Rubén Martínez is Fletcher Jones Chair in Literature & Writing at Loyola Marymount University. A writer, performer, and musician, he is the author of Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail and other works of nonfiction. Raj Mankad is Editor of Cite: The Architecture and Design Review of Houston and OffCite.org. He formerly worked with the Cricket Magazine Group and Penguin. Mankad grew up in Mobile, Alabama and received his MFA from the University of Houston. He served for four years as managing editor of Feminist Economics. Writer as PBS Star Raj Mankad        Rubén Martínez was a writer and editor at L.A. Weekly from 1986 until 1993. Subsequently, he became a contributing essayist to National Public Radio and a TV host for the Los Angeles-based politics and culture series, Life & Times, for which he won an Emmy. His books include The New Americans (New Press, 2004), a companion volume to the PBS series of the same name; Crossing Over: A Mexican Family over the Migrant Trail (Metropolitan/Holt, 2001); and The Other Side: Notes from the New L.A., Mexico City & Beyond (Vintage, 1993). His current book project is about ethnicity and the environment in the American West. Martínez worked closely with Raj Mankad—Editor of Cite: The Architecture and Design Review of Houston—as an advisor to Mankad’s mfa thesis at the University of Houston, which revolved around his time spent in Peru.        The following conversation between Martínez and Mankad took place over email, Skype, and text messaging. Martínez was in Cuzco, Peru at the time for the shooting of a PBS documentary about sixteenth-century Spain and Latin America. Raj Mankad: Imataq sutiyki ima hinalla hangada machda. Rubén Martínez: What does that mean? Like, “Fuck Werner Herzog and his Conradian contradictions?” Mankad: What’s your name how are you stupid bastard. Martínez: Good enough. Mankad: Let’s talk about how you are in Peru shooting a PBS documentary about sixteenth-century Spain. Martínez: You visited Machu Picchu eight years ago, right? It probably wasn’t as built up as it is now. It’s like a mini-Cancun at the base of the mountain in Aguas Calientes. There’s a mile-long line of hotels along the raging river. Everywhere you turn there are bars, restaurants, and artesanía shops. The whole thing is meant to bring the Euro or American tourists into an indigenous simulacrum. At the ruins, the guide tells them, “Put your hand close to the sundial. Put your hand near the sundial, but don’t touch. You will feel the energy.” The tourist in Bermuda shorts puts his hand out. Mankad: You put your hand out too, didn’t you? Martínez: I took a picture of the people putting their hands out. Our security for the shoot, you know, he is Quechua: an Indian guy. At one point I said it was good the rain went away. He said, “That’s because I made the rain go away.” He was completely serious. “You breathe like this and blow. You meditate and concentrate your energy.” There’s not that much of a border between me and the people with their hands out. We are all tourists in this place. We are all walking in the same simulacrum. We are all in the same New Age tableau. It is what it is. Scraps of history written over time. By the Indiana Jones historians. By local people who are cynical or self-serving or subversive. Each turn on either side of the native or tourist divide just adds another layer. Mankad: Can you rehearse to me the stuff you say on camera? Do you use a deep voice?                                           [Laughter] Martínez: My voice is different on camera. They call it a “standup” in TV production vernacular. You see it most on TV nightly news—the reporter facing the camera. In the context of this documentary filmmaking, I’m the host and I’m standing pretty much in the position of a native guide. I know I am liminal. But for the PBS audience, who knows? I’m brown-skinned. You’ll see me having conversations in Spanish with voiceovers. I can bring the audience along with me. There’s enough difference about me—my names, the linguistic space I inhabit—for people to see me as other or partially other.        There I am on Machu Pichu, walking along one of the grassy terraces, saying, “For the last five hundred years, the conventional narrative has been that the Americas were filled with backwards people who were defeated by a vastly superior culture, but recent scholarship paints another picture. These civilizations were incredibly advanced, capable of such engineering feats as Machu Picchu.” It’s a very basic reinscription. Like spoon-feeding the audience. An everyday speech by Obama gets across more complexity than this. It’s a weird suit for me to wear because I haven’t done it for so long. I walked away from public television more than ten years ago precisely because I was so frustrated with the level of discourse. I just don’t believe that the audience is filled with idiots, which is what some people in public television seem to think. So, it’s a challenge. Believe me. They run contrary to the approach I want. As a writer I’m always looking for the form that fits the story. The last thing I want to do is follow some silly mainstream convention. Mankad: Why did you take the gig? Martínez: That’s what I’m asking myself. It’s the typical predicament of a middle-class writer with two babies. Suffice it to say my wife and I did not buy a million-dollar house, but we also didn’t buy a hundred-thousand-dollar house. We have a mortgage and childcare. We wanted to be in a public school district that was strong. The bottom line was that we needed money and this is a way to make it. Am I saying I’m a mercenary? I wouldn’t do anything that I couldn’t stand behind in an ethical way. That said, there’s been a compromise aesthetically and a constant negotiation in the relations of power. Mankad: Tell me about an instance of that negotiation of power.                                           [Laughter] Martínez: We were in Chichén Itzá. The director wanted me to do a standup about pre-Hispanic history while climbing up the main temple, a really steep pyramid, just as the cameraman was going nuts saying, “We’re losing the light!” It was magic hour and the director yelled “ACTION!” I knew that it had National Geographic written all over it, except that I was the native subject, or a stand-in for one, although in the moment it was my body that reacted first—I knew something was wrong, but I couldn’t have expressed it with words—by tying up my tongue, by slowing my legs to an awkward crawl up the narrow steps, buying myself time to make an excuse for not doing it, or for declaiming the Greatest Postcolonial Speech Ever, indicting the Director (shall we call him the Administrator?) for crimes against culture and history. In that moment, walkie talkies squawked all around us. The pyramid was surrounded by Indians speaking a Mayan language, and then, in broken Spanish, “Señor, no tiene permiso!” The director practically cried and said, “But that’s the shot we’ve been waiting for all day!” The Mayans stood fast. I got off the pyramid and thanked the gods of my ancestors for intervening. Mankad: Jesus. Martínez: What’s amazing about this project is that it brings me back to Latin America after a decade of absence, except for a couple of short trips to Mexico City. From the time that I was twenty to thirty-five, I lived in Mexico and Central America for long sojourns. The majority of my relationships were in Spanish, including my romantic and professional lives. I kept coming back to the US, representing the South in the North. I wanted to act as a cultural translator because I was born into a very mixed position. I was exteriorizing a very interior process.        Coming back to Latin America has reopened that space, a totally unexpected dividend. It has been rich and productive beyond my wildest… I had no idea it was going to happen… it has opened so much of the aesthetic and linguistic spaces I had left behind, which in turn leads to a world view. In short, I discovered something that astonished me for its simplicity. The border does exist. For so much of my life, I argued we are all becoming hybrids: no border… I come back ten years later and that border is twenty-five miles high. It is real. It is material. It is special. A Mexican neighborhood in Houston is not a Mexican neighborhood in Mexico. It’s not, regardless of the cable and satellite TV. Cultural difference exists. Socio-economic difference exists. Economy and culture are linked. Colonial relationships exist. All those dynamics exist. They are powerful and moving. I hadn’t felt that so viscerally in a long time.        With Latin America, there’s that temptation to believe there is a borderless state. The old school essentialist Chicano movement wanted a borderless state by recreating a legendary ancestral Aztlan, which drove me nuts. Or you can look forward to a borderless world. I was part of the post-Chicano world; we proclaimed the border was being brought down. Obviously we acknowledged that it was being brought down by multinationals, voracious capital smashing protectionism, but we thought there was a much greater agency on a popular level—I mean socio-economically, popular as in the Spanish popular. It was a Romantic Marxist notion that the border was coming undone by a proletariat that crossed it at will, back and forth. My simplistic construction of it, as a writer and spoken-word dude, was that the migrants carried the South to the North and the North back to the South. You could see it as mestizaje. Our position was anti-essentialist. We thought it was cool that indigenous kids in Morelos were rapping in Zapotec. We saw more agency on their part than we saw cultural imperialism. The person who says “that’s fucked up,” that’s the essentialist Chicano speaking. But how can they say that, in English? As Richard Rodriguez would say, that’s the most American thing a Chicano could say. It’s the American who needs the indigenous essentialized. Mankad: But this is what people talked about in 1981—Richard Rodriguez versus Chicano essentialists. You’re talking about old demons. Martínez: The reason I’m thinking about those demons is that I’m surrounded by tourists who need the Indians—Indians who are willing to be represented the way the tourists need them to be. The tourist industry runs on essentialist representation. That’s its life blood. That little stone in my shoe from 1981 all of a sudden became a boulder again. Mankad: If you hadn’t gone to Latin America, we wouldn’t be talking about essentialism, we’d be talking about our mixed-race president. On inauguration day, you posted the following to your Facebook profile, “Rubén Martínez is considering that, as of this moment, almost my entire lifetime is bracketed by the March on Washington (I was barely a year old) and the swearing in of BHO.” I read that as celebratory, but also as an expression of becoming a literary casualty, of not feeling relevant anymore. Martínez: That’s not how I meant it. For my entire life, my own origin myth was the civil rights movement. We had overcome. Mankad: Now you are supposed to cry and fade away like Jesse Jackson. Martínez: I cried, I certainly did. I have become a fervent observer of everything he says. I’m inspired and cautiously optimistic in terms of real politik, but I have no illusion that the election ended any process. This trip has reinforced that impression. I’m seeing crushing poverty. The indexes of poverty in Latin America are absolutely unchanged in my 47 years. That’s with all the micro-entrepreneurship and billionaire philanthropists. Bill Gates, fuck you. Nothing you do can possibly have any effect until there is structural change in the Global South, which means there has to be structural change in the North.        Obama is fascinating. His first book flows out of post-colonial thought. I am Obama’s age. I am his generation. I know where he’s coming from—anti-apartheid, the ANC, solidarity with El Salvador, no nukes. The ’80s wasn’t just the age of Reagan. The ideological position of his first book is pretty clear. You see all the themes of post-colonialism, though Obama actually ends up in a relatively essentialized space, claiming his Blackness with Jeremiah Wright. Then he veers off and does something different with The Audacity of Hope. The point is, somebody who came out of post-colonialism is now the leader of the neo-colonial superpower. He is a smart dude. He has to be deeply aware of that colossal contradiction. And I would like to have a talk with him on those terms. Mankad: I campaigned for him from before he announced his run. I donated money. I had dreams about him. I saw him speak. I put up a sign in my window. Now, instead of the sign, my wife and I have a life-sized cutout of Obama in the window. When people walk by, they see it from the corner of their eye and it scares them. One person fell over. Then they laugh. For me, the switch from campaign sign to cutout is to acknowledge that he represents the state. It is an image to be scared of and to be comforted by and to shout at. Martínez: We know as writers that figures themselves are productive. As characters they become magnified. That’s why you have the cutout. Obama represents perfectly in his upbringing and young adulthood anyone from the Global South or descended from immigrants. His struggle is ours. When he goes to Europe, he acknowledges the U.S. isn’t able to deal with historical resentment against it because of the way it has acted, like a colonial administrator from afar. For anybody who is willing to listen, he is representing. We have to act differently in the world. Bill Clinton never talked like that. Obama even goes a step further. If the U.S. doesn’t deal with the problem, increasing attacks are inevitable. He makes the linkage. He says they hate us for a reason. Just to have somebody say that, and not get laughed out of the room like some Pacifica radio nut, is extraordinary. I think people on the Left who are being harsh on Obama aren’t recognizing how far we have come. He’s producing a text. He’s talking all the time. I’m really interested in what he has to say.        Obama represents the culmination of our work. I’m talking about you and me, and our global cohort, a vast array of people. We were the ones imagining this world to begin with. I don’t feel like history has passed me by, I feel like I pushed it forward. Forgive the colossal ego. Mankad: You’re making me cry like it’s inauguration day again. How does this affect your writing? Are you having to go back and revise the book you’ve been working on for several years? Martínez: There is a revision but it’s not because of Obama. The big revision I have to make is because of the economy. My book was written during the boom. I sensed something really, really fucking immoral. In the American West, the gazillionaires were buying hundreds of thousands of acres. Ted Turner got his million acres in Colorado. Rustic ranch chalets in the Rockies. Santa Fe gone berzerk with restaurants at 100 dollars a plate. That was what was happening during the main years of my research. I kept seeing heroin addiction and increasing poverty, people totally wiped off the face of the earth by the representations of the rich and famous. It was that very basic erasure that got me so riled up inside.        Something was wrong. The speculative monster was driven by tremendous greed and disregard. Where there is poverty in the US, it got worse during the boom. While a Manhattan couple in New York with the 10-million-dollar apartment in Soho was dining on native cuisine in New Mexico, there was an undocumented worker dying of thirst in the desert fifty miles away. The boom has gone to bust.        With the renewed critical energy I have from this trip, I want to write about the desert from, or in, Mexico City. And I want to write about Machu Picchu. It’s an existential desert. A desert that represents so many things. An existential desert I wandered into, as a person and a writer. A desert migrants die in. An epistemological desert. A representational one. The book is in complete flux. Part of me is freaked out. I have a five-month extension. The whole machinery of publishing—which just happens to be in total crisis right now—is telling you to fucking finish. But I have a process going on here. Like, life itself, you know? It includes having twins. The economy. The deep reflection that is coming from traveling to Latin America for the first time in ten years. That’s the poet in me. If I don’t represent that on the page, then what am I doing?