I'll be speaking tomorrow afternoon, Thursday, April 9, at the University of Iowa. If for some reason you find yourself in Iowa City or environs, please stop by.
My beautiful mother, Mercedes Alvarez, died in Guatemala earlier this month. She was an amazingly energetic woman who dedicated the last 30 years of her life to Catholic social work, often traveling to some of the most neglected corners of Guatemala City. Every year, on my birthday, she would call to tell me the story of my birth. How she had come to the Los Angeles in 1962, as a 20-year-old with a baby on the way. How her doomed love affair with my father (destined to end in divorce 8 years later) was the great romance of her life. How, after praying to San Martín (a newly canonized Afro-Peruvian saint), an American Black man had miraculously appeared and offered her help and then drove her to Los Angeles County General Hospital when she went into labor. (Years later, as a Los Angeles Times columnist, I discovered he was an NAACP youth activist who had fled Memphis after being arrested in a sit-in against racial segregation at the public library). I became a writer thanks to my mother. She passed on to me her optimism and sense of irony. Her sense of comedy and her eye for human foibles. Above all, her message was this: life is a beautiful drama and we humble guatemaltecos have a place in it. She would read my newspaper and magazine pieces, and my books, and say “Siempre le da ese toquecito humano.” You always give it that human touch. Yeah, mom, because you taught me. Thank you, from your loving son. Photos: Dancing with yours truly, Hollywood 1970. With my father, Lake Amatitlán, Guatemala, May 1962. Her wedding to my father, Guatemala City, 1962. With my father, days after their arrival, Hollywood, California, Oct./Nov. 1962. Guatemala City, circa 2001, with the orphan students of her Catholic school class. With yours truly, Los Angeles Public Library, 2023.
My new book. Completed. Happy to tell y'all that my next novel is set to be published in 2027 by MCD. My Beloved, My Metropolis tells the story of Los Angeles and its here and now—and its distant future. It’s a love story that begins in the twenty-sixth century, then moves backward to the twenty-third century, and finally to the present. To the chaos, the injustice, and the possibilities of this crazy moment we’re all living. I’ll have more to say about it in the months to come. But for now, I just want to say thank you to Sean McDonald for adding it to the MCD family of books—and thank you to all the readers who believe in my work and who’ve kept my career as a writer going.
Fascism. Readers of Our Migrant Souls will know that I have a lifelong fascination with the topic. And in the light of the first year of our demagogue’s second reign, there’s a lot to learn from a reading of the rise and fall of the Third Reich.
Hitler’s Third Reich was built on many things, but at its center was the personality of a small-minded, but very charismatic man. “Cult of personality” was a term coined later, but it applies to the Third Reich. Hitler’s personality held together a wide alliance of people: from the old-line German conservative elite, to the industrialist class, to the street-fighting gangsters of the Brown Shirts. The Donald’s personality is holding together a similar ungodly alliance.
The Nazi movement consisted of a lot of people who had been nobodies in German politics, but who rose to positions of great power—like Laura Loomer or Stephen Miller in MAGA. As in the Third Reich, MAGAland’s attacks on immigrants play to a collective sense of grievance. Germans felt humiliated by the Versailles Treaty--Americans by the decline of middle-class life. The Germans used age-old race ideas to create anti-Jewish mythology and laws; MAGA has done the same with immigrants. In the Third Reich, the leaders of the Nazi Party and the German government sought the favor of a dictator with a narcissistic and unstable personality; they got ahead by trying to figure out his wants. “Working toward the Fuhrer” they called it. You see this every day in the Trumpland. The Donald says something, and his acolytes fall over themselves to please him—even when there isn’t rhyme or reason to what he’s saying. (As with Greenland).
The end game to this is scary. The Third Reich ended with mass murder—and a number of suicides among the Nazi elite. The Third Reich’s Berlin looked a lot like Jonestown at the end. Like all cults, the MAGA movement is a reflection of the psychology of its leader. The math of American democracy (we “vote our pocketbooks”) isn’t in Trump’s favor now. So there’s likely a de jure authoritarian stage in the MAGA future. The Donald hints at it all the time. How will American society react when MAGA says we don’t need elections after all?
Your humble servant with three leading luminaries of Los Angeles literature; Naomi Hirahara, Walter Mosely, and David Ulin. We were on a panel yesterday at the Biltmore Hotel discussing Los Angeles in fiction at the conference of the Urban History Association.
Very honored to be appearing tomorrow night Friday Oct 10 as an interlocutor for the legendary critic John Freeman at Skylight Books in LA. We will be discussing his anthology of essays about new California writing. I’m honored to be in the anthology, along with so many writers I admire, including: Deborah Miranda, Rebecca Solnit, Karen Tei Yamashita, Dana Johnson, Percival Everett, Laila Lalami, and dozens more. Please come join us, starting at 7 PM.
So, I'm honored to be at the oldest artists' residency in the United States, the MacDowell colony in New Hampshire. One of the artists in our cohort, the amazing Sam Feder @samfeder_1 , is screening their documentary in Los Angeles next week. It's about Chase Strangio and the ACLU’s attempts to fight for trans rights and justice. You can see it at Vidiots in Eagle Rock, on Sept. 3, 6, and 7. As for me: I continue plugging away at the next novel in my L.A. trilogy--in my own cabin in the woods.
This is a post about dictatorship and fascism. Which is another way of saying it’s a post about now—even though the images tell a story from the 1970s. Earlier this month I was in Buenos Aires, Argentina, teaching. While I was there I paid a visit to the notorious Naval Mechanics School (Escuela Mecánica de la Armada, or ESMA), which was one of 500 torture and killing centers operated by the Argentine dictatorship from 1976-1982. Most of the violence unfolded in the building you see here (image 1), which contained housing for the school’s faculty. The hooded victims (activists and working people) were detained in the attic of the upper floors (image 2), and were tortured in the basement (image 3). About 5,000 people were held here, being shuffled up and down the staircases even as the faculty (most of whom had nothing to do with the killing) continued to live in the dorm rooms and use the staircases, where they passed hooded detainees in the process. Later, the victims would be drugged and loaded into airplanes and tossed into the sea. All the while, the commandant of the operation lived on site with his family, entering his private residence (the covered doorway on the left of image 1). He organized a birthday party for his young daughter in this building, even as men and women were being tortured in the basement below. As in the powerful movie The Zone of Interest (the drama about the commandant of Auschwitz) a daily “normal” family life unfolded alongside acts of unspeakable violence and sadism. Visiting ESMA, I saw a pattern in human history. I saw how official violence can unfold in intimate proximity to privilege and comfort; and how a society can assimilate the “normality” of acts of humiliation against human beings whose very existence challenges notions of order and privilege. Standing up there in the attic, where the prisoners were held for months in isolation, I couldn’t help but wonder: will we one day stand in a museum to immigrant detention, to the raids of our modern era? Will we one day understand that the suffering inflicted by ICE is unfolding alongside, and in service of our wealth and comfort?
This is what it looks like when you're writing three books at once. I'm deep into a trilogy of novels about Los Angeles, and its future, present, and past. The books tackle themes of inequality, violence, family, love, art, homelessness, and, of course, migration. Just about everything on this table is related to this project, including that stack of books at the end of the table, and an old Rolleiflex camera I got on the cheap.
These are dark days. But also days of courage and strength. On Thursday, I delivered the keynote at the Latino graduation at UC Irvine, to about 3,000 students and family members, (all undeterred by reports of ICE being in Irvine earlier that day). It was beautiful and inspiring.
Some excerpts from my speech:
Today, we celebrate those of you who worked alongside your parents delivering newspapers, or in the mercado, or on the sidewalk, or landscaping. Despertándose en la madrugada, a trabajar, para ayudar a la familia ganarse la vida.
…Today we celebrate those of you have childhood memories of the awesome volcanos of Guatemala and El Salvador, and the mountains of Honduras…and of the wonders of South-Central L.A., and of the Imperial Valley and the Central Valley, and of…little suburbs like Paramount, which I learned from you, my students, is also known as Paisa-mount. And I learned, too, in the past few days, that Paramount is the name of a place where people love their community, and they fight for it…
Y para las familias aquí presentes…
The young people graduating today—they all admire you so much. They know that, once upon a time, there was another young man. Another young woman. Un joven que se tiró a la aventura. A border crosser, someone who wanted to work and make it big. Y a este imigrante le dijeron que estaba loca, que iba a sufrir. Pero no se dejó. And that young woman, that young man kept going. Trabajó, luchó. This is a country built not just from immigrant labor, but also from the courage of immigrants, and pretty much everyone in this room has a courageous immigrant in their family…
These are not easy times to be young…I want you to draw strength from what you’ve already done. From the work you did to reach this day…For the rest of your lives, you will carry a hard-working college student inside you, just like you carry a hard-working immigrant inside you. A fighter …Someone who did not, and does not give up. Be strong, and carry this moment and this victory with you always. Because that what this is. Un triunfo. A victory for a community que no se deja, that does not surrender. Un triunfo for people who are always moving, siempre, pa’lante.
This Friday evening, May 2, I'll have the honor of being at PEN World Voices alongside the great writers and artists Lara Aburamdan, Charmaine Craig, and Ipek S. Burnett. We'll be talking about exile, displacement, reinvention, and belonging. It's free, at the Goethe-Institute, at Los Angeles, 1901 West 7th Street. Admission free, with registration at worldvoices.pen.org/event/25-home-displacement-belonging/
Please join us.
Today, Sunday, at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, I'll have the honor of being on stage in conversation with Percival Everett, discussing his brilliant novel "James." Come join us if you can, at 12:30. Details and tickets at the festival website: /festivalofbooks/
