Author Sandra Cisernos on her New Book

SANDRA CISNEROS, AUTHOR, “MARTITA, I REMEMBER YOU”: At night, doors slamming. Footsteps in the hall. Someone coughing on the other side of the wall. I never meet any of the neighbors all the time I’m there. Only footsteps, coughs, an ambulance wailing from a long way off. Somebody’s television murmuring a rosary. Martita, I don’t tell you I’m afraid to stay here with the cough on the other side of the wall, the darkness and that hall bathroom. When I have to go make pee in the middle of the night, I hold and hold and hold it until the next day I have cystitis. Martita, don’t make me laugh or I’ll wee-wee the bed, and then what do we do? I’m afraid of the dark. I’m afraid here in Paris. Are you afraid sometimes, too?

BIANNA GOLODRYGA: Why did you pick this passage? I’m just curious. And what story is it telling?

CISNEROS: Well, this is a passage from when the women are sharing a little canoe bed in what Martha calls the black hole of Calcutta, her apartment that’s way in the back and you’ve got to climb all these dark stairs and you have to share a bathroom. And I felt it exemplified the vulnerability of when we’re young and we’re traveling and we have to depend on the kindness of strangers and sleep in strange places, even when we’re afraid, we’re trying to be brave.

GOLODRYGA: You know, you tell stories, your books really focus on the Chicana identity, one that is close to you because it is yours. You were born in Chicago and grew up there and you were born to Mexican parents. And you talk about the struggle that you’ve had throughout your life of trying to identify as more of an American, and it really wasn’t until you moved to Texas where you lived for many years that you did feel more at home. And I’m wondering, what was the difference, aside from the cold in Chicago, that the experience in Texas gave you?

CISNEROS: I think it was just the ability to see people who had lived in the Americas for centuries, who had lived in the land that they were occupying before the United States was the United States, before it was Mexico. People who had roots there, going back to native time. So, you know, I knew that I felt a little displaced in Chicago and I needed to travel south to feel I was closer to my roots. And even Texas wasn’t enough. I moved even further south, and I’m in Mexico, 100 kilometers from where my grandparents lived before they immigrated to the United States.