8
2013
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
number 22
photograph by Joan Conwell
photograph by Joan Conwell
Cuban” was released way back in 1987. Even the 2008 issue of UNC-Pembroke’s Pembroke Magazine, with a hefty section devoted to Hispanic and Latino writers, includes fewer than a handful of writers who both identify as Latino/a and have an explicit connection to the state.6 Where are the stories reflecting a wider range of Latino/a experiences in North Carolina? Surely that Dominican flight attendant encountered by Díaz at his reading in Durham – the one claiming to be Wonder Woman according to his Facebook status update – has a novel in her. That’s a North Carolina book I would wait in line to read. Something urban and hip. Or something gritty and rural. With 8.6% of North Carolina’s population identifying as Hispanic in 2011 (US Census Bureau), even the considerable burdens of class and barriers of language should not prevent the emergence of at least a few rural Latino/a writers giving us a glimpse of agricultural life from a different vantage point. To find out what I was missing with regards to Latino/a writers in North Carolina, I contacted Hijuelos and three other Latino/aidentified writers – and cultural producers: Director of Latina/o Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Dr. María DeGuzmán; UNC journalism professor and nonfiction author, Paul Cuadros; and North Carolina Arts Council Arts in Education Director, Banu Valladares. The quest was for information about authors writing in either English or Spanish, and I was particularly hoping to find Latino/a–identified writers from rural areas and from outside the university system. None of my sources could name such a writer. DeGuzmán attributes the absence of rural Latino/a writers and writers independent of the university system to economics, saying: It takes time to write and writing is a luxury to some extent, so that’s why it comes more slowly, but there are Latina/o writers. In North Carolina there are a few; they tend to be associated more with the schools. And that’s again a class question. They obviously have some work at the schools, and they’re doing the writing on the side. Self-supporting, self-sufficient writers, well that’s already hard to come by, so the chances you’re going to have Latina/o self-sufficient writers are even lower.7
top International Foods, Su Tienda
Hispana in Raleigh, 421 Chapanoke Road bottom María DeGuzmán at Duke
University’s Latino/a Studies program’s “Days of the Dead,” Durham, NC, 2 Nov. 2012
6
Liliana Wendorff, guest editor, special section on Hispanic and Latino writers in North Carolina, Pembroke Magazine 40 (2008). This issue includes an article on poet Mark Smith-Soto, discussed later in this essay.
7
Quoted from my full interview with DeGuzmán, forthcoming in the print issue of NCLR 2013.