It has been a year and a half since Cristina Rivera Garza (Matamoros, Mexico, 59 years old) arrived in Berlin. “I came with two small suitcases. Every time I travel with less. My ideal would be to live with very little,” says the writer. Although the sky is overcast, the light coming through the windows floods everything. In the large apartment, there are hardly any of his things. A couple of glasses of champagne that cost three euros at a nearby flea market, two books that she brought from Mexico, an old manicure case, the photo of her sister, Liliana, who presides over her desk. “I'm trying to throw away things that weigh a lot, that don't fulfill several functions. With the aim of recycling, but also of developing a broader relationship, emotionally, with the objects,” she reflects. From her home in Houston (Texas, United States), she longs, more than anything, for a sensation: “I miss the aroma of my spices when I open the cupboard. It takes time to choose them and since I'm only going to be here for a short time, I don't have many.” It arrived in September 2023 and will leave in August. The apartment, located in the Schöneberg neighborhood, in the south of the city, comes with a scholarship from DAAD Program of Artists in Berlin; He comments that David Bowie lived nearby in the seventies.
Rivera Garza stays on the fourth floor and the elevator has not worked for months. He opens the door with his hair down and a cup of tea in his hand. She smiles with her new green glasses. Before, in 2022, with another scholarship (The Berlin Prize, from the American Academy in Berlin), lived in Wannsee, on the outskirts. “It was on the shores of the lake, it had a beautiful view, and it impressed me, because there is the house where the decision for the final solution was made. [el exterminio nazi de los judíos]. “That was always in the air.” Although she travels light, her memory occupies much of her space, in her work, in her studies, in her activism. “In my training as a historian, closeness to archives was central. “It has had a huge impact on everything I have written,” she acknowledges. Rivera Garza is one of the most recognized Latin American authors: she has twice won the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize, and since 2023 she has been a member of the National College of Mexico (prestigious institution that promotes scientific, artistic and humanistic dissemination). Her work is extensive: she has published novels, collections of poems (Lumen has just compiled her complete poetic work, which spans from 1997 to 2015, in the volume My name is a body that is not there), academic articles and elaborate translations. “The themes are the same, but the ways of approaching them are different; Different literary genres have different tolerance for uncertainty,” she says.
She always knew she wanted to write, but she studied sociology in Mexico City and then crossed the border to train as a historian in Houston. “I knew since I started reading that what I wanted was to write literature. But I also understood very early that I had to have extensive preparation. They said that the objective of studying sociology was to change the world, it had a utopian spirit that interested me a lot,” she recalls, “and then I studied history because in a very naïve way I thought that historians had to know everything; Later I realized that we know a lot about very little.”
Only in memory do we feel
The first thing they told him when he arrived at his apartment in Schöneberg was that the plaque above the elevator door remembered neighbors who had been taken to concentration camps. “One of the first books I read was Ana Frank's diary. I think she has had an enormous influence on producing female writers, she made me see that a girl my age could write,” she recalls. She thinks that from the beginning she established a special bond with Berlin because, despite the rain, it resembles Mexico City. Both are cities with three wounds: that of the border, that of violence, that of memory. “I recently watched the Wim Wenders film Wings of Desire [El cielo sobre Berlín en España] and I was impressed to discover angles similar to Mexico City: vacant lots, a certain speed on the streets, that type of population working class, the violence, its traces… I think that is why it has attracted me so much.” Nomadism has marked her. “I come from a family of migrants. I was born in Mexico, but more specifically on the border of Mexico with the United States. Travel, wandering, nomadism, are part of the family heritage,” she explains.
As a child, due to the work of her father, an agronomist specialized in genetic improvement, her family moved a lot throughout the north of the country. At the age of 25, he moved to Houston and has lived there for more than three decades, always with periods away: he has often traveled for work (in recent months he has been in Helsinki or Nantes), lived on scholarships in Barcelona and Poitiers, spent some years teaching in San Diego (California) and others in Monterrey (Mexico), because he wanted his son, Matías, born in 1998, to grow up speaking Spanish. “I wanted him to be a fundamental part of our mother-son relationship, to have two native languages, not just one,” she emphasizes. She thinks in both languages. “English and Spanish have both become my home,” she defends.
He is returning to Houston this fall, on the eve of the presidential election. “I follow the news from there with great passion and anxiety, especially in recent times. The Latino vote is increasingly important. It was previously believed that all Latinos voted Democratic, but in states like Florida it has become clear that this vote is changing and that it has to do with the gender perspective. There are Latino men who vote more frequently for the right, for the Republicans,” he argues, “and both the Republican and Democratic projects seem to be competing to see who is the most idiotic regarding migration, and especially Latino migration.” .
Everyday activism
For her, her writing and her classes at the University of Houston are a small insurrection: “I feel like I have a responsibility to participate in the process. Not only the electoral process; Right now all the options seem tremendous to me. But for me, teaching in my creative writing program in Spanish is activism. 60. The program, by the way, began when this man, whose name I hate to pronounce, became president in 2017. Just when they were removing Spanish from the White House website, we inaugurated a creative writing program in Spanish in the country, the first at the doctoral level,” he says proudly. She doesn't want to mention Donald Trump, nor does she dwell on the work of the Tea Party anti-abortion governor of Texas. “We are seeing an all-out fight. Policies that attack the autonomy of a woman's body and that in some way open the door to violence are gaining ground, but we must also remember that there are feminist movements that are growing in strength,” she emphasizes, “feminism has taken public space and the public word. There is a language that 20 years ago we did not use, we did not know.”
Precisely the rise of feminist movements, with demonstrations such as the performance A rapist in your path from the Chilean group Lastesis, encouraged Rivera Garza to take out of the boxes where she had been stored for 30 years the story of her sister, Liliana, the victim of a femicide at the hands of her ex-boyfriend in 1990. From that impulse it emerged in 2021 Liliana's invincible summer, which the author recognizes as an activist book: “Extending the conversation seems urgent to me, not only in countries like Mexico, where feminicide violence is so acute, but throughout the world, because there is gender violence in all countries. Sometimes you talk more, sometimes you talk less.” Memory is crucial, its portable home has always been found in working on history, from the documents of a madhouse. (No one will see me cry, 1999) to the exploration of his family's origins (Autobiography of cotton, 2021).
The next thing will be to talk about volcanoes and how important potato cultivation was in Toluca, where he lived with his parents: “Just as one of the themes of literature today are colonial or anticolonial issues, a conversation that I find What matters a lot is the role of non-human beings, such as animals and plants, in our human stories. He does not conceive, he emphasizes, a writing outside the discussion, the fray. “For me it is important to subvert accepted, dominant narratives, that is what writing does,” he emphasizes. She has once said that if she had not been a writer she would have been an upholsterer, she laughs when she says that she will leave that for retirement. “And from what I see it's going to take a long time… But I love the idea of restoring furniture. The other day she was explaining this to a friend and she told me that there she was also acting as an archivist, thinking about tapestry as I think about writing, recontextualizing objects that seem to have lost their function. In her borrowed living room there are many chairs. She could start practicing with one of them.
#Cristina #Rivera #Garza #Spanish #continues #considered #secondclass #language