Writing the Puerto Rican Rural Experience in the Midwest: An Interview with Fred Arroyo

Writing the Puerto Rican Rural Experience in the Midwest: An Interview with Fred ArroyoMARISEL MORENO

The author ([email protected]) is an Associate Professor of Latin@ Literature in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Notre Dame. She was a recipient of the American Association of University Women Fellowship in 2009–2010. Her fi rst book is titled Family Matters: Puerto Rican Women Authors on the Island and the Mainland (University of Virginia Press, 2012). She has published articles on Latino Caribbean letters in Afro-Hispanic Review, CENTRO Journal, The Latino(a) Research Review, and Latino Studies, among others.

For decades, Puerto Rican literature in the United States has found an almost endless

source of inspiration in the realities and dreams of the millions of Puerto Ricans who

settled on the East Coast. It is a literature that has emerged mainly out of the inner-city experiences of poverty, crime, violence, and discrimination faced by generations of Puerto Ricans even prior to the massive migrations of the 1940s and 1950s as a result of Operation Bootstrap. While U.S. Puerto Rican history has developed within the urban setting, there exists another lesser-known chapter in the history of this group: the rural experience of Puerto Rican farm workers in the Midwest.

It is precisely this rural experience that serves as inspiration for the work of Fred Arroyo, a Puerto Rican author born in Michigan, whose writings are inspired by his own experiences growing and working in the fields of the Midwest (specifically, in Niles, Michigan, and South Bend, Indiana). Until the recent publication of his debut novel, The Region of Lost Names (2008), and his short story collection, Western Avenue and Other Fictions (2012), this important chapter of Puerto Rican migratory history had remained mostly silenced from the greater narrative of the diaspora. His stories transport the reader to a realm that we seldom associate with the U.S. Puerto Rican experience, despite the fact that thousands were actively recruited by U.S. companies for farm work

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187Writing the Puerto Rican Rural Experience in the Midwest: • Marisel Moreno

beginning in the 1940s.1 Interestingly, despite the large-scale impact of this migration, those experiences have rarely been reflected in U.S. Puerto Rican literary production. Amid this silence, Arroyo’s voice emerges to offer the reader a glimpse of the rural experience in an exquisite prose that often reads like poetry. In Fred Arroyo we do not only find the impulse to record an often forgotten historical reality, but also a need to paint—with words—the beauty of the rural landscape.

The following interview was conducted during Arroyo’s visit to the University of Notre Dame on October 4, 2012, when he came to present and read from his new short story collection, Western Avenue and Other Fictions. We met that morning at the Julián Samora Library at the Institute for Latino Studies, where he candidly spoke about his childhood in the Midwest, his journey as a writer, the inspiration for his published works, and his future projects. In August 2013, I followed up with Arroyo via e-mail to inquire about his current writing projects.

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Marisel Moreno (MM): When did you discover that you wanted to be a writer?

Fred Arroyo (FA): I think that from where I’m at now, after going through certain forms of schooling, and thinking of myself as a writer, I start to find different ways to answer that question. But when I do that, I have to be careful because I think that no matter how I’m able to explain that, the answer to that question, what I find is that it’s a mystery to me. Everything up to me becoming a writer--none of [my experience] prepared me to become a writer. We didn’t have any books in our house, we had about three: a Bible, a picture book of the history of Borinquén, Puerto Rico, and a volume from an incomplete encyclopedia on the Civil War. So literature, reading, and education weren’t very important. But I was reading a lot on my own. So although there weren’t these steps that led me to become a writer, literacy was important to me. I think it was probably when I was here in South Bend that I started to read a little bit more. I read a book by Hemingway—The Sun Also Rises—and when I read that book, all of a sudden it made me see that the reality that I had come from, a kind of hard and poor life, was something that I could put into words. So that was probably the start of it, when I was 22.

MM: So at that point you wrote for yourself, not necessarily thinking that you would publish it, correct?

FA: Not yet, no. I just put my paragraphs in a notebook. At that point they had no purpose. That was probably the start of it. I think the main thing is probably that I discovered that when we put letters on the paper we see relationships that we didn’t see beforehand and something amazing happens from that. You create something. I probably also had a more heightened awareness of language than regular people. Many take language for granted. I probably developed this awareness because as a child I was bilingual. I lived in a Spanish community, but then in the fourth grade we left that community, and moved here to the Midwest. When I moved here, it was like a split, I lost that community and that language. And then, as I started to get older, I decided I wanted to master another language—English. So, that’s where the heightened awareness comes from, and I know that in some ways, that’s probably what makes me attuned to language. What caused me to write was not just to express myself, or to discover an identity, but to discover something about some kind of lost self.


MM: Were you surrounded by a Spanish-speaking community in the East Coast?

FA: There’s a Little Puerto Rico in Hartford, Connecticut, where my family came from. That was where my father’s family had come looking for work, besides New York. His father had been up doing it for years, mostly coming up to work all summer, when it was hot in Puerto Rico, and then going back.

MM: Was he a temporary farm worker?

FA: No, the story that I have heard is that he worked as a dishwasher at a restaurant called Coaches that used to be out in the Interstate. And then my dad came and did that too. I see pictures of me when I was little wearing a little paper hat, like restaurant workers did. So it was doing stuff like that, though there were Puerto Ricans in Connecticut working in the tobacco industry.

MM: I asked because that was also a time, historically, when temporary farm workers were also brought from Puerto Rico to the US mainland.

FA: Yes, well that pattern of migration was already there, and they knew about it because in some way it influenced how my father heard about going to Michigan to work in the Green Giant cannery. So he went, and that’s why I was born in Michigan. But after living here really briefly, and shortly after I was born, they went back to Hartford.

MM: In some of your writings you have talked about the small Puerto Rican community you were part of in the Midwest. Can you speak about the relationship between that community and other groups, for instance the Mexican migrant community in the area?

In my mind, that old gray house on 3rd Street in Niles, euphemistically became the “Puerto Rican house.”


FA: Well, this is only my perspective, but I would have to say that there wasn’t really a relationship, and the reason is because as young kids we were meant to assimilate. We were meant not to be different. So even when we saw each other at school, we sort of ignored each other. It was a result of racism, and we were all dealing with that. Racism even in the sense of internalized racism, because we were looking negatively at each other. You’re those people, and I’m white; so I was different than the darker skinned ones. There were all sorts of dynamics like that, so we were sort of forced to be apart. On top of that, I felt so different there without the community I knew or my grandmother and relatives, all that talk in Spanish. Also, my father started to drink a lot and became very silent and quiet. Around that time my parents bought a house—where I grew up in for a while—across the street from this old gray house. In my mind, that old gray house on 3rd Street in Niles, euphemistically became the “Puerto Rican house.” It was where a bunch of single Puerto Rican men congregated to talk and drink and tell each other stories. At night they would always be on the front porch, and it felt like they were censoring me, because everything I would do they would be there to watch it. Their presence also caused tensions because my father was going over there getting involved and all that. I know that although that house was a magnet for a lot of these single men, and several older men, it wasn’t for other men who had families or lived in another part of town. These men were drinking and sharing memories, but it led to destructive things like fights, a man getting stabbed, etc.

MM: Can you speak about your decision to pursue higher education? Having lived the difficult life you led working in the fields, for instance, was there a particular moment when you decided that you needed to find other opportunities?

FA: It’s hard to go back but I think I was always interested in education. Education was in my mind as something important. I knew that through education you could change your life, you could achieve certain kinds of dreams. But I remember that when we arrived in Michigan, one of the first things that happened was that they had a speech pathologist come to the classroom to see me. He took me out to the hall and he had me do my ABCs and count, because back then there was no such thing as ESL. If you spoke another language there was a problem of speech pathology. So I guess, because of my last name, they probably thought that I was a migrant kid, and they wanted to see how my English was. I remember that we were actually working


with the same books that we were using in CT, but the class was two or three books behind where I was back then, and they wouldn’t let me work at that level. Whether it was a question of disbelief, or simply that they needed me to work with whatever everyone else was doing, I remember that at that time studying became less challenging and boring. From that time on, I was pretty much a terrible student. I started working really young in the fields and it was much later, after sort of accepting that “that would be the only way to go,” that a shift took place: all of a sudden education became important to me. In the East Coast, what I was learning I was doing all by my own, without my parents’ help. When I became discouraged in Michigan, I kept it from my parents. I remember they didn’t have work so they were picking apples, and I didn’t feel the need to tell them about what happened because it wasn’t important. So I didn’t have them pushing me to do well. Speed forward, it was here in South Bend, where I met the person who would become my wife. One day she said, you’re reading all the time and you’re able to talk about what you’re reading, you should do something with that. Why keep working in a factory when there are possibilities for you to do something else? When she said that I took a leap and started going to community college. I had no idea what I would do, at first I thought I would study business, but I didn’t really like that, and then I decided, well I’m going to do English because if I do English, then I can go to law school. Being an English major is good for that, and I had all the books to take the LSAT. But then, once I started reading literature it just changed, that was part of that moment when I started writing.

MM: I’m wondering if during that process of reading and writing you were familiar with U.S. Puerto Rican authors, and in addition, how do you see your work fitting within that body of literature.

FA: I do read it, and I think that in reading probably three things affect the way that I write. First is the sense of experiencing what Luis Rafael Sánchez called la guagua aérea—the constant moving back and forth—and how that has become important in my particular case. For me it’s not just the movement from the Island to the mainland, but even within the mainland I find different elements of that. I think the second thing is linguistic play, this whole idea that you’re talking with two faces; sometimes it’s very serious, but other times it’s very comic, sometimes it’s Spanish, sometimes it’s English. For someone like Ed Vega, the linguistic play is a lot of code-switching, and you can see him


inventing the way that the characters think and speak because of the clash and transition from English to Spanish, because language is a way of knowing and seeing. I think I have that, but I think that it’s in English itself, and that you start to see the linguistic play in the syntax. Linguistic play in the way that it’s not monolingual English, there’s something else underneath the surface. And I think that the third thing is the Caribbean way in which art arises from folk art. I’m thinking of art by the people, and the art of the people most often is music, and how even in different languages across the Caribbean you have certain rhythms and performances that continue to repeat themselves. So linguistic play, migration, and the folk art element are characteristics shared by the kind of Puerto Rican writing that I’ve read. I guess a fourth thing would be that you really can’t understand the first three unless you acknowledge that we’re a mestizo culture, and that as a mestizo culture we have all different strands and influences.

So those things speak to me in the work I’ve read, but I know that my work is different because it’s not an urban experience. Because it’s not an urban experience, it seems to lie “outside” of the U.S. Puerto Rican corpus. Everyone’s perception is that if you’re puertorriqueño you’re in the East Coast, or you may be in Florida, or California, or Chicago. But for the most part it’s the urban East Coast: New York, New Jersey, Connecticut. As you know, I don’t write about those things. And at the same time, I think my work in particular problematizes that idea of community because the Puerto Ricans that I write about are really isolated people. And that loneliness has to probably come out of the characters themselves and the region that I write them in, but at the same time, maybe subconsciously, it comes out of my own loneliness in the sense that I know that if I was on the East Coast with other puertorriqueño writers and living there, I wouldn’t write what I write. I’ve enjoyed reading Nuyorican writers and poets, but there’s a way in which that literature spoke to me, but didn’t speak to me, because it’s very particular to the Nuyorican experience.

They have created their own community there, with its own language and geographical references that infuse what they write. My work has been different because I’m writing about these people in the Midwest, but when I write about the Midwest, you have to be able to create it so that any reader will see the countryside of Puerto Rico as well. And then when I write about Puerto Rico, it’s the same; I want the reader to visualize the Midwest. So, I’m just more of a jíbaro that way; I want to write about the countryside.


MM: Precisely because U.S. Puerto Rican literature is for the most part an urban literature, your work offers an alternative reality. It adds to that richness, the Puerto Rican presence in the Midwest is a chapter of our history that has been “forgotten,” and you’re one of the only ones writing about it.

FA: Hopefully there’s someone else!

MM: Do you know of anyone else who’s writing about this experience?

FA: I don’t, no. This relates to the question you just asked. There’s this Chicano writer, Daniel Chacón, who did an interview in which he said that when he read my novel The Region of Lost Names, he had no reason not to think that the author wasn’t a Chicano writer. I don’t want to make too big of a deal about that, but it was telling what he said: that when he read the work he thought I was Chicano.

MM: I agree. If you skip over all the references to Puerto Rico, I put it closer to the work of Tomás Rivera or Helena María Viramontes. But obviously, the experience that you’re portraying is one that we typically associate with the Mexican population in the U.S. That’s why I think it’s so important, because so many thousands of Puerto Ricans have worked in the fields all across the U.S.

I’m not being negative of that East Coast experience, but I think that that is something for people to maybe talk and think about more, and that is, there’s something about that writing which—although it comes from a really gritty, urban, puertorriqueños of color living in the city reality—built itself up so wonderfully that it almost became its own tradition.

FA: I think that’s a big difference in my work too, or my movement away from the norm in some way, which only seems natural, or accidental. I’m not being negative of that East Coast experience, but I think that that is something for people to maybe talk and think about more, and that is, there’s something about that writing which—although it comes from a really gritty, urban, puertorriqueños of color living in the city reality—built itself up so wonderfully that it almost became its own tradition. But it became academic in a way too, disconnected from a larger experience.


MM: I’d like to switch directions to ask you about the image of borders in Western Avenue, again, something that we tend to associate with Chicano and Mexican-American literature. I’m wondering if you see your evocation of borders as a U.S. Puerto Rican author as different from theirs?

FA: I try not to think about that border in the south, the reason being because that’s a real border, real in the sense that people give up their lives to interact with that border, so there’s a whole series of experiences there that I have no reason to try to appropriate. But, of course, the border is important because as a person, that concept and what’s happening there is important to me. I do think about it a lot, about those lives.

Part of what I’m trying to do is write characters that can take residency in a larger audience, not just Latinos. So that if they take residency in their heart, they can open up new borders in their heart and let more people in. That’s metaphorical, but I mean it literally. You know, if my work does anything that maybe allows them to see all different kinds of Latino people in a different way—beyond the label, the group—then that’s a good thing. That’s the opposite of people who might see a group of Filipinos or a group of puertorriqueños working out in a field, and drive by and say, man we need to get those Mexicans out of our country. They already say that without knowing who’s there. We can also read a lot of Caucasian writers, great American novelists, and not find one person of color in their books. It’s like they live in a world in which they don’t see these people working or walking down the street, and why is that? Are they afraid to include that? Or are they unaware of it? So that’s part of it.

I think it’s also the idea that I’m trying to understand how fluid borders are. For instance, I have done many interviews—and I never take it in a negative way—where it’s obvious that the interviewer doesn’t know that puertorriqueños are citizens of the United States, and sometimes even refer to us as “illegal aliens.” So it’s interesting that as puertorriqueños there are no borders for us, literally we can travel back and forth as much as we want, we can in a way that makes many people uncomfortable. We have dual residency, we want to be on the Island and be here sometimes. And that sense of freedom and migration; or, not even freedom but “forced migration” because you have to do that because of work, that makes other people uncomfortable. So we have that, but at the same time, because of these things I’m raising right now, those borders aren’t as free or open, because there are people who are


always questioning, Why don’t you stay over there? So it’s a part of my work, I think it’s part of just being raised here, that in some subconscious way I was growing up with a border mentality; and the border mentality was just that we lived in Niles, but we were really close to this place—Indiana—and in Indiana there were other things or opportunities. And that’s why I deal with it, we all have these borders, they’re emotional, they’re physical, they’re spiritual, they have to do with our identity. There are just certain borders we will not cross, but to write compelling fiction you have to have a character cross a border. Once you cross it you’re at a different place, you have a different perspective, you think you’re getting away from something, that you’re going to new possibilities and yet, everything you left is ten miles away! It’s real but it’s an imagined place. Can ten miles make such a big difference? So yes, that just became a really important metaphor, those elements of crossing. What do you gain? What is it that you might lose? What do you leave behind? What do you take with you? So somehow that just came with me, and it was a way to start to see those patterns of movement and migration, and to see these different borders you cross.

So now I’ve gravitated to South Dakota and I wanted to get more upper Midwest, but I was also interested in knowing, at that place, Would I be in a border existence again? So, I go, five minutes by car, and I go down below my house and cross the Missouri River and I’m in Nebraska. And then I go up on the bluff and turn around and look over to South Dakota. If I go to the airport to come here, I have to go to Sioux City, IA, only forty miles away. If I go to buy certain things because we don’t have them in our town, I go to Sioux Falls, and then when I’m in Sioux Falls, everyone comes from Iowa. My point is just that, it’s these geographical borders that were created because of the rivers, but there is an existence there, and people live according to opportunities or lack of opportunities along those borders, and you’re always thinking about choices. Eudora Welty talked about this and so did Toni Morrison, the idea that you’re in a place where confluences happen. So Morrison says that you can try as much as you want to dam the Mississipi River, but when the Mississippi River breaks through and goes to where it’s going, where it’s going back to is to its memory of what it was. That’s what my work is so much about—I think it’s like memory, you’re in that confluence where the past and the present meet. And rich, interesting, dramatic, compelling things can happen. I’ve learned this from other people too but it is like, it was probably Jim Harrison talking about the need to go into these areas of consciousness that are border consciousness,


and inhabit them. But that’s what most people don’t want to do. So I would rather do the opposite and that is, go into those areas of border consciousness and see what kind of myths, stories, original stories arise from there.

MM: Can you comment on the title of your new book Western Avenue and Other Fictions, which also happens to be the title of one of the stories?

FA: It’s probably an echo of everything we just talked about. The book for about two years was called Borders of the Heart. Then, when I did the last revision to send it to publishers, I worked on a new title. I had that story, and I don’t know, there was a way in which I wasn’t sure about publishing or writing that story because it was kind of simple and easy for me to write, but once I started to work on it more, it was a story that I had always wanted to write. I fell in love with it, and the reason was because, as I often do in my work, I wanted to have that connection between Ernest and this Polish man, and to deal with that kind of community again, where people from disparate places, seemingly totally different, could have a sense of friendship and community, united by issues of language, culture, exile, memory. And so I wrote that story, and called it “Western Avenue.” Western Avenue was a place we used to go, we worked in factories and a lot of the men were Polish, we used to go to this Polish-American Club that was on Western Avenue in South Bend. So it was sort of just a real thing, and I wanted to document that. But then of course I was, like, “This is a great title!” And the reason it was a great title is because there is a huge Western Avenue in LA, there’s a huge Western Avenue in Chicago, there’s a huge Western Avenue in London, etc. Then I went back and revised the book working on that metaphorically, letting that try to come back through in certain ways, and the idea being that, I wanted people to metaphorically think of our whole concept of “western” and “avenue.” So, these characters, a lot of people look at them as failures, they’re not going to live in a place that is called “Avenue,” you know? That’s a fancy word. There’s also the exceptionalism we associate with the West, so I thought it was very evocative, and it would make people think about who are the people who live on the streets around us? Why are we the “West”? We’re a Western society, we think we’re so exceptional in everything we do, but there’s a whole population, groups of people that we treat terribly. So that’s how that title came through in that way. And of course, Western Avenue itself, I wanted that because any “Western” avenue represents a border. In a city there’s always a division


between something, and even on the street itself, you start to see borders, you can only go to some areas, certain people are in certain neighborhoods off that main street. So it’s kind of a larger image of that. There’s also movement, but even though we’re moving there are stops along the way.

MM: Thinking more about the contents of the book, Boogaloo is a character that opens up this collection of stories and also opens up your novel The Region of Lost Names. Ernest says of him: “Sometimes I want to tell him [Boogaloo] I’m tired of his tales, his songs, tired of how its easy for him to conjure up some memory from when he was little, some evening when he saw a man dancing in the street, some little snatch of song or joke he overheard on some lazy afternoon and has so easily taken within himself and turned into a moment of significance, my father and the other men sitting under the tree mesmerized by his words” (Arroyo 2012: 77). Boogaloo seems to have a gift, the gift of storytelling; isn’t that what any writer would want for himself/herself?

As a black Puerto Rican man, he just deals with so many things, he moves so much because of work, that in the end he becomes cynical or has a nihilistic view of life that comes out in this sarcastic tone.

FA: Yes, very much so. And then on the other hand he has this thing where he can be really sarcastic and mean, but that’s what Ernest is coming to terms with in that story. He has to see that Boogaloo has this other power—he’s being sarcastic and mean, not because that’s his nature, but because it has become his nature due to what society has imposed on him. As a black Puerto Rican man, he just deals with so many things, he moves so much because of work, that in the end he becomes cynical or has a nihilistic view of life that comes out in this sarcastic tone. And that is how we are, we can be very mean and cut each other, but at other times we can sit down and laugh and tell stories and rise above that. So I wanted to have both sides of that. But I wanted that to come out; Ernest had to understand that. In anything that’s ugly or negative you want to be able to see the beauty or the positive in some way. It’s endearing and hopeful, in the sense that it’s redemptive in a character like Boogaloo, and it makes you want to live your life in a better way. He’s a very honorable man, even though in his circumstances, or from an outside perspective, he’s not


deemed honorable at all. When I wrote that story, it was one of the main big stories that I ever wrote in my life—a long time ago. I wrote a version of it in 1994, and when I wrote it, it just all came to me and I wrote it. But the title was something like “My Father vs. Boogaloo.” I was an immature writer then, so Boogaloo became a totally negative person. But then the more I matured, the more I wrote, I went back and saw that Boogaloo is someone you actually don’t know, that you need to know better and need to work on making him a more rounded character. As you said, he started the book, and the novel—his death starts the novel—and when I finished the novel, he still came back to me and I wrote that brand new story “A Case of Consolation,” to give him consolation. My interest in writing about him has to do with the fact that I’ve met men like a Boogaloo, I worked with them, or I knew them ever since I was young, and I always looked at them in a certain way and wondered things about them. I remember this man, Dracula, who had a big bump on the side of his head, and we would say, can we press your “bump”? And he’d say yes, and when you pressed the bump he would push with his tongue and the bridge on the top of his teeth would fall off. So something happened to him, I don’t know if it was violent, but a guy like him stayed with me. He was really working all the time, but when he wasn’t working he was very elegant, he wore all black and black gloves. I also had a friend in Niles, his dad had quit drinking and changed his life, and I used to go fishing with him and it’s kind of a mystery to me, but he was really this great guy. He was black and really handsome, with his gray hair and a mustache.

MM: That’s actually how I pictured Boogaloo!

FA: Yes, exactly. Once, we were driving back from fishing and he saw a stream that had some green stuff growing. He was like, “Man, isn’t that that stuff, what do you call that, like watercress or something? And for 15 minutes he stopped and was so excited, and it was such a big pleasure for him to pull all the watercress. He took it home and said I’m going to make some salad with this. And it was interesting because it was rather unappetizing watercress to make a salad, but it was just this beautiful moment when I saw this other side of him. So it’s just all these men, various ones besides these two—I tried to make Boogaloo a composite of them all.


MM: What also struck me in that passage was Ernest’s anger, which he carries for so many reasons, against Boogaloo. Yet, what he seems to be most angry about, is the fact that Boogaloo can tell stories.

FA: Yes, he’s angry at what he cannot understand, but also angry as you’re saying, because he sees he can become one of these men. If he sees it only one-dimensionally, it seems so terrible. But that’s it, I mean, I’m trying to create characters that have rich lives, and you just have to see that too.

MM: Can you speak about the relationship between your novel The Region of Lost Names and Western Avenue and Other Fictions?

FA: The two books are related in various ways because of themes, peoples, storylines, and place. I have always been influenced by Hemingway, Faulkner, Joyce, and García Márquez in imagining one’s own particular literary country, county, city, Macondo, or in my case region. Or I return to one of the beautiful powers of Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street: feeling the important desire towards a house, a home, and the need to take that crucial step toward making that home through words, language, stories. Understanding, moreover, that even though a house is not attainable because of systemic forces (racism, economics, marginalization and a lack of agency, especially for a young woman), there is a form of necessary magic in dreaming oneself towards that house. The region I write of is where I come from, of course, but the region has been transformed into an imagined house of peoples and stories that arise from the history of the land. When I had a great awakening into writing, when I suddenly had this inexplicable desire to sit down and write without any reason to even think it was possible, I began to see the region—this immediate area on the border of Michigan and Indiana (Michiana)—as criss-crossed by various paths of migration and stories. There are stories larger than myself waiting to be heard, and I think I continue to return to that. Of course I am a very obsessive writer. After finishing The Region of Lost Names, I wrote an essay “Working in a Region of Lost Names,” in which I wanted to understand a time when I worked with a group of my father’s friends, and why they were a composite for a character like Boogaloo. I felt this deep sense of regret, and then a feeling of justice I wanted to bring to Boogaloo, Ramón Pérez, even though he was simply a “fictional character.” And then after writing the essay, Boogaloo still returned to me, he continued to speak to me, and even


though he had died in the novel, I imagined him alive and living in Chicago. That story became “A Case of Consolation,” and once I wrote it other people started to talk to me. I imagined other memories and stories for this region, and I listened to other writings I had started, and a whole imaginative world started to arise that felt individual, separate, special from the novel, and yet at the same time connected.

There was nothing else I saw myself doing but writing, and so I started to recognize that over time there would be several interrelated books I would write. I wanted to discover—even if much life was lost—the lifelong stories of these peoples and places. The books would become islands in a growing archipelago. It may only consist of three islands, a trilogy, and that’s fine: for now I’m wholly focused on completing a book of nonfiction—essays—to create those islands.

Out of my particular experience the ox became my totem animal, my source for dreams and language and story, without consciously knowing that oxen are, in fact, celebrated in Puerto Rican culture and history (and around the world for their wisdom and stamina).

MM: Can you say something about the symbolism behind the white ox? Why is it a leitmotif in your works?

FA: My childhood memories of Puerto Rico never died; they became words, images, and texts—what I call linguistic memories—written within my blood, and a central memory and image is found when I return to a sad day: I found myself in a cane field crying, and a white ox in the field was my companion. In his eyes and body I found some kind of communion, and we seemed to stare at each other with understanding. I would return to the cane field often because it was my favorite place (to cut and eat cane, and to walk through the cut stalks and listen to the sound as I walked and looked towards the mountains), and when I did, I stopped to see the ox. It stayed with me forever, the ox suddenly appearing in imagination and dreams, and as I matured the ox shaped the way I saw memory, time, work, and place—life itself as circular, a continuous path made by sweat and labor and landscape, and because the ox could not literally speak, I discovered the power of silence. The ox is beautiful, evocative, and lyrical even in his silence—and those are qualities I continually


try to discover or capture in words. The ox is very real, more important than any symbol, but I recognize it is symbolic in the sense that it is a part of my identity, it shapes the way I see the world, and how I imagine the relations of my writing out within a larger community. He was my lifeline to an ancient, rural way of life, as well as a lifeline in imagining more fully how my father’s generation lived, and what they may have endured on the island—out in the country, in those fields and mountains—still existing in the 19th century. I have this sad feeling that the qualities of that ox will not be remembered, and by remembering him I’m connected to something larger than myself.

Out of my particular experience the ox became my totem animal, my source for dreams and language and story, without consciously knowing that oxen are, in fact, celebrated in Puerto Rican culture and history (and around the world for their wisdom and stamina). A writer sees things others don’t pay attention to—and we often see, are drawn to, and obsess over things we don’t understand. I feel, I respond, I imagine before I think or analyze. There’s just this personal, mysterious energy you feel, and you continue to return to it, write it, and it leads you to new places. That ox continues to walk a path that leads the way.

MM: One of the characters in Western Avenue, Rosita, is a Nicaraguan migrant, presumably undocumented. Why did you choose to include her in the narrative? Also, Lorimé and Magdalene seem like very real characters; can you say something about their origin?

FA: Although invention, discovery, and process are essential to my writing (I usually write many, many pages before I discover what I’m writing or where it is going), I do make very intentional choices. In The Region of Lost Names, for example, I decided to place a Cuban family in northern Michigan as a counterpoint to Ernest’s experience, so the themes of displacement and exile would have a different, compelling force through their presence in the story. And also because the exile and exodus of Cubans in my lifetime is something I wanted to understand, especially given the way historically and politically we seem to forget or ignore the plight of the peoples living in Cuba. Another example is that I decided in the novel that Ernest would be connected to the migrant community in northern Michigan, and work with literacy would be important. I recently returned from a long trip where the novel is set, the first time in at least six years, and I noted a new sign for a “migrant” head start on a


main road in the heart of the agricultural region. While there were many other signs of buildings for tourism and the vacation economy, the rural, agricultural, and labor-intensive strand of life is still very visible.

With regards to your question, then, I make certain choices that connect me to a larger world than the imagined borders of the United States. Languages, stories, and peoples migrate, they take root in places, and even if they are seemingly only present temporarily, they influence those places. I travel literally and imaginatively, and through those travels I encounter other writers who sense the importance of migration within a more global map or book, where various routes and peoples are connected even in their supposed differences. Decisions like this are not extra conscious, but all this must have something to do with why a Nicaraguan woman, Rosita, is important to the story “A Case of Consolation.” There is a very narrow view of what “Latina” means in the United States. I often feel outside whatever the term is envisioned to mean. Imaginative literature is what broke down the boundaries of my silent, solitary, and impoverished self. Imaginative literature gifted me a new book of the heart, and with that I found the margins of my sympathy and language and stories and life opened up to include much more than I imagined. Sympathy includes the word “path” within it, and I try to write a new path towards a larger, diverse community. I am more a writer of the Americas than I am a Latino writer, and aspire to include the peoples of this geography within my writing.

The second part of your question is important. I never imagine or feel I am writing “characters.” My fictions are populated by people. In imagining people rather than characters, I discover a great amount of freedom in what I need and don’t need on the page. More important, I think, is that I see my people out in life: living, working, laughing, signing and dancing, mourning and crying, dreaming and remembering. I may live a kind of sad, lonely life—except for my immediate family— but these people begin to speak to me in my quietness, they begin to share their stories, and as I said earlier they become pages in that book of the heart I keep close. Lorime and Magdalene arise from this kind of practice and process (those late nights or early mornings when they fight their fears to speak to me); they are very close to people I’ve known, as well as people I wished were a part of my life. They are close to passing acquaintances I’ve encountered over the years; they are a composite of them.

MM: Are there stories you were forced to leave out of the collection for lack of space?


FA: Yes, there were several, although it was more a matter of form than lack of space. That is, in the writing of the book I composed these very short stories of around 500 words or less, as well as the more traditional length stories, and I had to discover how they could exist alongside each other. Eventually I started to envision those smaller stories as spaces of consciousness, the consciousness that could be writing or narrating all the stories in the collection. But it also seemed to me this consciousness could be imagined as arising from Ernest, Chango, memories, or even the landscape. I found I didn’t need to decide because the consciousness could be all of these at once, and in this way the experience of the book wouldn’t be a “collection” of stories as much as a “novel in stories,” the experience of a novel arising from these various fictions. These smaller stories had to do with Ernest and his father. There were a few that I did not include because Western Avenue was not meant to be Ernest’s story. I realized that I had seven longer stories that had their own intrinsic narrative arc, and so then I worked on the various shorter stories to discover seven that had their own overall narrative shape, thus creating the cycle of 14 fictions.

The story is not an easy one to write, and I’m trying to understand how to carry the lives of the old, infirmed and dispossessed out of the shadowy peripheries of life, as the two main characters become entangled in the lives of those who choose to migrate to the United States—whatever the costs.

MM: Are you currently working on any new projects?

FA: I recently returned from an eight-week trip for writing, most of the time on Lake Superior, where I worked on the book of nonfiction I spoke of earlier. Originally the book was made up of eight interconnected essays with the working title “Close as Pages in a Book.” In these essays I write in more personal, lyrical terms, and meditate on the forces of work, reading and writing, migration and place. I reflect on how these forces are sources of creativity arising from my life and work in the Midwest, growing up bilingual on the east coast, and then being caught between urban and rural worlds. It’s a book about a writing life, literacy, from a life that did not seem to prepare me for writing, and thus the cross-current movement through the metaphor close as pages in a book. The writing blossomed in extraordinary ways this summer, and


I experienced one of my most productive times as a writer. And now there are more than eight essays, and I am in the process of publishing new very brief lyrical essays (like in Western Avenue these short prose works are very poetic, filled with memory and story, and they are providing a new layer of language and consciousness to the book of essays). I feel like now I’m writing a memoir (even though I don’t want to), and the working title is gravitating towards “The Gray House of Memory” as the book grows. I still envision the book as a series of essays, have at least six months of writing to do, I suppose, and I still feel strongly that these essays share a unique American story, a special border consciousness, and this writing details a series of experiences and explorations that a younger Latino generation may find inspiring.

These essays are where my energy is found now, although I have a draft of a novel done. The novel, Fruits of Paradise, is set in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and on a Caribbean island, and at its center there’s a moving story between a father and son, arising from these locations, “My father came to Paradise to die,” and “My papa took me to Paradise before he died.” The story is not an easy one to write, and I’m trying to understand how to carry the lives of the old, infirmed and dispossessed out of the shadowy peripheries of life, as the two main characters become entangled in the lives of those who choose to migrate to the United States—whatever the costs. It clearly has themes I’ve worked with in my other books, although this story is bigger, perhaps more social, and yet also an aesthetic challenge as I try to merge the memories and stories of a more socially driven story with an intimate story between a father and son. In my book I’m striving to get everything right—but in this novel the need to get it right is even stronger, I feel it deeper, and I don’t want to rush the story.

MM: Thank you Fred Arroyo, it’s been a pleasure to speak with you.

FA: Thank you for the opportunity.


ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

Special thanks to Francisco Aragón, Director of Letras Latinas at the Institute for Latino Studies at the

University of Notre Dame, for organizing Fred Arroyo’s visit, and for making sure that this interview and

a class visit were possible during Arroyo’s short time on campus.

NOTES

1 In fact, between 1948 and 1990, the Farm Labor Program “recruited 421,238 Puerto Ricans to work

on the U.S. mainland” (Duany 2011: 88). The program includied the states of New Jersey, Pennsylvania,

Connecticut, Delaware, and Massachusetts (Duany 2011: 88). According to anthropologist Jorge Duany,

this was “the second-largest organized movement of temporary laborers in the United States, after the

Mexican bracero program (1942-64) in the Southwest” (2011: 88).

REFERENCES

Arroyo, Fred. 2008. The Region of Lost Names. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

———. 2012. Western Avenue and Other Fictions. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press.

Duany, Jorge. 2011. Blurred Borders: Transnational Migration between the Hispanic Caribbean and the United States

Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Writing the Puerto Rican Rural Experience in the Midwest: An Interview with Fred Arroyo

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