I used to approach writing like a football game. If I went out there and aggressively saw more, I'd know more, and I'd capture more, and I'd write better. Hut, hut, hut: First down and haiku!
The French-Cajun culture is similar to mine - they're Catholic, they play accordions, and they eat hot chiles.
The concept of a literature of witness - of bearing witness - has embedded in it the need for action. One must not simply hide in the shadows and type; one must also stand in the light.
I believe God is a poet; every religion in our history was made of poems and songs, and not a few of them had books attached.
The situation was kind of complicated in that my mother didn't speak Spanish. My father spoke English, you know, as best he could.
The stupidity of militarized fences between two worlds is a metaphor for all the things that divide us as human beings.
A great Chicano forebear of mine in writing is Rolando Hinojosa-Smith. He was writing good border mysteries for Chicano readers back in the '80s and '90s.
I read most often in bed as part of my attempted sleep ritual. But I spend a lot of time reading on planes and in hotels, too.
I used to work with a relief group that took care of the people in the dump. We took them food and water and medicine and built homes and took them to church services, whatever was needed.
I don't like being angry all the time; it's not good for me. I have to have serenity or else go to war.
When I was doing missionary work when I was younger, which started this obsession of mine with the literature of witness, I was a translator for a missionary group, and I spent years in a Tijuana dump. People were really thrown by the fact that the Mexican poor, many of them pureblood indigenous people, seemed happy.