Spilling the Beans in Chicanolandia: Conversations with Writers and Artists

Lucha Corpi

95 Lucha Corpi orn in 1945 in Jáltipan, Mexico, Lucha Corpi grew up in a small town enveloped by rich tropical sounds. As a child she heard more than the noises of birds and animals: she heard the syncopated rhythms of people speaking Zapotec and Spanish. She was especially attentive to her grandmother’s voice as she would recount stories to young Corpi (along with her eight siblings) of grand adventures and bygone eras. Before becoming a writer, Corpi trained variously to become a concert pianist, a dentist, and a teacher. Playing the piano was her great passion, but just before she was to enter Mexico City’s famous music conservatory, her father strong-armed her into studying dentistry. In defiance, Corpi not only stopped playing the piano (the sounds of which her father greatly enjoyed) but also took the first opportunity to distance herself from her father’s reach. In 1964, she married a man who was on his way to study at the University of California, Berkeley. By the early 1970s, she realized that she wanted more than to be a housewife. She divorced her husband, enrolled at Berkeley for a bachelor’s degree in comparative literature, and began to write poetry. To make ends meet and help support her daughter as a single mother, she also began teaching English as a Second Language. Poetry became an important creative outlet for Corpi. It was through poetry that she was able to understand better the tensions between being raised a Mexican Catholic, with rigidly defined gender roles, and working as an educated, single mother in the United States. In 1976, Corpi published her first poems in a collection titled Fireflight. She wrote in Spanish and used a formal, short-line verse to express the deep conflicts and emotion she felt as a Latina—unable to identify culturally as Mexican or American, and facing racism and sexism in her everyday life. Her subsequent publication , Palabras de mediodía: Noon Words, put her on the literary map both in the United States and in Mexico. Here, for example, Corpi complicates the image of Malintzen, viewing her not as a traitor of the indigenous peoples, but as a complex female figure within Mexican legend and history: “Once, you stopped to wonder / where her soul was hidden, / not knowing she had planted it / in the entrails of that earth / her hands had cultivated— / the moist, black earth of your life” (“Marina Virgen,” 121). Her early poetry inspired many Chicana feminist authors, including Cherríe Moraga, Ana Castillo, Norma Alarcón, and Gloria Anzaldúa. By the end of the 1980s, Corpi’s journey as a feminist Latina poet had brought her to a crossroads, and she chose a new direction to travel. Encouraged by editor Nicolás Kanellos at Arte Público Press, Corpi wrote and published her first autobiographical novel, Delia’s Song (1989). In it, Corpi experiments with narrative voice and storytelling form to tell the story of Delia Trevino’s journey from being caught in the web of domestic life to becoming an empowered author of fiction. Delia’s Song not only put Corpi on the literary map as a gifted novelist but also whetted her appetite for more. Turning to the mystery/detective genre, in 1992 she published Eulogy for a Brown Angel, introducing her readers to a political activist Chicana detective, Gloria Damasco. This Chicana detective would reappear in Cactus Blood (1995) and Black Widow’s Wardrobe (1999), sleuthing out murders and cases of social injustice. She has recently embarked on the writing of children’s books, publishing the well-received Where Fireflies Dance, which colorfully revisits her childhood in Jáltipan, Mexico. Frederick Luis Aldama: When did you first begin to become aware of language and its power to communicate? Lucha Corpi: I grew up in an environment rich with language, community, and communication. When I was little, my grandmother would speak in Spanish and some Náhuatl, which she called Mexican. She also understood and spoke some Zapotec. I remember being fascinated by the language because it was so rhythmic; I didn’t understand a word, but it was so musical-sounding. And my father loved to recite poetry and listen to music of all kinds. There was poetry everywhere in Veracruz. The local 96 Spilling the Beans in Chicanolandia Lucha Corpi 97 newspaper was filled with politics...