S.5, ep 1 - Amplifying Latinx Voices: Literature

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RR: Bienvenidos! This is a podcast that explores Latinx media and culture in its many forms. I am Dr. Rojo Robles.

RS: And I am Dr. Rebecca L. Salois. And we are Latinx and Latin American Studies professors at Baruch College in New York City. In this podcast, we will analyze Latinx film, television, literature, art, and cultures.

RR: We will consider how these works are perceived, analyze them, and investigate the real-world reflections and implications of that work on Latinx cultures in the US and beyond.

RS: Welcome to Latinx Visions!

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RR: Bienvenidas, bienvenidos, bienvenides.

RS: Welcome back, everyone. Welcome to our fifth season. This season is dedicated to celebrating the voices, stories, and experiences of Latinx people. Our aim is to offer space for conversation, to register the nuances and complexities within the Latinx overlapping diasporas, recognizing that there is no singular narrative, but instead an array of voices that deserve to be heard.

RR: Central to this is the recognition of the power of orality throughout our systemically silent history, Latinx communities in the US have preserved and passed down their heritage and cultures through oral storytelling. We embrace orality as a significant medium of expressing our realities, theories, and social-political critiques. We understand the necessity of embracing multiple voices within the field of Latinx studies. By listening to a range of perspective and experiences, in this season, our podcast strives to keep presenting and gain a deeper understanding of the complexities and intersections of Latinx arts and life.

RS: As we embark on these conversations en español e inglés, we invite you to be part of them. Join us, write to us, and comment on them as we engage in insightful dialogues with scholars, writers, visual artists, and leaders at the forefront of shaping Latinx narratives distinctly and advocating for social, media, and artistic transformations. Welcome to the Amplifying Latinx Voices podcast season, where we explore the power of orality, dialogue, and the voices that make Latinx topics enriching and significant.

RR: In this episode, we will discuss with author and scholar, Dr. Amina Gautier, from our Afro-Latinidad series at Baruch. This conversation was recorded on November 30th, 2022, with support from the Black and Latino Studies Department and BRESI, the Black, Race, and Ethnic Studies Initiative. This was a conversation between the author and student leaders in my then special topic class, Afro-Latinidades. The class, happily, is now part of the BLS course offering. So shout out to Sandy Paulino, Yuddy Fermin, Jonas Reyes, and Isabella Bonilla for developing the question based on our class discussion. This student-centered course examines African descendent population in Latin America and Afro-Latinx in the United States. Throughout the semester, we explore questions of Black identity and representation, colonialism, resistance to slavery and its afterlives, transnationalism, Pan-Africanism, and diaspora.

RS: So for this episode, we'll first introduce Dr. Gautier and provide some background information on her. This will be followed by a partial reading of one of her short stories, Feliz Navidad. After this, we will share the questions originally posed by the students, editing and paraphrasing for conciseness. We will then wrap up with some story recommendations within Dr. Gautier's book, Now We Will Be Happy, and a brief conversation about how her work resonates thematically with our classes and the podcast itself.

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RR: Dr. Amina Gautier is a Puerto Rican, Brooklyn-born writer, scholar, and professor who currently split her time between Chicago and Miami. She's the author of four award-winning short story collections, At Risk, Now We Will Be Happy, The Loss of All Lost Things, and The Upcoming, The Best That You Can Do, which will be released in January 2024.

RS:  As of this recording, 145 of her short stories have been published in countless journals and reviews, including, but certainly not limited to, American Short Fiction, Boston Review, Latino Book Review, Los Angeles Reviews, New Flash Fiction Review, North American Review, Story Quarterly, and The Literary Review. She has won the Elixir Press Award in Fiction, the Prairie Schooner Book Prize, the USA Best Book Award in African American Fiction, the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, the Blackwell Prize, the International Latino Book Award, and more. She was a 2018 winner of the Penn Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, and a 2021 winner of the inaugural Letras Boricuas Fellowship.

RR: Gautier is a graduate of Stanford University and the University of Pennsylvania. She's a scholar of 19th century US American literature, and her critical essays and reviews have appeared in various academic journals. She has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Market University, St. Joseph's University, Washington University in St. Louis, and DePaul University. She currently serves as faculty in the MFA program at the University of Miami.

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AG: Feliz Navidad. On Christmas, we wake up Puerto Rican. That's when our grandmother stops pretending that hers is our only blood and lets our grandfathers bleed back in.

She stands at the feet of our beds and pulls on our blanketed toes. Wake up, you two, she says, holding up an album cover. Merry Christmas. All year long, she hides the Jose Feliciano album from us, but like magic, it appears on Christmas morning. While all the other families in our building are listening to Nat King Cole, Donny Hathaway, and The Temptations, we'll be jamming to a blind Puerto Rican guitarist. Bodies warm from our beds, hair mushed from our pillows, and eyes phlegm from our good deep sleeps, we follow our grandmother down the hall. As we stumble along in our footed GI Joe and She-Ra pajamas, she leads us into the living room and straight to the record player on the end table.

She lifts the dust cover, slides the record from its sleeve, sets it on the turntable and lowers the needle. Knock yourselves out, she says, abandoning us for the kitchen. This is her only present to us. Today, she doesn't mind that we are not just hers, but our grandfather's as well. Today, we're allowed to be not only African American, but also Puerto Rican to be all the parts of ourselves. Today, we can play our record as many times as we want, as loud as we like, until our mother comes home dead tired from her overtime shift. When she gets here, we'll tear bows and shiny wrapping paper off the gem Voltron Transformers and Teddy Ruxpin toys we asked for.

Then she'll stagger off to bed and we'll have to keep quiet. But for now, we're allowed to play our music and make noise. We want just this one thing for Christmas, to play this record that draws us closer to our grandfather. He left New York for Puerto Rico when his kids were little before we grandkids ever existed. He's never been back to Brooklyn to see us. He's a ghost of a man, flimsier than the tinsel we drape from the artificial branches of our artificial tree, a shining sliver of a thin, thin thread. This record is as close to him as we can get, a tether to pull him near.

We can't compete with an island and we are not Christmas card cute. We're rough from playing in the streets, strong and wiry from swinging on monkey bars and climbing the stone animals in the courtyard of our housing projects, nimble from setting off Roman candles, jumping jacks, moon whistlers, and skyrockets fast enough that our fingers don't get scorched. Our knees are skinned from playing skelly and shooting marbles.

Our elbows and arms scabbed from fighting like we need it. We're nothing to write home about. Yet our mother writes to her father several times a year, sending letters across the ocean to update him on our progress, mailing him school pictures so he can see us for himself.

We never hear back. We've long since stopped hoping for visits, for birthday or Christmas cards. A simple phone call on a day like today would do.

We'd love to hear his voice. Instead, we hear the coacto, the guiro, the guitar, the horns and the cheerful holiday wishes of a blind musician. For years, we will believe that every singer wearing sunglasses, Hector Lavoe, Bobby Womack, Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles, Isaac Hayes is blind.

No one will ever tell us different. We play the record and sing along to a song whose words we do not understand. If he were here, our grandfather could translate.

If he were here, our grandfather could love us. Without him, we have to make do. We make up the words as we go, singing what we think we hear.

Feliz La di da, Puliz  Na di da, Fleece Navidad, potato ano, blah, blah, blah, blah. We sing louder and louder until our grandmother yells from the kitchen that we are giving her a headache and still we don't stop. We're as happy as a song can make us.

We sing with gusto with all the joy the horns can blare. Our bodies help us to keep time. We strum our stomachs in time with the guitar and stretch our forearms to the rhythm of the guido.

We turn empty paper towel rolls into horns and blow, tooting along with the song. We clasp hands and swing each other around. We're not afraid of looking foolish.

No one's watching us. We belt out, I want to wish you a Merry Christmas from the bottom of my heart. And dance around the living room to wish our furniture well.

We sing and circle the living room with our arms flung wide. We fling love from our hearts to the corner of the room where our tree stands, dripping garland and tinsel and shadow-proof balls, multi-colored electric lights blinking back at us in response. We let everything present, the stereo sound system, the love seat and sofa, the coffee and end tables, know how much we love it.

We love the flattened arms of our couches, the dust in the corners, all the loose straw from our broom, even the gouges on the floor made from moving the couch and coffee tables out of the way. Yes, we love it all.

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RR: In your short story collection, now we will be happy you dive into the challenges of feeding into mainstream US society where having multifaceted identities is frowned upon or discouraged. For displaced or diasporic people, what is a possible way of working towards fostering an environment that allows for this amalgamation of experiences?

AG: I think one of the things that is happening in this story, like with Yauuba and Rosa, is applying with the idea of being seen and what it's like to sort of be present and not be seen, right? And so then one of the things that would, I think, improve or ameliorate the situation is if we were all seen and appreciated, right? Like Yauuba is there working constantly in this kitchen, and the patrons basically don't even notice him.

Like he's just like furniture, right? Like they don't even like see him. He's just sort of there to serve them. And then, you know, in the story, like Rosa is in an abusive relationship and the signs are there, right? That this is what's going on and people that she engages with just actually don't see her, right? I think one of the things is that we are like self-focused on moving fast and just sort of like narrowing our views, kind of having like tunnel vision, just seeing what we need to see to get what we need to get done. That we frequently move through spaces where we don't see or acknowledge the presence of people around us. And if we can't even see them, then we can't acknowledge or appreciate their diversity or their variety or what they bring and how that impacts us.

RS: Many of your characters returned to Puerto Rico and their Puerto Rican roots after living for a while in the US. What are your opinions on individuals who find more comfort in their ethnic backgrounds over US American culture? Does US society play a part in diverging people away from their inherited cultures or rather pushing people more towards it?

AG: You know, I think that changes over time. But one of the things that we're dealing with in these stories is kind of pushing back on the idea of the melting pot, right? Like, I mean, that trope that people have been using it from, I guess, like early 20th century to now, and then for the last 30 years or so, like there's been, well, is it really a melting pot? Or is it more like a stir-fry, you know, different things? But, you know, pushing back on the idea that just because someone wants political or religious or economic improvement or mobility, that it means that they also want to assimilate, right? Like you can want more, you know, financial resources or economic security without wanting to turn into something else, right? And so the stories, especially like with Nellida, right, with Nellida Torres, like she's like, I love PR, like I wanted to say this place is not necessarily better. So a lot of the characters are just pushing back on that assumption. That everyone who comes here like wants to like shuck off like who they were and adopt a new identity. And I think that, you know, there have been, you know, changes in the past decades, you know, with being more, I don't know if I want to say tolerant or open, you know, of people sort of retaining who they are. But at the same time, you still have all of these sort of like racial and ethnic attacks, you know, like speak English, you know, or, you know, things like that. And like, I don't think there's one answer. I think it like changes from like decade to decade. And I think it changes from region to region, you know, like for me, you know, I'm from Brooklyn. I'm from New York. So like being like Black and Puerto Rican was like nothing. Like it was like no big deal, like ever, you know, like just, you know, just walk around New York like, oh, yeah, okay, whatever. People like look at me. Sometimes they start speaking Spanish. And, you know, then I went to like just teaching in Chicago at DePaul and had to like go find the Puerto Rican people. Right. I had to like go search them out and I had to like introduce myself and be like, yes, I'm also Latino. They're like, huh, what, how, you know, so it like depends on it. It depends on like where we are, like what groups we're like, how we're accepted, whether or not it's sort of natural if we have to kind of like push for that. So I wanted like all the different characters to have like different experiences with it. Right. So you have like Melida who wants to go back, her son who did go back, but her husband who wants to sort of stay in Brooklyn and like create like an economic stake. Then you have Rosa like trapped between like her husband, Pedro, who, you know, is from the island and well as well as her lover, Yaluba. Like they're both from the island and she's from New York, but they're like two kind of polar opposites. Like one who is like full of machismo and, you know, this other one who is nurturing and protective and loving and not abusive. So I also wanted like make sure not to say like one is better than the other. Like the characters who are from the island are not necessarily all like like perfect and un-flawed, right? They just kind of have this mix so that it just represents like, you know, all the varieties that are possible.

RS: With the success of so-called Latin music from Mambo to Reggaeton, do you believe that the visibility of the Latinx experience through music goes hand in hand with the recent inclination to claim Afro-Latina? If so, have you had an experience with someone who was not Afro-Latina but still claim this identity for the aesthetic? What are your thoughts?

AG: I haven't had any experiences or interactions with someone who is not Afro-Latina or Latino claiming it for the aesthetic. But for me, I think of the explosion of Latin music as actually starting in the 90s. All the stories in Now We Will Be Happy are set late, early through 90s.

I just remember going to grad school in 1999 and getting to Philly and all of a sudden everyone, all races, everyone was taking salsa dance classes because everyone was listening to Marc Anthony. He had Nadia Como Ella out and everybody was jamming to it. Ricky Martin was shaking his bum bum and living la vida loca. For me, the explosion was dead. All these Latin artists winning Grammys and all these music videos, J.Lo, La India. What's the guy? I always forget his name. Everywhere you went, not salsa but merengue also, everywhere you went you could hear Pintame. It was Elvis Crespo everywhere. For me, the explosion was 99 to the early 00s. I would push it 20 years. Earlier and say that it's sort of the foundation of the reggaeton, the different explosion now, like Bad Bunny and all of that. I actually saw it for myself as kind of a push or a return to the identity and culture and to getting to know it more. Like, for instance, like when it was like, I think, a greatest, Rojo, that Mark Anthony album, like Desde Un Príncipio, that's like a greatest hit, right? Do you remember that one? The one that has like Preciosa on it? Is that a great hit?

RR: Yeah Yeah.

AG: Like that album, like when it came out, like everybody was like, like I was in Brooklyn and I could hear like Preciosa, like just playing out of like everybody's car. You know, there's this beautiful, nostalgic song, right? That makes you want to, if you haven't been to Puerto Rico to say like, man, I want to go to the island, I want to see it, or like I want to go back. Like it makes you like nostalgic and homesick. And I don't know like what kind of response that was, what kind of effect I was having on like non Afro Latinos. But I know that for a lot of us who were kind of like quietly identifying, it was definitely like an encouragement to sort of like be louder and to sort of like delve deeper. There's so much music in the collection, I guess, because I was sort of like just delving deeper and returning and I was just dancing all the time, right? So there's, you know, there's Mark Anthony in here, but, and Hector Laveau, but also the title, and now we will be happy, you know, it's the famous, you know, Braseo Hernandez. So there's lots of, I was inspired by a lot of music.

RR: One of the topics we got out of the story, Aguanile, was the problem of the absence of a parental figure on the trauma it creates generationally within a family. Do you believe writing helps as a coping mechanism for those who lack a parent?

AG: Well, I mean, I can't speak for anyone else, but it definitely helps, helps me, right? Because, I don't know, you always hear people saying walk a mile in someone else's shoes. And I guess other than being an actor, being a writer I think is one of the ways that allows us to consider points of view that are not our own, right? Like you have your feelings of what it's like to be missing this person or to project and just assume that if this person was in your life, that things would automatically be good and be better. But when you can sort of step out of your own point of view or your own perspective, you can start to think about why that person might have left, why they might have chosen not to come back, or what their own experiences were like. So I have like two sets of tios, right?

So my grandfather was, he's no longer alive, from Rio Piedras. My grandmother is from Brooklyn, African American. She's his first wife. So he married her in the 50s. It had three kids, my uncle Pedro, my mom, and my uncle Ricardo. And then he left. He got into some kind of like scuffle, and like thought like he might get arrested. And so he went back to PR, and he never came back. Like when he went back home, he married someone else while he was still married to my grandmother and not divorced from her.

He had three more kids, another boy named Pedro. So two oldest sons with the exact same name, another girl, and another son. And it was just sort of accepted by everybody that like my grandfather was like a hard man.

And people would just constantly say, oh, he had a hard life, he had a hard life, as if that sort of just is the answer to everything. And it wasn't good enough for me, but of course, as a young person, I couldn't see past that or know more. And as a writer, as someone who just wanted to start to think about not just what it felt like for me, right?

But to think about like how my mom might have experienced is how my two uncles, the uncles in Brooklyn might have experienced versus my titi and my  two tios like in PR. And like what it is that brings us together, like that brings the six of those siblings together, even though they have two different experiences with their father, right? And writing is what helped me to kind of like delve into that because I can create as many characters and as many angles and perspectives as I want and then unify all of them to get to some semblance of the truth.

RR: In a traditional patriarchal family, the man is supposed to be the provider and the woman is the caretaker as in the story Bodega. We know that in today's world that this is not necessarily true and that there are many families where the woman is the breadwinner as the narrator of Aguanile. How can short story be used to inspire the idea of a non-traditional family where the woman can be more than just the caretaker or inspire a dual income household?

AG: Short stories, well fiction in general, I mean novels as well, obviously I'm more partial to short stories, but fiction in general can challenge the status quo because it can poke holes into our cultural stories and our cultural myths. First of all, just by challenging, what is the idea of traditional? Where did it come from?

A lot of times when we use the word traditional now, it seems like we're referring to 1950s culture and forward, but tradition, if we were in 19th century, would have been something completely different. You think of like, I guess maybe 18th century, I'm thinking, you think of Ben Franklin

So fiction can sort of argue with dominant theories and cultural, social, political myths, but in a way that makes the argument like vivid and visceral, right? Like not, you know, a treatise, you know, not like, you know, a legal brief or something like that, that, you know, might get the same point across, but that a reader wouldn't necessarily be able to kind of like feel emotionally and intellectually, right? Like the other forms, you know, that we use to sort of argue with or correct or shave or change, you know, the myths or the tropes that we tell ourselves like anthropology, econ, poli sci, like we, they, they all, they all do the same job, but it's more only on an intellectual level.

And what, I guess I'm not just trying to diss the social scientists. I guess what I want to say is that I think that what fiction does is it makes the same argument, but it makes it in a way that is not only intellectual, but is also emotional. Like it's visceral.

Like you can sort of like feel it and you can see it. Sorry, I just got distracted by a question in the chat. Do you feel like fiction is as important as nonfiction?

Tiana asked, Tiana Burgos. I absolutely feel that fiction is as important as nonfiction. And I think that we need both genres, right?

Because you have nonfiction, whatever form we want to talk about, like a historian or something like saying, well, in 2022, you know, this happened and this occurred and the pandemic, blah, blah, blah. And then you've got the fiction writer coming in and maybe taking the same theory that the historian talked about, like the isolation of the pandemic, right? And maybe writes a story about a character who, you know, has an anxiety attack because of wearing the mask or what it feels like to actually be in the pandemic and not be able to socialize with your friends or to what it's like to have taken certain things for granted, like the fact that you can just hug someone or kiss someone, and now you have to like think twice about it, right?

The historian wouldn't be able to necessarily capture that the same way, so you need both of them as kind of like two sides of the same coin, like they're both documenting the same moment, but one is doing it in an artistic way that allows it to be kind of long lasting. I feel like I learned a lot of my young life lessons through short stories, like sometimes through novels as well, but things that adults would tell you, you know, like, Oh, be careful what you wish for. If all your friends jump off the Empire State Building, would you do it too?

Like all that kind of stuff. And then, you know, like I read a short story, right? Like you read Flair O'Connor's Good Country People, you're like, oh, that's what they mean by be careful what you wish for.

Got it. You know, like it sort of made those things real instead of just abstract.

RS: Much of your work focuses on empowering Black Latinx women. How do you practice empowering these girls and women, and how do they empower you? What more can we do to empower one another in our relationships?

AG: What I think I'm doing to empower, I mean, all readers, but like specifically women, you know, is showing a range of female characters, right, and not saying that one type is better than the other. Like you have, you know, like Rosa's mother, who is basically a homemaker, right? She's home all the time because, you know, her husband is ill, and she's dedicated, you know, to taking care of him.

But then, you know, you have, you know, other women that are more, like, community-focused, like, I would say, like, Nelida is, like, sort of taking care of, like, the entire, you know, community, you know, not just her family. And then you have Rosa, you know, who has, like, no children, right, and who, you know, is not a mother, right, to have, like, all these different perspectives, sort of saying, like, there's no right or wrong way, right, to be a woman. There's no ideal woman, like, you're not lesser if you don't follow this path, if you don't go this way.

And to have all of them sort of, I don't know if I want to say that they're comfortable, like, in their decisions. But to have them all, in my mind, they're, like, all different, like, pieces of the same puzzle. And you sort of put them, put them together and see, like, what the different sides of their personality are, personality is.

For me, that's what I find, you know, empowering, like, when someone is, someone stops comparing me to someone else. You're such and such age, and you don't have any kids yet, or when are you gonna do something, something, something? You know, as if there's some kind of, like, manuscript or pamphlet or template that women are supposed to follow.

You know, so, like, I have women in this collection, and then in some of the stories that I'm working on, you know, that, like, that challenge their husbands and their partners, that leave their husbands and their partners, or that are not necessarily, like, for instance, in Aguanile, that the mother is, like, kind of shadowy in the story. But you can tell, you know, that part of what's a challenge for the granddaughter to kind of bond, right, with her family on the island, you know, is feeling like she might be in some way, like, betraying, you know, her mother and her grandmother, right, who, like, raised her and who had, like, a bad relationship with the grandfather that she might be, like, betraying them and all the nurturing that they gave her, you know, by identifying with him. So you have also these women in the sort of background of the stories who sort of say, well, maybe I actually don't want to identify with that culture, you know, that I see that culture as actually having been, like, painful and hurtful to me.

So, you know, like, not every woman is, like, in the story is like an earth goddess, you know.

RS: Publicly discussing significant issues and topics around culture, race and identity must impact your self-esteem and overall experience as an Afro-Latina. How has your work impacted or changed your self-perception?

AG: I'm older than I look, you know, as you can tell since the stories are all set, like it is 80s and 90s, you know, so I'm 45. And like first is to me, like using like I'm totally I like the phrase, you know, Afro-Latina, but like it's a new phrase for me, you know, like as a kid, you know, it was like Hispanic. And then people would be like, well, don't say Hispanic because it means his panic, you know, but, you know, just identifying that way.

And then sometimes being told that I couldn't identify that way, like, you know, the public school systems in New York fill out these boxes and sometimes they're like, okay, Black and then not Hispanic, right? Like you couldn't check both and you had to pick one and like now you can check both and you're just like constantly, you know, changing like, like always identifying as Black because clearly you have eyes, you can see me. But then not always being able to like identify as Hispanic and Latino as well.

And so, you know, like having the phrase now, I never thought of it as sort of affecting my self esteem. But now that you put it that way, you know, it feels like it's more complete, but then sometimes I feel some tension with it. Because I'm like saying that, you know, is that sort of like when we say like Afro Latino, like it's this, you know, it's a modifier.

But does that suggest then that there's Latino, which is not Afro, you know? And then like specifically, you know, for Puerto Rico, like, I think of the three as always being kind of like interchange, like inseparable, you know, like the African, the Spanish and the Taino, like just kind of like, you know, mixed in. And it feels like saying like Afro Latino sometimes suggests that it's Spanish and Taino and then Afro.

I'm not answering your question. I'm just thinking it through. And I'm saying that like that it's it's it's constantly like evolving for me.

But it also feels like they're that it's creating like this this welcoming space, you know, because sometimes it's like, like you're in PR. They're like, oh, all the black people are Loisa, like only, you know what I mean? And and not like everywhere, not everywhere else.

And it's like not just like Loisa. And it's not just like Bomba Plena, you know, it's everything. And like having this space, I think, has been helpful for me to kind of tease things out to to ask, like, how far back, you know, can we go and still be identified?

Right. Like, for instance, like my mom would always count as like Latino because her father's Puerto Rican and her mother is is African-American. And then, you know, there are people telling me like, yeah, but it's your grandfather.

So not really, you know, you're not really like Latino. You're not like really, you know, Spanish. But I'm like, OK, so my mom technically is more.

But I can dance salsa, merengue, bachata, rings around her. You know, I can make like flan and those congandules and like everything else. And I've been to like PR like 10 times and like not fluent, but I know some Spanish, whereas my mom wants like nothing to do with any of that.

You know, so then it's like, how do you decide? Like blood, culture, language, like who's more and like, does it even matter?

RR: Even with your accolades and critical success, I imagine you have goals you want to accomplish as a writer and educator. How do you navigate the publishing industry as an Afro-Boricua woman? What next moves or upcoming projects are you looking forward to and perhaps able to share with us?

AG: I did my undergrad at Stanford in creative writing, well, in English with a creative writing emphasis. I started writing stories, gathering them, my junior or senior year, and published my first story, which is in this, well, my first full-length story. I did two or three flash pieces before that.

But the first full-length story I published is in the collection. It's called Palabras. I published that when I was 22.

The summer between undergrad and the PhD program, I just revised a lot of my stories. I started sending things out. I didn't have any rhyme or reason to what I was doing.

It's just writing and sending, not thinking of a bigger picture at that point in time. Just following the pieces of advice that I would get from different professors and just doing what people said. They were like, okay, well, you've published 10 stories now in the past two or three years.

You need to go get an agent. You need to put a collection together, et cetera, different things like that. I would go to bread loaf writing conferences.

I thought I was ready to really enter the industry before I really was. I guess I want to clarify that when I say the industry, I'm thinking more like publishing a full-length book as opposed to me sending stories out on my own. I came back home, met with different agents in Manhattan.

Most of them are in midtown. I picked one and put ten stories together and sent them out. As you can probably tell, nothing happened.

I didn't even understand the idea of what a collection was. To me, a collection was literally just collect some stories, not that they should make sense together or speak together or have any kind of thematic unity. It took a couple of years to really notice, to pay attention to what I was writing, just writing anything that came to my head.

I had been in high school in Massachusetts, I had been in college in California, and all those things made me homesick for New York and writing all these stories set in Brownsville and East New York and Bed-Stuy. I generated just a large body of work, about 50 stories around 2009, 2010, and sat them down and read them and realized that I had been writing on three different themes. I had been writing about at-risk kids in Brooklyn doing the war on drugs, that I had been writing about Afro-Latinos in Brooklyn as well, and that I had been writing about loss and grief.

That really laid the foundation for the first three collections. I just, I'm sorry, I forgot to say, I thought that I wrote a novel in between there because my professors were like, oh, you've written 10 stories, now you're going to write a novel. I thought that I wrote one, but what I really wrote was like a 250-page summary.

That was not a novel. But I thought it was. And that's another way that Now We Will Be Happy came to be because it was about the linked stories in Now We Will Be Happy, the stories about Pedro, Rosa, Yauba, and Nelida.

Like, they are from what I thought was my novel. I scrapped it and I saved chapters that became stories. But I started out in the industry just kind of like following other people's advice and not necessarily really thinking carefully or thinking for myself, just doing what I was told.

And I was presenting my work to agents and they were like talking down, you know, to me. Like I looked younger then and I was, you know, had a 26, you know, I had a PhD and they were talking to me like I was, you had a PhD from an Ivy League institution. They were talking to me like I was like 12 years old.

Like, what could you possibly know about literature? You weren't even born when such a such book was out. And, you know, whoo, whoo, whoo, whoo, whoo.

And I was like, all right, fuck y'all. You know, so I pulled my books. Yeah, I mean, I'm nice, but I am from Brooklyn.

Because I was like, all right, fuck all y'all. I pulled my work back and I was like, okay, I am not going to try to publish a novel or a collection if this is how people are going to be talking to me and treating me. I'm like, okay, so I'm just going to spend the next 10 years.

Well, I didn't actually put a time limit on. I'm going to spend a significant amount of time just perfecting my craft and publishing as much as I can to shut them up, right? Because if you have 10 short stories, somebody can say, oh, are you really sure you know what you're writing?

Did you really want to end it that way? Oh, maybe not. But if you have 100 short stories and somebody, you know, like really you think I didn't mean to end the story that way, I did this 100 times.

I think I know what I'm doing. So I just like pulled back, stopped thinking about books, you know, like I said, generated these stories, ended up with three collections, and then kind of came back and had a way of, had a chance to think about who I wanted to be in the industry. And one of the things I didn't want was to be pigeonholed, you know, which is why like the second collection has like all Afro-Latino characters, right?

Like, yeah, I'm not just African American, like don't try to, you know, like pin that on me. So like two books coming out, like three years apart with both parts of my identity so that people have to like take that into account right away. And then, you know, stories, and now we will be happy that are not only set in Brooklyn, some of them are in Connecticut, some of them are in Philly.”

So people can't be like, oh, she only writes about New York. And then following that like a year and a half later with another collection that has characters, you know, of different races. There are Southeast Asian characters in The Loss of All Lost Things.

There are stories taking place in Massachusetts, but like really changing the way that I entered the industry to kind of come in in a way that like showed my range so people couldn't pigeonhole me and think that I'm just going to write the same story over and over and over again. And also coming in by entering contests, not necessarily using agents or big New York publishing houses was important to me to sort of show people like potential aspiring writers, especially potential aspiring writers of color, that there are multiple ways to be successful in the industry, that you don't always have to have an agent. You don't always have to have a novel.

You don't always have to have a big press. So those are some of the things that I did deliberately when I came into the industry.

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RS: Thank you. And the last section we're going to include here are some of the final thoughts by Dr. Amina Gautier as she wrapped up her conversation with the students last year.

AG:I do want to say something that's a little different. I think maybe kind of responding back to Isabella's question earlier, like when we were talking about checking the boxes and Afro-Latinidad. And I want to sort of specify, like what I'm talking about, like feeling comfortable and identifying, that for me, my experience is like, I have a different experience when I'm trying to identify with Afro-Puerto Ricans versus just like Latinos in general, you know, or maybe it's because of like New York or something like that.

But like, if I, you know, like tell like another Boricua or something, you know, that I'm like Puerto Rican, like, it's like, okay, cool. And that's like the end of it, like great, yay. But I've definitely been in other spaces where, you know, I might like identify, you know, to a different Latino group and get more pushback.

You know, like I've been in like writing, writers colonies and artists fellowships, like places like McDowell and things like that, like where a bunch of different writers like are together, you know, and it'll be like dinnertime or something. And I'll just like, you know, say like Buen Provecho or something like that before we eat, you know, to like another artist who is maybe like Cuban or from like DR And I won't always be like acknowledged or recognized. So I do wanna say that I think there's two different things, right?

And, you know, and I don't know if it's because there's so many like New York Reacons and they just are just used to like, you know, like, yeah, okay, fine, whatever. You know, like Puerto Ricans look like everything. But when I'm in like other spaces, like being here in, I'm in Miami right now, and I've been here for like eight years, and this has been like really cool.

You know, go to the Dunkin Donuts or the airport or whatever. And like you, like people, all the orders and stuff are in Spanish and everyone just, you know, I say whatever and they're like, okay, great. And they're like, who, no, where are you from?

Blah, blah, blah. And there hasn't been any of that. But that happens to me a lot in other spaces outside of New York and Miami.

And when I applied for the Letras Boricuas Fellowship, because that thing is like brand new, right? Like Lin- Manuel Miranda created it with the Flamboyant Foundation.

And so the first people who won were last year, then they're going to pick the winners for this year. And we're all going to PR in next April. But when I applied, I was like really scared.

I mean, I know like people have really short memories. So I don't know if you guys just remember, like the last two years, there were all these stories about like white women in academia who had been like pretending-

RR: Oh, yeah.

AG: Black and like Native American, and I was like, oh my gosh, what if I apply? And they're like, she's not Puerto Rican enough. So I wrote this like long explanation, like, look, this is what my family is. And you guys decide, but I was like so scared that I would like apply and then somebody would be like, oh, she's not really Puerto Rican, give back the money.

RR: I'm really glad that you got that one.

AG: Thank you. I mean, like, it's been great. I've written like eight new short stories.

And I'm calling, I'm grouping them under this little heading Collect Puerto Rican, where they're dealing with a lot, like the characters that I read about in Feliz Navidad, like with those kind of situations. So in the last year, I've written like eight new stories, you know, dealing with Afro-Latinidad. And, you know, the fellowship was really helpful with that and giving me time to like think about it and create new stories. Oh, that actually answered the question about what I was working on. So I guess I kind of told you.

(MUSIC FADE)

RS: So let's give the audience a little more context for this conversation, these questions and where the students were coming from in this conversation.

RR: Yeah, of course. Yeah. When we had this conversation, my students from the Afro-Latinidad class and Latinx literature class were reading and discussing stories. From now, We Will Be Happy. This collection of stories published in 2014 focuses on Afro-Puerto Rican, US-born Puerto Ricans, and displaced Puerto Ricans from the archipelago living between spaces. Amina Gautier's characters deal with the difficulties of multicultural and bilingual identities in a society that wants them to erase their original language and cultural specificity.

RS: Songs are prominently featured in many of the stories in this collection. Directly or indirectly, the music in various stories also reflects the experiences of native Puerto Ricans, New Rican, and Afro-Puerto Ricans. For instance, the collection title takes its name from Rafael Hernandez's song, Ahora Seremos Felices, which translates into English as, Now We Will Be Happy. Gautier said, Hernandez was an important Afro-Puerto Rican composer deeply revered in Puerto Rico and Latin America. This song is a lovely bolero of his. To my ears, it is hopeful.

There aren't too many lyrics and verses, but there is hope in each word. To me, the song has a fanciful quality, whose essence I tried to capture in the content of my stories. The short story, Aguanile, another example, uses the song by Hector Lavoe and Willie Colon of the same title to portray the emotional ties and fractures of a Puerto Rican family spread out between New York and Puerto Rico. Gautier explores the possibilities of intergenerational bonding, troubled masculinities, the failures of father, grandfather, figures, and the importance of Afro-Caribbean music, salsa, as a grounding cultural phenomenon for Puerto Ricans in the US and the archipelago.

RR: Through focusing on Nélida, a Puerto Rican woman born on the island and brought reluctantly by her husband to make a living in the US., Bodega and the interconnected story only son nourish the tensions between diasporic longing, societal integration, and community building in Brownsville, New Lots, Brooklyn. All the characters search for roots while dealing with their own loss, regret, fear, and anger. Bodegas in these stories function as cultural sites and spaces of learning. They serve not only as places to shop for necessities, but also as cultural hubs where individuals confront their bottle emotions and the community gathers and connect. These stories also explore intergenerational socioeconomic expectations and sacrifices, parenthood, intimacy, and aging.

We saw in Bodega that deli owners Nelly and her husband left San Juan specifically to give their only child a chance at a quote unquote better life. But here's the drama, as a young adult, the son Esteban asks, what is a better life? Why do I need to follow the family path?

Why must this path be found in New York City and the States? Am I tied to my parents' sacrifices? Is it possible to experience authentic Puerto Rican culture in the States?

RS: These are amazing questions and definitely even beyond the story, these sort of existential questions that I imagine many children of immigrants ask themselves.

RR: Yeah, it resonated a lot with my students and we had like really great conversation that allowed them also to process their own experiences.

RS: And that's what we do this for, right?

RR: Exactly.

RS: You know, thinking about Dr. Gautier's interview and her work, it's notable how beyond the stories in the book, these topics are prevalent in Latinx literature, art classes, and the podcast itself. So let's talk a little bit about multiculturalism and in-betweenness.

RR: Yeah, two very important like topics for Latinx studies as a whole. So Amina Gautier's explorational of identities and in-betweenness is prevalent, of course, in Latinx literature. Latinx individuals, regardless of where they're coming from, yeah, often navigate various cultural environments, whether as immigrants, multilingual individuals, or first generation US. American. This constant negotiation of identities is reflected in many works that simultaneously highlight the complexity of being part of a diasporic community and the search for belonging in mainstream or US based subcultures.

RS: That makes a lot of sense, yeah.

RR: Finding parts of one's heart, desires, and dreams in different places or countries or cultural environment is also a motif commonly explored in Amina's work and Latinx literature.

RS: Absolutely.

RR: Many stories we analyze with our students in our classes revolve around characters who grapple with feelings of nostalgia and alienation as they straddle multiple worlds.

RS :Absolutely, and across genres as well. Belonging as a diasporic person is a recurring theme in Latinx literature as well, heavily influenced by migration and displacement experiences. These narratives showcase characters trying to maintain their cultural identity while adapting to new surroundings. They often explore immigrants' hardships as they confront the dissonance between their aspirations and the challenges posed by their host country, city, or even neighborhood. Now, if we look at gender and family, we have these traditional roles and relationships within patriarchal families and societies, and these are themes that we often focus on in our literature classes as well.

RR: Indeed, and in the podcast as well.

RS: Always, absolutely. These works shed light on the challenges individuals, often women, face when they attempt to break away from societal expectations and gender roles imposed by their culture and community. Definitely often women, but not exclusively, right? When we talk about masculinities and the extreme, extreme expectations for some of those masculinities as well, it's worth looking at.

RR: Yeah, and we also have like address these topics through, yeah, the perspective of queerness as well.

RS: Absolutely. In these narratives, intergenerational dilemmas in Puerto Rican and Latinx families come up repeatedly. These stories often depict the complexities of relationships between different generations. Themes such as generational gaps, cultural shifts, navigating economic challenges and changing values resonate with our students because they help us understand the dynamics of many Latinx families and it helps them understand their own family dynamics as well.

RR: Yeah, precisely. Another thing that comes up very distinctly in Amina Gautier's work is her examination of Afro-Latinidad, Blackness and Latinidad. So, overcoming struggles as an Afro-Latina is a topic that resonates strongly with Afro-Latinx individuals and students who often face intersectional challenges related to self and others' perceptions of race, ethnicity, and gender. We tend to explore colorism and anti-Blackness as complex and critical things, illuminating issues of prejudice and discrimination based on skin color or phenotype and how they affect access to opportunities daily. We also, in our classes, explore transnational understanding of the Black diaspora as a team that resonates with Afro-Latinx individuals who affirm their identity as part of the larger African diaspora. This theme provides a broader perspective on the shared experiences of Black communities worldwide.

RS: And as we go on, we'll keep addressing these themes and more with the other interviewees in our Amplifying Latinx Voices season. So be sure to keep listening.

(MUSIC FADE)

RR: Thanks for joining us for this episode. Remember again, you too can share your thoughts with us. You can always reach out to us on social media or by email.

Follow the podcast on Twitter or Instagram at Latinxvision. Our email address is latinxvision@gmail.com.

RS: Subscribe to us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Share us with your friends and family. If you like what you hear, subscribe and leave a five-star review on both Apple and Spotify. It really helps us reach new audiences.

RR: Thanks to Amina Gautier, the Black and Latinx Studies Department, the BRESI Grant, my Afro Latinidades and Latinx Literature students, and you all for joining us in this conversación. Estamos a la escucha. Hasta la próxima.

RS: Dale, until next time.

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