Nicolás Kanellos on why Latino literature matters more now than ever
By hola | Published | No Comments
The novel, “The House on Mango Street,” by Sandra Cisneros is required reading in many schools and universities across the United States. With six million copies sold and translations in 20 languages, it’s no wonder the story of young Esperanza has reached millions.
The tale of a girl growing up in the Southside of Chicago in a predominately Hispanic neighborhood has captured the hearts of readers since it was published in the mid-1980s. However, the person who gave the book the chance it needed wasn’t from a big established press. It was Nicolás Kanellos, a Latino editor who had few resources but a passion for Hispanic literature.
For Kanellos, who first ran the “Revista Chicano-Requeña” literary magazine with Luis Dávila in the ’70s before founding Arte Público Press in 1979, the book’s publication was also an important milestone. More than 40 years later, Arte Público Press remains the nation’s oldest and most successful publisher of Latino books.
Arte Público Press has published over 600 books, averaging 25-30 new books each year, both in English and Spanish. Its founder Nicolás Kanellos has had a long and storied career himself. He’s won many awards, including the Hispanic Heritage Award for Literature. His most recent book, “Hispanic Immigrant Literature: El Sueño del Retorno,” published in 2011, won the PEN Southwest Award for non-fiction.
Kanellos, now 77, continues to direct passion and time toward uplifting Latino voices in the literary world. He’s the editor and translator of “Against the Wall,” a new book of short stories by Hola Cultura’s cofounder Alberto Roblest, which Arte Público Press published last year and will publish in Spanish this summer under the title, “Contra la Muralla.”
Recently, Kanellos joined Hola Cultura for an interview to talk about his career in editing and the inner workings of the Arte Público Press. He touched on the misrepresentation of Latino immigrants in literature, the importance of elevating Latino literature and what it’s been like to start and run a publishing company.
Read more to hear about the making of Arte Público Press and why its founder still thinks Latino literature matters.
How did you get started in Hispanic literature?
In the late ’60s, early ’70s, I was heavily involved in the Latino Civil Rights Movement, doing street theater and marching, boycotting, protesting and signing up people to vote. It became evident to my friend Luis Dávila and I, who were both involved in literature, that there were so many writers and artists around who didn’t have any place to publish their works. So, we founded a magazine called “Revista Chicano-Requeña.” I was the Riqueño. He was the Chicano. But from the beginning, we decided that the magazine would be national in scope and open to all the different Latinos in the United States, regardless of their ethnicity, race or gender.
We hoped it would bring them together and create an overall movement — this aesthetic kind of blend of Latinos. The magazine did very well in the 1970s because, basically, there was no literature or very little literature being published by Latinos. The individual issues of the magazine were used as textbooks in many classes. Because Luis and I were in academia, we had that whole network of universities and colleges available to us for promotion and circulation.
By 1979, our special issues did well by themselves. I, along with a group of Nuyorican writers including Tato Laviera and Miguel Algarín, figured we could publish books because these special issues looked like books and were actually consumed like books. So, in 1979, we founded Arte Público Press. We went to all the people that we were publishing in our magazine to kick off the press — people like the Nuyoricans, Tato Laviera, Miguel Piñero, Miguel Algarín, Piri Thomas, Nicholasa Mohr, Tomás Rivera, Rolando Hinojosa, Luis Leal, Sandra Cisneros, Ana Castillo, etc.
But the first thing that needed to be done, and we took care of back then, was the business end. Everyone has an aesthetic, everyone has an artistic vision, but getting the business together, getting the accounting together, getting the funds and managing them well, is the most important part. Because without your financial basis, you have no aesthetic, you have no vision. That is why most of the small presses and small magazines go under, because they don’t take care of business.
How did Arte Público grow from there into the publishing house it is today?
The 1990s was an incredibly active and fruitful decade for us because not only did we learn the trade, we launched Piñata Books, and we also looked backward. While Piñata Books was looking forward to growing our readers, we established Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage program. It’s a program to find all of the written culture — not just literature — diaries, correspondence, unpublished works, family memoirs, treaties, libros de cocina, whatever you can imagine that’s been written in by Latinos in the United States from the colonial period up until the 1960s.
We engaged in an active program to find all of the writing by Latinos in the United States, and that included immigrants and exiles who just spent some time in the United States. If they left a written legacy in the United States, we’re going to find it and recover it. That’s what we have been doing since then — recovering the actual documents. We digitize. We microfilm for preservation. We put it into digital form and create large databases of these documents of this Latino thought.
One of the strongest and most important parts of that legacy is the newspapers. We have become the place for the history of Latino journalism. We have the largest collection of Latino newspapers published from the very first one — published in New Orleans in 1808 — to the large dailies like El Diario-La Prensa de Nueva York, La Opinión de Los Ángeles and so on.
Why did you decide to write “Hispanic Immigrant Literature: El Sueño del Retorno”? What inspired you?
Well, I grew up with and I’ve always been surrounded by Latino immigrants. Throughout history, of course, Latinos have been denigrated. Immigrants, in general, are very misunderstood. Latino immigrants, in particular, have been demonized, not just recently in the last presidency, but over the decades. I’m very familiar, through all the research that I’ve done working with all the old texts, that Latino immigrants have contributed greatly to the United States and have their own literature and their own opinions, but no one knew about this.
The opinions I saw in the works that Latinos wrote and published — for instance, in the newspapers of the 1920s or 1930s — was completely different from what American literature and culture think immigrants write.
Latino immigrants always yearn to return to their homeland, especially when they came here as what I define as economic refugees. They have always wanted to return to their homelands and preserve their culture. It was not the case, as has been trumpeted through [U.S.] education, that they came here wanting to forget their culture, forget their language and adopt the culture of the United States. They didn’t want to leave behind their culture — that had been demonized as a culture of poverty to acquire a new, superior culture. What they wanted was to feed their families and have access to good education and opportunities. But at the end of the road, many of the original immigrants wanted to be buried in their homeland or at least go back and with their earnings, have a little house or whatever. This is completely different from the European immigrant story.
So, that was one of the motives for writing that book and proving these theses by citing the works of Latino immigrant writers. It was contrary to the beliefs that working class people do not have a culture, that working class people do not have a literature, that working class people do not have art. Latino immigrant literature proves that Latino writers, immigrant writers and working class writers have concepts of art, literature and culture and can produce works of art that are worthy of study, remembering and becoming part of the American Legacy. That’s why.
How long did it take you to write the book?
Well, you have to understand that back in the 1970s, I was using the newspapers I found, going wherever there were newspapers, Latino newspapers in collections, like at University of California, Berkeley or the Library of Congress. I was accessing those newspapers to find out about theater. I would read all those newspapers and get all the theatrical productions in Spanish. Eventually, it became my book that was published in the early 1980s, “A History of Hispanic Theater in the United States.”
But as I was doing this, of course, I ran into lots of other material, lots of writing, lots of art, lots of culture in those same newspapers. So, all along, from the 1970s, I had been accumulating data — not only accumulating data, but also founding the Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage program, which gave me all kinds of tools — the Internet, digital tools — to bring all this stuff close at hand, so I could read it and be able to form a book. So, you might say it took 20 or 30 years to produce that book. But actually sitting down and writing it only took me two years.
What did you want to teach to your readers with your book?
I want them to become more familiar with the kinds of authors and the kinds of works that Latinos produced — [writers] who were immigrants and writing for an immigrant public. But I wanted them also to respect working class culture and our people in general because Latino illiteracy has been grossly overemphasized.
It’s a lot easier to learn to read Spanish than it is English. Latinos historically have used newspapers to read and have been self-taught in reading. We can improve this. Now, literacy in English, that’s another story completely. But we have never been without literature, without reading. What happens is that newspapers were the primary genre, not published books, because they were more immediate, they were cheaper, they were in the neighborhoods. There weren’t many Spanish language bookstores but newspapers, we have rescued some 1,500 of them, and we’re still finding more.
Why did you decide to translate “Against the Wall: Stories” by Alberto Roblest?
If you publish a book in Spanish, there aren’t sufficient reviewing mechanisms in the United States to recognize the book and to let people know it exists. The newspapers, for instance, will not review a book in Spanish. Publishers Weekly will not review a book in Spanish. For the most part, Library Journal will not review a book in Spanish. So, the whole review mechanism — and because we don’t have many Spanish language bookstores, the distribution mechanisms or wholesalers — are all disadvantages for publishing a book in Spanish.
One of the ways to [succeed] is to translate the book into English. Publish the English version first. Get it reviewed all over the place. Then, use those English reviews to convince librarians and teachers and everybody else that the Spanish original is worth having and studying. We are working within what the market tells us. Unfortunately, the way the market is constituted today is that we don’t have an infrastructure for books, original books in Spanish, to be published in the United States.
What stories would you think are the most important now? Based on what’s going on in our society?
I think that the stories in “Against the Wall” are right on for now. They speak exactly to what has been going on in the culture, and that’s a great factor in the decision to publish them.
What’s it about?
It’s a collection of stories. Some of them are about immigration, but a lot of them are about movement and traveling. Some of them are about accommodation to culture in the United States, but the first couple of stories deal with the satirizing, even to a Kafka essence, of the whole issue of fear of immigrants.
As in the very first story, people wake up in Washington D.C. to find the Washington Monument covered with roaches. The whole city goes into a panic trying to figure out what happened. How did this come about? How do we deal with it? Later, it becomes evident that it’s a metaphor for immigrants, the fear of immigrants, and of them taking over the United States. It’s a great story. In fact, when we applied for support from one of our funders, the National Endowment for the Arts — you have to give five pages of each book you want to publish when you put in your application — I submitted that story, and we got the funding.
Is there a particular type of story that you find most suited to combating the country’s fear of immigrants?
I think subtlety is the best. Actually, this story about the Washington Monument is very subtle. It’s a kind of magic realist, and the stories are highly literary. I would be opposed to something that’s very prosaic and political. Political essays are important but not as fiction. I see a very strong dividing line between political writing and writing literature that may deal with social issues. As far as I’m concerned, all literature deals with social issues, one way or another. All literature has a political stance, but the way you deal with it makes it art or not. So, that’s where the dividing line is because if we’re publishing literature, we’re looking for art.
— Interview by SPEL’s Arts & Humanities team
— Written by Talia Jackson
Recent Stories
