writers, inhabiting a bilingual reality. I'm thinking of your own choice to write Send My Roots Rain in English. When I first envisioned Living at Night, it was the mid-seventies, I had an idea that it should be a journalistic account of the conditions suffered by women with developmental disabilities living in institutions. But twenty years later, when I wrote the novel, it pretty much found me: I knew I needed to write about the reality of a Latina lesbian which examined the conflicts of race and class in the 70s-- it had to be in English because it was clear to me that we had been invisible at that time. Living at Night is definitely a novel about alienation and healing, establishing a Latina lesbian reality in a certain historical moment.

On the other hand, at this writing, I have just completed my second novel, this time in Spanish, titled Lo que queda en la memoria, which deals with exile and homophobia. With this book, the story emerged in Spanish, and I felt that this time I needed to direct my voice towards my origins, and so it is my hope to publish this book in the original Spanish first, and then have it translated into English, for an English-speaking or bilingual audience.


Ibis: Are you not the least bit worried that the combination of subject matter and the choice of language will make it particularly difficult to market this novel?

Mariana: Hm, it looks as though I haven't learned anything about the artificial limitations imposed on author and audience, if Cuentos was any indication, right? Sí, desde luego. But knowing what we know, how can we go back? Once our ideas have created a space we have to move into it. Lo que queda en la memoria presents an unabashed lesbian protagonist who chooses exile to the death of her lesbian identity, while still claiming a place as a Latin American person and a woman in Latin American culture.

Ibis: Why write it in Spanish?

Mariana: Precisely because by having a protagonist who is a woman who is complete in herself, and whose lesbianism is not incidental to the plot but intrinsic to who she is, places an inherent critique of homophobia as a phenomenon that is taught and bred within our own familial and cultural confines, and it affects all of us as Latin Americans and Latinas/os, whether or not our politics are progressive. This discussion needs to be taking place in Spanish! I think that as Latinas/os, we know that this discussion is operating within the literature we create but many writers choose to dissimulate the lesbian content in deference to being considered un escritor (writer) first-- the point is that we are not, we cannot be if the question of a lesbian character's agency is relegated to a political consideration and not a literary one. All literature is political, after all.

Ibis: Let me ask you about Speaking like an Immigrant, which I know won some kind of an award?

Mariana: The idea for the book itself was first conceived after I was awarded the first National Astraea Lesbian Foundation award for fiction, in 1991.Two of the stories, which would later be in the book, were submitted to the competition (Kissing Susana and The Meal). Winning the Astraea award enabled me for the first time in my life to make time to write. As an activist, I had always written sort of in a rush, between my responsibilities and my day job, my real work, for a specific reason-- an anthology, a demonstration, a benefit reading-- or when I felt writing was impossible to avoid any longer, always thinking that there would be a time when I would devote to writing the time it was demanding of me more and more. When my work was recognized as worthwhile by this award, I was finally able to take myself seriously as a writer. It seems like a finite event, doesn't it? But this was in fact, part of a much longer process, as I'm sure it has been for many women writers.

Ibis: This is a very esoteric collection. In some of the stories, like the one with the spiders, you sound un poco bruja. Where is that coming from?

Mariana: Oh, that's The Web. That story came specifically out of an image I had of envisioning the immigration experience as a sort of madness, a loosening of the holds of concrete reality, as it were, which immigrants and exiles may sometimes have to practice in order to survive. That's why the language in that story is quite surreal, and yes, it would have a basis on my heritage which includes an acceptance of witchcraft as part of the universe, not supernatural.

Ibis: Híjole! What about La bruja pirata de Chiloé, the one with the Chilean bruja and the woman pirate? Es un poquito de wishful thinking?

Mariana: Yes, probably so. A bit of lesbian wishful thinking, perhaps. The Chilean poet, Raúl Barrientos, was the one who rekindled my interest, and my mother was the one who first gave me books on the subject. But in fact, there are witches in Chiloé. The institution of witchcraft is an accepted part of southern Chilean folklore, and we can find all kinds of sociological and anthropological studies on this topic-- if that helps to legitimize its existence, as well as literary. What is true is that there is a bridge between the Indigenous cultural heritage of Chile and its spiritual traditions and also the acceptance of the spiritual and imaginative power of witchcraft. In the islands which form the archipelago of Chiloé, which is located at the end of the western land mass of South America, the society of powerful witches, men and women, are recognized and though people might not always discuss these things freely, it is nothing to mess with! There is one spirit, called El Trauco, who is said to travel on a boat from island to island, wearing his head on backwards. There are all kinds of stories about what might happen to you if he catches you looking, or what happens to those who cross a witch, intentionally or not. But these images form part of a national cultural subconscious, and as a writer I was reclaiming part of the inspiration to my own imagination, which after all is part of my heritage.

Ibis: Are you aware of any particular influences on your work?

Mariana: Claro que sí-- it's hard to be Chilean and not be influenced by the poets. Mistral, Neruda, Parra. But as a child the fiction I read was by Manuel Rojas and Marta Brunet, realist, regionalist writers who wrote about el pueblo-- Brunet wrote about women's experience in the 30s and this influenced me greatly. But Cortázar is probably my closest influence though I am highly critical of his earlier, more sexist work. Gloria Anzaldúa, Cristina Peri Rossi, Audre Lorde-- definitely. And lately, I have been enjoying poetry again, particularly Colleen J. McElroy, and the Argentinian, Diana Bellessi.

Ibis: Where does your work fit in the contemporary literary scene?

Mariana: Recently, I attended a panel discussion by Latin American poets living in the U.S. Among them were Cecilia Vicuña, Mercedes Roffé, and Jaime Manrique, all people I know, whose work I greatly respect. Since Jaime and I have been in the country about the same amount of time, and we have both written gay-themed novels in English, I think one could draw certain parallels. His poetry, however, is in Spanish, and in talking about this I identified particularly with his sense that his work would ultimately have to be evaluated as part of the Latin American literary tradition rather than the U.S.

For this reason, I think that my work is difficult to categorize in a literary scene which demands classification from its artists. As a Latina writer my work can just now be seen as a whole, because previously, it bore fragmentary publishing history of an activist-writer of my generation. At the and at the age of 46, my creative output is much more intense. The difference is that my work has an eclectic relevance, it spans a longer period of time and makes reference to multiple sources-- it is not easily conversant with the work of younger writers today. That may be its chief limitation in receiving critical response from my peers. But I think that, like Jaime, my work will turn out to be part of the Latin American-Latina/o continuum, and as such it will also escape the sensibilities of the dominant American literary discourse, as well as the mainstream lesbian and gay discourse.

Excerpted from: Discourse, 21.3 Fall 1999, pp. 153-168. Copyright by 2000 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309

Ibis Gómez-Vega is the author of Send My Roots Rain, a lesbian novel. Having received her doctorate at the University of Houston, she is Professor of English at Northern Illinois University where she teaches Ethnic American Literature, Gay and Lesbian Literature, and courses that focus on contemporary Latina and Latino writing.