>> Rafael Ulloa: Hello. It's
great to see all of you here.
Welcome to the Library of
Congress National Book Festival.
It's so great to see so
many people today, like
really happy to see a lot of
people here at this venue
and especially here
at the Insight stage.
Welcome also to our C-Span
viewers and to everyone watching
us online in D.C., in the
country and around the world.
El Tiempo Latino
is proud to partner
with the National Book Festival.
I am Rafael Ulloa, executive
vice president of content for
El Tiempo Latino,
Spanish newspaper here in D.C.
and a national
publication as well.
El Tiempo Latino is always
committed to foster the love of
books for our community. Los
Latinos, Lemos and El Tiempo
Latino is bringing all the
community together for getting
together around the love
for books and literature.
On behalf of the Library of
Congress, I want to ask you if
you see a survey taker roaming
around the festival, please stop
by and talk with them.
Take the survey.
The Library of Congress is very
interested in hearing from you,
and all your suggestions and
recommendations are important
and the library is looking
forward to incorporate some of
them for future
National Book Festivals.
The next event on this stage
is titled Myths and Promises:
Decoding "Latino" in America,
We are very happy
to feature today
Hctor Tobar, Jos Olivarez
and Jazmine Ulloa at this panel.
Hctor Tobar is a Pulitzer
Prize winning journalist and
novelist, and he is also a
contributing writer for
The New York Times
Opinion Pages.
He is the son of
Guatemalan immigrants.
He's a native of L.A.,
Los Angeles.
His new book--
L.A. people in the House.
Right. His new book
is "Our Migrant Souls."
Jose Olivarez is the child of
Mexican immigrants.
He grew up in the Chicago area
and currently lives in New York.
His debut book of poems
"Citizen Illegal" won the 2018
Chicago Review of
Books Award for poetry.
His latest book is "Promises of
Gold," "Promesas de Oro."
And our moderator
is Jazmine Ulloa,
a national politics reporter
for The New York Times.
Roving the country in search of
congressional races, districts
and people that capture
the political forces reshaping
American politics.
Before she came to the Times,
she covered Congress at the
2020 presidential and the 2020
presidential campaign
for The Boston Globe.
From Washington, D.C..
Thank you for joining us today.
It's really great to
have you here.
And we are ready for
a great conversation.
And welcome to our guests.
[Applause]
>> Jazmine Ulloa: So we thought
it'd be good to start
with a bit of a scene setter
and we're going to have
a little bit of a reading.
I'm going to have Hctor read
a passage from his book.
The opening
passages to his book.
>> Hctor Tobar:
Well, first of all, thank you
to the Library of
Congress for having us.
What a wonderful honor
for this son of Guatemalan
immigrants to be here in the
nation's capital before you.
Thank you.
[Applause]
"You write words for me to read.
A string of memories that
placed me inside the eyes of the
child you were. A daughter of
Honduras, of Mexico, and of
Puerto Rico, and of the Central
Valley of California, with its
flat, dry plains covered with
crops and cows and towns filled
with paisas and their chickens.
You sit in my office and begin
to weep as you tell me the story
of your undocumented boyfriend
and the demons that haunt him.
And it is clear to me that you
should break up with him,
even though I cannot say this.
You tell me about your best
friend, a white girl, and about
the African American family
who lived next door.
In your stories, I see a suburb
of rectangular lawns and a
rancho in the rural United
States where the neighbors heard
your mother and father yelling
at each other and where you took
solace in the natural beauty
of your surroundings.
In the crisp desert wind and
the muddy yellow outline of
mountain ranges.
You write, I am having a
nervous breakdown, but your
prose belies this controlled
and precise.
It tells a story of
violation and survival
you endured when you
were a kindergartner.
I read the pages you write for
me, and I learn that as a child
you were the good daughter
who helped raise her siblings.
You were the son who worked
alongside your father in his
landscaping business.
You were the daughter who
rubbed your father's weary feet
every night.
And you recount the months you
were living in your car with
your parents and brother taking
baths at night at the spigot
outside a laundromat.
You describe the water flowing
over your butt cheeks in a way
I'll never forget.
When your parents were
depressed and nearly broken,
you kept the home together.
You witnessed your mother
disappear to confront
your father's lover.
And you watched the home
invaders who arrived in your
living room. Criminals speaking
bad Spanish with their children
in tow. You cooked and you
drove siblings to doctor's
appointments. And now I
see you sitting before me.
Your sense of humor intact.
An awareness and a dignity
and a purpose about you.
In a minute, you will become
frazzled, but 15 minutes later,
you will recover yourself.
Your eyes dart nervously, and
then suddenly I see the centered
you and I want to weep because
I can see you walking
into the future. Unbroken.
Thank you.
[Applause]
>> Jazmine Ulloa: It's
beautiful. It's really amazing
how in just those two paragraphs
you managed to capture
just this, the wide
breadth and scope of
Nuestra Gente de la
Comunidad Latina
in geography and citizenship
in our pain, but also our joy.
I wanted, if you could speak a
little bit to how you came to
that opening and why you
decided to open it that way.
Your book that way.
>> Hctor Tobar: Yeah.
The real big inspiration
for "Our migrant
Souls" are really
two African American writers,
W.E.B. Du Bois, who wrote
"The Souls of Black Folk"
and James Baldwin.
And I had read James Baldwin's
"The Fire Next Time"
just before the pandemic.
And I thought, I really would
love to write something like
that about being Latino,
because so many of my students
have that same kind of anger
that James Baldwin felt in 1963.
You know, that anger living
in a country that devalued his
people, that
insulted his people.
And I wanted to write something
as passionate as James Baldwin
wrote in "The Fire Next Time."
And of course, James Baldwin
writes this essay, the beginning
is addressed to his nephew,
his young nephew.
And I thought, you know, I want
to write to my students because
I teach these classes at
the University of California,
Irvine, where my students tell
stories about growing up Latino
in a society filled with so
much hatred and xenophobia.
And they talk about the pride
that they have in their
families, the hurt
that they feel.
And I just wanted to speak to
that, to speak to their voices.
And so after I was lucky to get
a fellowship, to go to Harvard
for a year to write my book, I
had in my head the voices of my
students in all of these
incredible essays they wrote to
me and I just let
it all pour out.
>> Jazmine Ulloa: Yeah.
And I was wondering
whether there was
a specific moment or
whether this was something
that you'd been talking about--
thinking about for
a couple of years.
You know, right now there's
such a debate about Latinos,
who we are as Latinos, what
we should call ourselves as
Latinos, whether it should be
Hispanics or Latinx, whether
those labels are just way too
broad to describe our
community, whether
it races Afro Latinos.
And so in politics, you know,
the big question for us is
what will the political
future of Latinos look like?
But it feels like in journalism
and in politics, that
conversation really started
taking place really in the last
four years and really after the
murder of George Floyd.
I'm wondering whether there was
a specific moment for you that
that kind of sparked this
exploration of what it means to
be Latino or whether it was
something that you've just kind
of been thinking about?
>> Hctor Tobar: Well, I think
the George Floyd spring,
you know, we were all in
this moment of reflection.
We were all locked
inside of our houses
and we see a man
being tortured to death.
Then there's a kind of mini
rebellion across the country.
In Los Angeles, there were some
incidents, you know, and it
sparked this national
conversation about race.
And it was really important.
I mean, people who had never
really thought about race were
putting up Black
Lives Matter signs.
I personally thought that was
fantastic, but I also missed us
being part of that conversation,
you know, because
I think that if you think about
the central idea that defines
American politics today, it's
the threat of Latino immigration
and it's the racialization of
Latino people.
The fact that we have been made
out to be this barbarous mass of
uneducated people who are
threatening to bring down the
republic. There's a whole
television network dedicated
specifically to that.
And so for me, I felt, why
aren't we having a national
conversation about the
racialization of Latino
immigrants and Latino identity?
And so that's why
I wrote my book.
>> Jazmine Ulloa:
Got it. Well, I loved your book.
There were so many
great lines in it.
And and actually, you write, my
favorite chapter was actually
"Intimacies" because you write
about the influence of Latinos
on white America.
But I really love
the way you write,
"The drama of white
Latino contact is not yet
a part of the United
States image of itself."
And then you go on to describe
all these intimate ways
in which Latinos influence
white families, white people,
white society, the Mexification,
or the Latinification
of the United States,
and in day to day life in these
really intimate moments.
And then what I really like
about that is that you write
about, you know, usually we
write about Latinos as we relate
to white people, but you like
inverse that and you really
center Latinos. Is that an
accurate characterization?
And can you speak more to
how you decided to do that?
>> Hctor Tobar: Yeah.
You know, once again,
I think Du Bois and
Baldwin were really,
really important to me because
Du Bois talks about how
African-American people at the
height of Jim Crow had a second
sight. You know, it gives you
being excluded so viciously from
American society gave
African American people this
understanding of deep truths of
the United States that white
people couldn't see.
And so to me and Baldwin says
the same thing over and over
again, Baldwin is very much
concerned with deconstructing
whiteness. And so, to me, part
of my privilege as a son of
immigrants, as a Latino person,
as a brown person of color, is
that I can think about the
history that constructed these
ideas, right, the history
that's constructed these ideas
of who my people are and how we
fit into the United States.
And so to me, a lot of this
book is not just about
deconstructing
what Latino means.
It's also about deconstructing
what white means.
And and to me, I arrived at the
realization through a lot of
reading. I was reading a lot.
There's a lot of work now being
done about the construction of
white identity.
And so to me, whiteness is this
state of painlessness where
you've erased the
pain of history, right?
Unless you're Jewish, of
course, in which you embrace
that history. Right?
But whiteness is a state of
mind means that you've erased
the pain of the Irish famine.
It means you've raised the
humiliations of Italian
immigration or whatever.
Right. And so to me,
and that's what
we're supposed to have
become as Latino people.
You know, we were supposed to
merge into, assimilate into that
painlessness and
it hasn't happened.
It hasn't happened because of
the border and it hasn't
happened because of the way the
border is used in American
political life.
So to me, it's just
really been fascinating to
explore how these race ideas
are constructed because really
we have so much more in common
than we really know.
>> Jazmine Ulloa: Yeah. We'll
get a little bit more into that.
I want to ask both of you some
of those questions you
touched on some of the issues
that I want to follow up on.
But the other thing that
throughout the book you write
about the need for a protest
movement to recognize the hard
work of Latinos, the value,
the contributions
that we bring to this country.
You write, "Hollywood will
continue to make us into
villains and nonentities until
there is a seismic shift in the
social and cultural
perspectives in American
society, akin to the one Black
people brought forth in the
decades after the passage of
the 1964 Civil Rights Act."
And you say, "When that
day comes, Latinx people will
get in the face of the
country's cultural bearings
inside their boardrooms
and their living rooms."
And I'm just really curious
about that word choice.
You don't say 'if'
you say 'when.'
It's almost as if it's a
surety, like it's a sure thing
that there's going to be
this protest movement that it's
coming that is building.
Do you see it as a sure thing
or how do you see it and why?
>> Hctor Tobar: I see
it as a sure thing because
we love ourselves. We
have self love as a people.
And I don't believe that we're
going to tolerate our erasure
from American public life much
longer because we are erased.
Now, you were speaking before
about my chapter "Intimacies."
My chapter "Intimacies" is about
the way Latino life is just
melded into the life
of the United States.
And all of these ways, including
all these mixed families.
Most every Latino person I know
has white relatives, and almost
every white person I know is
married or works with Latino
people in some way.
But that's just not part of our
image of ourselves.
There isn't a 20 part Netflix
series about a Latino, a Black
and a white family, and the
way they all sort of like live
together in a town that because
they don't see us as serious
people, they see us as extras,
you know. And it just
drives me crazy every day.
It's what gets me up at 5:30 in
the morning to write because
I don't want to be an extra.
My people are not extras.
And I can feel this in so
many ways among the generation
of students that I teach.
And I believe that they're
going to find thousands of ways
to knock down those barriers
and to put us front and
center in the American story,
which is where we belong.
[Applause]
>> Jazmine Ulloa: So when did
you first hear the word Latino
and what was the context
and how did it make you feel?
>> Hctor Tobar:
Well, I mean, to me,
Latino is a word I first
heard in the 1980s.
You know, I grew up
in L.A. in the 1970s.
I was always thought of myself
as Guatemalan or Guatemalan
American. Latino is a term that
I started to hear in college.
And then I got a job at
the L.A. Times in the 1980s,
and the L.A. Times adopted
Latino as the House style.
It was one of the first media
agencies in the United States to
do that. So and also that came
at the same time that I started
having all these relationships
with people who were not
Guatemalan. My best friends in
college, the guys who got me
high for the first time, the
guys who got me drunk, you know,
they were all Chicanos.
They were Mexican Americans,
you know.
[Laughing]
And and the people who turned
me on politically, you know, and
eventually I married into a
Mexican American family,
a family that has its roots
in El Paso, by the way.
You know, in El Paso Juarez.
My mother in law is from Juarez.
And so to me, Latino is
an expression of an alliance.
The fact that, you know,
somebody from Chicago and
somebody from Juarez, El Paso
and somebody from L.A. and whose
families from Guatemala, we
can all be in the same panel
together because we have this
commonality of our experience.
And the commonality isn't
necessarily the Spanish lurking
in the back of our brains
because most of us has forgotten
it. It's the fact that we have
this story of a journey in
our background and that Latino
is an expression of that.
And of course,
it's been commodified.
It's been taken over by the,
you know, by the media and it's
turned into a television
commercial or whatever.
But it's also an expression of
a genuine shared experience.
And to me, that's from the
1990s onwards when all the
Puerto Ricans and the
Colombians and the Ecuadorians
and the Mexicans all
started getting together.
That's where Latino comes from.
>> Jazmine Ulloa:
Got it. Perfect. Perfect.
Well, now I wanted to have Jose
read some of his poetry.
He picked out a chapter as well.
We're going to continue the
Latino discussion, but together.
>> Jos Olivarez:
Cool. What's up, everyone?
My name is Jos
Guadalupe Olivarez.
This poem is called
Mexican-American Disambiguation.
"My parents are Mexican who are
not to be confused with
Mexican Americans or Chicanos.
I am a Chicano from Chicago,
which means I'm a Mexican
American with a fancy college
degree and a few tattoos.
My parents are Mexican who are
not to be confused with Mexicans
still living in Mexico.
Those Mexicans call
themselves Mexicanos.
White folks at parties call
them Pobrecitos.
[Laughing]
American colleges call
them international students
and diverse. My mom
was white in Mexico
and my dad was mestizo,
and after they crossed the
border, they became diverse and
minorities and
ethnic and exotic.
But my parents call themselves
Mexicanos, who again should not
be confused for Mexicanos
living in Mexico, those
Mexicanos might call my family
gringos, which is the word my
family calls white folks and
white folks call my parents
interracial. Colleges say
put them on a brochure.
[Laughing]
My parents say
[Speaks in Spanish]
[Laughing]
I point out that all the men in
my family marry lighter skinned
women. That's a Chicano in me,
which means it's the fancy
college degrees in me,
which is also diverse of me.
Everything in me is diverse.
Even when I eat American foods
like hamburgers, which to
clarify our American when a
white person eats them and
diverse when my
family eats them.
So much of America can
be understood like this.
My parents were undocumented
when they came to this country.
And by undocumented,
I mean [Speaks Spanish]
And by [Speaks Spanish]
I mean royally screwed,
which should not be confused
with the American dream.
Though the two are cousins,
colleges are not looking for
undocumented diversity.
My dad became a citizen, which
should not be confused with keys
to the house. We were safe from
deportation, which should not be
confused with walking the
plank though they're cousins.
I call that sociology, but
that's just a Chicano me
who should not be confused
with the diversity in me
or the Mexicano in me
who is constantly fighting
with the upwardly mobile in me,
who is good friends with the
Mexican-American in me, who
the colleges love, but only on
brochures who the government
calls non-white, Hispanic or
white Hispanic whom
my parents call mijo
even when I don't
come home so much."
[Applause]
>> Jazmine Ulloa: So tell us
a little bit about that poem.
How did it come into being and
why did you pick
that one to read?
>> Jos Olivarez: I chose
that poem because of the topic
of our conversation, and that's
a poem that came into being.
It was inspired by a poet named
Idris Goodwin, who opened up his
first book of poems with a
similar kind of exploration of
what it means to be Black.
And, you know, he kept trying
to clarify, and he'd be like,
not Sammy Sosa Black, but also
maybe Sammy Sosa Black.
You know what I mean?
Like pre 2000, Sammy Sosa.
And so he had all of these
clarifications that instead of
making it more clear or more
simple to understand, made it
more difficult to understand.
And when I thought about all of
the ways that for me, identity
changes, right?
It's not a static thing.
It led to me thinking about how
I could, you know, try to write
something with the intention of
making it clearer, but also at
the same time really bringing
out some of the things
that make it complex.
>> Jazmine Ulloa:
Yeah, that's what I love about
both of your works, is that it's
not-- the ethnic categories,
The racial categories are
not-- they're malleable.
They shift, you know, and
that's something we see.
I'm from El Paso, La Frontera,
Juarez and El Paso, right,
side by side each other.
We cross back and forth.
We find ways to cross
even when we can't cross.
And it's just like that's how
our ethnic and racial categories
also are. You know, we're we're
constantly kind of navigating
these different spaces.
In your introduction, you say
that you started out wanting to
write a book of love poems for
the homies about friendship.
And in the middle of a pandemic,
when was the moment
you realized that it had to be
about something more?
And was it a moment again,
or was it more like
a gradual evolution?
>> Jos Olivarez:
Yeah, I mean, I had.
I started writing the second
book of poems probably in 2019,
and I wanted to write a book
of love poems for the homies
because it was at a period of
time where a bunch of my friends
were getting married, and
that's really beautiful and
exciting. But it also meant
that we got to hang out
less together, right?
And so I wanted to write kind
of a book of poems about all the
ways that our friendships
are so central to who, you know,
to our growth as people and to
our loves. And yet also
something to your point that we
don't get a chance to
talk about much, right?
If I think about Hollywood,
is about romantic love.
And so I wanted to kind of
take a second and honor these
relationships for what they are.
And then the pandemic happened.
And so I'm trying to write
these love poems, and they kept
getting super sad.
It was just so
filled with grief.
And at first I was like, well,
maybe I can edit out the grief,
right? And I think what I
learned was actually the two
have to coexist, right?
It's part of being a person
in the world is learning.
It's part of what makes all the
love that we experience so
powerful is that we have an
understanding that our lives are
temporary, that grief is
inevitable, that we will have to
experience these things.
Right? And so for me, that was
kind of what pulled the book
together was like not trying to
make it simple and neat, but
kind of embracing the ways that
love can be lonely at times
or love can be sad at times.
>> Jazmine Ulloa: Beautiful.
And that grief was really
personal for you, right?
I mean, your parents were sick
with Covid as you were
writing some of these.
>> Jos Olivarez: Yeah. So
both of my parents still live
right outside Chicago
and I live in New York.
And so for me, the beginning of
the pandemic was just I mean, as
for I'm assuming a bunch of us
was just filled with fear,
right? Not knowing exactly
what was going to happen.
And both of my parents got sick.
And in particular, my dad is
hard headed, you know, Mexican
dads, I don't know
if you all can relate.
And so he refused to go to the
hospital at first, even though
he was sick. And it wasn't
until he, like nearly passed out
in the shower and he allowed my
brothers to drive him to the
hospital that he went.
And there were
multiple times during those
initial months where I didn't
know if I would ever see my
parents alive again, you know.
And it got me thinking also
about, you know, my grandmother
on my dad's side, who passed
away in 2016.
A lot of our family wasn't
able to go and see her.
Right. Because
she died in Mexico.
And it wasn't possible for
people who didn't have,
who were undocumented to go back
and be there for her funeral.
And so, yeah, for me, all of
those feelings were kind of
constantly present.
>> Jazmine Ulloa: Can can
you speak a little bit about
how you settled on the
themes that you did,
like gold, God and glory?
You talk a little bit about how
those were the things
that the Spanish came as they
were searching and pushing the
border further
and further north.
Right. But but can you talk a
little bit more about that?
I mean, you say you were trying
to practice the undoing of
colonial infrastructure,
to practice an undoing
of colonial harm.
What did you mean by that?
Elaborate.
>> Jos Olivarez: Yeah. So a
lot of the poems in the book,
I think if I'm thinking
thematically kind of center,
thinking about class, thinking
about latinidad and then
thinking about love, and then
of course, the relationships
between all of these things and
the way that they play with
each other.
Right? For me, thinking
about God, gold and glory.
I was trying to think about
how I could kind of reclaim that
from history. Like you said,
that was the banner that
the Spanish came to,
"new world looking for."
Right. And it's something
that I also see as still
reverberating, like not
just the search for money, but
the love of money, this
sort of hyper capitalism.
And especially if I'm thinking
at the beginning of the pandemic
when you had, you know,
people being called--
I'm sorry, I'm losing
the language right now,
but it wasn't necessary.
What was the term that they--
essential workers, right.
Who were being treated as
though they were disposable.
Right. And so I wanted
to kind of think about
how I could use that tagline.
But then, like I said, try to
practice an undoing, right?
So try to think critically
about how do these things still
echo in our life and how can we
begin to think more critically
of maybe what should we really
value instead of just money?
How can we practice being more
loving to each other?
How can we build a world
through poetry and maybe beyond
poetry that is communal in a
way that the world I was looking
at when I was writing the poems
was not actively communal.
>> Hctor Tobar: Wow. Wow.
>> Jazmine Ulloa: Yeah. What
about that Ohala, Ohala, Ohala?
Where did that--
>> Jos Olivarez: Ohala is
my favorite word in Spanish.
[Laughing]
I have it tattooed and it's
it's my favorite word in Spanish
because it's one of those words
that feels untranslatable.
The closest word in English that
I can think of is 'hopefully'
right, but hopefully doesn't
have that sense of holiness that
I feel when I say Ohalah or
when my mom says
[Speaks in Spanish]
whatever it may be.
Right? And so for me, there's
something powerful in kind of
invoking that particular word.
And so that for me is why Ohala
is so important to the book.
>> Hctor Tobar:
And it's from Arabic. No.
>> Jos Olivarez: It's
from Arabic. Absolutely.
Yeah. It comes from
Inshallah. Yeah.
>> Jazmine Ulloa: Nice.
I also noticed there
was a lot of imagery
about worms and
mouths and hunger,
and you've kind of
already spoken to this
about how class informs your
writing, but can you elaborate a
little bit more on that and why
Why the mouth specifically?
Why that? Why that imagery?
>> Jos Olivarez:
Yeah, that's a good question.
So I grew up in Calumet City,
Illinois, and my dad is a
steelworker. My
mom is a custodian.
And so, you know, some of my
earliest memories are like of
friends getting
Power Rangers toys.
And, you know, us, me
and my brothers asking for
Power Rangers toys and getting
like the dollar store knockoffs.
[Laughing]
And so I just I can't help it.
I kind of feel like I have
a sickness of sorts.
I went to France one time when
I was first dating the person
who's now my wife, and she was
like, Wow, isn't this amazing?
We're in France, everything is
so lovely and beautiful.
We're in the old country.
And all I could think about was
like, I'm from Calumet City,
like I shouldn't
be here right now.
I was like, you know,
I grew up eating cheese like
powdered cheese out of a can,
like this is, it just, I can't
help but imagine even when I'm
in spaces of great wealth, the
distance between where I grew
up, where my parents grew up and
where I'm at in
any given moment.
>> Jazmine Ulloa: Yeah, yeah.
No, I think we all can relate
to that experience for sure.
And then just the same
question I asked Hctor,
when did you first hear the
word Latino and what was the
context and how did
it make you feel?
>> Jos Olivarez: Yeah, so I
grew up thinking of myself as
Mexican American, as
Mexicano, as Chicano.
And it wasn't until I went to
college that I started to have a
broader understanding
of what Latinidad meant.
And that was really powerful
for me because my best friend in
college was from Costa Rica
and he was like,
Yo, thank God Mexican food
is good because we don't get--
He was like, Central American
people don't get nothing, bro.
We don't get bubusas
we don't get like, thank God
tacos are good because if they
were bad, we'd
really be hurting.
[Laughing]
So that was when I
first started to understand not
only the kind of communal ways.
Right. That that we could
relate to each other, but also
the ways that
within our community,
there was this kind of, you
know, you talk about how
invisible we are, but there are
different levels of visibility,
right? I hadn't considered
until that moment what it meant
that I could go to Philippe's
burritos and get a burrito.
But my buddy from Costa Rica
didn't have, like, a similar
restaurant he could go to.
Right? And so for me,
that was kind of the context
that I started to think about
myself as being Latino,
in addition to being Chicano
or anything else.
>> Jazmine Ulloa: So do you--
I know as Latinos,
we've been having this
conversation nonstop
to death about Latino.
Is it still a useful label?
But I still want to
ask you that question.
Like, is it is it
too broad of a label?
Does it still have a purpose
in our conversations today?
>> Hctor Tobar: Well, I think
it is the expression of
an alliance between people of
many different nationalities.
And I think in that
way it's useful.
I think it's it's complicated
in the way it relates to race
because, of course, Latin is a
romance European idea and Latino
is a mixture of so many
different kinds of peoples.
You know, our indigeneity is
wiped out by that term, you
know, Latino and that's
just the term is, I mean, our
last names also wipe
out our indigeneity.
I mean, think about it.
You know, supposedly if you do
in the Southwest DNA, the DNA of
average Latino person, there's
like 40% indigenous.
Well, that should mean
that we should have 40%
indigenous last names,
but we don't.
Right. It's more like half of
1% of people who have indigenous
last names. And that's because
systematically that's been
erased from our identity.
So I think that it's a paradox.
I think it's very necessary.
The fact that we're on this
stage right now expressing
shared experiences that many of
us in this room all share an
experience that is Latino.
That's very important.
But at the same time, all the
history that's wiped out and
simplified by the creation
of a category,
that to me is problematic.
>> Jos Olivarez: Yeah, that
makes a lot of sense to me.
For me, I think it can still be
useful because it allows us to
kind of consolidate power in a
way that we might not otherwise
be able to. Right.
If I think about what the
Mexican American population is,
it's whatever percent it is.
But if you are able to find
some common goals, if you are
able to build relationships,
then it gives us a chance to
organize in a way that we
can't organize individually.
And so there is potential there.
But like you said, absolutely I
understand why people would
have issues with
the term, right?
I think it does.
It can absolutely hide
indigenous histories,
afro-latinx histories.
It can hide those experiences
in a way that is, you know,
not only unfair, but
unreasonable and something that
we should absolutely, you know,
remedy in some way.
>> Jazmine Ulloa:
Yeah. I think as reporters,
we were also having
this conversation a lot
and I think even
in my reporting,
I tried to be as
specific as possible.
Now, like even the country of
origin is just says just so much
more about a person than
just this label.
But at the same time, we need
to talk about Latino voters and,
you know, Latino poverty rates
and Latino education rates.
So it's still kind of a helpful
marker in that in that way.
Let's see, are we forever
destined as Latinos to write
about migration?
I ask this because we wrestle
with this within newsrooms
as well. Latinos make up almost
20% of the U.S. population soon,
very soon in a couple
of years to be 30%.
But I often have found myself
trying to explain to editors
that two thirds of Latinos are
actually born, raised and
racialized in the United States.
And so we wrestle
with this question
within newsrooms. So just wanted
to get your thoughts on that.
>> Hctor Tobar: Well, I think
that there is always,
At the root of
all of our stories,
there's a story of empire,
which is what I say in my book.
Even if the border
crossed you, if you're
from New Mexico or southern
Texas, and really you never
crossed a border for 400 years
of your family history,
the empire drew lines that
basically separated you
from your past.
So to me, so migration
and empire are always going to
be part of our story.
My problem is that the way in
which migration stories are
told, they're told in a very
one dimensional way.
We're victimized, right?
We are perpetually victimized
in American media migration
stories. And as we all know.
Right. That's not
our full story.
The way in which the
migration story is told robs us
of our volition, of our will.
And so to me, my whole career
is an attempt to do two things
at once, honor my immigrant
heritage of my immigrant parents
and my immigrant communities at
the same time to show the world
I am a thinker.
I can write about anything.
I can write about
Chilean miners.
I can write about a white guy
from Urbana, Illinois.
My last novel, by the
way, also on sale here.
So I think it's this thing
that hangs over us,
but it's also our cause.
And so, yeah, I don't believe
we're perpetually fated to just
write about that, but it's a
big chunk of our experience.
>> Jos Olivarez:
Yeah, I agree with that.
I remember taking a writing
class when I was in college and
I went to college at Harvard,
and when I took my writing
class, I remember I was
in New England, right?
I was writing a
poem about the trees.
And I turned in this poem to my
classmates about the trees in
New England. And my classmates
were like, Wow, you know, this
image of the leaves falling,
it's like migration from
[Laughing]
It's such a beautiful story
about how when you're a
migrant person, you can't
assimilate because your leaves
will always change.
And I was like, Oh, these
people can't read.
[Laughing]
It doesn't matter what I write.
If I write a love poem, if I
write about trees, if I write
about concrete, all they're
going to see is migration,
right? And so part of it is not
even necessarily about what
we're, you know,
fated to write or not.
It's also, you know, the person
on the other side can't
understand us
outside of migration.
Right? And so for me,
that's the other part of it.
>> Jazmine Ulloa: Yeah,
you talk about this too.
The in-betweenness.
Even Latino is a label.
Not neither here nor there.
[Speaks in Spanish]
But I'm from both places
because I'm from the border.
>> Hctor Tobar: You're from?
El Paso, which is both places.
>> Jazmine Ulloa: I'm Mexican
and I'm American.
Yeah. And that was actually
going to be my one of my other
questions is you both write
about the effects of empire on
[Speaks in Spanish]
this tortured past or
this inherited loss that we
carry from one
generation to the next.
But you also do a really good
job of capturing people's joy.
Like I laugh so hard at some
of your poems just because
I related so much to
my own father and my
mother and my Mexican parents.
So how do you strike that
balance between
the hurt and the joy?
>> Jos Olivarez: For me,
it's really essential because
when I first started writing,
I felt like the poems that I
received, the best feedback
from were the sad poems.
And so, you know, you get
positive reinforcement.
You want to keep writing
those types of poems.
And then when I took a
step back, I was like,
but it doesn't
feel right with me.
It doesn't feel truthful in the
way that I want to be truthful.
And it's because even though
my parents were undocumented
growing up, the other side of
that is we were always,
you know, going to parties.
We were always, you know,
having people over.
My uncles and my cousins
are like the funniest
people I know. My mom was like,
You talk about poetry.
My mom was the
first poet I knew.
She was always gossiping to me
about the family next door and
telling me about her novelas.
You know what I mean? Like,
it was like just because
they don't necessarily they
being maybe white readers or
outside readers can't
understand us as full human
beings doesn't mean it was
important for me to remember
that. Like, you know, I don't
come from a sad people.
I come from a people that
laugh, that dance, that party
that, you know, drink
too much sometimes.
So that was important
to me to represent.
>> Hctor Tobar:
What he said. Absolutely.
I think that as a writer,
stereotypes are boring and
they suck the energy out of you.
You know, and it's like, to me,
I'm always writing against type
because life
writes against type.
You know, I tell it to my
writing students.
Write against type, you know,
and because that's what life is.
My parents are intellectuals.
My father got as far as the
sixth grade in Guatemala,
read like crazy. First thing he
did when he came to the United
States, did his night school
equivalency for high school.
And I meet people like him and
like my mother all over the
United States, you know, people
who are really curious and who
have these intellectual lives.
And to me, that's
what's most missing.
And that's also the hardest
thing about being a Latino
writer, is that people don't
see us intellectually, you know,
and they don't see us.
They see us as these performers.
And there's always that
temptation to perform that kind
of shtick, you know, of being
a Latino writer and telling
stories about my Lolita. My
Lolita is great, you know,
but I have more to say
than just that, you know?
And so absolutely, I just want
to say I agree 100% with Jose.
>> Jazmine Ulloa:
Yeah. It's so interesting that
to hear this,
we're talking about
the world of literature
and books and movies.
Right. And but you see that
a lot in politics as well.
I feel like I saw that across
the country, Latinos are not
feeling seen by either party.
And I think that at the
root of it is what you're
talking about, is that
this dissatisfaction
with both parties, because
they're not seen as like
intellectual beings, you know,
like voters that
can make up their
minds and decide.
And that's why you're seeing
such a rise in independent, like
the largest
political demographic
that's growing is this
independent voter.
And when we talk about
independent voters, we're often
talking about Latino voters.
So it's really fascinating
to hear it from that
perspective. And I think we're
getting the 15 minute slice,
the 15 minute marker.
Can you talk a little bit
about the American Dream
and how it plays into your
into your writing, whether
again, whether I just think
about the American dream
a lot because it's
used in politics a lot.
It's being used by Latino
candidates on the
Democratic side and on the
Republican side to shut people
in and to welcome people in.
So I'm wondering how it kind
of factors into your work.
>> Jos Olivarez: For me...
The American dream was so
important to me growing up,
in part because my parents would
talk to me about sacrifices that
they made in coming to the
United States and how they
wanted me and my
brothers to get educated.
Similar to you, like my parents.
Neither of them
finished high school.
Neither of them even made it to
the secondary in Mexico.
And so it was really important
for us to get a good education.
And then the year
that I graduated from Harvard,
which should be like the
fulfillment of an American
dream, was also at the same
time that my family was being
evicted from our childhood home.
And so having that happen
simultaneously made it clear to
me that there was no way, you
could do all the right things,
right? You could save your
money. You could purchase
a house in the suburbs.
You could try to fulfill
everything that goes with the
American dream. You could go to
Harvard, to the Ivy League,
whatever. And at the end of
the day, the reality is that
it's so imaginary, it vanishes.
It you can't actually ever
get a piece of it, right.
And so it made it clear to me
that I wasn't ever going to
outeducate my way into
the American dream.
There was no actually reaching
that Promised Land.
It was a myth.
And so for me, that was
when I was like, I can't write
poems that try to glamorize
this thing that is actually
rotten at its core.
>> Hctor Tobar: Wow.
[Applause]
Yeah I think my chief
problem as an adult now
thinking about
the American dream.
Father of three,
owner of a home, etc.
Is that the idea of
the American dream
attempts to erase class from
the American equation
and class is a reality.
Inequality is a reality.
The structures that produce
inequality are a reality.
And so we're led to believe
that we can somehow triumph over
this system that enslaves most
of our people and many other
peoples, you know, and to me,
that is yes, absolutely.
It's a myth. It's toxic, you
know, and it's sold to us as
this thing that we're
going to achieve success.
That's going to be this pill
that makes us feel happy and
we're going to have a swimming
pool and we're going to have,
you know, all these things that
are going to just erase
500 years or a
millennia of history.
And it's a myth and it's
a myth for so many reasons,
in part because
it's unsustainable.
You know, this attempt to
create this dream not just for
us, but for an entire country
of 300 million people, has
helped to almost
destroy the planet.
And so to me, absolutely I
couldn't agree more that--
I think that's part of our
mission as artists is to sell
another version of
happiness, of work, of labor,
of building community, one
that's outside of this very
shallow commercial idea of
what a human being should be.
>> Jazmine Ulloa: I was
actually going to ask,
what would you replace it with?
What what would be
your version of that?
Which I think you kind of--
>> Hctor Tobar: Well, you
know, I was really proud of
ending my book with
this idea of utopias
and how we just need
to kind of act out
the way we want
to see the future.
We need to dress up
and do crazy things.
You know, the last chapter
of my book begins with
with drag in these, you know,
these LGBTQ notions
of creating new ways of being.
So to me, it's about the
communal idea and it's something
that I would not
say socialistic at all.
No, I would say it's this idea
of creating another way of being
as a person, of being with
our fellow human beings.
And so to me, that's
that's the beginning.
And I think that Latino people,
because of our experience,
we have something very important
to contribute to that
conversation about a new
way of being an American.
>> Jazmine Ulloa:
Perfect. I think
it's a great way to
open it up for questions.
Thank you. Any questions?
[Applause]
You can start.
>> Hello. So this is mostly for
Hctor, but I think Jose could
answer this as well,
being fellow from Chicago.
So in Hctor's book in
Inventing Latinos
by Laura Gomez, a big theme I
really appreciated was how
Blackness and whiteness are seen
as defining anchors
to Latinidad.
So I'm Black and Mexican and I
feel like being able to fit into
Latinidad is a lot harder than
it is to connect with fellow
members of the Black community,
particularly because race itself
is phenological and visual.
So especially as we get to
second, fourth gen kids like
myself, how do you see
Latinidad continue to warp
around those two poles
of Blackness and whiteness?
>> Hctor Tobar: I think
that the most important lesson
I learned from writing this
book is how important it is
to learn each other's stories.
So this book is as much
a celebration of the gifts
of African American history as
it is about anything, right?
To me, I tell the story of my
African American godfather who
showed up at the door to my
mother's apartment and offered
her in his broken Spanish.
She was taking Spanish classes,
offered her a ride to the
hospital. And that's the
beginning of my family's
connection to Black history.
But really, all of us as Latino
people, we have this incredible
debt. So to me, I urge
Latino people to study
these various, including the
construction of whiteness.
How was white constructed?
One of my chapters tells a story
that weaves Asian and
Guatemalan and American history
together because they
are woven together.
If you're a Latino person
born the child of immigrants,
you owe your citizenship to a
Chinese American who filed a
suit, whose case went to the
Supreme Court at the end of the
19th century.
Right? Wong Kim Ark.
So to me, the most important
thing I think we can do is to
encourage this spirit of
cross-cultural inquiry where we
all study these stories
and understand, most
importantly, the way they're
all braided together.
>> Jos Olivarez:
Yeah. For me, I don't know that
I could answer how over time,
Latinidad will continue to
evolve around the poles of
whiteness and Blackness.
But I can't think about it
within a specific context.
Right? And so for me, I
think about Chicago a lot.
And when I was five years old
and Spanish was my only language
and I was in an all English
classroom, the people,
the classmates that actually
took the time to attempt to talk
to me, though I couldn't
speak English,
were my Black classmates,
you know what I mean?
And that kind of began
to establish for me
a sense of like, what
community could be like,
you know what I mean?
And it got me to think about
what it means to be
intimate with people
in the ways that
I was sometimes
welcomed into rooms
of Black people.
Where maybe--
You know, to understand
that intimacy is to be
respected and cherished.
Right. And so I think there are
possibilities in community for
the way that-- I don't
think it's set in stone.
How it will continue to change
is what I'm attempting to say,
right? Like, I think we owe it
to ourselves to continue to kind
of preach against
anti-Blackness, to continue
to organize ourselves against
that, to organize ourselves with
indigenous people so that we
can try and create a future.
The best possible future where
Latinidad is not harmful,
does not become more harmful
than maybe it can
already be at times.
>> Hctor Tobar: Can I say
one more thing about that?
I teach in California and
I have a lot of students.
You ask them,
Where are you from?
And they say, I'm from
South Central Los Angeles.
And that's a way of saying
I grew up with Latino and
Black people together.
And it's like the idea
of constructing ethnicity
is always being constructed.
So I see this kind of
ethnogenesis taking place where
there are people who are
saying, Look, we share in this
part of L.A. or in this part of
Atlanta, we share this common
experience. This is also
something that's important.
That's a story, a shared
story that we maybe
should think of as much as
we think about being Black or
Latino, if that makes any sense.
>> Jazmine Ulloa: And you
see that in Arizona as well.
In 2011 when you had these
really hardline anti-immigrant
legislation bills come through,
there was a movement of Latinos
that organized to fight
back against that
legislation, going back
just recently 2020 and 2021,
a lot of these groups have
morphed into these more
progressive kind of thinking,
more, you know, centering
Black lives, centering LGBTQ.
It's just a different space.
It's kind of morphed. It's kind
of evolved into more kind of
what you're talking about.
So it's interesting to
see how the organizing is.
We got it. Five minutes.
So before we get to the
question, I just want to say
that they're going to be
signing at the end of this
panel. So please head out and
buy their books and have
more conversations afterward.
And go ahead. Sorry.
>> Many of us try to seek
higher education to prove our
intelligence, but in that
process, we lose ourselves and
we end up being isolated
from everyone.
I know, for me, I come
from a community that's
only 2% Latino, so
seeking higher education,
we tend to lose yourself. And I
know I felt isolated from that.
Where do you find joy when you
go through like traveling to a
new location where
it's just only you?
>> Hctor Tobar: Well, I
think that you should try to
turn your education
against itself.
When I went to college, I
learned so much just by hanging
out in the library and just
reading about Latin American
history, which I had
never been taught before.
So I think that even that space
that feels segregated,
that feels isolated,
there are things that you can
study in that space that you can
use to give a sense of
wholeness to yourself.
>> Jos Olivarez:
Yeah. Yeah. For me,
even when I've traveled
through places that are
predominantly white,
there's always like a little
[Speaks in Spanish]
You know what I mean?
There is no corner of this
country that I've ever been
where there haven't been Latinx
people running something.
Right. You know what I mean?
And so for me, it's not always
the students that hold--
You know what I mean?
Like people,
you know, maybe there's
not, you know, grad
students that I can relate to
in that particular way, but
there are always some kind of
worker that I can come to.
And honestly, for me, that was
like one of the ways that I got
through Harvard was like the
guys that worked in my building
would check on me and they'd be
like, Mijo, you don't look too
good. Like, what's
going on with you?
And like, for real, they would
check up on me because I really
was also having a very
difficult time and was feeling
very alienated there.
And it was them who could see
that and who took the time
to really reach out to me.
So it may not always be, you
know, the people who you're
supposed to be on equal terms
with intellectually or in terms
of class, but like for real,
like we're not very hard to
find, you know what I'm saying?
[Laughing]
>> So thank you.
I'd like to ask,
is there a way of looking
at race that is not
grounded in what I feel is sort
of this idea of white exclusion?
Like basically white people
determine what races are like.
I'm Cuban. All of us could pass
for white, but we're not,
because white people say we're
not just like Jewish people are
not white because white people
decided that their religion and
their history is too
different from whiteness.
And so as we're looking at
race, is there some way of
viewing it that is separate
from this idea of whiteness as
the default that determines
what is white and what is
everything else?
If there is, what
would that look like?
And if there's not, then what
does it actually say about
race generally?
>> Hctor Tobar: Well, you've
hit the nail on the head of
exactly what race is,
because race is a story.
There is absolutely no
biological basis
to the idea of race. You look at
any dictionary, that's the first
thing it says. So race is a
story that was invented to
justify inequality, to justify
why there were Black people
that were being enslaved.
Right. And so to me, that's at
the very heart of
what race is.
So to me, the race terms
and race ideas are useful only
to the extent that we can tear
them apart to see who we really
are and to see the way those
stories have led to the creation
of myths of ourselves.
You have been racialized as a
Cuban person, not because of
anything that's inherently, you
know, racial about being Cuban,
but because race does that.
That's what race does.
It creates stories about people.
So when you left Cuba, your
family lives Cuba and comes to
here, you are now part
of this American story.
And race is an idea that
explains how you fit in the
story of the United States.
>> Jazmine Ulloa: Perfect.
And with that, our time is up.
[Laughing]
But thank you so much for--
And it's an honor
to be with you guys.
>> Thank you.
[Applause]
[Music]
[Music]