Category: Strong Women

Americas Award Books, Authors, Chingonas, fiction, Sandra Cisneros, Strong Women, Wisdom

Listening to Sandra Cisneros

Mona Alvarado Frazier

“We all need to have art in our lives and writing is art.” I’m paraphrasing what I heard Sandra Cisneros say while I listened to her speak, in her melodious voice, to a standing room only crowd of over 200 people. She spoke at Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural and Bookstore in Sylmar, California, located at the edge of a strip mall across from the new Fresh and Easy. Every seat was taken, every wall held up by shoulders, every piece of floor space and some laps taken up by listeners.

I’ve been to Tia Chucha’s twice, when visiting my friend Pati, who lives up the hill from there, but we either get there too early or too late and peer in the windows between the posters and flyers. Yesterday was the first time I’ve been inside. I’m early (no more Chicano time for me) and there are still seats. I give a quick glance at the book table and remember I don’t have “House on Mango Street” anymore because I lent it out to someone. The 25th Anniversary Edition of HOMS is there and I snag a copy.

There is an open seat towards the middle of the room filled with wall to wall fold out chairs and I settle in while the place overflows with more than 200 people.  Most of the audience drove from more than thirty minutes away, most are under 35 years old, and half attend college. I am in the ten percent of people over forty five years of age. I know this because she polled the crowd.

I mentioned Sandra’s dulcet voice ( yes I’m calling her by her first name as if we were comadres or amigas), because its softness and her inflections make you feel like she knows you. She can do this even in a huge university room, like Campbell Hall at UCSB where I heard her speak, in her cute pajamas, three months ago.  There is an intimacy in her written voice that touched my heart many years ago when I first read “House on Mango Street.”  Her stories and poems speak about where I have been, and that she’s been there too.

The selected reading was from her upcoming book, and I don’t remember it’s title but it’s coming out in the fall. She read a story about “Marie.” It was about two little girls looking for their lost cat in their neighborhood. Sandra read in several different character voices: male, female, young, old, and cat. I was there with her, looking under hedges, behind fences, peeking into dry yellowed backyards, pausing on stoops, knocking on doors. It takes an outstanding writer to do this to you, while you’re sitting in a hot crowded audience on steel fold out chairs. But she does.

Sandra invites people to ask questions. Yes she has two more books coming in the fall, she’s collaborating on several projects as co-author, her friend Lourdes Portillo is completely a screenplay for “House on Mango Street,” and the crowd is thrilled with that disclosure. She is entering into another part of her life now, seeking change, moving from San Antonio, Texas. Mexico is calling. I think it’s Oaxaca, only because her website has a recent photo of her in Oaxaca and she has a message to her readers about change.

I ask her whether she has thought about publishing e-books. “Yes, the publishing world is also undergoing change, shifting…” She will publish her books as e-books and she owns all of the publishing rights. Very smart woman. “I’m not married to a university or a rich man…so I don’t have a pension…further publishing (with e-books) is my pension.” I’m happy that she will do this and I want to tell her that, but I don’t. I know there are so many other questions to be asked.

The reading and question/answer period seemed short, a fleeting seventy-five minutes. The audience is instructed to line up in a certain area for book signings. The queue quickly forms to over fifty people before the second half of the building empties out. I hope Sandra has a wrist brace so she doesn’t tire out her writing hand. She has so much more art to create and I have so much more to read.

The photo of her is at the end, only because my BB takes crappy photos. 
Boycotts, Cesar Chavez, Chingonas, Faith, Family, Strong Women, Wisdom

Remembering Cesar Chavez and My Mom

Mona Alvarado Frazier

  

                                                                                

I love this photo. The black Aztec eagle symbolizing la causa is so familiar. Every time I see it I not only think of Cesar Chavez, but also of  my mother. I was in grammar school the first time I heard of boycotts, farmworker rights, and la causa. My mom was in night school at Ventura College and went to community meetings at the CSO building. 

One weekend she packed her bags and took off to Delano with several of her younger classmates and community organizers to participate in a march. When she came back she talked with a fervor about Cesar Chavez and farmworker rights. “Did you know he lived in Oxnard? Right here in La Colonia.”  His speeches moved her, she could relate, she embraced his words of “Si se puede.”

Mom was a migrant worker from the time she was a toddler playing  under the sombra of the vineyards until she was fifteen and cutting her hands on the thorny brambles of the cotton bushes, moving from place to place first with her parents, then with her tios when they both died. She hated that her education was interrupted and for that she never wanted to work in the fields again.

Her participation in la causa and community meetings were fodder for several arguments with my uncles. “What the hell are you doing, going to these meetings, isn’t it bad enough you go to night school, you’re never with your kids…”

That rang true, but she wasn’t gone because she was in a bar or with some man, we kids knew that. No one talked stuff about our mom like they did about one of the moms down the street. But sometimes she crumpled under their barrage of words, other times she let loose on them. Whatever happened though, my uncles and their wives were there for us, lending Mom money, bringing us food, and taking care of us.

Years later, when I was in high school we had renewed arguments, this time both my mom and I harangued our relatives. “We’re boycotting Coors, switch beers,” we’d say whenever they visited. “We thought it was just grapes,” they’d yell and add, ‘que la chingada,‘ for emphasis. It took a year of confronting them every time they popped open a Coors, but they stopped buying the brand.

In college I remember boycotting Safeway, standing in picket lines in Santa Barbara, and waving that red flag. By this time my cousin was involved in the Brown Berets and my mom was busy marching for a community pool in La Colonia, addressing workplace issues, and working on her BA at a university. My uncles noted the photos of the Kennedy’s, Cesar Chavez, and the Pope on the walls of our home. ” Is this is why you go to college?”

When Cesar Chavez died Mom went to Delano and paid her respects with 50,000 other people and mourned the loss of the great man who inspired her and gave her the three words she often repeats whenever we get discouraged. 

“Si se puedes,” she says, yes you can. And when I see that iconic flag, I hear those words, remember those sacrifices, and think of Cesar Chavez and my mom.