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The Telling of Cuentos: Stories by Latinas
A Conversation About Art and Politics
with Mariana Romo-Carmona, by Ibis Gomez-Vega
On October 13, 1998, Mariana Romo-Carmona held a reading from her novel, Living at Night, at Northern Illinois University.
I took this opportunity to talk to her about her work and about her role in the publication of Cuentos: Stories by Latinas
in 1983. the dialogue that follows was carried out in person and through e-mail messages during the month of October 1998.
Ibis: How did Cuentos: Stories by Latinas come about?
M: This book came out of the same impulse that founded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. It was the times, the women
writers and artists of color coming together from various communities and putting our energies together toward a common goal.
To understand the climate of that particular time, we have to look at what had come just before, in the 70s.
Kitchen Table Press had been founded in late 1980, and in early 1981, most of the new editors for the press had been
asked to join and began to meet on a monthly basis in New York City. I was one of the Latina editors-- you have to understand
what an amazing thing it was to be among several Latinas, not the only one anymore, it was a luxury.
Ibis: I can imagine.
M: At one of the press meetings, we began to discuss the idea of doing an anthology of short fiction by Latinas and Latin
Americans, in which the pieces would be published in the language they were written, without translation. At that time, we
had the phenomenal inspiration of the publication of Audre Lorde's poetry, and recently her biomythography, Zami. Audre was
one of the press's founders, and also an editor.
Ibis: I didn't know Audre Lorde was one of the founders.
M: Yes, Audre Lorde and Barbara Smith were the founders. Almost concurrently, we had the publication of the anthology
of writing by women of color, This Bridge Called My Back, edited by Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga, another one of the
editors of the press. Soon afterwards, Kitchen Table published the anthology Home Girls, edited by Barbara Smith. With this
anthology of fiction by African American women, we had the seeds planted to envision an anthology of fiction by Latinas.
Ibis: Were you aware that there was no other collection of Latina literature in this country at that time?
I think we were aware that there was nothing published such as what we had in mind. There was the protest literature
of the 60s, the Nuyorican poets and the writers of the Chicano movement, but there were very few women, and certainly a feminist
perspective that would be inclusive of lesbian writers did not exist yet in Latina/o literature. The work of Puerto Rican
novelist, Nicholassa Mohr was one example that Latinas were writing, and also, sadly, that very few Latinas were publishing
along with our brothers.
But many of us had been writing for several years, publishing in anthologies and journals where we were the only Latina,
next to the only Asian or the only Indigenous writer, and we knew it was time. As I said, the creation of Kitchen Table was
the impetus: as editors, we knew this would be the first time that the work of our writers, women of color, would be looked
at critically and given the space and the respect to evaluate the work on its own merit, with an understanding of all its
cultural and linguistic richness. This had not been the experience we ourselves had encountered as writers. We knew that our
work was looked at as marginal, as coming from a strange place that would have to be "revised" in order to make
it fit into white mainstream literary culture. Even among white feminist editors, women of color's work was not finding a
place of understanding and appreciation. That's why Kitchen Table Press was so crucial to our collective survival and development
as writers.
Ibis: Absolutely. I remember being very impressed by the photograph of the three Latinas on the back cover. It meant
a lot to me that the book had been edited by those three women who looked so much like me because we simply didn't have any
of that back then.
Mariana: It is very important to articulate this. You see, I can't tell you how amazing this all continues to be, that
now these materials are part of curricula and available to students, when at one point we could only envision a time for our
images and our stories to emerge-- literally.
Ibis: We never saw ourselves in any positive light, so that picture on the back cover mattered a great deal. It also
helped to know that one and maybe all the editors were lesbians.
Mariana: Yes, and that is illustrative in part of how as writers and activists we had to be thinking critically about
what it was we were able to publish at the Press.
It was Cherríe Moraga's idea to do the anthology because she knew that between us, we all knew Latina writers who were
writing stories- these first stories that were beginning to reveal our lives and our communities, and that together we could
put together a diverse volume of work. Moraga as a Chicana and an academic, Alma Gómez as a New York-born Puerto Rican and
coming from a tradition of the East Coast protest literature and culture, and myself, as a chilena immigrant and bilingual
writer, with a connection to the literature of Latinoamericanas-- the three of us each brought a completely different yet
complementary perspective. I think it was very significant that as a cultural group, Latinas represented a so-called "minority
group", a bilingual community, a diasporic literary community as well as a direct bridge to Latin American and Caribbean
literature, and we as editors needed to be conscious of this in order to represent these perspectives well.
Ibis: You did a good job. I still remember reading those stories and personal essays. Did Cuentos get reviewed?
Actually, I don't think it did, initially, not very much. There were reviews in small literary journals and periodicals,
but in academia, for example, the one place which should have taken notice of such an important collection, there was silence.
We don't even need to speak of the mainstream-- most of the publications at that time, by small presses, feminist and progressive
literary journals, were non-events as far os the rest of the world was concerned, But along the network of such publications,
the word spread slowly but surely, and great changes can be appreciated even on an international level.
Ibis: International?
M: Oh, yes! And not just through the network of our contributors. In 1982, for example, the year before Cuentos came out,
the second international Latin American & Caribbean Feminist conference or Encuentro had been held in Lima, Peru. That
feminist network is an efficient carrier of more than just ideas... The anthology Companeras, for example, was distributed
initially at the first Latin American & Caribbean Lesbian Encuentro n Mexico, in 1987. At any rate, I think it may have
been around 1990, at a cultural event organized by Las Buenas Amigas in New York City, that I spoke with an emerging lesbian
poet from Nicaragua who told me that an American woman had given her a copy of Cuentos years earlier, when she had been an
activist in the Sandinista movement, and reading this book had been the catalyst that started her writing. Cuentos has had
important repercussions, and perhaps it is just now that we begin to see the scope of its influence.
Ibis: Mira! That's a wonderful testimony to what this book came to
mean to so many of us. It influenced women in places where you didn't think the book would reach.
Mariana: Exactly. And let me ask you, personally. You and I are both novelists and contemporaries. What did you think?
Ibis: In my case, reading Cuentos told me that the work of Latinas, and especially Latina lesbians, had a chance. It
encouraged me to keepwriting. And, as you well know, one of the stories that touched me the most was "La virgen en el
desierto," your story, which was poetic, lyrical, a beautiful rite of passage story.
Mariana: This means so much to me, as one of the authors whose work is in Spanish in Cuentos, and because that story is
very close to my heart.
Ibis: I told my friends about it, but I couldn't share it with many of
them because it was written in Spanish, which brings me to another question. How did the bilingual nature of the book
affect its chances? There are stories written in Spanish in the book, and they are not translated.
M: Clearly this was an issue. You'll notice also that when a story is in English with some Spanish intertwined, the Spanish
is not italicized. (There is a glossary of terms in the back of the book) The only piece that is translated is the introduction
by the three of us, written in English and translated into Spanish. This was because the book took shape from our editorial
meetings which were held mostly in English, but often delving into Spanish.
The decision not to italicize words appearing in Spanish within an English text, not to translate, and to publish work
in the language in which it was created-- these were all political decisions that were informed by our experience as writers
submitting work to English-speaking editors who automatically marginalized our writing. We knew what it was like to have our
syntax and diction revised into a homogenized product, with italicized words, translations, glossaries and explanations which
all presumed an Anglo reader. What about the bilingual reader? The Latina/Latino reader? The reader who, no matter what their
first language might be, is willing to take a journey to explore another culture within literature without having everything
pre-digested and anglicized?
Ibis: That would be us, right? The ones who got left out before.
Mariana: Precisely. I think that when one edits a book like this it stops being so much a book product, it becomes a contribution
to a community of writers and readers.
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