Interventions: An interview with Isabel Quintero
- InterventionsAn interview with Isabel Quintero
Born and raised in the arid area of Southern California known as the Inland Empire, Isabel Quintero spent many hours at the local library that is today known as The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art, Culture, and Industry of the Riverside Art Museum. When her mom (originally from Guanajuato) wasn't working, she would walk Isabel and her brother there to pick up books. One of her earliest memories is sitting with her mom and learning to read with Amelia Bedelia. That is, she was already fascinated by books and the stories they contained.
Today, Isabel teaches at Riverside City College and is an active member of PoetrIE. Isabel is an award winning author of numerous books, including the YA novel Gabi, A Girl in Pieces (2014), the children's books, Ugly Cat and Pablo (2017) and Ugly Cat and Pablo and the Missing Brother (2017), My Papi Has a Motorcycle (forthcoming), and the graphic nonfiction book, Photographic: The Life of Graciela Iturbide (2017).
I had the pleasure of meeting and catching up with Isabel at the Modesto Latino Comics Expo in 2019.
Isabel, with publishers traditionally interested in publishing Latino stories focused on the barrio and migrant farmworker experience (usually male), your work like Gabi really stands out. How might you see your work as an intervention of sorts?
I chose not to write Gabi as a poor, humble Chicana with migrant farmworker parents. Because, though those stories are incredibly important, I wanted to write her as a fat, smart Chicana with a drug-addict dad.
You just published My Papi Has a Motorcycle, the story of a young Latina and her papá. When I step into any library, I don't see interesting, affirming stories about relationships between papas and daughters. What a great creative intervention.
I agree. Not only do we need our stories like that of Gabi and her dysfunctional childhood, we also need these uplifting stories. When papi lifts her onto the motorbike I write how, "his hands don't feel rough. They don't feel tired. They feel like all the love he has trouble saying."
Machismo is so deep our culture, these moments of papi expressing tenderness become really treasured; men in our culture are often taught not to express emotions because they show weakness. Yet, they do try to show that they care, but in different ways. I wanted this book to really highlight the love between father and daughter.
Isabel, when did your journey as a professional storyteller begin?
It didn't come until I was older. I was in my mid-to-late 20s. I had failed as a high school English teacher and decided to go to graduate school. I enrolled in a poetry class. I met the poet Julie Paegle who, after reading my writing, told me that I needed to publish my work. I had always been writing poetry, but I didn't think I could make a living from my writing, so I never pursued this. Her encouragement allowed me to see that it was a possibility. So, I began to research how to how to get published.
Is this the moment that you saw yourself as a professional writer?
This is when I started being disciplined about my writing. But it was just poetry then, not prose. Prose didn't come until a little bit later, though stories have always been a part of my life. I loved sitting with my mom and all her friends around our dining table, listening to their stories as they sipped their cafecitos. Their stories moved from marital issues to migration stories to daily challenges overcome.
I still eavesdrop on those conversations that happen around me. I have a little notebook where I write down conversations to get a sense of how people understand the world. We all have stories. I just want to hear them all.
In what seems to be a pretty sudden step into the publishing scene, in 2014 you published your YA novel, Gabi, A Girl in Pieces, with Cinco...
