Spilling the Beans in Chicanolandia: Conversations with Writers and Artists

Pat Mora

153 Pat Mora orn in 1942, Pat Mora grew up in El Paso hearing the stories told by her grandmother, her mother, and her Aunt Lobo. This storytelling matrilineage planted the seeds that would later blossom as Mora found her voice as a poet, memoirist, and children’s book author. Though Mora’s upbringing allowed her to develop an ear especially attuned to the rhythms of storytelling, it was not until years later, after studying to become a teacher and earning a B.A. (1963) and then an M.A. (1967) from the University of Texas at El Paso, that she decided to commit herself fully to writing. In the 1970s, Mora began writing bicultural, Chicana -themed poetry that caught the first wave of contemporary Chicano poetry and appeared in such journals as Americas Review. By the 1980s, Mora’s poetry had caught the eye of Arte Público’s editor, Nicolas Kanellos, who published her first two collections, Chants (1984) and Borders (1986). In the poem “Mi Madre” from Chants, Mora infuses life into a seemingly uninhabitable desertscape as she reimagines it to be a place of nurturing: “she: the desert / She: strong mother.” Both collections’ poems are steeped in a Chicana feminism that glows with a powerfully radiant aura of land and matrilineage, where grandmothers and curanderas act as wise and strong role models who guide new generations of Chicanas through the minefields of a patriarchal society. Through the 1980s and into the 1990s, Mora continued to develop her voice as a Chicana borderland poet, inventing a complex array of southwestern landscapes that tangle with the lives of her Chicana poet-narrators and figures. After the publication of Communion (1991), Mora’s presence as a major Chicana poet was firmly established. In 1993 she published her collection of essays entitled Nepantla, in which she expresses a deep pride in her Chicana cultural identity (language, cultural symbols, and spiritual belief systems), which is essential for survival, she writes, in “our era of international technological and economic interdependence.” In the poem “The Border: A Glare of Truth,” Mora defines the origin of her being as poet-curandera: That desert—its firmness, resilience, and fierceness, its whispered chants and tempestuous dance, its wisdom and majesty—shaped us as geography always shapes its inhabitants. The desert persists in me, both inspiring and compelling me to sing about her and her people, their roots and blooms and thorns. (10) In other poems in the collection, Mora again employs the imagery of land and matrilineal healing, but expands it to include the experiences of women in such places as Cuba and India. In Agua Santa (1995), her woman-ofcolor , feminist poetics again shines through powerfully. For example, her poem “The Loving Strip” begins: “Not for men alone do we remove our clothes, / slowly unbutton ourselves and stare / at flesh soft as the underside of petals”(3). As Mora’s poetry continued to flow, so did other forms of expression. In 1997 she published her memoir, House of Houses, in which she interweaves fact and fiction, past and present, memory and imagination, to render visible the experience of those inhabiting two worlds (U.S. and Mexican) along the Rio Grande between El Paso and Santa Fe. It was also during this great creative period in the 1990s that Mora began to write her award-winning children’s books. As she expresses in Nepantla, “My investment is in the future. I suppose that is one of the many reasons why I write children’s books.” In her first Chicano children’s book, A Birthday Basket for Tía (1992), Mora turns from her traditional focus on women to paint beautifully the intergenerational relationship between a boy and his grandfather. Giving texture to the complexities of Chicano family life in children’s narrative form is one way in which Mora invests in the 154 Spilling the Beans in Chicanolandia Pat Mora 155 future. Another way is by revitalizing Amerindian myth. For example, in her bilingual children’s book The Race of Toad and Deer (1995), she revises the Anglo-European story of the tortoise and hare that privileges individuality and turns it toward an Amerindian collective sensibility and worldview. Frederick Luis Aldama: You’re a writer and a teacher? Pat Mora: I’ve taught at all levels, briefly teaching in elementary and middle schools, then two years in high school, and many...