No matter what the venue, we can be witnesses to our own existence. "If we do not define ourselves for ourselves," said Audre Lorde, "we will be defi… - Kathleen Alcalá

Since we were in church half the time, I used to sit there and read the Bible, which, like Shakespeare, encompasses most of the human condition.

I hope that by including these cultures, the Jewish and indigenous as well as the mestizo, we can get past the idea that we are a monolithic people.

I never made a distinction between realistic and magic realistic writing. The first book I read that probably fell into the accepted canon of magic realism was One Hundred Years of Solitude, by García Márquez, maybe in 1972 or ’73. I remember I found a copy in Spanish later and sent it to my parents, because it was so like our family stories. I also made my husband read it before we married, so that he would understand what sort of a family he was getting into.