UNIVISION & HISTORY MAKING
If you watched part 1, part 2, or part 3 of Univision’s Special Report “Tragedia Sin Nombre,” and then you found yourself sharing the story with others, then you are making history. If you are reading the Tulsa World article or listening to the California Report, or NPR’s Tell Me More, and then you turn around and mention this story to a friend, you are making history. If you are a teacher using this story to illustrate a subject or point in the classroom, you too are making history. The more we share this story the more it becomes an irremovable thread in our collective experience. Please share far and wide. My hope is that my book spills far out, off the pages and into the streets, kitchens, classrooms, road trips and intimate spaces, wherever there is a discussion about what it means to be human.
Lance Canales and myself, the memorial benefit concert, Fresno, California, April 18, 2013
NOTES ON PROCESS OF “ALL THEY WILL CALL YOU” THE BOOK
One of my earliest mentors once told me that in order to find a poem we must live in the “non-poem.” In other words, those little spaces, rhythms, failures, joys and triumphs, the stuff our lives are made up of is where we find poetry and stories. But we have to be in it, really in it. Makes sense, right? But I can’t tell you how easy it’s been for me to forget this simple truth lately. As I dive headlong into the writing of my Deportees book, people too easily become characters, lived stories sway to and away from fact, letters to loved ones read more like narrative peaks and valleys, such to the point that I frequently catch myself digging out a photograph from my research files, just to prove to myself that I didn’t make up the image in my mind’s eye. That it does, in fact, exist. This is a whole new realm for me. For the past 15 years that I’ve been writing seriously, I’ve grown accustomed to generating material from my own creative impulses, my own slippery ideas and fancy distortions. This time, for this piece, I’ve resigned myself to the role of witness. Just as this is a book of witnesses. What the children on the ground who lived in that Canyon witnessed. What the prisoners who got their hands dirty that morning witnessed. What the media witnessed. What the landscape itself witnessed. The mountain range, and the airplane, what they witnessed. What Woody and Martin, and those closest to them witnessed. What we are now witnessing. For the last two and a half years I’ve carried around a small, very small, digital recorder. So a lot of this process has been transcription. Also, some of what the Nicaraguan poet, Ernesto Cardenal dubbed Documentary-poems, or Docu-poems, have been employed here. I guess Kerouac referred to a similar process he called “sketch-writing, or sketching.” Something like chronicling the found language and images as objectively as possible, quick and without too much thought. Free of all “fancy distortions.” Or in the words of Steinbeck, free of “my own authorial warp.” I’ve even dipped back into Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s “True Perception: The Path of Dharma Art,” because I see this approach to writing somewhat in line with his concept of “non-aggression,” or rather, a “non-aggressive art,” as in “all things a symbol of themselves.” I remember taking a workshop with Ruben Martinez, author of “El Otro Lado” way back in 1996, and he said something along the lines of “If you write about things as they are the metaphors are already there.” He might’ve been more poetic than that, I’m sure. But here I am now, doing my best to allow these voices, 65 years later, to speak on their own accord. And I cannot express to you how fantastic, challenging, and yet frightening this whole process is. As of right now, the book is shaping up to look like a textual documentary; language, interviews, photos and letters. I’ll try and post a few excerpts down the road.
