Interview with Héctor Tobar, author of Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of Latino
by Rey M. Rodríguez
Few writers capture the layered realities of Latinidad, migration, and belonging with the grace, precision, and moral clarity of Héctor Tobar. The author of six acclaimed books translated into fifteen languages, Tobar’s work traverses the Americas—both geographically and spiritually—bridging journalism and literature in a voice that is both intimate and global. His most recent work, Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of Latino (MCD/Farrar, Straus & Giroux), has been hailed as “one of the most important pieces of Latino nonfiction in several decades” by BookPage, a “resonant and deeply affecting book” by The New York Times, and “lyrical and uncompromising” by Publisher’s Weekly.
Tobar’s literary range is vast: from the harrowing collective endurance of Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine and the Miracle That Set Them Free—later adapted into the film The 33 starring Antonio Banderas—to the intimate moral landscapes of his novels The Tattooed Soldier, The Barbarian Nurseries, and The Last Great Road Bum. His short fiction has been featured in Best American Short Stories, Zyzzyva, and Slate, and his essays and reportage have graced the pages of The New Yorker, Harpers, National Geographic, and The New York Times Magazine.
Currently a Professor of English and Chicano/Latino Studies at the University of California, Irvine, and a 2023–24 Guggenheim Fellow in Fiction, Tobar continues to examine the borders—real and imagined—that define the Americas. In this conversation, he reflects on storytelling as a form of resistance and reclamation, the spiritual dimensions of migration, and the enduring power of the written word to make visible the humanity of those history too often renders invisible.
Hector Tobar. What a privilege and honor to have you here at the Storyteller’s Corner for Chapter House, the literary journal for the Institute of American Indian Arts. Thank you for agreeing to be interviewed.
Thanks for having me.
Tell us how you got into writing and your writer’s journey.
I'm the son of an immigrant family from Guatemala. I was born and raised in Los Angeles. Growing up, reading was something very important to my family, and especially to my father. I discovered later that his mother was illiterate. Even my paternal grandmother was illiterate, a secret that my father kept from me until I was well into my forties and had established my writing career.
So writing was very important to us, but I didn't know that writing was a career that you could pursue. As an immigrant, I was encouraged to pursue a career as a professional, and I was a pre-med student when I went off to college.
But I always wrote. I wrote for my college's Third World publication at Santa Cruz. I wrote for various petitions and documents, and ended up eventually writing for the Solidarity press. In those days, the Central American solidarity movement was in full swing. Writing became part of my identity because I could write well.
I probably wouldn't have become a professional writer unless I had wandered into a community San Francisco newspaper called El Tecolote when I was about 23 years old. There, I started volunteering, writing stories for them. Eventually, I became the editor of El Tecolote. This experience was the beginning of my writing journey, and since then, I have always been seeking out new opportunities, taking on new projects, and looking for new ways to develop my craft.
Why do you write?
I'm an only child from immigrant parents who divorced when I was young, and there was a lot of isolation and a little bit of neglect in my childhood. So, I grew up very shy, but I always did well in school, and so that became a source of power to me.
When you're an isolated child and your parents are divorced, and then they get involved in multiple divorces, it becomes challenging. It was 20 years of constant shuffling of people in and out of my family. To cope, I developed a strong empathy for people and strategies to keep them close to me.
The two strategies that helped me the most were that I loved to read and write, and I loved being an empathic person.
Empathy is part of my personality because I always try to see things from other people's points of view.
These qualities made me a good journalist, which was my first writing profession. When you do journalism, you're forced to go out into the world. You can't make things up. You have to base stories on real life, and you have to go and interview people. And so I interviewed for the first time in my life, all kinds of different people.
When I became a journalist, I discovered that everybody has a story that, when you first meet them, you might not imagine. But that discovery is incredibly surprising and life-affirming.
Eventually, after a couple of years at El Tecolote, I got an internship at the Los Angeles Times and started writing there. It was shocking seeing my name printed in this incredibly powerful newspaper, which at the time had a circulation of more than a million, both daily and Sunday.
I took the stories of working people from East Los Angeles or South Central Los Angeles, and I sometimes made front-page stories out of them. And that's a lot of power to give someone when they're 25 or 26 years old.
In a certain sense, that feeling was addictive. But after a while, I started to get frustrated with the limitations of it. Newspaper writing is a very structured format style of writing. While I was still working at the Los Angeles Times, I took night classes in creative writing at UCLA Extension and Beyond Baroque. I wanted to write fiction, and eventually I quit my job at the Los Angeles Times and got an MFA in creative writing.
Was that a difficult decision to make?
I was being groomed to be a certain kind of reporter. The last job I had before I quit in 1993 was as the LA County Bureau Chief to cover the County Board of Supervisors. I was being prepared and ready to be a national correspondent. I was being sent up the ladder as a writer.
And I didn't find that satisfying, because I understood that my skills were being mediated through this corporation. And this newspaper, as liberal minded as it could be, was also cautious.
The newspaper had the perspective of the upper middle class.
So to answer your question, I had absolutely no problem leaving, and I was very confident. In retrospect, I didn't have much right to be that confident, because it's a very hard thing to get a foothold and establish yourself in American literature and fiction.
I was full of confidence, so no, it wasn't a difficult decision for me at all. I had people at the Los Angeles Times try to talk me out of it. They asked me why I was leaving. It didn't make any sense to them.
But it turned out to be the best decision I could have made.
But you had won the Pulitzer Prize in your reporting, right?
Well, a team of reporters and I covered the Los Angeles riots. I was proud of what we did that day. And the day that we won the Pulitzer, I was on the streets reporting. But I wasn't even one of the reporters invited to go to New York to accept the Pulitzer. What I got was a little Lucite paperweight. Receiving it didn't remove the chip from my shoulder. It just placed more chips on my shoulder.
So this decision explains why you write. You have no choice but to write.
I write because it is a beautiful way of interacting with humanity. There's no other way to put it. I’m working on my eighth book right now. I just sold my 7th book and my 4th novel.
Wonderful.
Writing is a journey into an emotional, intellectual state. It gives me insight into our history as human beings, and the things that bind us together and define our existence. It’s also an exercise in the use of language and in wordplay.
Writing is one of those few professions where you get better at it the older you get.
Writing fiction or literary nonfiction is related to experience and wisdom. You know about the human experience.
It's just a wonderful process to create a new character, especially when there's a challenge involved. You're reaching across to someone who's not exactly like you. That can be satisfying to take on and explore.
About what you said about being shy, do you feel you're more of an extrovert or an introvert? Do you get energy from a crowd, or are you just exhausted after you leave a crowd?
It's a paradoxical state of mind, because I am very shy. I'm so introverted that it's hard for me to get on social media. It's like a blade. But at the same time, last night I was the center of attention for 4,000 people at a graduation for approximately 10 minutes. My personality feeds off of that kind of experience. Writing is this thing where you take this very introspective state of being, where you're alone, writing, and thinking about something, and then it converts into this public creation that goes out into the world that brings you this attention.
In a sense, I'm both introverted and extroverted in different ways.
Okay, let's get into your book, Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino.” I would like to focus on the second half of the book.
Okay, that's good.
The first part of the book has been well discussed. And many have focused on the term “Latino,” but I love the second part, and I would like to explore it with you.
Oh, thank you!
In Chapter 8, you write, “And I have followed the Holocaust back in time with a reading of the history of the Armenian genocide and the mass deportation of Native American people in the 19th century in the United States. I now understand that all of these events are deeply interconnected.” And then you talk about the book, The Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory.
Please elaborate more on this idea of how those different genocides are interconnected.
One of the frustrating things about American culture, and especially American popular culture, is that things are always presented to us out of context.
We're not encouraged to examine the connections between things.
The Armenian genocide, the Holocaust in Germany and the rest of Europe against Jewish people and others, and the California and Native genocides in the United States are all part of a continuum of events that are related to nationalist movements, state building, and empire building in the modern world.
The United States as a country was founded on this theft of Native lands. The United States starts this process of capitalistic accumulation that begins with this theft. This incredible wealth that Native people helped to create. Native people lived with the natural wealth of North America.
And so the United States establishes a model that other empires seek to emulate. When the Germans invaded Poland, took over the Sudetenland and Czechoslovakia, and tried to conquer the Soviet Union during World War II, Hitler, as their leader, was thinking of creating a new republic. He needed a model of conquest, and he looked to the experience of the United States. He was interested in how the United States attempted to conquer Native people. The Americans essentially showed the world how to build an empire. It all begins by destroying Native people and their culture.
So there's a definite connection among all of these experiences of genocide.
Hitler very famously said, when contemplating the destruction of the Jews, and I am paraphrasing, “Well, look what happened with the Armenians.” The Armenian genocide had taken place a generation or so earlier in what is now Turkey, right? The Ottoman Empire in Turkey.
These events are all part of the model of building a national power or building an empire.
Often, the leaders, the movements, the dictators, the strong men who helped to build empires use ethnic division and ethnic difference to motivate people or spur them on to commit these acts.
In the late 20th century in California and Texas, acts of violence were required to accomplish this horror, like building physical and natural barriers to keep Latino immigrants from using these urban pathways through El Paso, Los Angeles, and San Diego areas.
They forced migration into the desert into a killing zone, where nature itself would kill people, and they were very aware that they were doing that. That has echoes to me of these other sorts of forms of ethnic violence that are taking place, because at the heart of it is about the ethnic engineering of the United States, the racial engineering of it. The United States in the late 20th century and early 21st century was becoming too Latino for some. There was too much Latino immigration for many people, and it became a threat.
My whole life, I have been an avid reader of many different histories. It has served me at this point in my career in trying to understand the current moment in the United States.
It's chilling because we know that the Nazis studied how the United States enslaved people and how they employed genocide towards Indigenous people.
That draws from the work of Jason De Leon, a great anthropologist, who is now at UCLA. He's written about that extensively.
Yes, I thought that was so important to uplift because we hear Trump saying that we are poisoning the blood of the nation. He says that we are vermin. He uses identical language to the KKK and other similar groups.
Absolutely.
I want to move on to this myth of race. Race is a social construct. It is a made-up story that has been 500 years in the making, from Hernán Cortés and others, all the way to the present. In writing the book, what did you uncover for yourself in terms of the social construction of race?
To tell you the truth, I was surprised and illuminated by the scholarship that has taken place in the last 20 years or so on the construction of racial ideas in the United States. There's been a lot of work done on the construction of notions of whiteness. I did not know until I was in my fifties that race is a social construction, that there is no biological basis to it.
Yes.
Once I learned that fact, I devoured various books. I'm married to a historian, and she introduced me to a lot of works that have unpacked these notions of race, especially with regard to the formation of the United States and ideas of racial separation in the United States.
Two of the most important ones were Mae M. Ngai’s Impossible Subjects, which is about race and the formation of immigration policy going back to especially the immigration reform of 1927-27, which established quotas for Southern European and Eastern European immigrants. They tried to limit immigration from Italy and Poland and other places where people were perceived to be backward. Their migration had transformed the United States in the 19th century. And so people were trying to stop it. That book was very important to me, because I did not know the history of US immigration law.
Also, Nell Irvin Painter's amazing book, The History of White People, which goes even further back, almost to antiquity, in deconstructing how notions of race developed, going back to the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution.
It was this incredible revelation to me that race is a myth.
Nevertheless, race is very real in the sense of what it means when you're a person of color in the United States, and you go to a cafe, or you try to hail a cab, or you try to get into law school, or whatever. Those are very real impacts. But those impacts of something that is a myth and a fantasy, which is something that doesn't exist.
It becomes a powerful way of thinking because you realize how many different kinds of social, ethnic, and racial identities there are. There are even racial and ethnic identities that are pan-ethnicities.
And some stories are invented to make up or explain a state of being. For example, Mexico is an incredible mishmash of people. There are many different Native groups living in what is now Mexico. And then there are these European migrations, and there's also a big African immigration to Mexico. Africanness is very much a part of Mexican identity. And so all of that complexity is reduced to one word: Mexican.
When you're in Los Angeles, or if you're in Denver, or if you're in Chicago, or North Dakota. Mexican means something else. It means a common set of qualities of facial types,
But also, it doesn't mean anything. If you look at what a Mexican is. Or if you look at what it means to be Guatemalan. If you look at any country, the same is true. Italy has 20 different languages. Spain is an assemblage of all of these different regional identities: Castilian, Andalusian, Basque, Catalan, and so on. There's so much scholarship about this topic. I read this wonderful article about what Spanish identity was before they arrived at the New World. Before the first contact, Spaniards were Catalans, Basques, or Andalusians. But following contact, they were afraid of the people of the New World. Now they were Spanish, unified against other groups in the Americas.
Interesting.
And so Latino is the same thing. It's a pan-ethnicity that is now treated in the minds of many people and the country as a racial identity.
When you describe criminal suspects on American television, film, or by the police, they use the terms white, Black, Hispanic, Asian, and so every country, every society, uses these terms in different ways, and it creates new ones. So, for example, in Britain, Asian means that the person looks like somebody from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh or the Indian subcontinent.
I can go on and on. This story of difference is constantly being renewed to create a sense of difference.
Yes, I listened to Desmond Tutu speak once, and he said, “The funny thing is that we're all African.” I wonder if you've also read White by Law.
Oh, no, I haven't seen it.
That's a great book, as well, by Ian Haney López.
Let's move on to Chapter 9 entitled “Lies.” I love this chapter because there was a righteous anger as you write about those who describe themselves as progressive, and how they view Latinos. And also you shine a positive light on people like Reyna Grande, who has written her incredible books, The Distance Between Us and A Ballad of Love and Glory, among others.
So talk about how it felt to write Chapter 9.
I had been a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, and I wasn't very good at it, because it was difficult for me to get into that denunciatory voice. But it was wonderful to figure it out, finally.
I did so after reading and listening to copious amounts of the critical writing of James Baldwin.
That was for me the key that opened up that voice for me, because James Baldwin is this incredible thinker and artist. He was a gay man who was mostly in the closet in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. He was experiencing the end of Jim Crow and the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement, and the violence with which the Civil Rights Movement was met.
So my chapter, especially, was the culmination of that journey of being a journalist and an essayist. I felt like that was the climax of that process, and learning what a writer of criticism can do. I've been teaching various masters of the critical essay. People like Eula Biss, who is underappreciated and has written some beautiful essays about whiteness and race.
My reading of American racial history and also my own lived experience of having to deal with liberals every once in a while, and the absolute infantilization of the Latino community, also led to this chapter. It's an easy place for them to go, where we treat our community as defenseless children.
We don't see their power when people are being rounded up and deported in your community. We're a majority of the electorate now in California, thanks to our immigrant families becoming citizens. And it's important to focus on those 100 or so who are being rounded up and the fear that that's causing. Yes, absolutely. But, unfortunately, this moment, and the past 5 or 10 years, prevent us from having a more nuanced and true understanding of what the Latino experiences, and in this chapter use my observations as a journalist, and also my hopes and ambitions as a novelist to discuss the nuances.
As a novelist, you want to portray the most complex version of the human experience that you can, because that's what makes a novel interesting. And that's what makes it art in some ways.
So that chapter was a culmination of all that.
You write, “there was no time to ask to learn anyone's names,” when you're critiquing this progressive in the book. I find that's the case now, that if we were to interview each of those 100 people you mention, we are missing so many stories, because each one has such an incredible story.
Yes.
You write stories about Latinos, and immigrant people have become weapons in an ongoing political struggle. Each newspaper story, blog post, or photo essay is a potential tool and argument in defense of our humanity.
And I'm wondering how that resonates with you in this moment, with the mass deportations, ICE coming in our communities, and Marines entering Los Angeles.
It's incredibly frustrating to me as a writer and novelist to be living in a moment with so many stark narratives. Think of the people who have been wrongfully deported, and so their stories are usually complicated. They are stories of people who have lived with various kinds of familial dysfunction, just being normal humans, and so the right and the left take various elements of these stories, and they use them for their own purposes.
But, as a human being and as a novelist, it's the wholeness that makes a person. The understanding of the wholeness of us as a people is on pause right now.
That's understandable. I mean, during the Holocaust, some people wrote novels.
There was a Holocaust novel, Sweet Francais, written by a woman who was killed in Auschwitz, but wrote that before they sent her off. They arrested her during the occupation of France. In Poland, the Jewish councils managed to put on plays in the middle of the Ghetto. People are starving to death, literally starving to death.
Those are very rare experiences, and it's not what people are driven to do in the middle of a crisis.
So what it means is that the development of our art is being temporarily stifled. It's been stifled by many different forces over the years in the United States.
So it's just one more thing that keeps us from being our true selves, and that puts us in this space where we're either the good, noble immigrant or we're the criminal and the deportee. And that's not what people are.
I hear students in the last few months say we're not just labor. That's just not the reason why we are important. They're frustrated by that sort of rhetoric. The rhetoric that says we built this country. I used it myself last night in my graduation speech.
They're frustrated by that narrative because it doesn't allow them to be more than that.
To tell you the truth, that's just me being an artist. But I think there's damage that's done to a people over time who are not allowed to be seen in their complexity.
There's a beautiful moment in your book where you talk about how your narrative for yourself was that you were an accident, or a series of accidents.
Yes.
And how you turn that narrative around. And I find the journey that you took is something that we need to do now in terms of how we view ourselves as Latinos.
What happens to us if we change this narrative that we were conquered to one in which we were invaded? Then our view of ourselves must change. Then, Indigenous people were never conquered. They were invaded, and there was an attempt to erase them and to erase their language. But they're still very much alive, and they have an incredible message to convey to the world, and now there's this whole movement within Latinos not to call themselves Latinos, but to call themselves Indigenous.
Oh, right?
Which is fascinating. Can you describe how you went through that process of deconstructing this story that you had of yourself, of being a series of accidents?
That's a great question.
I went through a period in my twenties of some profound depression that was related to the ongoing crisis of my family, of about 22 years, involving my parents and their marriages and divorces.
There were two very violent deaths. Both of my parents were involved with people who died violently.
I was in the middle of going through therapy related to the death by suicide of my mother's third husband, whom I knew.
He made me an accomplice to his death by suicide without me knowing about it.
I never thought about it in that way, and I have never talked about it that way. But he did. He made me an accomplice to a death by suicide. So during therapy, you go back to your story. I knew my parents met as a result of a car accident. I found out recently that it was a car that struck a pedestrian, killing them. It wasn't a car accident. It was a dead pedestrian. My parents sort of spared me that detail until recently.
So it's a pedestrian being killed, which only would have made the story worse for me and its impact on me. But they were very young. My mother was 19, and my father was 20 when they got pregnant and were young. Imagine you and I both have kids who are around that age.
Yes.
I was at the bottom of this emotional, psychological spiral. I healed in many different ways. I remembered that when I became a professor and I started getting these narratives, these papers from my students, in which I encouraged them to write creative nonfiction. And they go to that same place. They're remembering, “Oh, my mother and I were part of the other family, and my father doesn't recognize us as another family, or my father was an alcoholic, or my mother was a narcissist, and all these sorts of different experiences that people have, or experiences of violation. I feel very fortunate I did not experience that kind of violation, or even homelessness. Many of my students have been, at one time or another, homeless.
People internalize that kind of brokenness.
In this book, I described going back to Guatemala, seeing the place where my parents met, and then hearing all the stories of my own family's migrations within Guatemala and from Guatemala, and realizing that migration is this eternal thing.
It may make us feel broken to have a border between us. But it is a common thing, and that it doesn't mean that we're a tainted people. It doesn't mean that we are a condemned people. It doesn't mean that we're a conquered people. It just means that we've lived through human history because all human history involves migrations and displacements.
Even the history of the Roman Empire is one of migrations and displacements. When Rome fell, they migrated to Constantinople. People are always migrating.
This is your story. It is our story.
Oh, my God, there's nothing to be ashamed of because what happens is that you take that very common way of defending yourself against the hurt and use it to bury it, and to make it a secret. We make it something not to talk about it.
This action is a common thing in Latino families and many other kinds of families. So that was all part of that process in terms of the writing, of coming to that realization and conclusion, wanting to share it with the reader.
That was such a beautiful moment in the book. I wanted to say how sorry I am for your losses. And thank you for sharing that background.
Yes, thank you.
Death by suicide is such a difficult circumstance to understand. So I appreciate that very much.
In a separate matter, I was pleasantly surprised that you ended the book discussing queerness.
Oh!
We learn so much in terms of humanity by talking about queerness.
Why did you make that part of your conclusion? Why was it so important? Because it's somewhat discussed in the book, but just in parts. But then, in the end, it's almost like a crescendo.
I just thought that it was important that you did that.
You grow as a writer when you allow yourself to be educated, and you allow yourself to learn to keep learning about humanity.
I grew up in a very homophobic culture in Southern California in the 1970s and 1980s.
Later in life, I had a daughter who came out when she was a teenager. And then, when I was writing this book as part of a fellowship at Harvard, I had two assistants.
One of them was this queer young person, and they and I had many discussions. We always talked about queerness. They and some other people turned me on to lots of new ideas.
I knew that I couldn't write the book without having a queer perspective in it.
And I'd reached the end of the project, and I was thinking about Utopias, and it was once again that sort of critical voice, all these things kind of melted together. You know the sort of performance of Chicano and Black, and even Native American radicalism in the seventies was very important.
It created these spaces in which people could imagine a different kind of society, and they could imagine fighting against our society and all these different kinds of ways. And so it was to me, I knew I couldn't leave the book without going to those places.
I remember I was getting towards the end, and I attended this wonderful virtual talk during COVID on Celia Cruz and her funeral.
I was happy to quote from that discussion and cite the writer and thinker. It blended into this idea of imagining new Utopias where we, as a society, have to begin to imagine new ways of organizing ourselves, a new ethos for building a new society.
What advice would you give emerging writers?
Understand that you have something unique to say and that it is extremely important. It's vital to study one's craft and to study literary traditions and to read as widely as possible.
I don't just read Latino fiction. I'd be a very different kind of writer if I did. I've always read widely. I remember I think my literary awakening began when I was in my late teens and I read Richard Wright’s Native Son. It was a total awakening to me.
And then, throughout my whole life, African American literature and African American thinkers have helped me. And so it's something that's not of my experience, but which has helped me. And oh, my God, I could go on and on.
You know, people as diverse as the late Roberto Boloña, or Rachel Cusp, the great British novelist Martin Amos, inspired my current writing and fiction project. And so, it's important to read widely and study your craft, and realize that the way you become a writer is simply by spending time in the chair. As one of my MFA instructors used to say, you must make it part of your lifestyle.
My MFA program was the beginning of the period in my life in which creative writing became part of my lifestyle, my everyday practice as a human being.
I write probably 300 days out of the year. But even on those days when I'm not writing, I'm thinking, like a writer. So I'm searching the world for the elements that I can use in my storytelling. And so commit yourself to it as not just an art form, but as a lifestyle, a madness.
It's madness.
One also that I have to say, too, is that I believe in the wholeness of being an artist. All the things that you need to do to be a human being. I have a family. I'm married and have three kids who are now all adults, and all of that life experience is also part of becoming a writer.
And so I am writing my works, I would say that from the third book on, they're all very much have huge debts to my wife and my children because they've educated me as to the ways of life. One of the wonderful things about being a writer of color is that we have all of this incredible experience we can draw on. I think that anytime you feel disrespected, such as now, for example, by what's happening in this culture. Anytime you feel you've been, as we say in Spanish, menos preciado. When you've been belittled, when you've been demeaned.
It is a source of incredible power for a writer..
It works in all kinds of different ways. Kafka, for example, has this incredible imagination, and that comes from a place of feeling alienated and low. I mean, here's a German-speaking Czech Jew in Prague.
Kafka is one of many people who take this outsider status and transform it into art. The same thing would be said for James Baldwin as a novelist. His beautiful novels were born from being a Black, gay man in the 20th century. The MFA Program that I took was part of beginning that sort of journey into an all-encompassing life of writing, where you're almost always working.
You go out to a baseball game with your daughter, and you see all of these faces. I'll see a face. I can use that face. That's it. I can.
I wanted to ask you about Obed Silva, how you'd helped him. But I think we're running out of time.
Oh, I have his next book right here. I met him at Cal State LA, because my book was a common read there many years ago, The Tattooed Soldier.
And I just became friends with him. I wrote a couple columns about him at the LA Times, and I got to know him even better.
And then he showed me a few chapters of his memoir. I said, “Dude, you're a writer.” This story has to be a book, and I encouraged him. And then he found a home at the publishing house that publishes me—Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.
I can't wait for his next book.
Yes, me, too.
He's so joyful and an incredible painter. Well, thank you so much, Hector. I am so grateful to you for your time and wisdom.
Rey, it was an honor to be asked questions about my work. Thank you.
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 book reviews are at La Bloga, the world's longest-established Chicana-Chicano, Latina-Latino literary blog, Charter House's blog, IAIA's journal, and Los Angeles Review.
