← On Being with Krista Tippett
On Being with Krista Tippett
Luis Alberto Urrea — On Our Belonging to Each Other
00:59:10
We humans have this drive to erect barriers between ourselves and others, Luis Alberto Urrea says, and yet this makes us a little crazy. He is an exuberant, wise, and refreshing companion into the deep meaning and the problem of borders — what they are really about, what we do with them, and what they do to us. The Mexican-American border was as close and personal to him as it could be when he was growing up — an apt expression of his parents’ turbulent Mexican-American divorce. In his writing and in this conversation, he complicates every dehumanizing stereotype of Mexicans, "migrants" — and border guards. A deep truth of our time, Luis insists, is that “we miss each other.” He offers a vision of the larger possibility of our time beyond the terrible tangles of today: that we might evolve the old illusion of the melting pot into a 21st-century richness of “us." And he delightfully models that messiness and humor will be required.
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- [00:00]
A
We humans have this drive to erect barriers between ourselves and others, and yet this makes us a little crazy, as Luis Alberto Urrea observes. What a refreshing, helpful way into the deep meaning and the problem of borders. What they are really about, what we do with them and what they do to us. This wise and exuberant writer says that a deep truth of our time is that we miss each other. And the Mexican American border was as close and personal to him as it could get when he was growing up. An apt expression of his parents turbulent Mexican American divorce. Ever since I had this conversation with him, I have not heard a news report of something happening at the southern border of my country without having his voice in my head confounding every caricature of Mexicans and the suffering human beings we now call migrants. I am also eternally grateful for the way he complicated my imagination about the moral agency of a US border guard. In this conversation he offers a vision of the larger possibility of our time beyond the terrible tangles of today which he lives and witnesses with his writing that we might evolve the old illusion of the melting pot to a 21st century richness of us. And delightfully, he models that messiness and humor will be required. I'm Krista Tippett and this is On Being. Luis Alberto Urrea writes poetry, fiction and nonfiction. His books include into the Beautiful north, the Devil's highway, the Hummingbird's daughter, and a 2023 novel, Good Night Irene, inspired by his mother's service in the Red Cross. I interviewed him in 2018 in the St. Croix Valley on the border between Minnesota and Wisconsin. Good evening. I'm delighted to be here tonight with Luis Alberto Rea. He has published in nearly every genre. He's written nonfiction, memoir, short stories and poetry. He's written historical novels. His historical novel, the Hummingbird's Daughter is based on the story of his father's Aunt Teresa. Is that correct? That's that book.
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B
My great aunt. Yeah.
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A
Known as the Mexican Joan of Arc, a Mexican mystic, folk healer and revolutionary insurgent. And I have to say, you have an inordinate number of characters like that in your family.
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B
I do.
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A
So we could go on.
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B
Okay.
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A
He's even written an award winning mystery story and so not surprisingly, has been called a literary badass, which we probably can't say on public radio.
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B
Oh, yeah.
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A
I see in your person another quality that is not quite so sexy, but in our global moment is so urgent and I think so vividly desired and needed and that is that you are a bridge person. Here's something Luis Alberto Urrea likes to say. There is no them, there is only us. And the way that is explored and revealed through your work is not to reduce us to some kind of monolithic mass. It's not the melting pot us, but to Grapple with the 21st century multiplicity of human identity. I think to imagine making a new richness of us. This is in your body, it's in your history. You were born of a Mexican father, an American mother. But it's a lot more complicated even than that.
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B
Yes, it's wonderfully complicated.
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A
You were Luis to her and Luis to your father.
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B
Or worse. Or worse, pick any exasperated Spanish word if you know them, that's what he would call.
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A
And you know, you were actually born in Tijuana. And as I understand it well, you know, it seems like the border ran through your parent, ran through your bloodline, it ran through your parents marriage.
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B
Yes, it did.
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A
And at one point it actually ran through your house.
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B
Yeah, the border ran right down our sad little barrio apartment because their marriage came apart. It was doomed from the start in some ways. And I always tell audiences, you know, the kitchen was the United States and the living room was Mexico, and I was in the middle. And both of them were trying to win a culture award, I think. And so to my mother, I was Lewis. I was Lewis Woodward, one of her relatives. And she watched my English like a fascist border guard, you know, and my
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A
father, to make sure you were speaking
- [05:46]
B
it, One speaks proper English, one does not say, yeah. One says, yes, mother dear. And in the barrio you can see me saying, yes, mother dear and being promptly beaten up for it. And my father was extremely chauvinistic. He loved Mexico and everything. Mexican was the best thing. And so he was living in terror that I would skew more American than Mexican. So I was raised twice at the same time. But I was a Mexican boy and an American boy.
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A
Right.
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B
So
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A
how would you start to think about what is the spiritual imprint on you or perhaps the spiritual work that that left in you for the rest of your life, straddling a border like that in your person from the very beginning of your life?
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B
A couple of things. I was. I don't know why, but I've always been God crazy. You know, I have been drawn toward whatever the cosmic mysteries are from boyhood on. To my father's chagrin, God has always felt like my companion in everything. And I, you know, you've read the books, I mean, they're full of naughty bits and bad language and bad behavior, but I think you are trying to portray us, the human family, warts and all. But critics often identify me as this political writer, and I say, no, I'm more interested in the soul's journey. First, you have to admit, yes, we have a soul. A lot of people don't want to go there, but even my atheist friends read me because I think the word
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A
soul is kind of coming back to it.
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B
It is coming back.
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A
People are getting. Well, it's like, I think people are realizing we can't really do without it, so we have to figure out what we mean when we say it in this world.
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B
Right. And, you know, for. You brought up Hummingbird's daughter. Just imagine 20 years studying with shamans and medicine people to write that book. So I've become. You know, I used to work with Baptist missionaries. They're not sure what kind of beast I am. Now they don't know if I'm in league with Satan or not because I've got a very strange view. But I find the sacred in almost everything.
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A
So, you know, I think that's not unconnected to something Ursula Le Guin said to you.
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B
Okay.
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A
Who was a teacher to you and
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B
she was my discoverer.
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A
Your discoverer.
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B
She started my career.
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A
You report this was something she said. I believe in a class. We writers are the raw nerve of the universe. Our job is to go out and feel things for people, then to come back and tell them how it feels to be alive because they are numb, because we have forgotten. And I feel like that, you know, you go out to feel things about the boundaries between humans and the borders we build between ourselves, specifically the U.S. mexican border. And the back. And the fourth of it really has been there all the way through your life, as well as your writing. So, yeah, as you said, you moved to the. You were born in Tijuana. You moved to the US At a young age. You're finishing college on this side of the border. And then in the year of your graduation, when your father was on a trip on the other side of the border, he was killed. Do you want to, you know. Yeah. Do you want to say anything about that? I mean, that's obviously a terrible part of the story.
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B
The journey was really interesting for me because I thought I was just like everybody else. Just like. I think you're all just like me. So when I meet you, I think, oh, yeah, you've got a Mexican grandma. You all speak Spanish. You used to eat peanut butter on a hot corn tortilla just like me. And you didn't. But in Some ways, we all are the same because we all have family and history and memories and so forth. And so I would spend my boyhood going back and forth across the border. And it the end of fourth grade, there was an outbreak of street violence. Somebody wanted to hurt me in particular. And my parents thought, we're going to get out of here and move to my mom's people, go up to a white neighborhood, an Anglo neighborhood. And to my mother's undying, I think, shock and chagrin, we were seen as the invading Mexican family in this neighborhood. And she was like, dear boy, I'm from New York City. You know, my family are from Virginia. But that didn't. She was tainted by our existence, which was shocking to all of us. And I had learned Spanish before I learned English, so I had an accent. And it was at that point when people started calling me racial names, which was a great shock. So that transformation hit hard and fast. I went to college. I was the first to go to college in my family because my parents pushed me, and thank goodness for that. And in my senior year, being my father's first child, he had. I had other. My dad was a traditional Mexican man. You know, he had families, But I was the only one in this family. And since I was the first, he wanted to get me a graduation gift. And so he drove into his hometown 27 hours, and he retrieved money for me as a graduation gift. And he drove back 27 hours and was caught by bad Mexican cops. And he died. And it was not good. And then they wouldn't let me bury him. They made me buy him. I was 20 years old, not ready. So I bought my dad. And that. That ended everything for us. We were completely destitute. My brothers and I took up a collection to bury him. We buried him in an unmarked grave in Tijuana. But then, you know, in steps Le Guin, who. I had written a story about that, and she took me in when she read it and she published it. It was my first sale. So in some ways, that sacrifice launched everything that's meaningful.
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A
And I think it's important also right here to point out that you write about the fullness of what it is to be Mexican.
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B
Well, yeah, we rule.
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A
And it's not all poverty. And it's also, as you say, it's not like everybody in Mexico is dying to get to the US which is a narrative that's very strong at the moment. So you draw out these layers of complexity, which also includes beauty and whimsy and all the things that happen in life. And I mean, one of the things you write about very convincingly, you don't just write about it, you live it convincingly. You say, Mexico is the true melting pot. You live and breathe. You are the living, breathing embodiment of it.
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B
Yeah, look at us. Yeah, I mean, we have Apaches in our family, Yaqui indigenous people, of course, the Murrays. And Urrea is not a Mexican name, it's Basque. So my grandfather was Basque. And in Basque it means golden man, man of gold. So in other words, bubba looking once again. And then we have like, we have Chinese urreas, the Wang family, Wong Urreas. And recently I met a bunch of Samoans. So I thought, ah, it's my Samoan cousin. How cool is that?
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A
And it goes all the way back to what, the Visigoth invaders of Iberia.
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B
Well, you know, when I was researching Hummingbird's Daughter, I was. My family has always been really thrilled that in Don Quixote, Don Quixote mentioned the Urrea family and he says, you know, I am not a powerful man like the Urreas of Galicia. And so we've been going out to lunch on that for about 500 years. And so when I started researching the region my family's from originally, it's a village named Urrea, and it was under the Visigoth king named Uraeus, spelled almost exactly the same. So when I started going through their notes about the Visigoth ancientness of the family, I thought that was kind of cool. And the reason I started making a little bit of usage of that was because there was a time when white supremacists were dogging me and threatening me and offering to kill me and my family and so forth. So I could write them back and say, I don't know what you're saying, man. I'm a Visigoth, I'm the only Aryan here. In this conversation, they couldn't take it. It would make them furious, but they wouldn't know what to do.
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A
You two, you point out some interesting things about language, right? And how our vocabulary is full of borrowed words. I think that's important and interesting also because the insistence that Spanish speaking Americans have on speaking Spanish feels like something new, I think in this melting pot culture. I'm not sure that's right. Like, I wonder if we could go back 100 years if we would find that Germans were still speaking German and whatever, Right?
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B
But yeah, all you have to do is go into the North End, you know, in Boston, and yeah, speaking Italian amongst your folks. You do?
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A
Yeah. Right. So. But you point out all these words and I think it seems like you've had a lot of fun, kind of.
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B
I was having listening field day.
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A
All the words borrowed from Spanish, like, well, coyote, marijuana. There's a good one.
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B
Who's stampede, who's gal.
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A
Calaboose Key, as in Florida Keys, Florida. I mean, you know, bonanza, bronco. All these words. Beef, jerky, vanilla, chocolate, rodeo. Rodeo. Here's something. Where do you say. Yeah, you also say English. It's made up of all these untidy words, man. Have you noticed? Native American, skunk, German, waltz, Danish, twerp, Latin, adolescent Scottish, feckless, on and on. It's a glorious wreck. A good old Viking word that glorious, I say, in all its shambling, mutable beauty. People daily speak a quilt work of words and continents and nations and tribes and even enemies dance all over your mouth when you speak.
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B
Why, thank you. Well, it's true. I don't quite comprehend the need for insult, you know, the need for paranoia and aggression. And I mean, I understand. I'm hearing all this new scientific talk explaining how, of course, the mind is tribal and we bound with our tribes and we're fearful of the. Of the stranger and so forth. But, you know, there's a particular tide of it in the United States and it's been here for an awfully long time. And I think I got a bit politicized when people started. Well, I did when I was a kid, when they started calling me greaser, wetback, taco, bender, beaner, all this stuff, you know, which was a shock to me, and started telling me that everything bad was Mexican, everything filthy. Because honestly, until fifth grade, everyone I revered was Mexican. And all of a sudden in fifth grade you're told they're all scum, invaders. I thought, what? It's no accident to me that in fifth grade I lost my Mexican accent and started speaking like my mother. Yeah, I didn't mean to, but I wasn't, you know, I was. I was in full on survival mode because I didn't understand what had just happened. And I think that bafflement stick with me to this day. And I don't understand. You know, as a teacher, I teach in Chicago and I watch students fear each other. I come into a class and African American students are on one side and white students are on the other side. Or I come into a class and there will be two young ladies with a hijab and no one will sit near them. There's an empty arc of seats around them. And so I'm always trying to find ways to stop these things, because it only takes this much, I think, for us to see each other, know each other, and then love each other. And that's what's so dangerous. That's very dangerous. So one of my writing rules with my students, which I use all the time, and it's why the books are so comedic in places, is I always tell the students that laughter is the virus that infects you with humanity. And if you sit with somebody and laugh, not at them, but laugh with them wholeheartedly, how in the world can you get up from that table and say, those people? You can't. And if you've laughed with them, you're going to cry with them, too. You know that laughter is a very dangerous portal for humanity. Yeah.
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A
I mean, we are learning these things about our brain and how they really are trying to help us.
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B
Right.
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A
They're trying to help us because the complexity of reality is overwhelming.
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B
Yes. Yeah.
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A
Right. So we. So we, you know, what is it? We interviewed Mahzarin Banaji, who helped create the field of implicit bias, you know, and she says the mind is a different seeking machine, but it's also how it's creating order for us and making reality feel manageable. And I. But it's not. It doesn't have to become hardened and hostile. Right. I also feel like the. These things we're learning about ourselves, I mean, this is very new, very new knowledge really will be a form of power. Just like those tools, those humanizing tools are forms of power.
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B
Yeah. It's maybe a redistribution of power. Maybe it's a more collaborative power, communal power, you know? I mean, my daughter, for whatever reason, my youngest daughter, Chayo, she just thinks somewhere deep in her soul, she's a Norse woman, she's a Viking. And I've had to listen to years now I'm, you know, I know everything about Odin. And, you know, it's. It's amazing.
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A
Yeah.
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B
But what's really cool is that, you know, she has understood things outside of the myth we have of the rampaging maniac Viking berserker killing everybody. And now she sees all this stuff and she tells me, you know, Vikings were feminist, you know, as part of my curse. Now that she tells me things like, yeah, you men gotta go. That's what daughters are for. All men have to go to an island.
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A
Yeah, but. And so what we do with borders and walls. Right. That's where this hardens.
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B
Yes, it does.
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A
And you've written recently about Going to visit the Ote Mesa border crossing to see the wall in progress. And I love. You know, one thing that you do is you just plant that place in its history. Right. Of 12,000 years of being inhabited by the Kumeyaay. Kumeyaay Indians. That also softens something, seeing that sweep of time.
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B
And, yeah, you know, you. You know, it's been. It's been on my mind for many years. And when the immigration issue caught up with me after a couple of books and I was talking about it, you know, and people would be really offended and upset with me, and I would always get the same response, you know, yeah, my family, sure, they were immigrants, but we did it legally, unlike you guys. We had papers. And so I started being a jerk and saying, who checked them? Geronimo. Crazy Horse. Stamp the paper. It's ridiculous and in some ways a folly to say, can't we all just get along? But it is the truest thing that I don't understand why we can't. And part of it, I have to say, in my new novel, for the first time, I'm feeling very mature right now, because for the first time in my writing career, I've made the hero a Republican, just to show everybody that
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A
I can, you know, like your mother.
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B
My mom was a serious Republican. Yeah. Yeah. So I just wanted people to know. Yeah. Hey, you know, I feel like our family is scattering worse and worse, and we need to be able to talk with each other. We need to be able to. To enjoy each other's point of view, even if we don't agree with it. And, you know, I think I am certainly in the world of so much grievance that I have Facebook friends who have the Make America Great Again hat. And when they say something, people attack them. How dare you say that to Luis? And I say, wait, wait, don't you have your own page? Because if I didn't like those guys, I would unfriend them. They're my friends, and we have fun sometimes attacking each other just, you know, because we can laugh. I hope. We can talk. I hope. And when we can't, we are in serious, serious trouble. And we've seen what the world is like over and over again. When you must be silent, it's not good. Mm.
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A
And I feel like one thing you do as much in your fiction as in your nonfiction and certainly into the Beautiful north, but is, like, you work with the idea of a border or a wall, not as a. Not, in fact, as a hard and fast thing, as a liminal Space as a liminal zone.
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B
It is a liminal space, right? Absolutely.
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A
But that is a. You know, just to think about it that way opens up a lot of imagination.
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B
I think liminal space is where all writers go. Jane Hirschfeld has some beautiful stuff about being in liminal space. You know, that place of crossing, that place of pressure, of two things meeting. That's a rich. I mean, that's where the plankton wells up, you know, and the currents meet. And you can choose to see it in different ways. Right. And, you know, either the border is a hideous, festering scar of oppression, horror and violence, or it's a fraternal space where two cultures meet and can exchange. And honestly, particularly before the narco wars, there was a. You know, and there still are bastions of friendship along the border. All you have to do is go to places near Nogales or Yuma, where kids on the Mexican side and kids on the American side play volleyball over the wall with each other.
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A
Yeah. And see, we don't hear these stories.
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B
No, you don't. And I recently did a ballet. I didn't, I didn't. I read poems while they danced.
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A
I'm imagining it.
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B
No, me and a tutu. Nah, nah. But I narrated. This ballet was the 100th anniversary of a Stravinsky piece which included a Faustian journey through a wasteland where the man trying to get to safety has to make a deal with the devil, essentially. And the composer slash conductor who was reviving the ballet thought that my work was appropriate for this era. That was 100 years ago. This time, its people dying in the desert, making that terrible deal to survive. But what he did, his other piece, his name is Stephen Schick.
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A
Oh, yes.
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B
He's brilliant. I keep saying, this guy's.
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A
So he did a concert on the land where the wall is being built.
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B
Yes, he did. Yeah. He went three miles down the road, the dirt road, and he set up American musicians on one side of the wall and Mexican musicians on the other side of the wall. They couldn't see each other, but he conducted. And the Mexicans could watch the video, him conducting. And each side had 300 people watching. And they did a concerto together to prove that those walls, you can't stop art, you can't stop human touch or communication. It flew over the wa.
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A
And he also spent some time in Berlin. Right. And that was a wall with which I had some intimacy. And I mean, I remember still when Michael Jackson came and did a concert Right. On the western side of the Wall, just as things were Falling apart. But the concert goers gathered right on the eastern side. It was exactly that. I mean, that couldn't. But. And you know, I'm pretty fascinated with wall. Like, I've also. Have you been to the wall in Belfast?
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B
No.
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A
Yeah, let's go. Yeah, well, see, that one is interesting too, because that one is almost just like a safety blanket right now. Like it's still there, even though it's no longer true that you will almost certainly be killed if you're the wrong person going into the wrong neighborhood across the wall. But one thing you point out is, so in Berlin, on the western side, the wall was painted and raucous and alive and rebellious on the western side, where people were free in Mexico. What do you say in Mexico? It's the Mexican side.
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B
It's the reverse.
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A
It's the reverse side. That's.
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B
Well, it was, you know, thank God for Stephen Schick. I stole it when he was telling me it because it was the perfect wrap up for that piece for the times that when he went across the other side, he said, you know, the Mexican side, the entire fence is an art gallery covered with paintings, sculptures, graffiti. There are ice cream men and taco stands and they're mariachis and their lovers and their people dancing. The American side, steel trucks, dogs, helicopters, guns. No art, no graffiti, no nothing. And he said, I suddenly realized that that was the Soviet side in Berlin.
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A
Yeah, it was. And I think, I think, yeah. And I think you said, who was free? Who was free and who.
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B
Yeah, yeah. What exactly is that wall for then?
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A
And so, I mean, I just want to. I want to read something that you wrote about. Here's another thing you said about a border. Border is an imposed metaphor on a family. The border you were talking about, specifically that region. The border remains a fluid, mutating, stubbornly troubling, enthusiastically lethal region. Perhaps it's not a region at all. Maybe it's just an idea nobody can agree on. A conversation that never ends, even when it becomes an argument and all participants kick over the table and spill their drinks and stomp out of the room. You say, I was born there.
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B
I was born there. And I do think that it's a convo that is alien. But it always surprises people who don't know a lot about the border up here, north of the border, even if you go to Phoenix, regardless of what politicians tell you, people in Phoenix aren't really clear on what the border is. It's not very far away, but it's already alien. Well, people in Mexico are the same way. They don't. You know, it's not like people wake up every day and say, ah, the border. Let's go.
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A
They don't.
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B
And, you know, it's just the direst need that brings you to it. And it's a different world. And an example of that was I got to go to Mexico City in the late 90s, and I was interviewed by La Jornada, great Mexican newspaper, and they were asking me about myself, and I thought, like you said, you know, the border ran down your kitchen. I thought, I'm going to get them now. And I said, you know, in a certain way, the border fence goes right down the middle of my heart. My heart is bisected by barbed wire. And the reporter said, that's great. That's great. Mexico City. When the article came out, it said, if you cut his chest open with a knife, there's a border patrol truck idling in his heart. I was like, That was truly lost in translation. Support for On Being with Krista Tippett comes from the Fetzer Institute. Fetzer supports a movement of organizations that are applying spiritual solutions to society's toughest problems. Learn more@fetzer.org.
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A
In the early 2000s, Luis Alberto Urrea ventured into nonfiction reportage, training a journalist's eye on the Mexican American border for his book the Devil's Highway. This became an adventure that changed him, and the part of the conversation with him that follows also ever after, changed the lens with which I read stories about that border. Though, to be clear, these stories he tells described details and realities that have surely changed in smaller and larger degrees along with our world in the two decades that have followed. When did you write the Devil's Highway? When was that?
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B
Well, I started working on it in 2001. They died in May, and I started working in August, but it came out in 2004.
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A
I mean, so that is a story, because to me, also, I see that you, as much as you've been thinking about this, not just for 25 years, but since 1955, you've also had a journey in just going farther and far into the layers of complexity. And one of the things that struck me about this, I mean, this is really as much reportage, I think, as it's narrative nonfiction. And it's about a terrible story of 26 Mexican men who set out across this desert known as the Devil's highway and heading for Arizona, heading hopefully for work. And 12 of them made it, and 14 were just burned to death under that sun. And one of the Things you've said is that when you set out to write it, you were tired of people just demonizing, not seeing these people as humans. One of the interesting things that happens. Oh, yeah, that you were sick of the toxic reduction of these people. But one of the things that you also ended up seeing is the humanity of the Border Patrol.
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B
I didn't mean to.
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A
You didn't mean to. But that's a huge, huge piece of the story. And it's in Agent Arnie Davis and Into the Beautiful North.
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B
Right.
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A
Like, that's a very affecting piece of this.
- [35:46]
B
Well, thank you. It was. It was a big shock to me. I went in as, frankly, a really bad writer. I thought I had it all. I thought I am, you know, Mr. Witness, Mr. Enlightened Progressive. And I thought, I'm going to witness everybody except those jerks over there in the Border Patrol. I'm gonna burn those guys because I just believe they were bad guys. And they knew it. They knew it before I walked in the door and they made my life quite difficult. And the supervisory agent of Welton Station, Kenny Smith, a Lovely Man, a 30 year veteran of the Border Patrol, while they were basically eating me alive, tearing, you know, my sinews off my bones, he came out and he said, what's going on? He said, this idiot's writing this book about the. And he just looked at me and it was what I call grace. I don't know what else to call it. But this moment came when his eyes focused and he looked at me and he said, I sent out the rescue. I sent out that big Banzai Run. And at that moment, without knowing it, my life changed. And, you know, he took me in and he began training me and he took me out and showed me what it means to track people and what it means how to. How to know what time of the morning somebody walked by. It was incredible. I realized this guy had a PhD in dirt. I say in the book, because he could read a piece of dirt like we read a poem in a lit class. Then he was saying things that were blowing my mind. And there came this moment, the transformational moment for me was standing on the Devil's highway with him. And there's nothing there. There's no fence, there's no barbed wire. It's just desert as far as you can see. And there's a sign with some bullet holes in it that says, you know, if you come in the United States, we'll really be depressed. That's about it. And I am standing there with him and he Says to me, and mind you, I still think they're evil. He says, I know what you think of me. And I remember looking because he's got his 40 caliber Glock on his belt, and I thought, oh, man. And he said, you think I'm a jackbooted thug. And I was busted. I wasn't going to say, well, yes, I do. I just stood there and he said, I am your jackbooted thug in shining armor. And he started talking about his life and he told me all this amazing stuff that I couldn't have imagined in a hundred years. You know, that how agents park, they live 70 miles, 50 miles away from any station because it takes that long to get into the game and change the human being. You were when you woke up to the human being that has to go out there. And he said, and you gotta drive 70 miles home because you gotta go home and bounce your child on your knee. And he said to me at one point, jaw, white, cowboy. You know, he says, my daddy was a rancher. I'm a rancher. You know what I do all day? I chase ranchers around this. He said, I know, they're my own people. And he said, you know, he said, my job is to save innocent civilians dying a terrible death. My job is also to arrest those same civilians.
- [39:28]
A
Both parts of that equation that you didn't know. I mean, once you talk about how there's, you know, in this swirl of things that get these accusations that are made and assumptions that are made, that there's the criticism that American taxpayers are paying for comfort stations and expensive light towers. And then you said, wrong. In fact, the towers are built, raised, maintained and paid for out of pocket by those bleeding heart liberals. The border patrol agents themselves, they, I
- [39:59]
B
mean, okay, they're cops.
- [40:01]
A
Yeah.
- [40:01]
B
So they're not stupid, they're sly. So they designed life saving towers with shiny mirrors that can be seen from many, many miles away. And they're solar powered, they have a call button and they have a sign that says, you will die. You will not make it to the freeway. And if you're in distress, push this button. We will be here before a half hour and save you. And you know, being cops, they put them in the places where the most people walked. Yeah, it gave them more arrests, but yeah, it gave them access to safe people. And that was designed and built in garages by Border Pat. They went out and put them up themselves and they paid for them. You know, those were little things. And when he was telling me all this stuff, all my alarms went off all my Chicano border, Mexican, liberal, may not love Border Patrol. You know, it was like the Robot and Lost in Space. Danger, Will Robinson may not love Border Patrol. And I couldn't help myself. And he told me these things about being a dad and being a husband and dead people he had seen and all this stuff. And I turned to him and I said, kenny, Kenny, I love you, man. And he just. He never looked at me. He just kept looking in the desert and said, I kind of like you, too, buddy. How can you not write a book?
- [41:26]
A
Yeah, okay. I think this is actually what you're getting at right there. You have this experience. You've said that at the same time, people want to strengthen barriers. We seem to want to supersede them, and this makes us a little crazy. You said we'd like to be able to speak to each other. We miss each other.
- [41:53]
B
Yeah. Don't you think?
- [41:56]
A
I do think, but there's something about somebody like you writing it down that way. And I read it, and I know it's true.
- [42:07]
B
I do think it's true. And I think, you know, I. You know, the border, to me is just. It's a metaphor. All we have to do is look around us. The border's everywhere. Look at the world we're in. Muslim band, black and white, Black Lives Matter. Gay, bi, trans, immigrants, north and South Christian, and not anywhere you want to go. There are these weird fences. And I can look in any audience and see fences.
- [42:42]
A
Yeah.
- [42:42]
B
And so, yeah, I think we miss each other. And, yeah, I've tried to train myself to be able to listen and not just react automatically. Right. I think that's. And that. That goes back maybe to my theological mania, too, that I just think that there's a great loneliness.
- [43:02]
A
You also have observed somewhere that I think you said something like having the life you've had. You think that each and every one of us is at least bicultural.
- [43:12]
B
Yeah, somehow.
- [43:14]
A
Yeah.
- [43:15]
B
I think you're all Mexicans, but I know you're not. I just, you know, it's the default. I don't. And I think about this thing a lot. There's a great Mexican American novelist named Rudolfo Anaya. A lot of people don't know him, but he wrote a kind of a classic novel called Bless Me Ultima, which was when I was growing up, the book about Mexican healer women. And I owe a lot to that book for figuring out how to do Hummingbird's Daughter. But when I was a kid, he told me this amazing thing. He said, if you in Your writing can make your Tijuana grandmother the grandmother of a reader in Iowa or Nebraska. He said, you have committed the strongest religious and political act in the world. And I've always kept that as one of my prime writing rules. And that's what I'm thinking about, that we can. If we can, talk to each other without agendas. I'm not trying to convert anybody. I'm just telling you how I feel. I think people will listen. The acid test is if you have to talk to kids. I have to talk to kids because the NEA all the time. And kids will shut you out like that if they sense any kind of a come on, or, you know, I'm gonna get you to vote a certain way or accept the Lord or whatever I want you to do. I just tell you my story. They know if you're telling the truth, and that. That means a lot to me. So I'm trying to be as willing to listen to people as I am, to sort of blab at them. And there's a lot of wisdom that can be had from both sides of the aisle. Yeah. If we're willing to listen to it. And I admit, most of the time I'm like, are you kidding? I'm watching MSNBC every night saying, are you kidding? Kidding me? But I'm still willing to listen.
- [45:14]
A
Okay, let's have a couple questions. This is two questions you can answer. Either both. What is the hardest thing about non Latino audiences when presenting your work way up north? What must you do differently compared to Los Angeles, San Antonio, or even Chicago?
- [45:34]
B
Not a doggone thing. There's. It's absolutely wonderful. There's nothing. I mean, I. You know, sure, in San Antonio, we speak Spanish more, but other than that, no. People. These are readers. People are readers, you know, and they want to know things or they wouldn't be reading. So, no, I feel we have this phrase in Spanish, en familia. You're in your family. Everywhere I go. Because people are kind.
- [46:18]
A
So if the we is not a melting pot, what is it that we're evolving towards? I know Richard Rodriguez talks about the Browning of America.
- [46:30]
B
Oh, I hate that.
- [46:31]
A
You hate that. I kind of thought you would, so I don't think so. It doesn't have to be that, because in a way, that's another way of talking about the melting pot. We'll just eventually all look alike, so it won't matter.
- [46:39]
B
Well, it fed into a negative narrative. It sounds like some kind of stain in your laundry. The Browning of America.
- [46:46]
A
Okay, so let's. So we'll leave him outside. So just pretend like I didn't mention him.
- [46:51]
B
No, no, let's get it.
- [46:54]
A
What are we evolving into? What would your hope be, your dream that we're evolving into?
- [47:02]
B
Oh, gosh, Star Trek. We're going to have, you know, we're going to have a culture perhaps where there's a kind of federation of planets. Right. What is wrong with, you know, seeing a stranger in the dark and have that stranger only raise a hand to you to wave hello and not hit you? What's wrong with that? So that to me, you know, that my family, my naming my daughter Rosario Teresa doesn't take away from your child named Biff or Sally. It doesn't, we don't have. It doesn't harm anyone. And it seems so simple to me and enjoyable to be able to appreciate someone else's culture or music, you know, or cuisine or even to listen about their religion and say, that's very interesting.
- [48:02]
A
I like that. So we evolve into just enjoying each other more.
- [48:06]
B
Well, wouldn't that be nice? Yeah, I think it sure would. Yeah. Except maybe in sports. Right?
- [48:13]
A
We can still hate each other.
- [48:14]
B
Yes. Oh, absolutely.
- [48:17]
A
All right. This is completely self indulgent, but when you were in that one of those pages in the, I think in the book review of the Times recently and talking about books you like and you said you really like hard boiled mystery novels. And I do too.
- [48:31]
B
You do.
- [48:32]
A
And I can't. And it's hard for me to explain that.
- [48:34]
B
I knew I liked you. I knew I liked you.
- [48:37]
A
But I say one thing I say is I want a world without murder but not without murder mysteries.
- [48:42]
B
Oh, exactly. Oh yeah, yeah, absolutely.
- [48:45]
A
So like, so what is that, though? I think. What is that? That we also, as humans, as creatures, we can be against this and yet somehow we have to grapple or. I don't know, I don't know. What is it? Maybe an unanswerable question.
- [49:02]
B
I think deep down in my heart I wish I was Jack Reacher and could just kick open a door and shoot all the bad guys. Maybe, I don't know, you know, that's the old Whitman line of, you know, I contain multitudes, there are all sorts of sides to me. And I think that detective genre is fascinating for a lot of reasons. My wife is very much more literary in her tastes than sometimes I am. And we'll be lying in bed and I'm reading, you know, I'm reading the new Lee Child and, or James Lee Burke. I'll buy any James Lee Burke on site. And she's reading some incredibly turgid thing about a melancholy Russian thinking about I don't know what. And she will say to me, so has the tragic alcoholic detective met the wistful yet large breasted woman in trouble yet? And I take umbrage. I'm like, no, are you kidding? It's not that kind of book. And then at about page 110, I'll say, yeah, he just met her. Yeah, I can't. It's a formula. I think it's like watching really good tv, maybe.
- [50:29]
A
Yeah, right.
- [50:30]
B
And those archetypes are fascinating because they really go back all the way to nights.
- [50:36]
A
Right.
- [50:36]
B
You know, as Raymond Chandler pointed out so long ago. Plus, they're just cool, man. They're cool books. Yeah.
- [50:43]
A
Okay. This is a beautiful book of poetry.
- [50:48]
B
Thank you.
- [50:48]
A
The Tijuana Book of the Dead. And actually the first poem in here is called you, who seek grace from a Distracted God. And it's way too long to read and I'm so intrigued by where it ends and I. I even wondered, you know, maybe if you would just want to read like just that very, just this, this page. But I want to know about these, all these I love yous. Would you just read that and then talk to me about where that goes? What's happening there?
- [51:22]
B
Well, the first line of the first poem is, you who seek grace from a distracted God. And the last line of the last poem is, you are not forgotten. Hence, in my mind, this is the world's longest sentence. It's all about God or about our yearning. And so this is a poem that was inspired by anti immigrant rhetoric. And it's a journey through the first hours of the morning of people desperately trying to get to work. And this is an echo of my own mornings taking many buses to many awful jobs. And so you're standing in the downtown plaza.
- [52:06]
A
You can start earlier, wherever you want.
- [52:07]
B
Yeah, I'll find a spot so it makes some sense. And you're standing with all the people there in tedium. You walk silent, counting your manifold sins to the plaza. Stand in the crush of your family, these children heading for trade school. The wheelchair man, the woman and her shopping cart. The nodding hooker with blue tears on her cheek. Paisanos y borrachos, ticos, boricuas, Chicanos, Apaches, Tainos, habaneros, cariocas, Mayas, tattooed cholo samurai and inscrutable, leaning back hushed as he watches you. And you want to, you really want to. You are bursting with it, you are burning with it. You who have no words Want to cup their cheeks in your hands? You want to hold their faces between your palms? You want to say it. Say it. You have nothing to lose. Just say it. Say, I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. Partially. It's really hard to say I love you a lot to people. I think, certainly to an audience. Interestingly, it's funny you choose that, because that's how they started the ballet. They made me say this to all these strangers. Really? Yeah. And often, if I'm feeling really dramatic, I will gesture to each part of the audience when I do it, because I want it to be sort of a pagan benediction in a way, you know? But, yeah, you want to say it. We all want to say it, but we can't. Man, I deal with so many kids who can't tell their story, and they don't think anybody loves them. They think nobody cares. They think everybody hates them. They're waiting to be thrown out of the country or their mothers to vanish. So part of it is talking to people who need to say it more. Part of it is talking to myself to say, don't be a coward. Tell people you love them. And part of it is I'm often talking to 600 kids, not you adults, and I'm telling them, I love you. I love you all. Because somebody's got to, you know, you've got to. I mean, if I could have a radio show, I would just read them a story every night and tell them I love them.
- [55:15]
A
This has been so beautiful. And I wanted to ask you, as we finish, if you would read these lines from Nobody's Son, which is kind of a memoir. Notes. I marked it up, but since you wrote it, I'm hoping you'll know what. You'll still be able to read it.
- [55:36]
B
Okay.
- [55:39]
A
Is there anything else you would like to say?
- [55:41]
B
Just thank you. I mean, this is a bucket list event for me, speaking to you, and this is the best place to do it. So I'm really happy. Words are the only bread we can really share. When I say we, I mean every one of us. Everybody, all of you. Each Border Patrol agent and every trembling Mexican peering through the fence. Every Klansman and each NAACP office worker, each confused mother, every disappointed dad. For I am nobody's son, but I am everyone's brother. So come here to me. Walk me home.
- [56:59]
A
Luis Alberto Urrea is a Distinguished professor of Creative Writing at the University of Illinois, Chicago. His many books include into the Beautiful north, the Devil's highway, the Hummingbird's Daughter and Good Night Irene. A big thank you for this show to Artreach St. Croix, the Stillwater Public Library, Trinity Lutheran Church in Stillwater, and the NEA's Big Read program. A special shout out to Heather Rutledge, Stephanie Atkins, Tracy Post, Travis Nordahl and Phil Kadidlo. The On Being Project is Chris Heagle,
- [57:42]
B
Loren Drummerhausen, Eddie Gonzalez, Lucas Johnson, Zack Rose, Julie Seiple, Padre Gautulma, Gautam Srikishan,
- [57:51]
A
Cameron Musar, Kayla Edwards, Tiffany Champion, Andrea
- [57:55]
B
Prevot and Carla Zanoni.
- [57:57]
A
On Being is an independent nonprofit production of the On Being Project. We are located on Dakota Land. Our lovely theme music is provided and composed by by Zoe Keating. Our closing music was composed by Gautam Srikishan and the last voice you hear singing at the end of our show is Cameron Kinghorn. Our funding partners include the Hearthland foundation, helping to build a more just, equitable and connected America. One creative act at a time. The Fetzer Institute Supporting a movement of organizations applying spiritual solutions to society's toughest problems. Find them@fetzer.org Kalliapea foundation dedicated to reconnecting ecology, culture and spirituality. Supporting organizations and initiatives that uphold a sacred relationship with life on earth. Learn more@kaliopeia.org and the Osprey Foundation A catalyst for empowered, healthy and fulfilled lives.
- [59:01]
B
On Being is produced by On Being Studios in Minneapolis, Minnesota.