Authors Cristina Rivera Garza and Mitchell S. Jackson read excerpts from their award-winning short stories
Authors Mitchell S. Jackson and Cristina Rivera Garza presented their readings in a virtual session that was part of the Writers Here and Now program in the Anti-Racism: Communities and Collaboration series (Pexels)
The Masters in Fine Arts (MFA) program in the Creative Writing and the Jiménez-Porter Writers' House hosted a virtual reading session with authors Cristina Rivera Garza and Mitchell S. Jackson on March 4.
Both authors read aloud excerpts of their emotional and thoughtful writing that reflect on their racial background and its history.
Rivera Garza, originally born in Mexico, is a professor at the University of Houston in Hispanic studies. She uses her Hispanic background as inspiration for her work and writes her stories in Spanish first before being translated to English.
During this session, she reads from her upcoming book “New and Selected Stories,” a collection of the stories she’s written over the past 30 years, as well as new ones.
The excerpt that she reads from, “Carpathian Mountain Woman,” is about a woman who has lived in the mountains for 20 years after leaving a city. She encounters a man in the military that shows up at her front door. Although she was scared, she still answers all of his sometimes ignorant questions and listens to his rants about the military.
Throughout the story, the woman compared her experience as a stranger to the village to the man’s experience in the village. Rivera Garza draws on how someone from outside a community, like colonizers, can interact negatively with the community.
For example, the woman said that despite not being from there originally, she learned their languages and their customs. In return, the people respected her and brought her into the community like she was their own.
In the story, it said that “they had the kind of cautious affection for me that one feels toward someone who, because she arrived late, has lost forever the mystery of the cause.” And because of that, they weren’t suspicious of her.
On the other hand, the man wasn’t accepted among the community because he did not take the time to indulge in their culture like she did. In the story, the villagers would point out that people like him wouldn’t learn their language and looked down on their culture. While this makes the woman uncomfortable at first, she embraces her new home in the end with pride.
Rivera Garza uses the phrase “every forest has a forest within” to show that history often doesn’t show the true hard work a community goes through to keep up the foundations, both physically and spiritually. She demonstrates that the village’s expectations of respect are different from the outsider's view because of what they have to do to maintain their livelihoods.
Jackson read three short stories of his – ranging from first person to third person. The award-winning author uses imagery and visuals in his work to enhance his mix of nonfiction and fictional tellings. He is also inspired by where he’s from: Oregon. By centering some of his work around the Black community in Oregon, or as he calls it, Black Oregon, he brings attention to how the state wanted to constitutionally ban Black people.
The first two stories were centered around his experiences growing up in the Black community in Oregon. The first story was about an uncle giving a character advice while the second was about a nonfictional telling of how Black boys had to be even more careful in dangerous activities because “killing a white boy would’ve been the end of your freedom.”
The third story read in third person was from a book he’s working on called John of Watts. It is about the Great Migration to California during World War I that spanned from 1919 to 1970. He describes how Black people struggled through Jim Crow and lynching while migrating from places like Louisiana and Texas.
In the story, families would do anything despite the financial constraint to travel to California so their families could be safe. They took jobs starting out as domestic workers and entered skilled positions in factories later on during the Great Migration.
Families would prepare for months for the journey and would dress their best to travel. Because people told them that life was better there in California, they had high expectations there that they sang gospel songs on the train there. Despite this, Jackson said this to demonstrate their reality: “But in Watts, in the city of angels, a promised land, their welcome was seldom the one of their hopes.”