Alejandro Murguía: California Poets Part 6, Five Poems

Alejandro Murguía

October 18th, 2023

California Poets: Part VI

Alejandro Murguía

Five Poems

You Will Know the Devil When You Meet Him

When the Devil arrives—he won’t be sporting a pointy beard or pitchfork. Hell no. He will dress in a fancy suit, lathered in expensive cologne to hide the stink of Sulphur, and he will reside in a high tower, surrounded with gold which at night, he will turn into dog shit on your sidewalk.

You will never see him at church or place of worship, a shrine, an altar because his orange hair would catch fire revealing his horns. He will never show his birth certificate because they don’t hand those out in the ninth level of hell. You will know him by his destruction of God’s creation: he will pollute the air and poison the water—annihilate bees and butterflies, unleash tornados, hurricanes, floods and call it a hoax.

And his followers, to prove their loyalty, will eat maggots in his presence.

Remember this when the Devil comes to steal your country.

If you still have a country.

13 Lines for Roque Dalton

In Memoriam

Because no one could write a poem so full of love and anger

Because he could make fun of his own Central Committee

Because humor has a place in the Resistance

Because a revolution without humor or poetry is absurd

Because poetry is revolutionary

Because Roque was a true revolutionary

Because—at the risk of sounding ridiculous—

he was motivated by great feelings of love

Because love & struggle are twins joined by poetry

Because the rich and the ultraleftists accused him of being a poet

Because Roque was a poet

Because he was un hijo legítimo guanaco hijo de la gran puta!

Because he loved El Salvador more than El Salvador loved itself

Because he was Roque Dalton and there will never be another poet like him

Not that it Matters

When Mother Nature made the lobster

She was in a mood—you can tell

Like maybe lonely

Or thinking of someone

Who is absent

Like I think of you when it rains

When the mail drops in the slot

The time at the zoo in awe of the giraffe

Now that’s Nature at her creative best

But I return to the lobster in my hands

And the vagaries of life—

Syria bleeding on the news

The absence of rain for years

A train wreck somewhere

A bastard of a flood wiping out cities

A fire storm in the north country

The fading end of this smoky late October afternoon

So brief

So quickly gone

Silicon City

They evicted Mia from her storefront on Valencia

Then they burned down the apartments on 22nd Street

The good die young and isn’t it a pity

But the beat goes on in Silicon City.

You’re a stranger now in your home town

With strange faces on once familiar streets

And strange shadows at four o’clock

And cops—strangers on a strange beat

Where the days and nights are mostly gritty

But hey, it’s ok, you’re hanging in Silicon City

So I was told everything that rises must fall

And that the wicked shall be denied

But now a day’s it’s hard to tell who to trust

—and watch out you don’t get run over by a google bus

It be’s like that, all down and dirty

In the heartless heart of Silicon City

Now everybody knows the center cannot hold

But prophecy is cheap

And politicians are slippery

So baby get your high heels sneakers and your black beret on

Because tonight we fight the power in Silicon City.

Bad Luck Coming

Cat caught a hummingbird today—

59 missiles were fired at Syria

Only half hit their target

Homeless camps crowding the underpass

Poisoned food is the main staple at the local fast food market

And a fire broke out in a rundown apartment building

A twenty-car pile-up on the freeway in bad weather

Caused 13 deaths

And angry employee at the local minimum wage job shot the owner

With a shotgun and stabbed two others before taking his own life

A tornado struck Kansas and wiped out a trailer park

Home team lost 23 times in a row

Stock market crashed and gold became worthless

Luck so bad fortune cookies went out of business

Knock on wood three times

Repeat three times

Knock on wood

Burn incense, sage, copal, myrrh

To your favorite saint or goddess,

Deity, plant or animal

Then book the next boat out the harbor

Interview

July 14th, 2026

California Poets Interview Series:

Alejandro Murguía, Poet, Writer, Editor

interviewed by David Garyan

DG: In 2012 you had the great honor of being named San Francisco’s sixth poet laureate, and the first Latino to hold the position. What initiatives did you embark upon to continue the legacy of your predecessors and what are things you've continued doing to bring greater visibility to Latinx literature?

AM: I think the most important thing I did was to launch an international Flor y Canto festival. The term Flor y Canto goes back to pre-Columbian times. It refers to flower and song, which is the metaphor for poetry, and these gatherings happened in pre-Columbian, with the gathering of poets to celebrate poetry and friendship. Then around 1973, the first contemporary one happened at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. You can find some of those videos because I’ve seen them recently. This was the first time that Chicano poets came together as a community to celebrate their poetry, so it was a very groundbreaking event. When I launched the event in San Francisco, I added an international dimension because although those festivals had happened in the years after 1973, they were all quite localized and focused on the Chicano poets. San Francisco, being a more international community, allowed me greater opportunity to add a more international dimension to the event. For the very first one we were very privileged to have Ernesto Cardenal, the great poet/priest of Nicaragua, inaugurate that festival. This helped us launch the International Flor y Canto on quite a formidable scale. Since then, we have had other poets, including, more recently, some Mayan poets Feliciano Sánchez Chan from Yucatán who came and read in Mayan and then Spanish, which was translated into English. That was very important. After I left, I was very pleased that a new cohort of young poets have continued to carry on the International Flor y Canto festival. In June, I believe, there was another edition of that here on 24th Street, and the way it happens is that it starts with what we call a paseo poetico in which half a dozen or more sites in the Mission District (taquerias, bookstores, coffee shops, doughnut shops, panaderias) host poets. It’s very much a community event. They might show films, for instance, and the last time they had a presentation by Ishmael Reed from the Before Columbus Foundation. So we continue to expand the concept of the International Flor y Canto to include poets outside of the typical Chicano/Latino community. This is something I’m very pleased with and the work continues.

DG: I like the idea of broadening the scope, while at the same time having a focal point for the endeavor. The next question ties right into what you’ve discussed. You were a founding member and the first director of The Mission Cultural Center in San Francisco. Unfortunately, the center closed in January 2026. Could you talk about the significance this institution had for the community?

AM: The Center was envisioned and created not just as a space for literature. On the contrary, it had a very nice theater with capacity for more than a hundred people. It had dance floors for dancers to practice all kinds of dancing—Brazilian, capoeira, for instance. It had a music workshop. And on the top floor, because it was four stories, roughly 10,000 square feet, it had the graphic workshop that produced some countless posters and events: cultural, political, and so on—featuring some of the best artists working during that period, like René Castro, Calixto Robles, and more. In short, a whole host of artists including Sal Garcia came through the graphic workshop and it’s why we create archives that the institution has produced. The Center has gone through changes, but let me add a side note: The inauguration of the Center in 1976 was initiated, again, by Ernesto Cardenal, the Nicaraguan poet/priest. It was an incredible event. He filled the center and afterwards began doing a Campesina mass where he took a big jug of red wine and a loaf of bread (I think it was Boudin French bread). He took a chunk of the bread, and a sip of the wine, then passed it around. That’s how we did communion with him, and in fact, that was the last time I took communion.

Something interesting to know is that at the mass he did a mass baptism of about 200 young kids. After the mass, we went across the street to have a burrito at the taqueria, and after the lunch break he did a poetry reading. That was the very first event at the Mission Cultural Center. So, in that sense, it has a very deep history, and as I mentioned, it has also gone through changes. Because the site was formerly a furniture store, the process of remodeling it and turning it into one of the biggest galleries in San Francisco (the second floor was 4,000 square feet) caused the space to change a great deal. Moreover, there were updates, closures for several years to fix the electricity, or general renovations, and right now it’s temporarily closed for financial reasons. In addition, it has to be upgraded for earthquake standards. Remember, it was a furniture store, so it wasn’t meant to host a bunch of people. Recently, however, the Board of Supervisors took what I thought was a strong stance by issuing a resolution stating that they will continue to support the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, regardless of the problems we’re having. Furthermore, a new cohort of cultural activists have taken the helm, based around the 24th Street Latino cultural district. In many ways, I would describe this as an innovation in San Francisco because about six years ago the community gathered and named 24th street a cultural district, so that it could keep its cultural integrity. And now all over San Francisco you see cultural districts for every community: Native Americans, African Americans, LGBT, and others. So it has expanded from our original concept and that’s very important. The Cultural Center will go on. It’s been around for fifty years. I suspect it still has some life in it.

DG: That’s great news. So it will go on in the end?

AM: Yes.

DG: In 2015, your short story “The Other Barrio,” was made into a movie and inspired by real events. It deals with social and political problems within San Francisco’s Mission District. Given that you not only wrote the story but also acted in the film, could you speak a bit about the making of the movie and how it was received by the public?

AM: As you mentioned, it is based on actual events around 1975, the Gartland Apartments, on the corner of 16th and Valencia, burned down in a very suspicious way. Twelve people died. It was perhaps the biggest fire since the earthquake in 1906, and yet it was never completely investigated. The pit created by it stayed there for decades. Every time I went by there I would get the heavy feelings associated with that era. So, when Peter Maravelis, who did the anthology San Francisco Noir, asked me to write a story, I knew instantly what story I was going to write. And it came out like I was taking dictation. Usually, I’ll rewrite a story fifty or so times. This time there were only two or three small changes. It seemed like the story was coming out on its own. Then, some other colleagues like Dante Betteo and Lou Dematteis, saw the story. They were looking for something to make a film on. They picked up the anthology, San Francisco Noir, and originally they were going to do three short stories—combine them into one. But once they started filming “The Other Barrio,” they realized, no, this is so important, let’s try to make it a full-length feature. Of course, films are very expensive and indie films, in particular, always suffer from the pressure of budget. I was very lucky—the film was very lucky—to have Lou Dematteis as the producer. He was able to pull the funds together to finish the film. Once it was finished, we premiered it at the Brava Theater, along with a good venue here on 24th Street. We packed the house. It’s gone on to be screened at other venues. It won some awards at independent film festivals, and yet at the same time, Hollywood refused to have anything to do with it. No help distributing it, or anything like that. So it still has legs, in that sense, because it was shown I think about a year ago at the Roxie Theater, the Roxie Theatre, the oldest continuously operated theatre in the country, here on 16th Street. And here we packed the house again. It was, however, and continues to be difficult, like I said. Look at the most recent film released, The Odyssey—250 million.

DG: That’s crazy.

AM: For a movie. That’s almost obscene.

DG: It is. But that’s how good art is mostly in the underground. Stuff that gets the most visibility today is often not what gets remembered tomorrow.

AM: Right. And now that we’re talking about films, let me add something else. Lou Dematteis, the aforementioned producer, has collaborated with Ray Telles and David Brown to make a documentary about my work called Keeper of the Fire. That will be shown on Latino Public Broadcasting in the fall.

DG: Congratulations, Alejandro.

AM: It also had a premiere at the Brava Theater about two and a half months ago. Again, people came out in force, packed the theater, and it was so important to have a sense of something positive happening in our community. I’m sure you’re aware that times haven’t been easy. There are difficulties on many fronts. So it’s important for us to show that we’re still here. We’re still an important part of not just San Francisco, but this nation. And I think the film, Keeper of the Fire, makes that statement.

DG: I agree. Art has always been one step ahead of politics. The old quote of poets being the unacknowledged legislators of the world comes to mind. It seems like we’re now doing the things that politicians will do at some later point. That’s the way it works. So let’s talk a bit more about San Francisco. You have consistently spoken about the gentrification inside the city. The phenomenon of art cities becoming playgrounds for the elite turns diversity into homogeneity. What are unique elements the city has lost over the years and to what extent can that be recovered?

AM: That’s a good question. I think part of what you pointed out is that San Francisco is losing some of its racial diversity. For example, the number of African American inhabitants in the community has plummeted. It used to be around ten or twelve percent and now it’s at about two percent. That’s a big loss. The Fillmore District, as you know, is often called the Harlem of the West. It has lost some of its jazz clubs, like Keystone Corner, which was very accessible, and though there’s a new venue, the San Francisco Jazz Center, probably the premier venue for jazz in the US right now, it’s still difficult for artists, musicians, graphic artists, poets, especially, to survive in this environment. When I first came to San Francisco in the early ‘70s, I had a five-room Victorian flat on 22nd and Treat that I was paying $175 for. I just saw an article in The New York Times a few days ago about San Francisco. A couple was trying to rent a one-bedroom apartment. They couldn’t find anything for five thousand a month. They finally found something for $5200—there were thirty people waiting to look at it. That’s an incredible disparity.

DG: Indeed, when you contrast those first experiences that you had with what’s going on, the difference becomes stark.

AM: Stark, right? And you saw the same thing with the Beats. Why did the Beats come to San Francisco in the ‘50s? You could rent a place for forty-five/fifty bucks a month. Another sixty/seventy bucks in income, and you could have money left over for a bottle of wine. You could afford to be a poet. You could afford to be an artist. A lot of that, unfortunately, is gone. The other thing though—and it’s important to point this out—especially when it comes to the Mission District, the gentrification, the changes happening here are not organic. It has been a very aggressive and violent gentrification. The reason I say violent is because there have been so many instances of arson—and let me be clear, that’s right here in the Mission District. The film The Other Barrio, as you recall, is based on that.

A week before we premiered it at the Brava Theater, there was another fire on 22nd and Mission destroyed longtime businesses in the area. One young Latino died. That was some years ago. Just like the Gartland Apartments, you go by 22nd and Mission, there’s still a big empty pit. That’s what I mean when I say it’s been a violent and aggressive gentrification. A lot of evictions. And that’s what has impacted the Latino community. Evictions of longtime Latino working class residents. Now such individuals can’t afford to live in San Francisco. They have to commute from twenty, thirty, forty, fifty miles away. That adds expenses like gas, takes away time due to commuting, and so on. These are the changes.

DG: Absolutely, and these things have happened right in front of your eyes, as you’ve lived in the city for a long time. I want to take this opportunity in order to focus a bit more on the concept of racial diversity. The ability to write also in Spanish must give you access to ideas that monolingual speakers don’t simply have. Words like sobremesa, estrenar, or tocayo, for instance, are so unique that English needs a whole sentence to communicate them. Even the demonym estadounidense describes a person from the US—not just American, but a United States of American, because America is clearly more than just 50 states. Would you say that much of this country’s ignorance comes from its monolingualism, which limits not only people’s perspectives, but their ability to understand the complexities of other cultures?

AM: Yes and no. But before I answer that question let me give you two of my favorite Spanish words that can’t be translated in English. The first is piñata. Try translating that.

DG: Can’t do it.

AM: Right. You either know what a piñata is or you don’t. The other word, though, which is different, is the concept compadre or comadre—a co-parent. So that’s not even a question of language, but of cultural differences.

DG: Of familial structures.

AM: Exactly. That expand beyond the nuclear family. But to answer your other question, here’s the misconception—the US is a monolingual, English-only speaking country. Absolutely wrong. For example, about 44 out of the 50 states have either an indigenous name, like Connecticut, Kentucky, Dakota, Kansas, or Spanish, like California, Texas, Arizona, and so on. So to start, it’s never been monolingual. And then you have other indigenous words, like coyote, or the root of so many vegetables like tomato or avocado—

DG: And those are New World crops. They weren’t available in Europe before the New World was discovered.

AM: Exactly. So if we want to expand this, part of the beauty of English is that it can absorb foreign words into its syntax. Look at all the Greek words that we have. All the Latin words. All the German words. The other day I was doing a workshop with sixth, seventh, and eighth-graders and I was telling them: “Try to analyze this word—kindergarten—a garden for kids.” And then I made a joke: “There’s a very common German word that we hear every day. That word is Uber.” So to talk about monolingualism or speak English only is absurd. I once had a conversation with a judge from Connecticut. We were sitting in the Buena Vista, a bar in North Beach that overlooks Fisherman’s Wharf. He made a comment, something like “why don’t you speak English?” And I told him, “let me make sure I understand. You come from Connecticut, which is an indigenous word, to California, a word in Spanish, to sit in a bar called Buena Vista, and that’s what you’re saying?” I went on to joke, saying “They must not have a very high standard for judges in Connecticut.” So that’s part of the fallacy we’re involved in.

DG: Which Spanish-speaking writers have inspired you the most and who are some you would recommend to people who are not familiar with this incredible body of literature?

AM: My earliest influences were Cesar Vallejo, Poemas humanos, followed by Federico García Lorca, who I recently learned was the first big influence on Leonard Cohen. Of course, Pablo Neruda, Roque Dalton, and Ernesto Cardenal. Because I used to teach literature, I’m also a big fan of the novel— Roberto Bolaño, for instance. But what I’m discovering is that the best writers right now, coming out of Mexico and Latin America, are women. For instance, Cristina Rivera Garza, who is a Pulitzer Prize winner, and also a MacArthur Fellow, I believe. Another writer whose book is so powerful, it’s called Hurricane Season, and her name is Fernanda Melchor. There are so many Mexican writers that are just over the top. They really made a big impression on me. And this is one my daughter introduced me to. Her name is Agustina Bazterrica, a Chilean author, who does genre-bending work, which is hard to categorize. It’s not science-fiction, but she certainly takes the novel into another direction—

DG: Another realm.

AM: Realm. Totally unexpected. So I’m enjoying these Latina writers very much. And as a side note, I just finished a translation of Mayan poets last year. They wrote in Mayan, then translated the work into Spanish, and I rendered it into English. We presented that book, The Word Turned Butterfly, at a big international book fair in Merida Yucatan. The other important thing hence is the recovery of indigenous languages, in this case indigenous poets starting to publish for the first time in five hundred years.

DG: I agree. I think the preservation of languages happens best through literature. That way it both frees and freezes the languages in time for people to interpret but also preserve. It gets read and then circulates that way.

AM: Absolutely.

DG: Let’s continue with your work, Southern Front, which won the American Book Award in 1991, is a collection of stories about the Nicaraguan Revolution. You have direct experience with these events as you were, at the time, an international volunteer there. Could you talk about those experiences and how fiction helped you communicate these events in a relatable way?

AM: It’s important to acknowledge the international solidarity behind these events. I’m Chicano. I’m not Salvadorean. I’m not Nicaraguan. I’m often mistaken for that. I’m also often mistaken for being Palestinian. And so the international dimension is very important for me, which is one of the reasons I was in the Southern Front. It was the front in the war that had many international volunteers, as I mentioned in the book, which is a combination of my experiences, stories I heard from other combatants, things I witnessed, plus the Nicaraguan history I knew. In this way, I could frame the work in a context that was historically valid. That, for me, was the purpose. And let me add that there were about a dozen other Chicano internationalists in the Southern Front, and this was also important for our community in showing our solidarity. 

DG: In your memoir, The Medicine of Memory: A Mexica Clan in California, you bring Chicano-indigenous history to the forefront of the Golden State’s history. Using personal experience and your own family’s past, which goes back to the 18th century, you create a chronicle of California that’s not often accounted for. In what way, from your perspective, is the state unique and what did you discover in the process of writing the book?

AM: I grew up across the street from Dr. Mark Raymond Harrington, one of the foremost anthropologists/archaeologists of California, who restored the Pío Pico Adobe, which is about five hundred yards from where I grew up. He also restored the San Fernando Mission, which is across the street from where I grew up. So I grew up with this strong sense of California history, especially the history of the Missions. And so when I began investigating it on my own, I realized that the image of the California Missions that the majority of people have is very romanticized, and not at all the true representation of how they really were. In fact, when you travel throughout California and you see all the little bells that talk about the Camino Real—that’s actually a fabrication by the Triple A motor club to get people to start driving up and down the state in the early 1920s. The actual so-called El Camino Real is more of a trail than a road or a highway. The other thing is the incredible violence of the Mission system against indigenous people. It was basically a concentration camp for them. Once you entered the Missions, you couldn’t leave. If you attempted to leave, they’d track you down and bring you back. In addition, it was the imposition of a very rigid agricultural economy that did not exist for Native Americans. In reality, Native Americans did not grow corn in California because there wasn’t a necessity for it. Instead, they were gatherers of acorns. They didn’t grow corn, as we think of it. They were hunter-gatherers. They were great fishermen, along the coast. And if you read the first accounts that Europeans had of Native Americans in California, they invariably describe them as big, strong, and super-healthy. Accounts, for instance, by Francis Fletcher, who sailed with Francis Drake, was astounded by the people he encountered here in California. This whole perception is hence very different. And then of course the incredible decimation. California, outside of the Valley of Mexico, was probably the most populous part of North America. By the early 1900s, however, there were maybe 15,000 left. And though there’s been a great resurgence since then—a great resurgence in recovering the language even, which is so important—the damage done was great horrific. It was deliberate extermination. A genocide. The settlers, especially in Northern California, were determined to exterminate the Native Americans. And they make no bones about it. In fact, the last armed conflict the United States has with Native Americans occurs in California—in the Modoc region. It was basically the remnants of the Modoc community, about 150 men, women, and children trying to hold on to their last ancestral lands, and they held off the US military—the most powerful in the world at that time—for about three months. These were things I wasn’t aware of.

I was recently reading something in The New Yorker, where someone claims that the San Fernando Valley was just oak trees.

DG: That sounds ridiculous.

AM: Totally ridiculous. Because I grew up there, and it was nothing but citrus orchards, as I recount in the book. My father worked there. He knew Mulholland and other people who had all these huge citrus farms, but when you read the history of Southern California all that’s not mentioned. That whole era is skipped over. One of the things, unfortunately, I didn’t delve into, because I had personal family history about it, was the participation of Chicanos in WWII. My uncle, the youngest brother of my mom, eighteen years old at the time he was drafted by the Marines, fought in Okinawa, Iwo Jima—two of the most violent places in the Pacific Theater. But when you read the history of Chicanos in WWII, that’s totally absent. What I found most offensive, however, was Kevin Starr’s story of California, when, as the official historian of the state, he talks about Chicanos in a very derogatory by making the following statement with regards to our participation: “We made very good paratroopers because we were very small.”

DG: That’s a bad thing to say.

AM: In all that, he left out how many Chicanos won Silver Stars and Medals of Honor in the Pacific Theater. It’s this kind of attitude that goes on today. The erasure of Chicano history. The erasure of African American history.

DG: That’s the foundation upon which this current ignorance—not an ignorance of not knowing but an ignorance of not wanting to know—comes from. But I think it’s the job of writers like yourself, and really every writer, to reclaim that history from the jaws of deliberate illiteracy. To be the historian, to be the politician, to be the reporter—all at the same time, using poetry as the vehicle.

AM: I’m glad you brought that up. Because a writer’s task, and I’ve done that in the past, is not just to recover our history but to recover the writers we have forgotten. Our writers who didn’t get the attention they deserved, for instance.

The Mayan poets, for example, I mentioned. Or the Volcán: Poems from Central America that I published back then. The recovering of Roque Dalton. I don’t want to boast, but I was one of the people who first introduced his work to the US. And now he’s very well known in Italy.

DG: Indeed.

AM: And that’s also due to the work of my late friend, Jack Hirschman. This is a very important task of the writer and poet in our time.

DG: Absolutely. So let’s talk a bit more about this book you published in Italy. Having mentioned Italy, I think this is the perfect transition. It was translated, so I want to know to what extent you worked with the translator, how involved you were in the process, and all that good stuff.

AM: I was closely involved. She’s a friend, Alessandra Bava, a poet and translator living in Rome. I was particularly happy with the final title, Offerte di carta, because I had wanted to name my poet laureate book, Paper Offerings. For some reason or other, they wound up being called Stray Poems. So when I had the chance to redo that, I chose that title. And the poems are only in Italian. You don’t see the English text. I was very pleased with that. At the time I was in Italy, and I had the chance to read in Mantova—

DG: I know Mantova.

AM: I read in Rome on the Isola Tiberina. There was a big festival there on the island. I also had the pleasure of reading at the Cervantes Cultural Center in Piazza Navona. I had a very good experience in Italy sharing my work with people. More recently, Lou Dematteis, who produced Keeper of the Fire, has presented that film in Rome and a couple of other places, in Piedmont, I think. In one way or another, I’m close to Italy.

DG: It’s good to hear of your connection. Let me also talk about your teaching because so much of that informs creativity. You are professor emeritus at San Francisco State University’s Department of Latina/Latino Studies, where you taught courses on creative writing and contemporary Latinx literature. How did you structure your classes and what do you miss most about teaching?

AM: When I was still kind of a young, brown buffalo—maybe 22/23 years old—I had a very unique opportunity to sit in on a workshop with the noted Brazilian pedagogist Paolo Freire.

DG: Amazing. I’m aware of his work. The banking model of education.

AM: Absolutely, so I was very lucky, before I even started teaching, to listen to him, learn from him. So when I actually first entered the classroom myself I immediately tapped into his approach, which is the pedagogy of the oppressed. I didn’t describe what I did in class as lectures. I called them dialogues. An interchange with my students. I would tell them that an indigenous person in the heart of the Amazon has as much knowledge as the PhD botanist from Harvard.

DG: I completely agree with that. People in the Amazon know so much about their environment. They know to survive in it. They know what to do in case of danger. What not to do. When to do it. It’s almost as if they have more knowledge because they’re dealing with life and death every single day. Existence is so visceral that they don’t have the comfort of academic reflection. Theirs is the intellectual study of the moment—and about that they know far more than any professor who studies that environment.

AM: This is the point I’d like to make. They know the names of the plants, but also their purpose. They know the names of the animals—how they live in this environment. You put that PhD botanist in the middle of the Amazon—

DG: They’d die on day one.

AM: That and they’d be the ignorant one. 

DG: Haha.

AM: So this concept of knowledge is one of the biggest lessons Freire teaches. And the other concept, which I would tell my students, is that unlike in traditional teaching where the professor knows everything and the students are empty vessels waiting to be filled, you are empowered here. That’s another reason I called my lectures dialogues. I learn from you, just like you learn from me. So let’s talk about the topic. In this way I would always put the novel in context—the context in which it was written, why the author wrote it, and so on. Another important thing I would point out to my students, and I still do this, is that great novels, movies, and theater don’t give us answers. What they do is raise important questions. That is the point of reading something like Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo, or other great writers like Fernanda Melchor that I mentioned before. Profound questions that she raises. The other novel of hers I didn’t talk about is Paradais. Such a profound, violent, Faulkner-like way of telling a story. And going back to the question of being bilingual, I have a BA in English, which means I read everybody from Shakespeare, Blake, Poe, Dylan Thomas, James Joyce, Hemingway (my master’s thesis was on him), Flannery O’Connor, Faulkner, and I also have access to an incredible body of Latin American literature that I can tap into, which I don’t want to a call an advantage, but an enrichment in my reading experience. Just like anybody else, for instance, who might be knowledgeable in Italian, has access to an abundant literary tradition. Talking about Italian literature, one of the nice books that I read recently was Sostiene Pereira (Pereira Declares) by Antonio Tabucchi. Pick that up if you get a chance. Another author I’m reading is Andrea Camilleri’s Inspector Montalbano detective series. I read that just for fun. And so a reader like yourself who is familiar with different languages is enriched a great deal, whereas if you speak only English and read only literature written in it, that’s not the same thing—as much as I love Shakespeare.

DG: Many cultures have their so-called Shakespeare, but it’s too often the case that we simply don’t know. We have homogenized knowledge to such an extent we like to believe that we’re the only ones who have a writer like that but if you look at Portuguese, for instance, they have their Shakespeare with Camões. It’s only having the awareness to recognize that. Or Cervantes, for instance.

AM: Exactly. As critics much smarter than me have pointed out: Cervantes uses all the modern techniques of the novel in Don Quixote. The other thing I would teach my students is first-person accounts, beginning with Cabeza de Vaca, with the incredible experiences that he has. And I would always encourage my students to read across their interests. So, if you’re a science major, read about art history. If you’re a literature major, read botany, or astronomy, but expand your reading one way or another so that your world expands. In that way, when you do sit down to write the poem or the story, or whatever you’re writing, you have a much richer background of information to draw upon. Those are some of the things I really emphasized to students and I always tried to pick books for them that would appeal to their worldview. In that way, they could fall in love not only with books, but with books literature they didn’t know—writers like Clarice Lispector, the Brazilian novelist, for instance. And the response I would get—wow, I love this work. Another book that they loved was Oscar Zeta Acosta’s The Revolt of the Cockroach People. They often didn’t realize that reading could be so enchanting, so enjoyable.

DG: It’s all about the instructor’s skill in choosing material that can inspire students. You have to identify the passion and interests that students have and meet them halfway, and hope that they’ll do the same. In that sense I can tell you that I would’ve enjoyed being in your class. What else can I say?

AM: You would’ve been good in the class. So what do I miss most about teaching? The interaction. I began going towards semi-retirement at the start of COVID because at that point I was no longer in the classroom. I was teaching on Zoom. There was, I felt, the lack of authentic communication, that personal contact.

DG: Which is important.

AM: Very important. And then another problem that would happen is that they were on a camera, I was on camera, but sometimes they would shut off the video, so I’d see just the black screen. So one time at the beginning of a course, after one or two sessions, about half the class was blacked out, and I made a comment to them: “Look, folks, I want to be able to see your mug.”

DG: Haha.

AM: They didn’t know what I was talking about. What mug? What are you talking about? I need to be able to see your faces!

DG: That’s pretty cool.

AM: That’s what I said. So it was like, okay, I think I’ve had my run. But I miss that interaction.

DG: I can certainly relate. Before we finish, I’d like to thank you for your time in doing this interview. It’s been a great pleasure for me and I’d like to conclude with a question about what you’re working on these days? What’s in store for the future?

AM: As I mentioned, I just concluded this translation of the Mayan work, something that’s very important for me, but I also recently finished a novel, which is a genre I haven’t established myself in. I’m very happy with the outcome and it’s called The Theory of Miracles—

DG: I like this title.

AM: Yes, and it deals with extraordinary things that happen in our world and that can’t be explained. And yet these things are so much a part of our world, a part of our beliefs, especially in Latino culture. We always have virgins appearing on hilltops. We have our deceased returning on the Day of the Dead, which I’ve written about in other stories. All these sorts of things, and I’ll loosely use the word “magical” to describe them. The question then becomes: How do we incorporate them into our worldview? Into our life? Without necessarily making them fantastic, in that sense, or fantasies. That’s what the novel is about. I’m basically putting the finishing touches on it, tweaking some of the details, and so on.

DG: Congratulations on that. Like I said, I find the title intriguing—how it really reflects what you’re saying. If you think about it, a theory explains something but at the same time you’re talking about things that the supernatural—things that can’t be explained. So how do you have a theory for the supernatural? I love this dichotomy. I love that tension.

AM: And it’s not the first time. Like I told you earlier: I revise and revise. It’s about the third or fourth title I’ve tried, but with this one it was clear that I got something. This is the title. This is the heart of the story.

DG: Thank you for this wonderful talk, Alejandro.

AM: Thank you for continuing to do this wonderful project.

 Click here or on the image to buy Alejandro's latest collection of stories

Author Bio:

Alejandro Murguía is the author of Southern Front and This War Called Love (both winners of the American Book Award). His non-fiction book The Medicine of Memory highlights the Mission District in the 1970s during the Nicaraguan Solidarity movement. He is a founding member and the first director of The Mission Cultural Center. He was a founder of The Roque Dalton Cultural Brigade, and co-editor of Volcán: Poetry From Central America. Currently he is a professor in Latina Latino Studies at San Francisco State University. He is the author of the short story “The Other Barrio” which first appeared in the anthology San Francisco Noir and recently filmed in the street of the Mission District. In poetry he has published Spare Poems, and this year a new collection Native Tongue. He was the Sixth San Francisco Poet Laureate and the first Latino poet to hold the position.