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I know you’ve said that by the time you were a junior in high school you could no longer speak Spanish. How did that happen and how did you relearn Spanish?
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I wasn’t different from my friends. Many in my generation couldn’t speak Spanish by the time we reached high school. Well, you need to take that with a grain of salt: we didn’t want to speak Spanish because we had learned well. Some people struggled with that for the rest of their lives. Later when I was starting college, I relearned the language, but not exactly. Spanish hadn’t gone anywhere. What I had to do—and it was a very slow and difficult process—was relearn my attitude toward the language.
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That reminds me of your poem Nani. In this poem, you describe visits to your grandmother’s house, where you would sit down to eat. But since you couldn’t speak Spanish and she couldn’t speak English, another language was formed. Can you explain what this language was?
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When you look at just the face of it, you’d think we would’ve had a problem. But a grandmother and a grandson sitting down for lunch is not a problem, and we should resist anybody who tells us it is. What we ended up doing for ourselves was to evolve a third language that everybody will understand. It’s very simple: she would cook, I would eat, and that is how we talked. That’s the first language of a grandmother and a grandson anyway.
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How does your latest collection of poetry The Theater of Night fit into your work as a whole?
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It’s what I imagined is the love story of my great-grandparents Clemente and Ventura in northern Sonora and southern Arizona before there was any fence or any sense that there was even a divider there. The best way to ground it is in education. When you go to school, all your motion is backward, but you go to school to move forward in your life. How do we reconcile the two things? For me, the idea of going backward to my great-grandparents—and even farther down the road—is going to help me move forward.
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The Theater of Night opens with: “This book is in good and personal debt to Clemente and Ventura and all the rest of my extended family, in whom so many of my words find treasure, and to my hometown of Nogales.” What is that good and personal debt?
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They made me, they made me possible, and I’m indebted to them just intrinsically, just absolutely. Without them and without that story, I wouldn’t have my story. Very specifically, it’s because of them and where they moved to that I come to my point in my story as a human being. And that’s the debt I owe them. I don’t live very far from where they lived, I carry some of their names with me in my family, and all of that is worth remembering.
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