Manuel Luis Martínez

author of the novel Crossing was interviewed via email in the spring of 2000 by Elisa Ambrogio, student at Capital

Dear elisa,
i'm sitting here waiting for the pain killers to kick in and
i thought I'd respond to your questions (i had wisdom teeth removed). i thought your comments on the indeterminacy of the contemporary novel very compelling. your questions are also very good. so good, i'm willing to put my misanthropy aside."

I think that every honest writer would have to admit that not all symbolic/allegorical elements are consciously created. I think that a well-imagined narrative takes on a certain reality, a certain consistency and texture. I did set out to create real characters in a real context, and I imagined it as fully as possible so that in creating that boxcar and Berto's farm, Luis's home, etc, objects of significance appeared to and for each character. All humans produce their own symbologies. To me, you're just holding an old quilt, but to you, it represents a living thing, a history of feelings and attachments. So the canteen that Luis has left over from his father's days, or Berto's symbolic desire for a horse, developed "organically" as they told their stories. On a conscious level, I did choose various elements that I intended to be allegorical: the 13 men, the campanario, the various injuries to characters' hands or legs, "darkness, "dreams that use the figure of the peon, etc. Ultimately, the beauty of a conscious allegory, is that the reader creates many of the connections within the structure the writer creates.

That's a tough question and an easy question. I knew I had to write the story when I went off to Ohio for graduate school at the tender age of 21. I had read about the tragedy the summer before I left and had filed it away mentally. But the story became more urgent to me when I found myself isolated, a Chicano in Ohio, living in snow and wondering why I had been so stupid as to leave my family, friends, and Mexican-oriented culture that had so much to do w/ my identity. So I felt that I could relate to at least some of the feelings these men had—the were scared, hopeful, and motivated enough to leave in the eternal hope that journeys have always promised. Luis is ultimately me. He was easy to draw, but Berto and Pablo were ultimately both sides of my father, to a certain extent: the father I had idealized and the father I had demonized, both representing the "dead" father Luis remembers in the boxcar. In a sense, the migrant's journey seemed to represent not just the "failure of roots" but of the failure of the father-as-nation, as well as the failure of "fatherhood" in my personal case. I don't want to get too psychoanalytical here, but I was dealing with a number of issues simultaneously, issues that have only recently begun to reveal themselves to me. Luis is wrestling with his own demons in that train, and it became apparent to me that his father-figures had to also be in direct contestation with each other--thus Pablo and Berto were "born."

Pablo's dialogue was perhaps the hardest to write because he has to be "evil" and power-hungry, yet compelling enough (smart enough) to make him better than simply a one-dimensional character. I've never been satisfied with his depiction because he seems to me to be a bit of a blowhard. His dialogue, since he pontificates and philosophizes quite a bit, seems a bit stilted to me, and I struggled hard not to allow him to be melodramatic, which is a difficult thing to do with an "evil" character. I don't know how successful I was with that.

I think that the hardest thing to write were the scenes in the railcar, because the other scenes take place in flashback, outside the confines of that dark, enclosed space. They were easier to imagine and contour and shape. Inside the car there is only darkness and stench and lonely interior monologues. Inside the car there is so much pain and thirst, and that is difficult to imagine, or rather, to render into words. I wanted to be direct and simple, to convey intense fear and pain. That sort of emotion is also difficult to portray.

That's a very good question. Generally, my readers point things out to me that I didn't see or intend. You might not believe this, but I never made the connection between Luis and my own middle name until a reader in the audience asked me why I had named the narrator after myself. Also, one reader wanted to know if I meant my book to be a discouragement to immigrants. I NEVER intended that, but rather wanted to humanize the migrant that is so often rendered as simply a statistic or a subhuman "illegal." One of the nicest realizations came from a professor at Penn that wrote to me that I wrote very much like Mexican great Juan Rulfo. She suggested that I was probably much influenced by him. I had never read Rulfo, but after that kind letter, I read his book The Burning Plains and was struck by our shared concerns about the struggle to survive and the brutality of life. So I find things all the time, but usually readers help me to do so.

I've been asked this many times and the answers generally puzzle my interviewers or readers. Many assume that I was most influenced by Chicano novelists such as Tomas Rivera, Ernesto Galarza, Oscar Acosta, Sandra Cisneros, etc. But I did not grow up reading them because I wasn't exposed to these fantastic writers in school. It wasn't until after my BA that I got around to studying (and focusing) on Chicano literature. My most influential writers, I would have to say, have been Mark Twain, Joseph Heller, JD Salinger, and Kurt Vonnegut. They are all dark writers whose characters find a way to survive in a hostile world, but lessen the pain of that brutal world through a sardonic, ironic, sense of the absurd. I admire that more than any other survival skill. Also, all those writers were responsible for giving me an education that I couldn't find anywhere else as a kid.

Yes, my father had been diagnosed with cancer and he was in the hospital awaiting a very serious operation. I realized that I was now 20 years old and yet had NEVER had a conversation with him. He was, and is, a very talented musician, and I had always idolized him, but when he left our family, he had taken all my illusions with him, and we just could never talk about anything. So I decided that I was going to give him a story to read that would communicate that which I could not articulate to him. I had been messing around w/ writing for a couple of years, but when I wrote what turned out to be about seven short stories for my father, I found that I had a calling. I never really looked back after that even though everyone told me I was crazy for not going to law school. I was first-generation college student and people thought I shouldn't waste my only shot at hitting the big time. But I knew that this writing thing was for me.

What would you like the impact of your fiction to be?

I want my readers to find that even though human communication is so difficult, that even though we are in many ways seemingly doomed to live alone, w/in our own constrained subjectivities, that we are NOT alone, that as humans we share the same longings and desires, and that if we can tap into that commonality, that we'll be better for it. I guess you could say that I'm a humanist that is not naive about the pain and suffering out there, but that still believes that through empathy (through art) can alleviate some of the pain and loneliness inherent in life.