Western Writers
An Interview with Alex Espinoza
By Jenny Shank, 5-25-07
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Alex Espinoza’s debut novel, Still Water Saints, is an arresting portrait of a fictional California town called Agua Mansa that cycles around the Botánica Oshún and its owner, a woman named Perla. Botánicas, stores that sell candles, herbs, statues of saints, and remedies for people’s physical or emotional problems, are common in Latino areas of the United States. It’s the perfect setting for a novel, as it places Perla at the center of the complicated lives of her patrons. The book is told in alternating first-person chapters from the perspectives of Perla’s customers and third-person chapters from Perla’s perspective. Espinoza was born in Tijuana, Mexico, and grew up in La Puente, California (outside of Los Angeles). He will be coming to Denver in June to participate in the Lighthouse Writers Workshop Summer Literary Festival. On June 16, he’ll be at the Tattered Cover in LoDo, taking part in a discussion entitled “The Exotic in Fiction: Finding Your Yoknapatawpha.” Espinoza recently answered some questions for NewWest.net in an email interview.
NewWest: How did you first start to develop the fictional town of Agua Mansa?
Alex Espinoza: From the first, I was setting my fiction in an imaginary place, loosely inspired by Colton, California, but with bits and pieces of other communities – Riverside, San Bernardino, Bloomington, La Puente, etc. The actual choice of “Agua Mansa” came late. The earliest version was called El Llano, but the name just didn’t work somehow. The town was then unidentified for a while. Finally, I had to name it, fix it in place. I was looking at maps of the Inland Empire and was drawn to a large empty space near Colton, a site on the Santa Ana River and Interstate 10. A bit of research later and I discovered there had once been a town there called Agua Mansa, wiped out by a flood in 1862. So I resurrected it.
NW: Did you find freedom in setting your fiction in a place that doesn’t exist?
AE: I did. For one thing, I wasn’t competing with someone else’s memories of a real place. I hope that by being non-specific, by using an unreal place, the town can actually be more real, more universal. That an empty lot or a church or a shopping center or a housing development doesn’t become fixed on an actual map, but instead its borders extend beyond the “Inland Empire,” beyond Southern California.
NW: Do you think you’ll continue to set your fiction in Agua Mansa?
AE: Yes. There are certainly characters there I want to revisit, including some of the peripheral characters from the novel. And I’m also curious to find out what happens to the town itself – what happens to the botánica and the shopping center, what happens in the vacant lots and empty buildings, how Agua Mansa changes as Southern California changes. That said, the next book doesn’t look to be going there. Going back to Agua Mansa is comfortable, which is why I need to leave it, to stretch myself. But, no, I’ll definitely be returning to Agua Mansa.
NW: You’ve said that you wrote this book to represent the “Inland Empire” in California, but have you been getting a response to the book from other places in the country? It personally reminded me of a neighborhood I know in Denver. :
AE: Again, I think this is an advantage of the fictional community, that it can become something more universal, that despite being a purported Southern California town, it can be something more. I’d imagine Agua Mansa has things in common with many urban and suburban communities, especially those that are traditionally Latino. Reviews so far have come in from a variety of places – and the “California-ness” has never been an issue. I’m pleased that it seems to be speaking to people in places like Virginia and Louisiana, as well as in California and elsewhere in the West.
NW: How did you come up with the structure for Still Water Saints? Did you ever consider making it a short story collection, or was the unifying figure of Perla always in the plans?
AE: The book did originate as a collection. Perla and the botánica appeared in all the stories, but, in the earliest versions, she never came into focus. While you could see different customers’ perspectives of her, I couldn’t manage to get a fix on her voice until I decided to tell her story. That’s when the structure became something else.
NW: Still Water Saints was published simultaneously in English and Spanish. Have responses to the book been different in the Spanish and English-speaking communities? Does any aspect of the book catch more attention in one language or the other?
AE: Wow…What a great question. The first responses to the book were in English, from both Anglo and Latino reviewers. The response to the Spanish-language edition has been slower in coming, but that’s a factor of current publishing and marketing models – there tends to be a lag between English language and Spanish language coverage of books, because simultaneous translations are still not the norm. Navigating the strange and hybrid world of multiple languages, of multiple ethnicities and origins, of multiple geographies – it’s a challenge. In fact, the English language press has almost never mentioned that there is a Spanish translation, and vice versa. If there’s been any difference in coverage, I’d say that some Spanish-language critics, as well as some of the Latino critics who reviewed the English version, were a little more sensitive to issues of cultural authenticity and stereotyping. But these weren’t a monolithic bunch of critics – some were Mexican-American, some Mexican, some of other Latino origins.
NW: You create so many different characters so fully in the space of a few pages. Did you cut the chapters down from longer pieces once you’d found the essence of the character?
AE: Yes. Many of those first person narratives were originally 20, 25, even 30 pages. And the third person part, Perla’s story – a lot got cut there. I wrote more than I needed at first while I figured out who Perla was.
NW: The character of Rodrigo is an impoverished Mexican teenager who is sold into sexual slavery to an American man. Is this based on situations that you’ve heard of, or is this something that you imagined?
AE: That thread actually derives from a report I heard on NPR about the sexual trafficking of children. The story unnerved me and stayed with me while I was writing Perla’s chapters, but I didn’t know at the time that it would lead to the development of Rodrigo. The report told of children being passed from one pedophile to another through a complex underground circuit. These men met in public places like amusement parks and fast food restaurants; they didn’t know what the other looked like. They communicated through hand gestures or through the wearing of a particular color of shirt, the report explained. One pedophile would drop a child off in front of a roller coaster or Merry-go-Round and the other would take the child away to an undisclosed location where they would be abused and swapped again. That a vast network such as this existed surreptitiously blew me away. It was this notion of “exchange”—of anonymity, of children being passed back and forth, of this happening in a public place, of children as merchandise—that was the genesis of Rodrigo’s story. I knew Perla needed to confront a situation that, for all her training and wisdom, went beyond anything she had ever encountered or imagined. Rodrigo provided this. And his presence, and Perla’s impulse to save him, ultimately took her to a very dark place which was what I felt she needed to experience in order to further complicate her character.
NW: One of my favorite chapters is “Taking Stock,” which features Shawn, a young man who works at an electronics store, and Beady, his drug-addicted roommate. What I especially liked is that it created a believable character from a sort of person that everyone encounters—an employee at an electronics store—but that you don’t usually read about. Do you feel that part of your project as a writer is to write about people that are often overlooked?
AE: I was born with a disability that, for much of junior high and high school years, kept me from playing sports. My P.E. coaches would give me a clipboard and whistle and instruct me to sit on the sidelines and keep score or call fouls, so early on I got used to being in the backdrop. I got used to people forgetting that I was watching everything. So documenting the lives and movements of individuals who are overlooked or who don’t realize they’re being observed is what I’m attracted to the most, what fuels my fiction. My first writing professor, author Susan Straight, encouraged me to always look and write about those places that no one else was writing about, to be fearless with my work and to chronicle the lives of the people living in the “other” California, where speed freaks and smog replace surf boards and movie stars.
NW: Have you considered continuing the story of any of the characters that you introduce in Still Water Saints?
AE: Yes. I’ve already starting jotting down some thoughts for a third novel that brings us back to Agua Mansa. While the central characters are new, we’ll certainly be seeing some of the characters again. I love Nancy (the school teacher) and her husband. I love Shawn and Beady. I love the botánica and the shopping center and the town itself. I know I’ll be revisiting many of these characters at some time or other. Plus, I’ve got a number of short stories, some of which are B-sides of Still Water Saints (first person chapters that got cut at one point or another), which I’m hoping to find homes for, some of which focus on characters only alluded to briefly in SWS.
NW: What are you working on now? Are you continuing to teach as well?
AE: I’m working on my next novel. It’s about a Mexican actor who comes to Los Angeles during the Golden Age of Hollywood. This is something very different for me, with a far more epic sweep than Still Water Saints. But I’ve also already begun scribbling down pages for book three, another Agua Mansa book, a quieter book than the Hollywood novel. And, yes, I am continuing to teach. This summer, I’ll be helping out at Sandra Cisneros’s Macondo Workshop in San Antonio. And come fall, I begin a position teaching creative writing in the English department at Cal State Fresno.
Catch Alex Espinoza at the Tattered Cover on June 16 at 7 p.m. Details are on the Lighthouse Writers Workshop website.
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