[00:00:12] Speaker A: Hi, my name is Geraldo Cadava, and I want to thank you for tuning into season three of Writing Latinos, a podcast from Public Books. We're back for more terrific conversations with Latino authors writing about the wide world of Latinidad.
As always, we aim to provide thoughtful reflections on Latino history, culture, politics, and identity and how writing conveys some of its meanings.
Don't forget to like and subscribe to Writing Latinos wherever you get your podcasts. And now for the show, we've got a real treat for you today. We're here with Justin Torres, who teaches English at ucla.
He's the author of two spectacular novels. His first is we the Animals, which was a national bestseller and was made into a feature film with the same name. His second novel, blackouts, won the 2023 National Book Award for Fiction and has garnered many other recognitions.
Torres has been profiled by the New Yorker, has won a Guggenheim Fellowship, a fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University, and a fellowship from the New York Public Library's Cullman Center.
Simply put, he's one of the best writers out there. Justin, we are delighted to have you with us today.
[00:01:37] Speaker B: Thanks for having me. I'm really happy to be here.
[00:01:39] Speaker A: We're going to try something different today. It's actually something that I have wanted to try on the podcast, but this is the first time we're actually getting around to doing it, and that is reading a piece of Latino literature and then talking about it together instead of talking about an author's work. So the piece we're going to read is called the Palisades as a backdrop. Over to you, Justin.
[00:02:04] Speaker B: I was very tired.
I felt I needed at least three days away from the city noises and the telephone.
So I convinced Concho that she should accompany me to one of the workers camps to spend the weekend.
We arrived Friday evening just in time to listen to the last announcement over the public address system informing everybody that there was to be a campfire at the the edge of the cliff fronting the Hudson river that very night.
After arranging for accommodations, my wife and I started to walk single file, leaving all the camp's cabins far behind.
We passed bushes and walked through lanes of nature's little gems, beauty bathed in sweet calmness.
The crickets provided the musical background dissonance that you somehow found to your liking.
Concha kept back to me. My flashlight told her where to step next.
Now we heard the singing and the guitars like a long lost echo repeated by the trees that extended tall and erect, dissimilar in size like the pipes of a monumental organ.
Now we could see the reflection of the campfire bursting in the compact darkness of the night with its glare.
At last we got there.
20 or 30 teenagers with a sprinkling of middle age and old, both sexes and of various colors, sprawled around a campfire that was growing as the young people threw more pieces of dry wood into it.
In the middle of the group stood a black woman.
I was told later that she was in her 50s, but there that night, bleeding all over the reflection of the fire on her live sylph like body, she looked as young as any of the teenagers.
Concha, my wife, said, she looks like a goddess.
Goddess? There are no such things as goddesses.
These are only imaginary things from the pages of old books on Greece and Rome. I objected, mildly showing off a little of my erudition.
Concha just responded to my professional answer by reflecting a little more affirmatively, she looks like a goddess.
But did you hear what I was saying? The goddesses are imaginary creations in Greek and Roman.
Concha interrupted me and repeated again, this time pointing to her, she looks like a goddess.
I thought I could clinch this little argument with a brutal knockdown, drag out unanswerable question. Have you ever seen a goddess?
Concha's answers came in rapidly. No, but still I say she looks like a goddess.
The firmness of conviction in Concha's voice made me examine the black woman's silhouette standing like a glint of light in the middle of the group around the campfire, and I had to admit that she looked like a goddess, though I conceded that I'd never seen a goddess myself.
We started to squeeze in unobtrusively and easily until we made ourselves part of the circle. The youth sang individually and in chorus, the guitars right there, keeping pace with the voices.
The voices spoke, the guitars answered.
On the other side of the river, like an immense theater backed up, were the Palisades and the Hudson River. The Palisades have seen Henry Hudson in his half moon, following up the stream in his hopeless search for a passage to India.
But the Palisades had never before seen a campfire like the one that night.
Youth with its enthusiasm saw to it that neither the fire or the singing would die out.
Concha and I sat there looking and listening. The hours passed by. Nobody cared where the hours went. It was a wonderful night. All around.
The bell for the morning breakfast rang three times. The stomach insisted that we get up. Unwillingly we obeyed.
During breakfast the program for the morning was announced.
Those who were practicing for The Saturday night show were asked to the open theater at the clearing near the river.
We strolled around the grounds, visiting familiar spots that we knew from previous trips to the camp.
The social hall and theater, the canteen meeting place between meals just before you go into the lake.
We kept on exploring till we came to the open theater.
There, on the wooden platform, about a dozen teenagers were reciting in unison the famous poem by Emma Lazarus. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these the homeless tempest tossed to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
Again the black woman was in front, leading them, teaching them the recitation of that inspiring poem.
She directed them like a symphony orchestra. Every accent badly stressed, was corrected. Every exaggerated gesture was lovingly subdued.
Somebody told us that she was not only a great teacher, but a great poetess and actress.
It was a delight to see those youth responding with feeling and imagination to the instructions of the tall, slim black woman.
The whole scene looked to me like a page out of the future.
[00:07:06] Speaker A: Thank you so much for that reading, Justin.
Sounded nice coming from you also.
So I have a lot of questions. There's a lot to talk about, the particulars of the themes and the language. But first I wanted to talk a little bit about the broader context and about the writer himself. So this is a piece by a writer named Jesus Colon. What do you think the audience needs to know about Jesus Colon in order to begin to understand this story?
[00:07:36] Speaker B: I mean, he's such an amazing figure and there's so much to say about him, so I'll try and keep it short. He left Puerto Rico and came as a stowaway when he was like 16 or 17, I think it was around 1918, and arrived in New York much earlier than the kind of massive waves of Puerto Rican migration that would come in the 50s and in the kind of post war years.
And he was a kind of committed socialist, I think he converted in like the 30s to communism. And he. And he never, never altered in that commitment. He was brought before the House of American Activities Committee and, you know, accused of being a traitor to the country, et cetera, et cetera, and remained firm. He was a real chronicler of the Puerto Rican experience in the city. And he was also a real chronicler of workers experience more broadly, more generally. And so this particular story comes from a collection that he wrote in English, and it's called A Puerto Rican in New York and Other Sketches. And it's a series of vignettes that cover kind of several decades of his experience in New York.
And they really vary.
What I love about the kind of vignette form is that it's really good at capturing a mood. And so this one, I think, is really optimistic. Others of his are much more strident or much more dogmatic or much more angry.
But in general, I think his tone and his approach is quite kind of tender and sentimental. In this one, I just return to it again and again. Again, there's something about it that, I don't know, kind of comforts me.
[00:09:30] Speaker A: Yeah. And do you know. I mean, he was very politically engaged, politically committed. Do you know how. What the story is about how he became a writer?
You know, I'm thinking about other politically committed people, like Jose Marti, the Flores Magon brothers. There are so many. So I'm not trying to say that there's like a clear line between literature and politics, because there's not. But I. You know, I guess the theme of so many of his writings is the. The working class and workers. And so.
[00:10:03] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that he's, you know, in. When he was still in Puerto Rico, his kind of political education came from the.
The cigar makers, the tabaqueros. Right. And so, like many people who. Who's kind of got politically educated by, like, in that environment, you know, these. These people would be rolling cigars, and people would be reading out literature while they. While they rolled cigars to kind of keep. To pass the time. And they would also read out political tracks. And so the very first vignette in this book, he talks about his kind of political awakening as a very young boy. Right. This kind of moment of him being discriminated because he was black and he was.
He had a white teacher, and teacher's like, oh, come play checkers with me. And then somebody comes by and says, you can't play checkers here because you're black. Whatever. And it awakens something in him. And he talks about moving from writing bad sonnets to reading political pamphlets and going with the tobacco workers and getting his political education. And I think that his entire trajectory is about marrying these two things.
He's actually a great admirer of kind of canonical Western white European writers. And he also has this intense resistance to colonialism and imperialism.
And he's very dymatic as well. And so he's constantly kind of moving back and forth between the kind of lyric and the kind of stridently political. And I think it makes for a really wonderful read.
[00:11:47] Speaker A: It does. And I think we'll probably return to some of this, when we talk about the form of the vignette, too, and what it allows him to do. But. So that was about Jesus Colon. Do you remember what your first encounter with Jesus Colon's writing was?
[00:12:01] Speaker B: My first encounter, I don't know.
I think that I was doing a lot of reading.
I think, like, most people, kind of the Nuyorican scene, you know, it's just if you're. If you're kind of like me, somebody who's really interested in getting to know kind of Puerto Rican literary history and especially Puerto Rican literary. Literary history in the US Like, I think, you know, it leads you to the kind of New York scene that kind of dominates everything. And.
And then quickly, I think Cologne gets mentioned quite a lot as the kind of Godfather or this kind of figure that presages the New York scene, right? That he's kind of.
There he is kind of laying the groundwork for what will come.
And so a lot of those people reference him that I think I started to read. But again, his.
These vignettes, because they're so extractable, right? You can just. I, Like, I started just encountering them before I. And then at some point, I was like, I read. This is. This is a long time ago. I read for the first time I read Cologne. And I think that there's this kind of simplicity to his language and his approach that as I reread him over the years, I find all this complexity. Right. Like, we can. We can look at this vignette. I can pull out just exactly how layered it is.
[00:13:22] Speaker A: Absolutely, absolutely. Let's do that. And is this a vignette, by the way, that you teach in any of your classes at ucla?
[00:13:28] Speaker B: I. Yeah, you know, I talk about this. This particular vignette quite a lot when I'm in. Like, I just bring it up a lot.
I've been thinking a lot about the vignette form and vignettes in series and books that. Books that are composed of the vignette and series. And so I teach it in that context.
I teach kind of Latino or Latinx literature courses, so I'll teach it in that context. And then I teach creative writing as well. And I think it's very teachable. It's a piece of creative writing as well. It's a kind of. On a craft level.
[00:14:00] Speaker A: Sure is. Yeah. The sentences are so short and simple and sweet, and they're meant to be unpacked. And again, I'm trying to resist the temptation to dive into the conversation about vignettes, because I Want to get there, but it's so tempting because it's such a.
Interesting form. But there was a lot that stuck out to me in this reading, and I've only read it twice now. Once when you first suggested it, and once today in preparation for this conversation. And I know what you mean about being able to return to it and sit with it and unpack it. But, you know, one of the things that jumped out to me, the whole. The whole setting of it, is that he and his wife Khonsha, are going to a workers retreat for a weekend. And we don't know who the workers are. He tells us that there are varied shades and ages, mostly young, some middle aged, but it's this kind of like multiracial cast of characters. They're workers. But the whole weekend is about art and community.
And I'm wondering if you. If that was a theme that stuck out to you as well, the art and community part of it.
[00:15:15] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, these retreats are historically so fascinating. I mean, there were lots of them, kind of, especially in the Hudson Valley region, these kind of communist retreats. And there were ones that were predominantly Jewish. There were ones that were. But like these kind of socialist retreats where people would go. And this was a really multicultural one where people, working class people would go, who worked at all different kinds of fields and disciplines. But it was a place where you could go and not spend money or spend very little money and have this kind of rural escape. And it's a camp, you know, it was like. I mean, and there's these very idyllic places that. The founding of them is really fascinating. Some of them lasted for quite a long time. And I mean, it's funny, right? Like, you think of a work retreat now and you think of this kind of corporate in which no relaxation is done whatsoever. It's just like an extension of work. But this is like an actual retreat from work, right. Like into nature.
And it's about building community and existing within community.
[00:16:25] Speaker A: I don't know if any of your colleagues in department meetings ever float the idea of, oh, we should go on a retreat, but that has happened a couple times in our department meetings. And everyone is like, oh, no, it never goes anywhere.
But yes, this is a different kind.
[00:16:40] Speaker B: Yeah, retreat has become a dirty word. This is a different. This is a different thing.
[00:16:43] Speaker A: Different vibe. Yeah, for sure. And you know, of course, one of the lines that stuck out to me, too. So this is this gathering where there's campfires and songs and one of the lines early on Says that he and his wife Concha heard the sounds of the guitar and singing, quote, like a long lost echo repeated by the trees extended, tall and erect. And when you read that, what do you make of the long lost echo and the echo's interaction with the tall and erect trees?
[00:17:17] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I think that you're right to focus on the tall and erect trees.
This is set in the Palisades. And the Palisades, he talks about it as a kind of monumental organ as well. You get this vision of these kind of organ pipes as well. So you've got the tall, erect trees, these organ pipes. There's a kind of phallic thing that's going on here. And I think the entire piece is about turning away from this, you know, this idea of this kind of a certain kind of masculinity and masculine approach to the world and seeing the future as something that is feminine, that is black, that is multicultural. Right? And so I think that it's. It's. It's Concha who redirects his gaze, right?
[00:18:01] Speaker A: Very much so.
[00:18:01] Speaker B: And so, like in the beginning, he has the torch and he's leading. They're walking single file, and he's leading her down the path. He's like, I showed her where to step next, right? And she's.
And then they encounter this woman, this amazing black woman who's teaching these young people, and she's like, look at her. She looks like a goddess. And he in his kind of indignation is like, this is a Eurocentric concept. And he's actually so caught up in the dialectic, right? And combating this kind of macho Eurocentric pose from a macho stance as well. And he's like, what are you talking about? There's this thing as goddess. This is irrational.
And she's just like, look again.
And, you know, she does it three times, this kind of fairy tale structure, right, where she's like, look. And finally he sees and she redirects her gaze to something new, right? That there's something. Something is happening here, right? This introduction of something kind of spiritual and beautiful. And he finally sees it. And then there's all of this kind of, you know, there's Emma Lazarus, there's the Statue of Liberty, right? So we get him with this flashlight torch in the beginning, and it ends with the Statue of Liberty, right? Who's holding this torch.
And just kind of different way of maybe thinking about what the future needs.
[00:19:28] Speaker A: Justin, this is why you do what you do. And thank you. The detail about the flashlight, it Wasn't lost on me. I remember the line, but I didn't see the meaning in it at first. But it's interesting now that you draw our attention to it. I mean, the black woman who is also at the center of the story, this goddess, she's being lit up by a fire. It's like more elemental. And then the torch is also elemental instead of his flashlight, which is, you know, a man made invention to light a path instead of something much more natural and elemental than that. That's so interesting. And I also hadn't paid attention to the shift from the flashlight to Emma Lazarus torch too. It's not just the fire lighting up the black woman's face or making her figure visible, but it's the torch of Emma Lazarus too. That's great.
[00:20:22] Speaker B: I think that one of the things that turned me onto that was in his own introduction to this piece, he.
He says that, you know, the Portuguese experience has been kind of over determined. Right. And that there's all this medical and political writing. He's writing this in the 50s and it's called the Hispanic Panic. Right. Where people are just freaking out about this influx of Puerto Ricans coming into the city. And so he's like, I'm trying to. Actually, I'm going to write something that talks about how international Puerto Ricans are, how connected they are to other workers, how interested they are in literature and other things. And. And so he's. These sketches are just about daily life of Puerto Ricans. And he describes it as a modest attempt to throw a little light. Right. And I think it was that at phrasing that, like, as I read the book again and again, I found all these references to illumination. And I think, you know, again, I. I think that Cologne believed in a lot of enlightenment ideas. Right. I think he was. He was somebody who.
Who never felt that all of it needed to be thrown out. Right.
That you don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. Right. That he was quite convinced, I think, by a lot of democratic and enlightenment ideals.
[00:21:39] Speaker A: Totally. And thank you also for redirecting my attention to that pivotal scene where he and Concha, his wife and Concha, I believe is his real wife's name. Right. You know, where they're having this back and forth about whether there is such a thing as goddesses. If there is such a thing as goddesses, are they just for the Greeks and Romans? And Concha is actually not really concerned with whether they're Greek or Roman at all. She's just kind of insistent. Well, she looks Like a goddess to me. And so that is a really pivotal. I don't know, I was more tempted to read something into the Greek and the Roman part of it versus her being unconcerned with whether a goddess was Greek or Roman or not. And whatever it was, this woman was clearly an example of it. But I think I was thinking about this series of thoughts because you had just said that he's not against Western civilization or the Enlightenment or anything like that. And I think I heard that come across in his insistence that, you know, he, I think he says something about like he wanted to show her even his erudition that he knew that goddesses came from, from Greek or Roman culture.
[00:22:59] Speaker B: And he was incredibly erudite. I mean, the thing is that he like his references to Henry Hudson and, and the Half Moon, right, The ship that's, that's mistakenly exploring, you know, looking for a path to India, right? This is, again, he's like, he's bringing up the kind of follies of, of kind of colonialism and imperialism and, and European dominance.
And he's like, he's a, it's obsession, right? Like as somebody who, who is fighting for the dignity of his people. And he identifies his people as Puerto Ricans, as black people, as working people, right? Like this is, this is a constant. He has his kind of dogmatic obsessions. But, but he's such a delicate writer and he's such a generous writer, right, that he's, that he knows that how many times has Concha redirected him, right? They're like, yes, get off, get off your hobby horse, right? Like just look, open your eyes and actually see what's, see what's new in front of you. See what's happening that's exciting and new and different and that you haven't seen before. And don't try to just compare everything to history with a capital H, right?
[00:24:14] Speaker A: And I think so I have two follow up questions based on what you just said, and one of them does pull us back to history and one is about the last line of the story, the history one. I mean, was I reading too much into the Hudson's folly of looking for India?
And my first thought was like, oh, Columbus was looking for India and that was also. Or to the Indies, I think. And he was, it was also folly. What do you think was Cologne wanting us to think about Christopher Columbus and colonialism when he was talking about Henry Hudson?
[00:24:47] Speaker B: Sure, yeah, yeah, I think, absolutely. I mean, I agree with you. I think it's all part and parcel of you know, of thinking about the quote, unquote, explorers. Right. And. And what that led to, what that, you know, that search for these trade routes.
I mean, it all begins, the new world begins in this. In this quest and this desire. And there's so much mistaken thinking that persists right to this day. And so, and so here, I mean, here we are, he's here. He is going to this retreat and it's on the Hudson river. And you can't escape Hudson, you can't escape Columbus. You can't escape these figures. I mean, Cologne, his last name. Right. Like, it is literally inescapable.
Again, I think this piece is trying to get us to look again and again to what else can we see beyond that?
[00:25:46] Speaker A: Right, yeah. Well, there's like an almost in the moment ness of this. I mean, it is a retreat where it's explicitly taking you out of the. The hustle and bustle of your daily life to put you in this treat where you retreat, where you're just experiencing what's right in front of you immediately. And I think, yeah, Concha. And again, like, in her. I think maybe this is what I meant when I was saying, like, she's unconcerned with the Greeks and the Romans. It's really just about what's right in front of her. And I don't care about that. This is what I see. I see a goddess, period. And so I appreciated when you said that she's also trying to get him out of the history. And just to have that moment.
[00:26:25] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think that there's, you know, there's an implicit argument here that, you know, his wife Concha, and this, you know, unnamed black woman who, I mean, I should say that in the Peace Cologne, she's described as the Negro woman because at the time he's writing this, that's the most polite. Yeah, you know, respectable term that one would use. And I just substitute black because we live in a different time. Yes, these terminologies change. But this unnamed black woman and Konsha, I think both, again, that final line where it says the whole. This whole thing felt like a page out of the future. And it was like he's, he's, he's.
He's asking his readership and I think talking to himself and he's saying, like, what can we learn? Right? Like, we need new teachers. Right. We need, we need new voices. We need. We need to think about how much we can learn from.
Yeah, from women and from black women and from black people and from working people. And that's his life work.
[00:27:30] Speaker A: I think Writing Latinos is brought to you by Public Books, an online magazine of ideas, arts and scholarship. You can find
[email protected] that's P U B L I C B o o k s.org to donate to public books, visit publicbooks.org backslash Donate for listeners out there. And I can make a joke of it now. I did the wrong homework assignment. I read a Puerto Rican in New York. Maybe a Puerto Rican man in New York, I can't remember which. But, you know, when you were talking about how he's also kind of optimistic and future oriented, I was also thinking about that short story because he's talking a lot about, you know, we the people. He, he believes in this line, we the people from the Constitution. But then also the last line of that one is also future looking, I think, where he says something about like, you guys don't realize how soon independence is going to come. I mean, he's talking about in particular the independence of Puerto Rico. But, you know, and I have to say, I mean, reading both of those, these vignettes, Palisades and a Puerto Rican in New York in 2025, I have to have a little bit of a lament that his vision of the future has not arrived. I mean, when he says that, you know, you, you don't realize how quickly independence will come, or I saw the future in this. I mean, we're still waiting for that. And I don't know, I mean, I guess that raises the question of how literally do you think we should take his hope that this future will look different? I mean, is it, does he really believe that that future is imminent or is it more metaphorical?
[00:29:27] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I think that it's, it's a really complicated question. I, I think that. So, so the, the other vignette that you're talking about, the Porter can, New York is. It's the last vignette in this book. And I think tonally it's, it's less optimistic. Even though he still, he still does believe in this idea of we the people. And he's like, well, who are we the people? And et cetera, et cetera. And it, but it's much less optimistic. It's much more.
It's.
He's, he's, he's fed up. I mean, he's like, I've been in New York for, at this point, he's been in New York for like 40 years. And, and he's, he's, he's angry because what is. I mean, Things have not changed in a fundamental way. Right. This colonial relationship has not changed in a fundamental way. And if anything, he's like living through the Red Scare. At the same time, he must have written that one.
A year or two before the Cuban Revolution.
So he sees what's on the horizon as well. And it's completely possible that Warico could have gone the route of Cuba, except for this kind of release valve, that Puerto Ricans could flee en masse to the States. And they did.
And so I think that he wants to see the overthrow of kind of US imperialism and kind of long status of being a commonwealth or colony of the US And I think that this other vignette that I read is. I think it's written in. It's about the 30s and 40s. He's looking back. The opening line of that vignette is I was tired.
Like, that's the first time I was like, I was tired. It's the very first sentence. That's all it says, is, I was tired. And then you get this, Emma Lazarus, give me your tired. You're poor. Like, you get. You get it brought up again. And so he's thinking about what sustains us in this kind of long fight. And I think the reason I returned to this more optimistic often myself is because when I think about what sustains me, right? Like, where can I shift my gaze from this constant analysis of. Of.
Of what's broken and what's unchanged and what's so static and the ways in which capitalism and imperialism continue to triumph? And I mean, it's. It's so depressing, right? You think about. You think about the fact that 50 years, 60 years after he's. He's saying revolution is on the horizon. Like it's. Nothing has changed at all in that relationship. I mean, it's. It's really, really depressing. But then he's also giving you, and I think me as the reader, keys to, like, get yourself out of that. When you're in that position, you're like, I am so tired.
What does sustain us? Right? What. And this is. This little piece is about sustenance.
[00:32:33] Speaker A: Yeah. Art and community. And.
And, yeah, I mean, I loved the scene too, where he doesn't want to wake up the next morning to go have breakfast. I mean, he forces himself to have breakfast. But, you know, he'd been up late the night before enjoying art and community, so he didn't. He wanted to, like, suspend time for a minute to continue to savor that before having breakfast.
[00:32:57] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you get like three times the morning. The morning bell rang, the breakfast bell rang. You get that kind of fairy tale structure of three again. And it's like the. It's like the kind of corporeal needs, the needs of the body. Like, like they just. It's like, well. And you kind of return to the kind of material reality of the world. And this is. And this is the fluctuation. Right. But then we've got to feed ourselves back to thinking about work and care.
[00:33:21] Speaker A: Right, right. He reflects it was a wonderful weekend overall. And then. Yeah, I mean, he doesn't.
The story ends before he has to go back to work, which is probably good.
[00:33:32] Speaker B: And in a way, like when he says it looks like a page out of the future, he is. Right, right. I mean, like what he's seeing was so rare in the 30s and 40s. Right. All of these people of all different races, different ages coming together, you know, sharing community. Like, it wasn't happening a lot in a lot of places, but it was happening in this kind of socialist retreats, in these kind of idyllic spaces. And so. And the idea that like. Like there are some things, a lot of things have shifted and he does have his ear to the ground in that way.
And then in another way, all he could do was continue to believe that the revolution was around the corner. What else can you do?
[00:34:17] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, exactly. I want to. I mean, we'll continue to sit with this series of thoughts, but I also wanted to, before letting you go, talk about the form of the vignette too. And I mean, I.
Well, you're the expert here. I want to hear you talk about the vignette. I found it very powerful because it's kind of evocative and you can really unpack a lot of the themes.
I find it to be a real contrast with the style of writing that by training and profession I do, which is like expository and historical analysis that's just full of explanation. And I was just thinking this morning about the book I'm writing before, apart from this conversation, but thinking like, how.
How I need to be explicit about what I'm saying and how I have to explain and over explain so that my. My argument is heard and not wanting my argument to be misinterpreted or open to many different interpretations. But I want the argument to be clear. But I think the vignette. So the vignette's very different. It works very differently. And so tell me about your interest in the vignette as a form.
[00:35:33] Speaker B: When you use the word Evocative. I think that that is exactly right. I think that evocative is the most important, maybe, adjective that can be applied to the vignette, because that's what it's about. It's about evoking a mood, a tone, a moment.
I love the vignette form because it's so quickly changeable, and I think that it resists a kind of linearity and progression. It resists argumentation.
I think that there's a lot of that, and it's great that, like, that you do that, and like, lots of people do that, and we need it.
But we also, I think, need to acknowledge how fragmentary and changeable the world is. Right. And that an argument that holds a lot of sway in one moment, one place at one time can become quickly dated. Whereas I think a vignette like.
Like there's something timeless about this vignette. Right? Because. Because there's something that's just so. It's always about the kind of human moment. And I think that when I think of pieces that are composed of like. Like. Like this book, A Port of New York, and so many other books that I love that are composed of a series of vignettes, it.
It's the exact refusal of a certain kind of plot and linearity and progression that I. That I respond to. That's like something in my own work that I've always been really very much attracted to, the vignette. And I think that oftentimes people turn to the vignette form as well when they want to emphasize community over individuality. Right. The kind of. This narrative of, like, individual progression. But they want to. They wanted to kind of jump around and talk about contingency, community, and talk about.
Rather than, like, causality, like association. Right. Like how one moment associatively leads to the next moment. Yeah, that's what I love about the form.
[00:37:34] Speaker A: No, that's great. And I think, you know, there's a real argument to be made about the ways in which a vignette, compared with more explanatory writing, operates on you. You know, I mean, I think, you know, there's something to be said about the. The righteousness of the sharp argument in the street, for example, or on the page. But then. But then, you know, I think, like you said, the timelessness, too, but it just operates on you in a different way.
[00:38:04] Speaker B: Yeah. And you can see it in historical context. Like, there's tons of historical context that Cologne has seeded in here. But. But the piece, again, kind of remains timeless because it has been Kind of worked in a very subtle way, whereas Cologne was somebody who wrote tons of pamphlets, tons of things that were very much of the moment and about very specific issues.
And they're interesting to read as well. But you kind of need to really hunker down into historical context. You really need to understand who is he talking to? He's arguing for and against.
Whereas his vignettes, I think they, again, they evoke all of that. They evoke all the actual struggle that he was involved in. He was a real organizer. I mean, his main job was political organizing in the moment. His main job was argumentation.
So he evokes all of that, but also allows you to. Kind of allows anybody, I think, to kind of pick up and relate and kind of get to the human very quickly.
[00:39:07] Speaker A: I have to say, hearing you talk about it, I mean, it makes me think that it's a hard genre to write in because it probably requires a lot of discipline to stick to the brevity and to almost strip away a lot of things. So I don't know. I mean, you write in vignettes, and does that mean that a lot of the writing has to do with editing and stripping away, cutting out afterwards? How does that work?
[00:39:35] Speaker B: Yeah, I think so. I think so.
I think when I'm composing vignettes, I think a lot about resonance. I think a lot about connotation versus denotation. Right? So words have certain meanings, and they mean something quite literally, blah, blah, blah. But what are the connotations that are going to be evoked in the reader if I kind of focus on a certain image or a certain word or in the clone piece, right? There's this idea of light and fire and the torch and illumination.
And, you know, he hits on that several times. And it works a kind of magic on you. Even if you're not explicitly picking it up as you're reading, it works a kind of magic on you. And so I think that the vignette form, often when you look at vignettes, there's. There's a lot of repetition of certain images or symbols or metaphors.
And I think it's. It's about kind of sublimating some of the direct historical reference, right? This, this, this. Every time you have a moment to kind of really contextualize and just kind of be slightly didactic and just be like, yeah, let me just tell you what I'm actually talking about. Like, you have to push that down a little bit and allow.
And allow the reader to get at it through kind of hints and kind of play rather than a kind of directness. And I think that kind of indirection is hugely important to the vignette. I mean, in our emails, you mentioned the Paradise. Right.
[00:41:06] Speaker A: Hammond and the beans.
[00:41:07] Speaker B: Yeah. And that opening vignette. There's so much explicit historical context that he's referencing. Yes.
[00:41:15] Speaker A: The military base, the sound of the alarm. Yeah, yeah.
[00:41:19] Speaker B: And he's like a very specific border, you know, confrontations, et cetera. But it's sublimated. Right. It's like. It's like. It's like. It's encouraging the reader to, like, oh, maybe go and, like, figure out what the context is here. But the human story is heartbreaking and immediately accessible and all right there. Right. And I think that so many of.
And it's interesting. I think a lot of Latino writers, it's a form that they returned to.
[00:41:50] Speaker A: Again, I was just going to ask that, and I almost thought that it was an unfair question to ask, but since you opened the door, maybe you do have thoughts about this. But I was going to ask if there is something about the vignette forum that is appealing to, I don't know, if you want to say, minoritized subjects, marginalized subjects, Latino authors, African American authors, LGBTQ writers. I mean, is there something particularly powerful or appealing about the vignette for them?
[00:42:20] Speaker B: I think so. I think so. I mean, I have my kind of vague and unformed thesis on this.
[00:42:27] Speaker A: Let's hear it.
[00:42:28] Speaker B: I mean, I think.
I do think that that's the case. I mean, if you look at. In the Latino context, if you look at a book like City of Night by John Ritchie, right. Where he.
There are all these vignettes kind of interspersed within the narrative. It's.
It's a fascinating book structurally because of the ways in which it refuses a certain kind of linearity.
You have Salo Trago La Tierra and the Earth Did Not Devour Him, Spanish is Terrible by Don Las Rivera, which is, again, an absolutely fascinating book composed entirely of vignettes and the ways in which. I mean, I love that book so much.
I think it's a fascinating study. Obviously, the Hasselb industry has to be one of the most popular books composed of a series of vignettes not just within Latino literature, but within American literature in general. Right. Like, it's just. It's a touchstone.
I think that there's Gil Cuadros. Often he would switch between poetry and short story forms. And. And the vignette.
There's a book called Mundo Cruel by Luis Negron, a Puerto Rican writer. That I absolutely love.
There's.
I mean, I just think that. So that's just the two causes, but, yeah, if you kind of spread out, there's, like, Cain, which is a hugely influential book, I think, in African American Literature by Jane Toomer that uses this form.
What else?
Ceremony.
[00:43:58] Speaker A: Leslie Marmon Silka's ceremony.
[00:44:01] Speaker B: I mean, like, whatever. I could list books.
[00:44:03] Speaker A: No, I mean. Yeah, you're reminding me.
It actually caused quite a stir. When was it? It was published in the New Yorker in 1925. A short story called the Lottery.
[00:44:12] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, yeah. Shirley Jackson.
[00:44:14] Speaker A: Yeah, Shirley Jackson. That was definitely a vignette about sacrifice. I mean, sacrificing a member of the community and. Yeah. I mean, it's a powerful, powerful genre.
[00:44:25] Speaker B: It is a powerful genre. And I think that when you. Especially when they're put together in a series, I think that there's just something that. I don't know that. That gets at the kind of fractured way we experience the world. Right. And there's a kind of fantasy of cohesion and narrative through line, and people are constantly trying to insist on one kind of narrative through line, and that's how we get in massive trouble. Right. Music, Make America Great Again or whatever. It's like the fantasy that there was. There was an America that was. That was cohesive. Right. And that. That it has been fractured and that. And that we need to return to this cohesion. Like, it's. That was never the case ever. Right. And so it's actually a danger. Like, I think it can be a quite dangerous fantasy. They kind of have these grand narratives in the vignette form. When you put them together, it just. It resists grand narrative. Like, that's. It's. It's a novel that resists the idea of.
Of a great novel itself, which I love that.
[00:45:33] Speaker A: I love that. And I'm gonna think a lot about that because I do think, like, you know, we are trained as historians to have an argument that ties the whole thing together. But you're right. I mean, even when we're writing and it feels like a fantasy in the sense that we try to articulate it, because I think it makes us feel like we have a grasp on the subject that we're writing about when we don't really.
We don't. But. So there's something also, then, more honest about the.
The impossibility of a grand narrative that a vignette helps us see.
Justin, thank you so much for talking to me.
I think it was hugely educational for me. It was a joy to just read this vignette with you and kind of unpack it. And then also, I'm pretty sure it was an educational experience for me. I'm going to be thinking a lot about vignette as a genre, and I'm sure that it was therefore also very useful to our listeners. So thank you.
[00:46:29] Speaker B: Justin, when you originally asked me on you're like, talk about myself and my work. But I just, I really, I think I made a point where I'm like, I need to talk about something else. I can't be anymore.
[00:46:41] Speaker A: Well, you know, it's like going on the retreat and finding some peace and solace in the retreat that then gives you energy to go do the work you need to do. So for sure.
[00:46:51] Speaker B: Yeah. So thanks, thanks for indulging you.
[00:46:53] Speaker A: Of course.
Yeah, of course. And thank you. I hope we cross paths in real life. And good luck with the rest of your fellowship year.
[00:47:01] Speaker B: Thanks so much. Great to see you.
[00:47:15] Speaker A: Thank you for listening to season three of Writing Latinos.
We'd love to hear your suggestions for new books that we should be reading and talking about. So drop us a line at geraldoupublicbooks.org that's G E R A L D oublicbooks.org this episode is brought to you by Public Books. It was produced by Tasha Sandoval. Our music is City of Mirrors by the Chicago based band Dos Santos. You can follow us on bluesky, Instagram and X to receive updates about season three of Writing Latinos. I'm Geraldo Cadava and we'll see you again soon.
