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GUEST: Ana Castillo, author of “The Guardians”

As temperatures soar over a hundred degrees along the US-Mexico border, nearly three hundred Mexicans attempting to cross over have been found dead. The fates of countless other immigrants who have gone missing remain unknown. The trauma to family members of missing immigrants is imagined in a novel called “The Guardians,” the newest offering by prolific author Ana Castillo. In the story, Rafa, an undocumented man who often crosses back and forth across the border, goes unexpectedly missing as his sister Regina and his son Gabriel or “Gabo,” become desperate to learn of his fate. The search for Rafa along the borderlands of New Mexico and El Paso, Texas accentuates the human element all too often ignored in our nation’s immigration debate. Cristina Garcia, author of “A Handbook to Luck,” called Ana Castillo’s newest novel “[a] surprising and powerful novel that captures the vulnerability and stark beauty of life in a small border town. Castillo instills the voices of her four main characters with such passion and humanity, their vitality practically crackles on the page.” Ana Castillo is an accomplished poet, novelist and essayist. Her books include, “Peel My Love Like an Onion,” “My Father Was a Toltec,” and “So Far From God.” She has won many awards such as the Carl Sandburg Award, the American book award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in fiction and poetry.

For more information, visit www.anacastillo.com.

Ana will be doing a reading and book signing on Thursday 7 pm at Libreria Martinez, 1110 N. Main Street, Santa Ana, CA. For more information, call 714-973-7900.

Rough Transcript:

Sonali: First tell us, why did you choose to write this book through simply the narratives of these four characters, not as a straight start to finish story.

Ana: Well the first pages came to me in the voice of this woman you’re hearing. This is part of the beginning of the book. Her name is Regina or Regina. She’s a 50 plus year old widow who, as she says here, she’s a teacher’s aid.. So the first chapter comes to me in her voice and toward the end of this chapter, we get a scene of her nephew and originally I began to struggle with him, as far as, how do I do the perspective, the shift? So I decided then, OK I am going to give him his voice and that was a struggle because as you can see, it’s sort of a testimonial, or internal monologue, who’s he talking too? And this boy is very special young man he loves to read, he’s crossed back and forth with his parents since he was a child, and his aunt has great hopes for him that he’ll go to college. So he’s a very literary person so his voice comes in the form of the epistlry. And he’s writing to his favorite saints in heaven. And that’s how I developed the voice for him to tell us his side of the same story. This woman needs to recruit someone to help her she really as you can see the woman doesn’t really have a great deal of resources, connections. She approaches a teacher at the college and he’s got a ponytail, and he wears blue jeans, and probably an earring in his ear, and so he’s got the trademarks of someone that might not, you know, be above, you know, helping her find someone who obviously is trying to cross over without papers and…

Sonali: This is her brother Rafa that she’s, that’s missing….

Ana: Yeah she’s looking for, she’s expecting him but what to happened to him, he’s been crossing over like she has for most of their lives and so this character Miguel, Mike, the school teacher comes into her life and says, “Yeah OK I’ll help you.” So he’s got the kind of personality that has to take the front stage and center. And then, as a historical voice, the last voice in the quartet is his grandpa, his abuelo Milton, who lives right on the border of El Paso and Juarez in one of the oldest barrios that’s been there since the 1800’s. So he represents the real living voice of history and so when they meet him he says, “let me tell you my story.” He begins to talk about when he was a kid in the early twenties and then beginning of the border patrol, it’s very brief, it’s not a big book by the way, it’s about 200 pages, very slim, narrative, but I tried to pack as much as I can into each of those voices.

Sonali: Well the story certainly moves, and it’s a very very moving story. As I mentioned it’s a story that I think really brings to life the trauma that people face when their loved ones go missing. This is I’m sure very much more common that some of us realize. Can you talk about how you or what you sort of dipped into, what sort of experiences you dipped into to bring to life the fear that people face when someone they love just simply goes missing, particularly on the border?

Ana: Well this is, the funny thing is, as is it says in the story, is that, it’s a place, it’s kind of another land, you know being on the border this by this paramilitary atmosphere that’s created there

Sonali: And you live somewhat near there….

Ana: Yeah, I live in Southern New Mexico, and the book takes place on the border of New Mexico and Mexico, and also El Paso-Juarez sort of like a tri state-double country space. So you got this paramilitary atmosphere you cant go me that the border patrol isn’t doing their job, they have certainly stopped me enough times, the thing is, almost all of the border patrol that you will see now as they are recruiting more vigorously are people of color, so it’s not as if they’re sons and grandsons from people of El Paso and that area, and they look like me and I think I look very mestizo, very Mexican, and its not at all that they think that I myself am a citizen, you kow tht whole living everyday kind of gets to you, you know, you’re driving along, and they are parked somewhere they stop and ask you you know, they all make the excuse of checking for your license, I happen to have a driver license from Illinois, from Chicago, which got me in trouble immediately, because apparently there is a direct drug connection from the border, from Juarez to Chicago, so that got me pulled over to get inspected, and so forth, so what they’re looking for is not just the undocumented, they’re looking for obviously all kinds of drug runners, and then we have the body trafficking, the organ trafficking, and the female the femacide issue with the fact that you have mestiza brown skin women from children’s age all the way to old older disappearing and turning up if at all you know hours later or days later mutilated and thrown by the wayside.

Sonali: So this is the setting for this entire novel and all those aspects come into play in this novel. I should say we don’t cover that many novels on this program but there are so many political issues that intersect within this novel that we cover on this program that we felt quite appropriate, not only the immigration issue Ana, but also another interesting issue that plays into this particularly the young man Gabriel or Gabo, Regina’s nephew, is the issue of gangs, and how this very pious young man with a bright future inevitably gets sucked into this gang. Can you tell us a little bit about that and how you, what you drew upon to bring this to life, this particular gang to the book.

Ana: Well, that’s an aspect that’s very painful to me as an educator and as a mother of a brown Latino young man. My son is now past that age, you know, the potential gang life, he could’ve been, and thankfully he wasn’t swept into it I have my feelings of compassion especially towards mothers who are struggling, from the margins to keep their children safe, boys and girls, the girls are just as tough as the boys. I live in Southern New Mexico as I mentioned, and I’m on the border between New Mexico and Texas, and this another space away from the border. This is between the City of El Paso and the growing City of Las Cruces, and it’s amazing that these kids these young people have no resources, so where else do they go but create this terrible gang life? Observing this hearing about it seeing it you know just going to the little market you now just to pick up whatever, tortillas on a given day, I see the girls, the cashiers with the black eye, the tattoos on the neck, you know, all of this as part of my daily experience when I chose to live in this area, began to permeate my system and my soul and really that’s the kind of research that I can say that I do is by living there and being there around that.

Sonali: So Ana, how do you feel this book is going to be received in the context of the political landscape today, were talking about an era where people are demonized simply for being brown? The federal agents aren’t not only rounding them up and deporting them we’ve got vigilantes who also figure in your book briefly. Who do you think this is going to be received?

Ana: Well, I’ve been writing and publishing now for thirty years identified as a Chicana, writer, as a Latina writer, as a feminist writer, you know all the flags that will keep me from becoming a best selling mainstream writer so this is not news for me. When I started working on this story in I think January of 2005, this was six months or five months before this just became this huge hot button issue in this country from all sides. Having said that, now that it is, and knowing how much antipathy we’re experiencing, still in this country as Mexicans, Mexican Americans, if you will, Chicanos, I suspect I am not gonna get a call from Newsweek and I am not be asked what I think of Lou Dobbs on CNN and so on. It’s unfortunate how much anti-immigrant sentiment has come along. I personally believe this is a diversion tactic from where our money is really being spent, and where things are really going in this country obviously with the administration we had in the last six years. As far as an immigration bill and a guest worker program, we’ve been guest workers for the last 500 years on these lands and I don’t think that’s going to change. So, from any indication so far I’ve gotten in terms of reception from the book, I’ve gotten the usual suspects who come up stepped forward and really loving the book. My usual readers and maybe a few new readers are coming along, and that’s good enough for me, I think I am very privilged to have the opportunity to publish and have a voice and I think for those people that are not represented, don’t have that voice, don’t get published, don’t get on the radio, I think a story like this is very healing for the heart.

Sonali: I want to ask you about the character of Miguel in your book as you mentioned he is the schoolteacher the ponytail, the jeans wearing guy who wants to front and center, and the possible love interest of Regina, he is an activist, or at least calls himself an armchair activist claiming to want to write a book someday about the dirty wars, in Latin America. Who did you model him on?

Ana: Well he is someone I think that in many of our communities is familiar. So on the one hand he is a composite of people, I think we’ve all met a Miguel in our communities and the guy who still uses the term Chicano. In California it’s pretty popular, but it not so popular in other places, like this community in which this book it’s written in, he’d certainly be the odd man out calling himself Chicano, being very political. So he is a composite of people that I have known, and as I tell people playfully, all my characters have a little bit of myself in there, I split myself up like an atom so that I can express different aspects of my story And at the end of the day I think Miguel reminds me mostly of myself talking about the School of The Americas, and like you mentioned the dirty wars in Latin America and the drug cartels. I was able to use him to kind of put the politics into context here.

Sonali: The book is mostly in English, but there is a lot of Spanish in there. Did you sort of use the bilingual aspect in your book to simply express an authenticity that you see in the characters that you’ve built?

Ana: Well I think, yes I did. I think the fact that I refuse to do this kind of redundant writing that some authors style that some bilingual authors choose to do repeat in English or resay in Spanish the same thing they just said and the context of the narrative, I decided with the proofreading of this book that I wasn’t going to do that, that I wasn’t going to translate for he monolingual speaker so there will be moments with the monolingual speaker that they will scratch their head for a minute. But my style of writing is such that if you stay with it later in the page or in the next two or three lines you’ll figure out what’s going on. So I think thee real political decision for me in this book was not to do any of the translation. It does give the authenticity if I really wanted it to be authentic, I would have had a lot more Spanish in it because people in these communities are always what they call in literary academia, code switching. There always going back and forth in the same sentence. But I think I enough in there to give you a sense of how their speech is.

Sonali: Well as someone who barely barely speaks Spanish, I didn’t have any trouble getting the gist of the book for sure. So finally, in terms of the main gist of the book this searching for lost loved ones and really the pain and the trauma that your characters experience. How does one bring the reality of separation of families to the mainstream in America? Sort of a follow up to my earlier question to the immigration debate. People tend to put folks into boxes and categories and treat them as numbers, until it happens to you. You think a book such as this can make that reality a little more tangible?

Ana: We’re living, as I said, in a time where we are investing, where this countries investing billions of dollars in invasions in other lands and so there are all kinds of families and people that are experiencing loss, everyone is experiencing loss. And if we were going to talk really as a democracy, we would talk about it within the context of the whole, in that sense, you know, this thing that you said families being split up. That was brought up in the immigration bill. However, the anti-immigration sentiment, that you know like I said, so to divert us from the fact that were spending billions of dollars elsewhere, lets talk about these poor people that are coming to wash our dishes in the restaurants and demonize them. And we don’t care about their families, we don’t care about them. This is the anti-immigrant sentiment. We don’t care about them dying out there in the desert. They have no business trying to cross over to begin with. It’s very It’s a very hostile, I feel it’s a very hostile climate toward the Mexican and Central American, especially undocumented migration.

Sonali: Well Ana Castillo, I wish you the best of luck.

Special Thanks to Anthony Ponce for transcribing this interview