Elena Poniatowska

I live to the rhythm of my country and I cannot remain on the sidelines. I want to be here. I want to be part of it. I want to be a witness. I want to walk arm in arm with it. I want to hear it more and more, to cradle it, to carry it like a medal on my chest. Activism is a constant element in my life, even though afterwards I anguish over not having written "my own things." Testimonial literature provides evidence of events that people would like to hide, denounces and therefore is political and part of a country in which everything remains to be done and documented.

I have always been drawn to characters like Jesusa Palancares. María Sabina, the one who performed the ceremony of the sacred mushrooms (LSD in Oaxaca), Juan Perez Jolote (the Chamula peasant from Chiapas), Demetrio Vallejo (the railroad leader), all popular heroes, even if they are not recognized. I admire them because of their wisdom and the way they impart it, with great patience, great prudence, with respect for the ignorance of the person who asks the questions.

I have always responded to challenges, followed apocalyptical personalities, apostles, Rasputins, Joan of Arcs who hear voices that come from Heaven, illuminated guides of humanity, holders of truth, priests.

It is one thing to identify oneself as a citizen of a country and to love its landscape, its people, its arts and culture. It is quite another thing to assess the workings of its social and political structure—the degree of freedom and opportunity enjoyed by its people, its standard of education and quality of life. A Mexican peasant has virtually no chance of becoming anything else. The standard of education was low fifty years ago and, if anything, is even lower today.

To this day, if I ask so many questions, it is because I don't have a single answer. I believe I will die like this, still searching, with a question mark engraved on my eyelids.

There is an immense abyss between the very few who have money and the vast number who are poor—and there is scarce concern on the part of those who have for those who do not. The politicians can be numbered among those who have. So my being a Mexican writer and loving my country has come to find its expression in opening up this reality to other Mexicans and to the larger world, expressed through the voices of the least empowered—women, especially, and poor people of both genders.

I write in order to belong.

We women treasure faces; in fact at any given moment life becomes a single face that we can touch with our lips.

That the poorest Mexicans don't deserve their ruling class is a truth that leaps out at once.

I have always had questions, and to this day, I don't have a single answer.

Carefully I asked them questions, visited them in their crowded neighborhoods, watched their kites cross the sky in February, treated them like kites, because that's how testimonial literature is. It fills one with anxiety, with insecurity. One handles very fragile material, people's hearts; their names, which are their honor; their work; and their time. And one tries to turn it into memorable material.

if I had been, say, a French writer, I would have been free to write whatever I wished, which would have been writing of an imaginative sort. But in Mexico, because of the suffering that is the result of centuries of corruption, there is a moral obligation to write of this. I could not ignore it, and, because I have become known for it and have refined my ability to write this way through practice, it became my principal work.

I learned, as they say, by doing. I began as an interviewer for the society pages of Excélsior—the only sort of thing a young woman could expect in those days...Since Excélsior is a daily paper, I had to produce these pieces every day with almost no time for review. Then I would read them in print and see that I had spent too much time on things of little importance and failed to ask about what mattered most. And so,with frequent embarrassment, that is how I learned. One also learns ­humility doing interviews, because people may not want to give you much time and so keep you waiting in an anteroom or are dismissive or in a bad mood, and all this has to be accepted.