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  • CLR Oral Histories
  • Loida Maritza Pérez

Editor’s Note

Loida Maritza Pérez was born in 1963 in the Dominican Republic; soon afterward her family moved to New York, and she grew up in the Bronx. Her novel Geographies of Home depicts in part the experience of growing up in this neighborhood, experiences in the school system, and the internalized racism and cycle of abuse that impacts the children of such neighborhoods. Critically acclaimed at the time of its arrival, now, more than a generation later, comparisons can be made of her text with Piri Thomas’ influential Down These Mean Streets, first published in 1967. Pérez has not yet received adequate attention or merit (not even Wikipedia includes her), although she continues to publish in New York magazines, teaches creative writing workshops throughout the US, and is currently preparing a new novel, Lamentations. Pérez was interviewed at the DePaul Center for Latino Research in late 1999, by Félix Masud-Piloto, Betty Paugh-Ortiz, and Elsa Saeta. The following is an edited version of that interview, interesting in the context of the articles in this issue, and for her observations at that stage of her career.

DIALOGO:

[In terms of your education], would you describe yourself as a science geek?

PEREZ:

I think I was just pursuing sciences, I wouldn’t say for legitimacy, no, but I loved science, I did. It still fascinates me, but I don’t know, to answer your question about how one becomes a writer, it’s such a roundabout process I don’t think I can begin to pinpoint it, it’s just like when people say, well, what made you the way you are? You don’t even know how to answer that question.

DIALOGO:

Who were some of the writers that did influence you?

PEREZ:

I think first and foremost James Baldwin, not even in terms of my becoming a writer because I didn’t know that’s what I was heading towards but in terms of influences, reading him I realized that he also craved what I had been feeling or perceiving for so long but had no language for. I think the man is a genius and I don’t think he’s given enough credit, maybe because he’s gay, or whatever. The man has such fire to his prose. The first person of color I ever read was Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls”, and I read that when was in junior high school because I used to read avidly all the time and would go to the library and would take out books randomly. When I encountered her, I had never read any such thing and it really changed my world. I knew women like that, we all know people like that. Prior to that I’d been reading whatever I got my hands on, but there were never people who looked like me, or sounded like me, or lived like me.

Gabriel García Márquez, the first time I read him I was in college and it was because I was driving my roommate crazy because I couldn’t sleep, and she said, “you know what, this will put you to sleep in a minute: read One Hundred Years of Solitude.” And it kept me up all night! He’s another one, and so it’s gradual in terms of influences and the process of becoming a writer. Prior to that I had been considering writing short stories but I thought, no one is going to be interested in my writing because es una locura, and you know, reading him made me realize there are other people who are as crazy as I am and I guess I can write about whatever I want.

DIALOGO:

We were talking about publishers and the politics of publishing, it seems to me that publishers and the media have the need to pigeonhole writers and their work: a Latina writer, an African American writer, a writer of “magical realism”.

PEREZ:

Oh that’s another thing I want to say about Márquez and the whole thing about magic realism that drives me crazy, the term drives...

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