SOURCE: Portillo Trambley, Estela and Faye Nell Vowell. “A MELUS Interview: Estela Portillo-Trambley.” MELUS 9, no. 4 (winter II 1982): 59-66.

[In the following interview, Portillo Trambley discusses the portrayal of women in Chicano literature, influences on her work, and her love of writing.]

[Vowell]: Could we begin by talking about how you decided to become a writer?

[Portillo-Trambley]: I really didn't think about it seriously until after I married and had children and found out I had to do something besides raise children and teach school. The first bilingual theater here in El Paso was started back in 1968. A group of four people from the university and about three other people who were interested in writing were doing translations of American plays. Or we would take some old Spanish play and try to put it on, because we called ourselves bilingual. But during one of these very desperate, frustrating periods, we were all sitting around and someone said, “What we need is material, material! We have no material!” And all of a sudden I just said, “I'll write you all a play.” I don't know why. It just came out. So I set about and wrote the most atrocious play that you could ever imagine. It was put on, and it enthused the crowd. And it was a terrible play. But the bug bit me. This was going somewhere, being bigger than myself, this magnification of the spirit, the soul, and the senses was all there. So, I was hooked, you might say. And since then I've done it little by little. I wrote more and eventually someone would say, “You ought to send this in.” That was Day of the Swallows, and it was picked up immediately. That play has been anthologized five times by different people, and it's been done in various universities. It's not the best play. I've rewritten it by the way. I've written in all, eight plays, and all of them have had rewrites, some of them as many as five or six times. But writing plays is about the hardest thing there is because everything is concentrated into dialogue. It's not true when you write short stories because you have there the ability to break free and go into a “stream of consciousness” and descriptions and intermingle the human beings with life itself and background and so forth. So, maybe because it's a challenge I write so many plays, and I rewrite them. Doubtless that was what really got me started.

Did you have any trouble initially getting your work published?

At that time Chicano literature was poverty stricken. There was very little coming out. Tomas Rivera had come out and Octavio Romano was starting his publishing house—he's probably the father of Chicano publishers. I didn't even send in Day of the Swallows. A friend of mine at the college sent it in. And, before I knew it, you know, I got this note that it was going to be published. It was my first. It was sent in, and it was accepted. Now, before that, I had gotten poetry done and had written an article for The Texas Outlook. But it wasn't anything where I said I'm trying to get published. Actually, I never did take writing seriously until Octavio picked up Day of the Swallows. There were lots of positive strokes: letters with encouragement like, “Keep it up. We need you.” I'm not a writer who struggled for a long period trying to make it because I think I was picked up when I was still a novice. I think I've learned a lot, and I'm still learning. And I hope to become one of these days a good writer. I don't know whether I'll ever get to it, but I'm trying, learning technique, I'm learning mechanics, I'm utilizing all the influence of everybody I read, and yet at the same time I'm trying to integrate it into what I am, which is Chicana. And, basically—although I might seem to be very Americanized and you might say I'm not a Chicana, I'm a gringa—back there in all those formative years, I was definitely, very much Mexican. My family were, my thinking, my philosophy, everything.

How do your plays differ from the actos being written?

I started on the other end of the spectrum, you might say, writing the structured play, the traditional three-act play. Many of them are psychological dramas, actually structured to bring out some kind of happening, a high point or change of learning in certain people's lives without any social protest whatsoever.

I think all actos, and practically everything that's been done, are a form of social protest. And I think one of the philosophies of Chicano theater is that theater should be used for unifying the people, making them aware of the injustices of America. One of the real arguments I have is that theater—one of the greatest, the most difficult, and probably the most sophisticated of all the arts—should never be used as a political tool. I think that definitely is a prostitution of art. It may be used to some extent as that; but if it doesn't grow out of that, it will die. Theater cannot survive a diet of social protest; it cannot always be the tool to unite people because it only unites them on an emotional level. And that's not the right kind of unification. If people are going to get together, to have common beliefs and common goals, it has to be done on a mental or intellectual level. When you unite people through the theater, you are only hitting the emotions. And that fizzles out; it doesn't have any lasting power. When I was young, I was involved in community theater: I acted, I directed, I taught theater—so to me it is almost like saying it will die before it begins because we are using it as a weapon for social protest. Mind you, I'm not saying that we shouldn't; it can be used, and it may be used. I think all theater started that way. It all started with that. But it grew. In my plays, I am attempting to do this, attempting to see that they go beyond the social protest. The social protest in my work is not done directly, or overtly, in saying, “Look, this is the white people, the gringo, and we're the poor, long-suffering, exploited Mexicans.” I show the wear-and-tear of poverty on human beings. And also the good side of it because poverty does have a certain element of teaching people. Wisdom in itself must have a certain amount of suffering. And I think that poverty has done this to a lot of the Chicano people, given them acceptance, an appreciation that the people who are affluent would not really have.

Why do you choose to write primarily in English? Were you bilingual as a child?

Yes, definitely, and my mother and my father were bilingual. My father insisted on speaking English in the house, and my mother and my grandmother spoke Spanish.

Did you speak English to your father and Spanish to your mother and grandmother?

I think that's the way it was, because, you know, we talked to him in English and to my mother and grandmother in Spanish. And, I feel very comfortable with Spanish. I feel at home with the Spanish. It's sort of what I like to breathe into my pores. But when it comes to any type of creative work, I feel I can, I do much better in English than I do in Spanish. The Spanish was only for speaking, and I did not do as much reading in Spanish as I did in English. Although I do, and I have taught Spanish, and I have read, but not to the great extent as I have in English. But I feel at home with both languages.

Do you ever think that you will write a novel or short stories in Spanish? That seems to be the trend these days.

This is what I'm doing right now. Last year, at the university, I wrote a historical play, Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz, which is the story of the seventeenth century nun in Mexico. For some reason I identify with her because of her love of books. It was done at the university—it's a very long play—and Herminio Rios wants me to translate it into Spanish. Then he will publish it in book form in Spanish, not in English. Because it's long enough, really, for the book. It was a labor of love. I took liberties with history in itself, but actually not enough is known about her to really write why she gave up everything in the end. Convents in the seventeenth century in Mexico were something of a social and cultural center, and the nuns had more freedom, like you might say, Chaucer's nun. They could travel and interact intellectually with the university people. So she was in the center of the cultural and intellectual life in the seventeenth century. She was not aware of the dire poverty, of the starvation of the Indian and the mestizos who were clamoring against the injustice of the Spanish. On the contrary, everything she writes is about the great traits of the Spanish viceroy and the queen and the king's son and their tremendous accomplishments. She's very very gongorian. She's very classical, writes with great artistry. Actually her plays are not that great, but her poetry is beautiful. And she was raised at court. She was taken into the viceroy's court at the age of thirteen and raised in the Spanish court, in Mexico City. She had a library of over two thousand books in her cell and all types of instruments—mathematical—she had a telescope, one of the first. She was a brilliant woman in every area. Finally when there was an uprising, she gave everything up and sold it. People claimed that she was forced to do this, and that she hated it. I like to think that because she was all Mexican and of Mexican blood, somewhere along her life she found herself and decided that the reality of her existence was in doing for the Indians of Mexico—because she was an illegitimate child, a mestiza, she was not of Spanish blood.

I think she had always wanted to be. And one of the lines I use in the play to begin with, when she sits in the viceroy's chair is, “Oh, I wish I could be a lady of the court!” And to the priest, who is her confessor and probably the greatest influence in her life, she says, “I'm the lowest of the low.” And he replies, “Do you mind that?” And she says, “Oh, yes, very much.” And at the end of the play, when he has just died, and she has seen him die, she says: “I forgot to tell him something. I don't mind being the lowest.” Sort of an acceptance of what she really was. This is my interpretation.

How do you see yourself in relation to the Chicano authors, the males who are writing today?

I cannot relate to them. I love what some of them like Ron Arias are doing. I love, of course, Bless Me, Ultima. I think it's one of the best novels ever written. It has a tremendous amount of symbolic beauty. I like what most of them are doing. I think all of them are being honest about what they do. Some of it is repetitive. I think we should extend ourselves from just being Chicanos, into something else—into being persons, and human beings, into not making things black and white. Because I tend to see that, except for Anaya who doesn't care about the black; he just goes into the Chicano experience and stays there within that scope. There are those who will bring in the gringo world; immediately the gringo world is black and white. You might see a little irony there. But, in essence, I think that this should not be so. I think that we should extend ourselves out of the Chicano globule and go out into the world, not looking at people as “us” and “them” but as just being there, having a place in the universe as human beings. And I think we're not doing that. I'm trying to do that, but I don't know whether I'm succeeding or not. I only know that I'm trying.

What is your opinion of the way Chicano authors portray women in their writing?

I think if you look through Chicano literature, you find that it's done mostly by males—I mean the extended writing like prose, not poetry, because we do have a lot of women poets. The male divides (this is typical of the macho concept) women into three categories: the adored, revered mother, who is, of course, a semblance of La Virgen de Guadalupe; then you have the suffering wife, who is supposed to be pure and good, have children, keep quiet, and be a good mother; then you have the lady who is there for fun and pleasure. They make these very distinctions, and they even write about the three types as if women were separate groups of individuals. I have always fought these images. We should be seen as a totality of all things, and we cannot be labeled as one or the other. We cannot be fit into a pattern. I keep telling many of these Chicanos, “How come you males don't divide yourselves into these three categories? Why women?” Of course, it's a historical prejudice for the convenience of men, you might say. And it's not only limited to Chicanos.

How do you fight the stereotypes, then, in your own writing?

Well, look at all the women in my stories. They're very independent; they create their own universes; they are very unorthodox. They are not held down by rules and regulations. Of course most of them are involved in, shall we say, very strong conflicts, which in essence will lead to some violence or whatever. But even so, they're not passive. They're not passive, they're alive, they have a mind of their own, and they're not afraid. So I think that this is one of the things I have been attacked about, the fact that they are not images of the Chicana, really, you know. I've said that they are definitely images of women, and they're images of angry women.

You don't think that they reflect an aspect of the life of the Chicana?

Yes, I think some of them, like the mother in the little story, Rain of Scorpions, who is a long-suffering mother who does accept the life of poverty and the injustices. But it's fair.

Your protagonist in Woman of the Earth, is she typical?

Yes, definitely, she is an Indian, she is receptive, she is gullible. She has faith, faith in people, faith in life. She is innocent. It's just a journey of the innocent, who will stay innocent even unto the end, except that there's an acceptance of a kind of subtle defeat in her later years. At the very end of the novel, she still wants to reach out for a hope, and she does in the final chapter. She says, “The reality of things I have attained: I have my piece of land; I am now free—you know in the United States.” But she finds that life still has the loneliness, the hardships. And that she must dream again. The thing is, she cannot live without that dream.

What writers have had the most influence on you?

Oh, as a child growing up, as an adult, I think, I admired Faulkner the most. I've read everything Octavio Paz has ever written. I like the Latin American authors.

Do you see your work possessing the same world view as the Latin American authors?

They're very European. And, let's face it: I'm a little Chicana in a little southwestern town in Texas who has never had the sophisticated, international experience. I'm not in the milieu of sophisticated intellectuals. So I can't possibly write about that—not from my experiences themselves, but from what people I've read and those that have influenced me, certainly I take from them.

I remember reading many books as a child. My favorite teacher was my English teacher, who was struggling very hard to do away with my Mexican accent; she never succeeded completely. She would send me to the library and started me on all the little romantic novels. I read all the books. So I was very much indoctrinated into all the American reading, types of literature that are available for the American kid. And I had periods when I was pregnant when I would shut myself up in my room and read all night. I read Sartre and Genet. I read all the Nietzsche and Jespers, all the philosophers—I've read, I like to go into every area, not just fiction. That's where my philosophy book, After Hierarchy, came from; it was the gestation and actual birth of all these philosophers and social scientists that I had read, and of course it came out into a hodgepodge of something terrible. But it cleaned out my system. It gave me a marvelous, universal spirit. Really, much more open and accepting. But of course I had to do away with a lot of the traditions and viewpoints that my family—my husband and my children and my parents and everybody—had, which were very parochial and very local. Of course, when you do this, eventually you think you are either going mad or you have become unorthodox, and you don't fit the pattern.

It's hard to be a writer, then?

It's very difficult. It's very difficult to be a writer, because it's a very lonely thing. But it's a very self generative experience. And I don't think you can find writers that really want to be writers that can limit themselves to prejudices and particular views. I think we all have them, basically. But not up front. They might be in our subconscious. I think all writers should try to reach for something universal, something basically very, very human.

Would you encourage other young Chicanos and Chicanas to be writers?

Yes, I would, for this reason: it's a beautiful experience. It's not a rewarding experience monetarily, but it's a beautiful experience when it comes to experiencing a totality, the act of creating a world and people. I think it is exhilarating. It's very fulfilling, very fulfilling. … It is frustrating when you don't have the time or the money or the means by which to really dedicate your life. Like I tell everybody, “All I want is a little more time. To write. But you know, with the family, and housework, and work, and all that, when do I write?” But I always find time. That's how much I must love it. I think it is something worthwhile that I have learned to write, that I can share.