An Interview with Reyna Grande by Rey M. Rodríguez

In this interview, we get to meet one of this country’s most beloved Chicana writers, Reyna Grande. She is the author of the memoirs The Distance Between Us and A Dream Called Home, and the novels Across a Hundred Mountains, Dancing With Butterflies, and A Ballad of Love and Glory. Her books have been adopted as the common read selection by schools, colleges, and cities across the country. More importantly, she is a powerful voice for immigrants. In her latest fiction book, A Ballad of Love and Glory, she introduces us to the events leading up to the annexation of half of Mexico as a result of the Mexico-American War in which the U.S. invaded Mexico. The story is set in 1846 after the controversial annexation of Texas. During this year, the US Army provokes war with México over the disputed Río Grande boundary.

During our interview, we mention several characters from the book. One is Ximena Salomé, a gifted Mexican healer. Her first husband, Joaquin, is killed when Texas Rangers attack her ranch in what is now Texas. Trying to honor her husband’s memory and defend her country, Ximena becomes part of the war by using her healing skills as a nurse on the frontlines of the ravaging war.

We also mention John Riley, an Irish immigrant who enlisted in the US Army to help his family escape the famine devastating Ireland. He becomes disenchanted by the unjust war and the unspeakable atrocities done to his countrymen by the Anglo-Protestant US officers and decides to join the Mexican Army—an act punishable by death. He forms the St. Patrick’s Battalion, a band of Irish soldiers who fight on the side of México.

We also discuss Antonio López de Santa Ana He was a Mexican Army officer and statesman who was the storm center of Mexico’s politics during such events as the Texas Revolution (1835–36) and the Mexican-American War (1846–48).

We hope you enjoy this wide-ranging conversation about, among many other things, becoming a writer, Pablo Pasqual playing Santa Ana in a movie, and why Reyna Grande writes.

Reyna Grande. Welcome to the Chapter House Storyteller's Blog. It's such a privilege to have you here. We feel honored given all of your books and everything that you've done for the literary community. Today we want to speak about your book, “A Ballad of Love and Glory.” But before we do, how did you become a writer?

Well, it's a long answer, so I'll try to be brief.

Oh, we have plenty of time.

I started to write when I was in Junior High School and mostly it was writing in my journal because I discovered that when I wrote I always felt better afterward. It became one of my favorite ways to express myself.  I started to do it more as a form of therapy, and then I fell in love with books. I became an avid reader. Falling in love with stories inspired me to start writing my own stories. So, I started doing that, and I won a writing competition in 8th grade. I won 1st place for a short story that I wrote and that encouraged me to keep writing.

But it was when I was in community college that the dream of becoming a writer was born. My English professor told me that I had writing talent, and she encouraged me to pursue a career as a professional writer.

And what community college was it?

Pasadena City College. My English professor started to give me books written by Chicana/Latina writers like Sandra Cisneros, Helen María Viramontes, Julia Alvarez, and Isabel Allende. She was trying to convince me that if they could do it, then I could do it. She provided these role models for me, and it was just really inspiring the way she believed in me.

What's her name?

Diana Savas. She's retired now from PCC. Thanks to her I started to dream of being a professional writer. She was also the first person to tell me that there's such a thing as a creative writing major. I didn’t even know.

Sure.

So, then I transferred from PCC to UC Santa Cruz as a creative writing major and I spent 3 years. developing my craft and learning as much as I could about how to be a storyteller. I learned so much, especially because I was doing a lot of writing on my own time.

I wasn't just doing whatever we were doing in creative writing classes.  And then I got a grant from the school to self-publish a collection of short stories I completed as an independent project. I was driven and determined to pursue a writing career. But then, when I graduated from UC Santa Cruz, I went through a period of depression because I realized that I didn't know the first thing about how to pursue a career as a writer. I knew how to write stories. I knew the elements of fiction. But we never talked about how to find an agent, or how to find an editor, or how to pitch yourself to publishers. I didn't even know about a query letter because we never talked about any of that stuff. So, then I struggled after college to figure out how I was going to be a professional writer. I had bills to pay, and I ended up having to get a job as a middle school teacher for the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). And then I got even more depressed because that was not the job I wanted.

Interesting.

I wasn't trained to teach, but LAUSD was giving out emergency teaching credentials. I was completely unprepared to be a teacher. It was hard.

And middle school is the hardest to teach.

It was so hard. I was drowning in that job, and I got so depressed I stopped writing for a while, and then one day—three years after I had graduated from college—I woke up, I think maybe I was having a panic attack, and I was feeling that my dream of being a writer was dying.

Hmm.

I told myself I had to do something to keep it alive. And so, the next day I signed up for a weekend writing class through UCLA Extension to get my feet back in the water. To get back in touch with my writing. That weekend class changed everything for me because my teacher told me about this fellowship—the Emerging Voices Fellowship given by PEN America.

That's great.

She told me about the fellowship, and she said “you should apply for it. But the deadline is this Friday,” and it was Sunday.

Wow!

So, I only had 5 days to put together my packet. I went home after that writing class and took all the writing I had done at UCSC to put together my 20-page writing sample. I called my teachers and  said, “Can you write me a little recommendation, but I need it by Friday?” I started gathering all the stuff for the application, and on Friday I went to Pasadena because my PCC teacher met me at the post office to give me the letter of recommendation in person so that I could put it in the envelope.

Interesting.

I can still see her running up the stairs to the post office, waving the letter and saying, “here it is!” We sealed the envelope together and sent it off. Several weeks later, I got a call that I had been chosen to come in for an interview. I went for the interview and then I got the call later that I was selected as one of the eight fellows.

Amazing!

And then it was through the program that I met my agent. And after I met my agent, I had a book deal a few months later, and then my book came out. And so, it's like one of the most magical things! One day I wake up feeling sad that my dream was dying, and as a last attempt to fight for that dream I signed up for the class, then I hear about the writing fellowship program. And I get into it, and I meet an agent, and then I get a book deal, and then my book comes out. It all happened within a few years. Just bang! Bang! Bang!

And I always look back on that time because it was magical. It almost felt like the minute I decided to fight for my dream, the universe aligned itself to make it all happen. Obviously, there were a lot of challenges along the way. I'm not saying it just happened magically and effortlessly. But I always go back to that one moment where I wonder what things would have been like if I had given up. 

That's incredible. What a great story. That's the perfect story for MFA students to hear because there are plenty of times when you want to give up. So, it leads to a question, why do you write?

Well, I write for many reasons. Initially, I started writing for myself as a form of therapy, to try to heal from all the trauma that was carrying in my body. But then, when my professor encouraged me to pursue a career in writing, I wrote to be a professional writer. Once I became a professional writer, I realized I could use writing as a form of activism. It's a tool for social change, and the stories I write are not just for entertainment. They can make a difference, and I've noticed through the years the impact that my stories have had on people. And so, now I write because I see it as an obligation and a responsibility to my community. I see it as my contribution to make a change and help push back against all the hatred and anti-immigrant rhetoric out there. I am writing for a different reason than when I first started, but I still feel that writing has always been, of course, a form of healing—personal healing, but now also collective healing. I have seen that people who have read my work have been helped by it. 

The healing power of art is incredible.

Oh, for sure!

It is another reason why we need to include art in schools. 

It's always a shame when I hear that because of budget cuts, art programs get cut. But people don't understand that the arts are such a great investment. It helps kids with their mental health. Ultimately, we would be saving so much more money if we were investing more on the arts and giving access to the arts to children and young adults so they could grow up into healthy and stable adults who contribute to our society

It's criminal not to have the arts in schools. I get the sense that you must write and that you don’t have a choice.

Yes, although I've been struggling with writing lately because I have found other creative interests that I find a lot more enjoyable than writing!

Is that the documentary work that you're doing?

Yes, the documentary film, and also, I do a lot of gardening and sewing. I do watercolors. I have all these other creative things that give me a lot of joy. There's a lot of turmoil in writing. Sometimes it gets hard to relive the traumatic moments. After Covid, when we started talking more about self-care, I found writing about my traumas harder to do. Collectively, we started to find other ways to hold on to the joy. We got tired of all the sadness and all the depressing stuff. And so, my problem lately has been that I have trained myself to write when I'm depressed, but I no longer want to dwell on my depression.

Oh, I see.

Since I was a young girl, I've always written when I'm feeling sad and when I have a lot of anguish and inner turmoil. But now my brain doesn't want to go to those dark places anymore. 

I'm impressed by people who can get to the other side of the trauma.

Yes, writing helped me cope with my trauma but now, in a way, writing is keeping me stuck there. I've been doing this for almost 20 years, not just writing books about my trauma, but also talking about my trauma on stages across the country and abroad.

Oh, yes.

And so now, after 20 years of doing it, I'm tired of writing and talking about my pain and struggles over and over again for public consumption. I think I might be burned out.

Yes.

I’m trying to figure out how I can teach myself to write from a different place than what I'm used to.

But I feel like you did that with “A Ballad of Love and Glory.”

Really? I thought it was just as depressing as my other books!

It's such a work of art in terms of your writing. You had to write as an Irishman. That takes skill.

I must have been an Irishman in my past life.

I listened to the book, and I read the book and the audio of it is extraordinary.

Yes!

Of course, it's a sad story, in a sense, but I felt like it also shows the power of love to get you through even the darkest things. I don't think there was anything that was going to crush their love. They find joy regardless of the trauma. And that's why I felt that it's such a powerful book. 

Oh, that’s beautiful. Thank you. 

If I tell people that the US invaded Mexico, they think I'm crazy, right? Because that history is never taught.

Right.

It is an insightful and important book because we barely learn about the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in school.

Right.

What would it feel like to lose half of your country? It's just a very important book.

Oh, thank you!

So, let’s start discussing it and maybe we'll look into it in terms of the joy. How about that?

All right. I have to say this was a very difficult book to write, but I also have a lot of joy for this book because I'm very proud of it. I feel that it made me a better writer.

Please talk about that. How did you come up with the idea for the book?

Well, when I heard about the Saint Patrick's Battalion in 2014, I was intrigued. I started to research John Riley and read about the San Patricios. And I thought, Oh, man, this story is incredible, but I felt very intimidated writing about it because I had no knowledge about war or military life or battles. Writing a historical novel wasn't something I had ever done before, and it just sounded like a lot of work beyond my skills. I tried not to write the novel. I was pushing against it, but John Riley kept calling me back. I was just so fascinated by him.

And so, one day I just wrote a scene in his point of view, the opening scene where he wakes up at the Yankee camp and they do roll call. That was the first thing I ever wrote for that book. As soon as I started writing him, he kept calling me back, and then I would put it away because I would say, No, no, no, this book is too hard. I can't do it. It's too much. I don't know anything about how to write a war book. I would put it away for a few months, and then he would call me back and then I'd go back and write another scene. So, this happened on and off for more than four years. I started it in 2014, and I struggled until 2020 when the pandemic happened. I had 200 very rough pages of the book when the pandemic started. And then I ended up writing a whole book and completing it during the first year of the pandemic. I was forced into it. All my speaking events got canceled. And so, then I said, What the heck am I going to do for income? So, then I sold the novel to my editor, based on a proposal and 3 sample chapters.

Wow!

And it wasn't something that I had planned to do, because I wanted to finish the book first before I put it out there. But because I was broke and didn't have another way to make money, I pitched it, and she bought it. I got the first check when I signed the contract.

I was very grateful to my editor because she bought an incomplete fiction project, and I needed to pay my bills. So that year was a blessing in disguise in that I had a lot of time to write. First time in my life I didn't have any other distractions or any other obligations. All I had was my novel, and also my novel helped me to survive the pandemic because it gave me a way to escape

from all that was going on around us. Instead of dwelling on what was happening in my world, I would escape to the 1840s and hang out with Ximena and John. And so, I was able—in one year—to go from 200 to 400 pages, and then do 3 or 4 rewrites.

Is it fair to say that John Riley kept calling you?

I feel very connected to him because of him being an immigrant. I realized that the Irish in the 19th century went through what Latino immigrants go through in terms of being vilified, demonized, and dehumanized. I was able to connect with his feelings of being rejected by US society. No matter how much he wanted to give the best of himself, they wouldn't see him as a human being and treat him with the dignity and respect that he deserved. And so, I was able to tap into that feeling. I also thought a lot about my father when I was writing him because I reflected on what it might be like to be a man who has to immigrate and leave his wife and son behind, like the way my father had to leave his wife and his children behind, living in poverty. It gave me insight into what it’s like to have a huge responsibility hanging on your shoulders like that. To have your loved ones depending on you, and you’re so far away in another country.

And what that must be like to describe his turmoil of longing for his home, family, and finding himself so far away from them, just to try to find a way, to give them something better.

And to maintain his dignity as a father and as a husband, as a provider. My father gave me a way to connect with John Riley, and then I don't know why, but I found him a lot easier to write than Ximena. John Riley and Santa Anna came very easily to me. But Ximena was the one that I struggled with the most. 

And for me, this struggle comes through. It's really interesting, because I felt the story popped in the first chapters where you start meeting the Irish. Wow! It just popped for me. And it also did when you meet Santa Anna. You paint him in all his complexity. Sometimes he's vilified, but the way you've done it's more complex. He was very much a product of his moment, it seems. 

He was! He was a very complex and complicated man. Very charismatic, narcissistic, moody, but passionate, regal, and persuasive. 

Yes.

When Ximena is forced to become Santa Anna’s private nurse and the two of them have a lot of scenes together, that's when I started to figure out who she was. I had to go back to the beginning and write those early chapters on her, which I had skipped over. Something that helped me was when I was researching John Riley, I learned of a rumor that the real John Riley had fallen in love with a Mexican widow, and one of the theories that people had about him was that he stayed in Mexico to make a life with this Mexican widow. So, I had to figure out how to make Ximena a widow. So then, coming up with Joaquín as her husband, and how he gets killed by the Texas Rangers, helped me figure that out and answer the question What drives her to join the army?

What is it that you want people to take away from this book?

Mexicans are not the invaders. It was the US that invaded Mexico. I get tired of how, when some people talk about the situation at the border, they complain about Mexicans immigrating here and call it an invasion. A border invasion! I wrote about the real invasion, and by doing so I wanted to say, loud and clear, that we're not the invaders. We're just coming back to our ancestral homeland.

I love that. Now, more than ever that message is so important because people must be disabused of their ignorance of the past.

You were talking earlier about how we don't grow up learning our history because it's not taught in schools, and this deliberate erasure, this whitewashed history, has done a lot of harm to the Mexican-American community. We have been portrayed as outsiders, as foreigners, and since people don't know this history that's how they see us. Whereas if people knew the history of the US-Mexico border, of the US invasion of Mexico and the land theft that occurred, they would understand that the Mexican-American community belongs here. That we’ve been here all along. There are not a lot of novels about this period and about this invasion. It's been ignored for too long. I was happy to be able to write about it, to reframe our history, and to offer a different narrative.

What's powerful about your book is that you name the racism and it's not just towards Mexicans. It's towards Germans and Irish and all these people that aren't Anglo-Saxon Protestant. The level of hatred is extraordinary. Is there anything that people don't ask you that you would wish they would ask you about this book?

One of the things that I found surprising was the mention of soldaderas, women who participated in the conflict and formed part of the Mexican military. Before I wrote the book, I used to think that soldaderas only existed during the Mexican Revolution. When I started researching, I found out that there were Mexican women in every war that Mexico fought. Ximena is not the kind of soldadera that's fighting on the battlefield, I made her a nurse. When I was researching I learned about the women who were there as nurses, cooks, and helpers, and they followed the men from battlefield to battlefield. They all came—pregnant women, women with children, wives, mothers, sisters, daughters. They were all following their men, and that was not common in the US Army. There the women didn't follow the men into battle the way that the Mexican women did.

The medicine the nurses provide seems to be sophisticated in terms of the knowledge of how to apply nature to healing.

I enjoyed writing that part about Ximena and how she applies all of the herbs and medicinal plants that she uses to heal. It fits in so nicely into the plot because Santa Anna had an amputated leg that suffered from chronic infections. It allowed me to bring in this historical detail about Santa Anna's amputated leg into the story and use it as a plot device to bring Ximena and Santa Anna together. I really enjoyed finding ways to connect real history with my imagination. I liked the challenge of how to fit my plot into the historical timeline.

Yes, I mean that one moment when he takes off the leg and she has to heal him. You feel like you're a fly on the wall watching this whole moment turn out. Their relationship is very complicated because he's kind of creepy, but he's also very elegant. He's not a caricature.

When I try to imagine my book as a movie, I picture Pedro Pascal playing Santa Anna!

That would be awesome. That would be great.

That's my dream, because I think that Pedro Pascal could really capture the complexity of Santa Anna, being creepy, but also charismatic and regal, eloquent and cruel. I think he could capture all those contradictions. 

Yeah, I agree. Well, let's put that out into the universe.

Oh, my God! That's great!

We'll put it out there.

Light a candle.

We are going to light a candle for that one. I've taken a lot of your time. Any advice that you have for up-and-coming writers?

Yes, don't give up.

Okay, that's good.

Don't give up. You have to fight for it, and the more you fight for it the more the universe will align itself and make it happen. But the important thing is not to give up. Also, don't be afraid to ask for help. Nobody ever gets successful on their own. We all have help.

Yeah, we all need each other. That's true. Okay, well, Reyna Grande, thank you so much. It has been such a privilege.

Thank you, Rey.

Rey M. Rodríguez is a writer, advocate, and attorney. He lives in Pasadena, California. He is working on a novel set in Mexico City and a non-fiction history of a prominent nonprofit in East LA. He has attended the Yale Writers' Workshop multiple times and Palabras de Pueblo workshop once. He also participates in Story Studio's Novel in a Year Program. He is a first-year fiction creative writing student at the Institute for American Indian Arts' MFA Program. This fall his poetry will be published in Huizache. His other interviews and book reviews are at La Bloga, the world's longest-established Chicana-Chicano, Latina-Latino literary blog, Chapter House's Storyteller’s Blog, IAIA's literary journal, Pleiades Magazine, and Los Angeles Review.