¡Colores!; 303; Denise Chavez, Roberto Mondragón, Max Evans

Funding for COLORES was provided in part by: The Nellita E. Walker Fund KNME-TV Endowment Fund The Great Southwestern Arts & Education Endowment Fund ...and Viewers Like You >>THIS TIME, ON COLORES! DISTINGUISHED AUTHOR, PLAYWRIGHT, AND ACTIVIST, NEW MEXICAN DENISE CHAVEZ SHARES HER INSPIRATION. >>If you're attuned to the writing of the world and the story of the world, you don't have to go anywhere. All you have to do is go get a hamburger at Blake's and the story's right there. >>WITH A PASSION FOR CULTURE AND TRADITION, RENOWNED NEW MEXICAN MUSICIAN ROBERTO MONDRAGON EMPHASIZES THE IMPORTANCE OF STORIES AND SONG. >>I don't think you would have much of a culture

if you didn't have music and if you didn't have songs that are composed of music and poetry coming together to tell a story. >>AUTHOR OF ROUNDERS AND HIGH LOW COUNTRY, MAX EVANS SHARES HOW THE WEST AND NEW MEXICO INSPIRED HISWRITING. >>All of life is creative if you're open to it, all of it, everything that happens, every single little thing. >>IT'S ALL AHEAD ON COLORES! >>NEW MEXICAN AUTHOR DENISE CHAVEZ SHARES HOW SHE FINDS - Emilia could hear the cicadas outside the kitchen window - Pobrecitos, no mas tenian esta noche. They had only this one solitary night to feel the cool and down after those years underground. How would

it go for them? Was it enough to have this little moment of joy? They would mate, bury their eggs, and then what? Fall down and rest in the earth again. If they could tell their story, what would it be? Dreamers, dreaming a dream of coming up from the dark earth of their tomb to breathe the shallow air of this one May night. The night was full of stories. Who listened? Who cared? >>[Hakim Bellamy] - Where do you find inspiration? >>[Denise Chavez] - feeder. I have the first permit in Las Cruces to have a catery. I'm standing in line, waiting to get

my feral cat food for the month, it's very expensive and very difficult to feed 25 cats or 30 cats. And I'll be standing in line and you see mostly multicultural people - Chicano, African-American, other people - you see a woman in a wheelchair getting food for her dog and I saw a guy with a bike - he's got a Sturgis t-shirt with this rickety, old card in the back and he's getting food for his dog. And I see that character, Chuy, somebody called out to him - Chuy! And it's like - I know you, I love you, you are a character, I want to know more about you Chuy, and did you actually go to Sturgis or is it a dream of yours? And what kind of lives do people live that would give their cats and dogs food

before themselves? And so, those are the people I want to look at. We stopped at a very definitive New Mexican place - Blake's Lottaburger, but now they've moved into El Paso, Texas, and there's a guy that has this incredible tattoo with theletters facing out this way. I was so struck - what does he have on his arm? Affliction. Excuse me,do I have a story here? Yes, I have a story, I have a character. Who in the world would write Affliction on your arm? you find a story through the process of writing? >>[Denise Chavez] - You work on it every day, it's a meditation. So I see the tattoo that says Affliction, who is this man? And then I see the guy in the dog food line, in the animal line - Chuy!

And then I'm thinking of the title of my book - City of Crosses and then I realize there'sa movie by that name, so I have to think about that. And then I realize that Chuy isn't his real name and if it is, he hates the name. I lay in bed thinking, all of the time. I'll wake up in the middle of the night and I'll have a name and I'll writeit down in my notebook next to my bed or characters will follow me, scenes follow you. If you're attuned to the writing of the world and the story of the world, you don't have to go anywhere. All youhave to do is go get a hamburger at Blake's and the story's right there. >>[Hakim Bellamy] - I'm curious as to your definition of magical realism. >>[Denise Chavez] - It's life. Magical realism is the sorting out of things that cannot be sorted. It is that extra spirit. You walk into a room

and see something scuttling around the side, and you realize it's nothing that's visible, but there's something there. And it's the stories that are behind the stories, in front of the stories, and the characters that are just inhabiting the room, and they're sitting next to you, but they're not visible and then you, as a writer, are bringing those stories and those people to life becausethey demand it. They want it, and if you don't do it, I just read something recently - You have to do it or those characters, those stories are going to haunt you, they're going to stay with you. Andso I need to tell my stories. And the stories of the people that ar e in the shadows. >>[Hakim Bellamy] - Why is humor important to you? >>[Denise Chavez] - Aristophanes, come on now. Humor is very important because you cansay very deep things. People think they're laughing, but they're

really taking it in and humor, I love humor, I can use it. I come from funny people. My father looked like Jack Benny, he talked like Jack Benny, he was irreverent and funny, he could give you that caustic look. My mother was absolutely brilliant and funny and I'm not really giving her credit, but she was my great, major inspiration, all the women in my family. My mother was a widow for 9 years, wore black, but she still had a sense of humor. Then she met my father, the great joke - Wedding night, this man is an alcoholic, let'slaugh about it because you think about these things and if you can have a sense of humor about it, then you don't take things so seriously. Yes, you have to take things seriously, but you can put it in the context of a Chekhov. Chekhov was the master and my master too. Here's somebody who's expounding

on the great story of the world and he's an incredible philosopher and he gets up, his foot is asleep, and he falls over. Now that's humor. So, come on now, let's laugh and let's have a good time. I always tell people when they buy a book of mine - I hope you laugh a lot and cry a little bit. >>[Hakim Bellamy] - You've stated that your work has gotten deeper and more aligned to this time and place. How so? How is it more aligned? >>[Denise Chavez] - Well, growing up on the US-Mexico border, my mother was from far west Texas, my father from Nuevo Mexico, Southern New Mexico, close to El Paso and Juarez. What is the major issue, oyen dia? Immigration. We need to talk about immigration, what's happening to the world's population and howthe powers that be are decimating people. I don't know if you're fracking, or what these chem trails,

I don't know what's happening, but our multicultural populations are being inundated and disappearing because we don't want them. They're the - other - so I want to talk about immigration, borders,and all of us being the same people. We are all one people. >>[Hakim Bellamy] - Why use fiction to address some of our social problems and our societal problems? >>[Denise Chavez] - Fiction gives us a license to speak truth. I remember when I had my first editor, he says, and this was a face of an angel, he says - I don't believe that one section. And I said - That's the one section that was true! So the truth cannot be believed, but the fiction can be believed. People don't want to believe that it's real sometimes. Fiction allows us to set the spirits in motion to be freed. >>[Hakim Bellamy] - Why do you write? >>[Denise

Chavez] - Because it's my blood. I was a writer when I was 8 years old. And we had a willow tree from the willow game. And I came outside and my mother was talking to our neighbor and he was cutting branches from our willow tree. And I happened to witness that. Thank you. And my mother said to our neighbor, Billy, she says - Billy, what are you doing? And he said - I'm killing your tree. And he did. It was my first story that I wrote when I was 8 years old. Not that story. That was the second story. The story was the tree thatI love so deeply - it was the tree coming into me, me going into the tree and I wrote that very first thing, I still have that little snippet of three lines. Then I wrote the story of Billy and he did kill that tree. I still have that stump in my backyard and there's a triptych of story. I write because I could not understand

what he was doing. Because I want to make sense of things. Because I knew there was a who, what, when, where, and why, but it's always the why. At age 8, I was writing. I'm still writing because I still have questions. Why? I want to know. I want to understand people's feelings. I want to understand what it is that gives us grace. >>FOR ROBERTO MONDRAGON SONGS TELL STORIES. (music and applause) >>Mondragon: I was raised by, on my mother's side. Part of his life was singing

songs also, and he probably learned some of those songs from his grandfather. ("Que Viva la Marcha Zacateca!") >>A lot of the other ones were songs that he remembered when he was a child, and then some of them were we love songs. One was called "Adios mi Chaparrita." Chaparrita, his girlfriend, I guess, was kind of short. Chaparrita means short, and so the song was (singing in Spanish), so he's saying, you know, don't cry because I'm leaving. If I go away from the ranch I'll come back soon, you know, little simple messages that go into a song like that.

There is a dicho that says, (speaking Spanish: he who sings scares bad feelings away.) (performance of My Little >>Mondragon: So, I had three

sisters and three other brothers and they would have songs that they really enjoyed together and in harmony. I remember one that just pops up and it's, "There once was a farmer who took a young miss to the back of the barn where he gave her a, lesson on horses and chickens and eggs and told her that she had such beautiful, manners that suitedthe girl of his charms, and they would get married and raise lots... no... (laughter) It's something like that, you know, that girl that he wanted had take in his, washing and ironing and as they didthat they would get married and raise lots of... sweet violets, sweeter than the roses, covered allover from head to toe, covered all over with sweet violets.

The songs are actually about real happenings. Most of the songs that I like to sing about have to dowith water and land, with the soil, with farms and ranches, that way of life that most people throughout the state of New Mexico, it doesn't matter what their origin, enjoy doing. There are sometimessongs that bring the community together. I wrote a song called "El Corrido de la Cienega," the ballad of La Cienega. Several people contributed ideas on what to put down there, which was, you know, these were the traditions that we have known. This is how the water is important. If too much development takes place the water gets dirty and you're going to have golf courses in the area that will lower the water level

in the ground and that's not good. It brought the community together and they, you know, got petitions and opposed that big development and it didn't happen. That song used >>Mondragon: The music and the songs associated with the part of our culture that is made up of music are a way of continuing not only the history, a lot of the beliefs, a lot of the family life, and just a lot of the traditions that also make up culture, to keeping that alive. I don't think you would have much of a culture if you didn't have music, and if you didn't have songs that are composed of music and poetry coming together to tell a story, and without those stories you wouldn't have muchof

a culture because as Sabine Ulibarri another well-known personality at the University of New Mexico used to say, "If you forget your past, then where is your future?" And the songs are what helps us to keep alive the things that we remember about our past and our present into the future. >>AUTHOR MAX EVANS SHARES A FEW MEANINGFUL EXPERINECES FROM HIS LIFE IN NEW MEXICO. >>Hakim: Sometimes there's more truth in fiction then in real life. >>Max Evans: If you tell a true story let's say I'm interviewing someone for a story for a magazine. Pretty simple like that, then I'm obligated to that person to tell the truth the best way the most interesting way I can in the way they related to me. But in fiction, I'm allowed

to take mylifetime observations, of all human and wild or whatever or tame. And insert that into fiction that's why I say you can reach a greater truth because you are not using a single approach, you are using How do you find that truth through the process of writing? >>Evans: There's not much of a process, because I write out of just emotion but there has to be a process no matter what your emotion is and I think even in the most wildest of fiction you know it, innately you know, okay I'm tell the truth. You just simply know it by life experiences; by putting things down they're the same in a strange way. What you are doing is extracting the essence of life into the essence of a story. >>Hakim: Your westerns aren't

shoot 'em ups; you talk about these untold stories in the Western genre. >>Evans: Before the pickup truck came along, horses, and everything was slow and you'd use wagons for transportation you'd use them all over town to do shopping. And then everything changed at that time and for a short time,which I wrote about, people depended on their humor they had no, hardly any of them hardly had a radio they had no television, they had no movies. So their humor that everyone had to survive was simply between two people or three people and they had to invent their own humor. And I noticed this first as a kid when I first took a job on a ranch that these people had a grand sense of humor more than I already related to in my life. And it

dawned on me after WWII, that here comes the pick up trucks beginning to take over so if I don't tell this it'll never be told. That was the driving force, I started to laugh with them, I remembered things that happened, cowboys that would kid with one another the whole pranks they would pull on one another. Their own movies and radios and their own cell phones were in their head only. In their souls, in their own observations of what would have been funny to them or to their friends. So that was the world I wanted to tell in the beginning so then I started spreading it around, you know the bartender or the grocery clerk would be just as important asthe cowboy in my stories. So that transition was an immense transition if you're going

to think about the west as part of America. It was part of America. >>Hakim: What would you call that phenomenon of living your writing before you write it? >>Evans: The word creative as a kid at 10, 12, 13 and even at 14 you don't really understand what that word creative means in it's totality but you're doing it you're absorbing it, all the world around you, if you're going to be a writer. I don't know it, I don't think you're going to know it. It was a thing that inspired me deeply was the first ranch I grew up on, I went to work in Glorieta which is south of Santa Fe, there was no telephone, no mail service there was nothing besides the horses the cows and the wild animals. There was no communication to the outside world what so ever. And I think one of the most beautiful things

I've ever experienced was a ranch lady, the boss's wife, who did the cooking, she painted the pictures on the wall, she made the rugs on the floor. Thelamps that you had to hang when there was no electricity you had to bring in Kerosene for the lamps. All of that she made and I discovered that one night when I carried the water for her stove, I cutthe wood for her stove and at night I volunteered because I could not imagine, I started looking around thinking my God this woman is holding the world together here. And it was a thing that was going on throughout the whole so called West. We were neglecting the appreciation of the women who were holding it all

together. That was to me a huge inspiration to me and we talked many things I got to talking painting with her, she never had lessons she ain't never had a lesson in the world, she painted in this old ranch house they were good, they touched my soul, my heart she did that greatly while I was drying dishes for her every night. That was one way, I didn't choose it, I was there that's how I became aware. >>Hakim: Why write it down? >>Evans: You can't help it, I've never known a writer that can help themselves, if you are a real writer you might not be able to make a living outof it but you'll be able to maintain your soul and if you are

that's what you are going to do. You are going to have those things all through your life the great cord of life is going to have little knots here and there, it's going to have wonderful things that are on that cord in your head and soul you can't help it. You can't do a cockeyed thing about it. >>Funding for COLORES was

provided in part by: The Nellita E. Walker Fund KNME-TV Endowment Fund, The Great Southwestern Arts & Education Endowment Fund...