Lyn Miller-Lachmann
Q & A with Lyn Miller-Lachmann
Author: Gringolandia (May 2009, Curbstone Press)
I see that Curbstone Press has published your first novel Dirt Cheap, the short story collection you edited, Once Upon a Cuento, and now is in the process of publishing Gringolandia. What attracted you to Curbstone Press?
I became aware of Curbstone when I lived in Wisconsin in the early 1980s. I was involved in several solidarity groups concerned with Latin American issues—one seeking to change U.S. policy toward the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, one helping refugees from El Salvador and Guatemala as part of the Sanctuary Movement, and one working with Chilean exiles and those struggling within the country to restore democracy. Curbstone published many of the poets that were associated with these three causes—from James Scully’s Santiago Poems, which was the press’s debut publication, to works by Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton and the Central American poets that appeared in Poemas Clandestinos/Clandestine Poems.
I continued to follow the works that Curbstone published in the 1990s, because many of them were reviewed in MultiCultural Review and in the bibliography that I edited, Global Voices, Global Visions (Bowker, 1995). So when I finished the first draft of Dirt Cheap, the first place I submitted it—even before I started looking for an agent—was Curbstone.
At the time, however, I had just come back to writing fiction after a decade-long hiatus, and I didn’t realize what I’d submitted was merely a first draft. Sandy Taylor rejected it, as did every other place I sent the manuscript. I decided to enroll in a writing program through the New York State Writers Institute, and signed the manuscript up for a one-on-one tutorial. Following a harsh critique, I rewrote Dirt Cheap several times and because I’d taken on the editorship of Once Upon a Cuento in the meantime, Sandy agreed to consider the revision.
As part of my contract for Dirt Cheap, he had the right of first refusal on my next project. He claimed Gringolandia before I even finished writing it.
Even more than Dirt Cheap, Gringolandia fits Curbstone’s mission and history—the press’s longtime interest in Latin America, in human rights issues, and in giving young people an awareness of the world around them.
Your book gives a striking account of the brutal military regime in Chile from 1973 to 1990. Why did you choose to focus on these issues through Marcelo, who was so committed to liberating his country from the Pinochet dictatorship?
Successful historical fiction depicts real events through the experiences of characters about whom the reader cares deeply. What made the character of Marcelo so compelling to me is that he sacrifices his own physical and mental health, but he cannot bear to see his wife and children sacrificed—that is why he pressured them leave the country. However, once he is released, he ends up back with his family—disabled, traumatized, and in a foreign environment far from the struggle that gave his life meaning. And his family doesn’t know what to do with him.
While the story portrays the terror of the Pinochet years, including the exile of a tenth of the country’s population, on a deeper level it’s about what happens when family members are separated and undergo such profound changes—one because of what happened to him in prison, and the others because of the new lives they’ve made for themselves in the United States. Marcelo’s bitterness at being shipped to “Gringolandia” is magnified by the fact that the rest of the family has gotten along very well without him and there seems to be very little place for him as a father, a husband, or an activist.
I tell most of the story through the eyes of Marcelo’s teenage son, Daniel, who has become almost completely assimilated, and who avoids anything political because of what happened to his father, and what happened to him the night his father was arrested. In Chile, it’s common for sons to follow their fathers’ career paths, but Daniel has no interest in journalism, Marcelo’s profession. Instead, he wants to become an engineer—and a U.S. citizen as soon as he turns eighteen.
Are the characters you created based on any real-life people that you know or are they entirely fictional? What made you characterize them the way you did?
The characters are based on real people, mostly Chilean exiles involved in the freedom struggle. Some of my friends from Chile were having problems with their teenage children, who they felt had become disrespectful and had little appreciation for their parents’ political concerns. One Chilean friend read my first young adult novel, Hiding Places (1987, about a teenage runaway in New York City) and suggested I write a novel about exile families. I failed to warn her, though, that as a young adult author, I would take the kids’ point of view.
As he evolved over many years and numerous drafts, Daniel did not turn out to be a disrespectful teenager, although he doesn’t get involved in his parents’ political activities. As the eldest child and only son in a single-parent family, he’s become the man of the house, a responsibility he takes seriously. There’s a tendency in young adult fiction today to portray immigrant teens and teens from other cultures as spoiled and defiant, so that suburban middle class teens in the United States will be able to relate to them. I think that reflects a stereotyped view of U.S. teens and distorts the ways in which young people grow up and the challenges they face.
Marcelo is based on a real person, though I’ve changed many details. The person on whom he’s modeled was forced into exile after being imprisoned and severely tortured after the 1973 coup. Like Marcelo, he struggled with alcoholism, flashbacks, and nightmares—what today would be known as post-traumatic stress disorder. In those days, the treatment of torture victims was in its infancy, and much of what we know today was developed through work with former political prisoners from Chile.
Did you know beforehand exactly what you wanted this novel to be about, or did the ideas randomly come to you in the process of writing it? Did you make any major or sudden changes to the plot while writing?
I had a general idea from the beginning, but the novel developed in two stages, 18 years apart. Originally, it was a contemporary novel that I wrote from 1987 to 1989. At that time I was working closely with an editor at a mainstream press who’d liked Hiding Places and who had an interest in Latin America because her husband grew up in Colombia. In 1989, I received a prestigious grant from the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators to fund a research trip to Chile. A month before my departure date, the big-press editor backed out of the project, saying that the revisions hadn’t come together the way that she’d hoped. On returning from Chile in spring 1990, I found two other editors, but they wanted me to make changes that fit their houses’ different marketing priorities—one wanted a teen romance while the other wanted a book that would appeal to the 10-14 age group. I’d already written an ending I wasn’t entirely happy with to suit the first editor, and now I realized I would not be able to write the book I wanted to write. So even though I’d spent two years on the project, taken advantage of the generosity of dozens of Chileans, and won a major work-in-progress grant, I shelved the manuscript.
In many ways, this was a hard project to pick up again. Chile and the rest of Latin America had fallen out of the news by the mid 1990s. As the editor of MultiCultural Review I found it hard to justify writing a book as a cultural outsider when so many cultural insiders were having a hard time getting published because they didn’t have big names. From time to time, I’d play around with the manuscript, rewriting chapters from different points of view, but I didn’t work on it seriously until the beginning of 2006.
The revelations of U.S. torture at Abu Ghraib and the CIA’s extraordinary rendition of terror suspects to secret prisons around the world motivated me to pick up the manuscript again. I felt that people in this country needed to know what torture is, what it does, and why it’s wrong. Television programs like 24 were indoctrinating people to embrace torture as the way to prevent “ticking bombs” from going off, thereby creating a generation who think it’s okay to deliberately and permanently damage other human beings for some greater good.
When I returned to the story after nearly two decades, I saw that it was no longer a contemporary novel but a historical one. I cut out most of the pop culture references and downplayed the fact that Daniel played in a band because those were things that made the story feel dated. I also found the third person past tense narrative a problem because it distanced readers from the characters, so I changed the point of view to first person present tense. And I brought in a second point of view—that of Daniel’s gringa girlfriend, Courtney—because she turned out to be the source of lot of the conflict in the novel, as a cultural outsider with her own reasons for getting involved in the Aguilar family’s struggles. The part of the story that she narrates is one that only she can know, as she engages in a secretive campaign to capture Marcelo’s account of his torture on tape and get it published.
In all, I kept less than a tenth of the original version. Courtney plays a much larger role, Daniel’s bandmates a much smaller one. To streamline the narrative, Daniel only has one younger sister, not two. I eliminated a parallel conflict between Daniel and some school authorities that I felt diverted attention from the three major characters—Daniel, Marcelo, and Courtney. As a result, very little of this book, compared to most young adult novels, takes place at school. And the entire last half of the book, leading to the ending, is completely new. I love my ending now; I couldn’t say that about the original one.
Were you familiar with what went on in Chile before writing this book, or did it take a lot of research in order to identify the characters and the challenges they faced?
In high school I had followed the events during the Allende government and the coup, and the first demonstration I ever attended, in 1974, was to protest U.S. support for the Pinochet dictatorship. During these protests, I discovered la Nueva Canción, the New Song Movement, and learned about Victor Jara, who was brutally murdered during the coup. Over the next decade and a half, I had the opportunity to get to know quite well many of the leading figures in Chilean New Song as well as the younger musicians—those of my generation—who grew up under the dictatorship and came to use their music as part of the underground struggle for democracy. When I traveled to Chile in 1990 I stayed with the families of several prominent musicians who had remained inside the country during the 1980s to fight for democracy, at considerable risk to themselves and their loved ones.
While I did a lot of research, especially on the problems faced by torture survivors, I also knew many people in the situations of my characters. Most of the people I knew who’d been tortured wouldn’t really talk about it, but their family members in Chile were quite open about what had happened and wanted me to get their stories out. At the time, it was difficult for me to hear their testimony, to know how much they had trusted me and invested in me, when my own efforts to get the book published had come to a dead end.
What do you hope people will gain after they read Gringolandia?
Sometimes I worry that people will dismiss this book because Chile is such a small, isolated, and distant country, and no longer in the news. But Gringolandia is about more than one country at one particular moment. Fundamentally, it’s the story of a boy on the cusp of adolescence who witnesses something terrible happen to his father, and when his father returns five years later, the boy has changed into one kind of person and his father into someone else. The boy, Daniel, tries to escape the larger forces that have upended his life; he wants nothing more than an ordinary life that is stable and secure. Once his father returns, however, Daniel realizes he cannot escape his past; it’s part of who he is and the people he loves.
Much as we try to avoid it in the United States, all of us are vulnerable to forces that are larger than we are. Those who were affected by the September 11, 2001 attacks, by the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and by the economy today already know this. You try to survive, protect the people you love, and seek a community where you can feel secure and where you and your activities are valued. These are human desires whether we live in the United States, Chile, or anywhere else.
Once we acknowledge our common humanity, we can begin to grasp why torture is fundamentally wrong. It’s the most inhuman thing that one person can inflict on another person, even worse than murder because the victim remains alive to deal with the consequences and the memory of his or her degradation—as does the torturer. Like many people who’ve been tortured, Marcelo uses alcohol to numb the constant pain, all the while inflicting more pain on himself, and he perpetuates the cycle of violence on his family—especially on Daniel’s sister, Tina, who’s the youngest and weakest member.
Finally, I’d like readers to understand how difficult it is to restore a democracy once it has been lost. Until recently, we tended to take our democracy in the United States for granted, but after 9/11, the war in Iraq, and eight years of assaults on the Constitution and our civil liberties, I think people have become more vigilant and involved politically. I was heartened to see the participation of so many young people in the Obama campaign, and hope that it continues because we need this energy and idealism to confront the economic, political, social, and environmental crises that have resulted from years of misrule.
The Chileans who ended 17 years of dictatorship had to endure great pain and hardship, and possess extraordinary courage. Their mostly nonviolent struggle is one of the inspiring stories of the latter half of the twentieth century, along with the end of apartheid and the fall of communist dictatorships in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. In May 2008, I did a test reading from Gringolandia at an alternative high school in Troy, N.Y. Afterwards, one of the students, whose older sister had traveled to Chile through her employer, said, “Chile isn’t like that today,” to which I responded, “It’s because of the heroism and sacrifice of Marcelo, Daniel, and millions of other Chileans who risked their lives to bring democracy back to their country.”
I see from your website (www.lynmillerlachmann.com) that, as editor-in-chief of MultiCultural Review, you have a strong appreciation for the diversity among people in the U.S. and around the world. What made you decide to focus your life on increasing awareness of diversity?
For my first full-time job I taught high school in Brooklyn for the New York City Public Schools. My students came from all over the world, and I probably learned more from them than they learned from me. After I moved to Wisconsin and tried to make a career as a young adult author, I regularly returned to New York to give writing workshops at my old high school and other schools in the city. Those workshops led to my becoming editor of Our Family, Our Friends, Our World: An Annotated Bibliography of Significant Multicultural Books for Children and Teenagers (Bowker, 1992) and two years later, editor of MultiCultural Review.
One expects a great deal of diversity in New York City, but people from all over the world had also come to Madison—a small Midwestern city—seeking safety, freedom, and economic and educational opportunities. That’s what I wanted to write about when I started the manuscript that would become Gringolandia. Today, this trend is more pronounced, with smaller communities in the South and interior West, for example, becoming home to people who trace their roots to Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.
As a country, we need to embrace our diversity because we become strong by working together. And many of our young people now find themselves working in other lands. They need to understand the cultures of the places where they’ll be living, and all of us need to realize that the way we’re treated elsewhere depends in large part on how we treat those who come to live among us.
You also mentioned on your website that it has always been your passion to write a novel. Now that you have succeeded in that, has writing a novel been everything you hoped for and expected, or would you much rather concentrate on editing or teaching?
I’ve now written three novels that have been published, along with one that’s staying in the drawer (much of it was cannibalized for Dirt Cheap anyway). I’m in the middle of another young adult novel, a companion to Gringolandia with Daniel’s younger sister, Tina, as the protagonist. While I plan to continue writing, I don’t anticipate giving up editing or teaching because they pay the bills and teaching provides material for my novels.
Interview reprinted with permission of Curbstone Press (www.curbstone.org)
Reviews
Gringolandia
Lyn Miller-Lachmann
Daniel Aguilar’s father Marcelo is ripped from his family during the night because he has been publishing an underground newspaper critical of the government. Daniel’s mother takes the children to the United States, where she works to free her husband from his torturers. Six years later, Marcelo is able to return to the family. Daniel’s beliefs about right and wrong are challenged as he must face the person that he has become and discover the person his father has become. There are relationship challenges for every member of the family, but Daniel is strengthened by his girlfriend, Courtney. When Marcelo decides to return to Chile, Courtney and Daniel hatch a plan that could enable his father to free other prisoners—or get them all killed. This action-packed story is a wonderful work of historical fiction that is a must-have for any library or personal collection. There are several Spanish words and phrases in the book, but they are defined in the glossary. This book would be useful when speaking to teens about boy/girl relationships, international issues, difficult decisions, divorce, and general family conflicts that many teens experience.
2009, Curbstone Press, Ages 12 up, $16.95. Reviewer: Jennifer Mitchell
ISBN: 978-1-931896-49-8
Added 10/27/09
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