Until quite recently, any Latinex writing had to be the same story about poor people who come up north to work on farms and make good and send their … - Kathleen Alcalá

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Until quite recently, any Latinex writing had to be the same story about poor people who come up north to work on farms and make good and send their first child to college. That story falls within another story about the Protestant work ethic, the American Dream. This was the story we were allowed to tell. I don’t tell stories about earned success.

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About Kathleen Alcalá

Kathleen Alcalá (born 29 August 1954) is the author of a short story collection, three novels set in the American Southwest and nineteenth-century Mexico, and a collection of essays.

Also Known As

Alternative Names: Kathleen Alcala
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Additional quotes by Kathleen Alcalá

what I'm writing about in each of these novels is the notion that these are people who look around at the society they live in or the culture they live in and say, "This isn't necessarily where I belong. I need to change my place in history and I need to change my place in this culture."

I'm really interested in is this notion that when you read histories and when you read official documentations of countries and people, they tend to be very much on the macro level. When I did the research on nineteenth-century Mexico, you can find out where all the railroads ran, you can find out the front lines of all the battles, of all the wars, but you can't find out things like how women actually prepared meals in the home every day. That was much harder to find. The outward history, the official history, is easy to find. But the little things of how families interacted were much more difficult to research and I had to dig a little deeper.

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