Getting Ready for NaNoWriMo 2010

Over twenty years ago, when I lived in Boston, committed to living the writer's life, though stuck in a 9-5 job at a braille press (yes, I learned to read braille, but with my eyes rather than my fingers), I learned the most valuable lesson of my working life: that time is a non-renewable commodity. That I might be able to make up money, but I would never be able to make up time. Thus began my very conscious effort to use whatever time I had to write in the most productive way possible. I think this has been the secret to my productivity, that I no longer take time for granted, that I know each passing day is a day I will never get back, each hour an hour I could have moved forward on my writing. For three years, between 2007-2010, I wasn't able to move forward in my writing very much because I was serving as Chair of the Cesar Chavez Department of Chicana/o Studies at UCLA. Not that I wasn't productive, and I took advantage of the time I did have to write three new research articles and edit two new anthologies, and I did actually manage to eke out a brand new short story for an anthology on YA mystery fiction. But there were all these ideas for a new novel swirling around in the back of my brain, haunting and taunting me on a daily basis, that I did not have time to sit down and flesh out in my journal. Usually, they would needle under my eyelids while I was undergoing an acupuncture treatment, although occasionally, they also danced on my dashboard while I sat in L.A. traffic on the 405. It was these brilliant (I thought) but amorphous ideas that I attempted to channel into a NaNoWriMo novel in 2008 and again in 2009. But I never got very far, not even halfway through the 50K challenge, and still, I was content to have been able to write anything at all. This year, I have a sabbatical and that means I finally have time to sit down and really listen to and voyeurize those story-ideas that have been haunting me for three years. Of course, October is a great month to be haunted, and November, with its cooler weather, its occasional gray skies, its gothic possibilities, lends itself well to daily summoning at the computer. And so, I have resolved that this year, 2010, I will finish the 50K challenge, and out of it will emerge a very raw, very rough draft of a YA novel that is at this very moment sitting in lotus at the top of my head.

Making a Killing: Femicide, Free Trade, and La Frontera

It seems eerily appropriate that my edited book on the murdered women of Juárez is going to be published in November 2010, the centennial anniversary of the Mexican Revolution. How did Juárez go from being a seedbed of revolutionary thinking in 1910 to a killing field of women and girls and a cesspool of narco slaughter one hundred years later? Maybe Porfirio Díaz was right: poor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the United States. But it's more than the crimes of proximity that have affected my hometown (because the El Paso/Juárez border, el Chamizal, to be exact, is literally the place where I was born). It's all of the ways in which this portal to the promised land has been poisoned, exploited, and coerced into losing its soul to Big Business and Big Brother. The deaths--particularly the femicides, which Making a Killing is all about--are the detritus of all this spoilage. The greed at the root of this spoilage is nothing new; it marbled the heart of Porfirio Díaz as much as it worms through the guts of any current-day politician, north or south of the border, whose only interest is to profit at anyone's expense, that is, to "make a killing." Unlike my previous mystery novel on the subject (Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders), this book is a collection of 13 scholarly essays and testimonios that focus exclusively on analyzing this continuous heinous crime wave of gendered violence on the El Paso/Juárez border, and the different forms of activism that have arisen over the last 17 years. Click on the thumbnail picture to see the book's table of contents and introductory essay.

The Sabbatical Begins

And now, finally, after a month of house renovations, family visits, and a Vegas birthday vacation filled with bowling and blackjack, my sabbatical after a three-year term as department chair officially begins. As a "broche de oro" to close my chairship, I got the news that UC Systemwide had officially approved our department's M.A./Ph.D. proposal, and this was a fantabulous way to step down, although I know we all have our work cut out for us to get the graduate program off the ground. Still, as Elena our department's long-time administrative specialist said, I helped launch the new future of our department and I feel damn good about it. As to what my sabbatical brings, here's what I'm hoping for: much-needed rest and perhaps even the end of my stress-induced fibromyalgia; more exercise and walks on the beach; completion of a new academic book manuscript; beginning a new novel, and I'm playing with the idea of a YA book; and lots of bowling. Got a personalized bowling ball for my birthday, some spiffy bowling shoes, and a very professional-looking bowling bag to carry it all in (and with my Vegas blackjack winnings, I got Alma the same, and she helped upgrade our bags to rollers with her roulette winnings) and we are looking into lesbian bowling in Los Angeles. I think we found something at Lucky Strike Lanes in Hollywood. And we continue to look to the stars for signs of one named Azul.

Sex y Corazon Symposium @ UCLA

On Friday, February 12, 2010 the César E. Chávez Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies and Chair Alicia Gaspar de Alba will be hosting a one-day symposium that looks back over the last fifteen years of Chicana/o Studies and examines how Chicana/o queer and feminist scholars have changed the field.

This historical symposium will gather over twenty-five Chicana and Chicano scholars and practitioners whose work intersects race, class, gender and sexuality paradigms within both traditional and interdisciplinary fields. Speakers will also speak to how their scholarship and activism utilizes love as a political strategy for social change.

The symposium is free and open to the public.

Online registration required at http://sites.google.com/site/sexycorazon2010/.

Seating is limited so register today.

"Love has no gender..."

It makes me very proud to have had two of our wedding pictures selected for this Courage Campaign "igualdad" advertisement. The pictures, especially the one showing "the kiss" part of our ceremony, always puts a little knot in my throat as I remember what an incredibly beautiful day that was, and how perfect everything was from the passion roses to the clear color of the Pacific Ocean, to the way Captain Chuck's white uniform and Alma's Veracruzana dress and the black embroidery of the Virgen de Guadalupe on my white guayabera all stood out against the colorful Mexican dresses of our flower girls, ring bearers, and madrinas. It's almost our one-year anniversary and I can still relive every moment of that perfect day in which our families and closest friends came together to celebrate and honor our love and union. It's a bittersweet memory, however, when just a few months later the retrograde people of this State overturned the right to marry for gays and lesbians. What I love about these Courage Campaign ads, in English and Spanish, is that they put that right into the context of other civil rights struggles which have been won through the unity of open hearts and minds. As Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz once said, "love has no gender, love is our very soul."

Scenes from a Journal

7/3/08
In the Plazuela de San Martín in Segovia, a stone fish spouts water into a fountain and a saxophone spouts low notes into an afternoon of geraniums and white-canopied tables on the side of a hill, and two little girls watch the woman I love sketching orange over a yellow heart, the fish that caught both of us in this tiny plazuela in Segovia.


7/11/08
The Mass is ending at Notre Dame. We found la Guadalupana here, resplendent in her own nicho with a jeweled crown on her head and candle offerings with her image stamped on the cup. She's the only Virgin we've seen with her own line of candles. This is how great Paris has been so far. Yesterday I proposed (again) on the Eiffel Tower and today we said vows of love and gratitude to each other during the mass at Notre Dame. Our wedding in California isn't until August, but it feels as though, in another lifetime, we must have sat in this cathedral before, perhaps married each other for the first time in this very spot, the nave filled with the smoke of incense and the voice of an angel singing blessings over our heads. I sit here writing and Alma draws another Virgin in watercolor hues.

8/24/08 (honeymooning in New Mexico)
Now we're at Chimayo where we came to film Marion Martinez for Alma's "Our Lady" DVD that we're going to include in our book. It's so green because of all the rain this summer, and the trees look younger than I've ever seen them, while the santuario looks older, more rickety and worn with age. I find the contrast amazing--the young, fertile trees, the dynamic energy of the water crashing through the acequia, and the old dilapidated church. There's a family of Mexicanos having a picnic out here under the cottonwoods and weeping willows. Mexicanos love their Sunday picnics in the park. A baby cries, a young boy calls out to someone in the parking lot, children laugh and play along the ditch. This is Llorona territory--the ditch, the flowing water, and the children playing too close to the stream. At dusk, la Llorona will come down from the red hill and see if anybody left a child here, or a memento of a child, a doll's head, a baby's shoe, a toy of some kind, and she will gather it up and carry it into the santuario to bless the lives of the children who played there that afternoon.

My First Legit NaNoWriMo Experience

So yesterday was the official end date for this year's NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month for you non-initiates) novel contest. I did not win. I did not even get close to winning, as you have to reach the 50,000-word mark to be declared a winner, and I only got to 17,879. But I started a week late, did not put in the suggested 1,667 words per day, and on some days, didn't write at all, so I knew from the get-go that I was not going to be among the winners this year. And yet, I started a novel anyway. Or rather, I started to flesh out an idea that I saw while under acupuncture needles one Wednesday morning, as each of the characters presented herself to me in fully-fleshed-out form, with a name, a backstory, a boyfriend or girlfriend, a situation. And I knew that even though there was little chance in hell that I would reach 50K words, I wanted to see what would happen if I did sit at the computer whenever I could and try to listen to those characters' stories echoing off the inside of my skull. The last time I tried the NaNoWriMo approach was in 2005, and I was able to finish the last half of my historical novel, Calligraphy of the Witch (2007), though it was February rather than November, and the only other wacko person doing it was my buddy, la Emma Pérez (of Gulf Dreams and The Decolonial Imaginary fame). So I knew the approach could work, if only because of the constancy of daily writing and the clarity you get from being in your imaginary world with your imaginary peeps day in and day out for 30 days. What I love about the NaNoWriMo approach is the freedom it gives you to write crap, to play with technique, to do whatever it takes to increase your word count and in the process to free yourself of any rigid thinking about plot or the logistics of novel-writing. Because of this, I now have 67 pages of new work that I actually really like, and that I can feed into work that I've had on the back-burner for years, like a bunch of ingredients needing a recipe to become something solid and whole. Those 67 pages are not crap--I still haven't learned to free myself that much--but they do have a lot of breathing space around them, and the truth is, I love these new characters, the time-weaving that I'm doing between a meta-story set in the second century AD (or is that now CE?) and the contemporary story set in 2005, and the way I get to summon up characters and situations of my previous novel, Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders. Right now, the new work is called "The Nine Sisters," and even though I'm not on a crazy deadline anymore, I'm still going to write every day and follow these girls and women until they lead me wherever it is that they want me to go. I started out not knowing anything about this book, and I still know very little, except that these characters have become three-dimensional for me, and I like being in their company. Plus, I'm good at tracking, eavesdropping, taking dictation, and then spinning everything off in a new direction. And so, you see, I am a winner after all.