SABRINA & CORINA: Writing a Place for Oneself

Season 2, Episode 8 Transcript

(Note: Also check out our lists, Discover Books by Native Authors and Latine and Hispanic Heritage Month Reading List on The Lift Up’s shop on bookshop.org)

V: Happy Wednesday! I’m Vina Orden, here with Tamara Crawford. And this is The Lift Up podcast — inviting you to discover empowering reads by marginalized writers. In this Episode 8, we will discuss Sabrina & Corina, a debut short story collection by Kali Fajardo-Anstine.

Sabrina & Corina, published in 2019, evokes a powerful sense of place with stories set in Fajardo-Anstine’s hometown of Denver and in southern Colorado, and that center the lives of mostly working-class Latinas of Indigenous ancestry.

Sabrina & Corina won a 2020 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. It was a National Book Award finalist in 2019, noted as “a powerful meditation on friendship, mothers and daughters, and the deep-rooted truths of our homelands.” It also was a finalist for The Story Prize, The Pen/Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection, and longlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize. Fajardo-Anstine received the 2019 Denver Mayor’s Award for Global Impact in the Arts.

So, without further ado, let’s get right to it …

V: Hey, Tamara!

T: Hey, Vina!

V: What a treat it is to be sitting right across from you, recording this episode in-person in a studio in Chelsea — well, New York City that is.

T: Yeah.

V: So, it’s been a few years since we’ve seen each other, and I still can’t believe you’re really here! It meant so much to me that you were able to come to the launch of Issue 5 of Slant’d magazine last month, and I’m glad we’ve also been able to do some other fun things while you’ve been here …

T: I know, I know! It’s so exciting that we can record this last episode of the season together in New York City in person! And thank you so much for inviting me to the Slant’d issue 5 launch — it was fantastic to see all the various artists, authors, poets, and contributors, but also celebrate the culmination of all of you and you and the team’s hard work! I mean, it was great fun, and it goes without saying that hanging out with you is always fun!

V: Oh, absolutely! I can’t wait to return the visit and meet up in London next time, so let’s plan for that.

So, Sabrina & Corina … I appreciate this book so much because it dispels particular ideas that I think a lot of us have about the West — you know, that we probably got from movie Westerns, or books like Little House on the Prairie, or writers like Willa Cather or Larry McMurtry.

I was in Denver once for a conference, and I remember deciding to visit the Black American West Museum — which is actually near the Five Points neighborhood where Fajardo-Anstine grew up. And I did that because I realized I knew nothing about the history of Black cowboys and freepersons who had settled in the West. Actually, the museum is in a building that was once the home of Dr. Justina Ford, who was the first licensed Black female physician in the state of Colorado — so that was pretty cool.

T: Wow!

V: Yeah, and it was also the first time I saw an exhibit about the Buffalo Soldiers who fought in the Philippine-American War, including Captain David Fagen, whom we’ve talked about on this podcast before, who defected from the American army and joined the Filipino insurrectos. I just loved stumbling on those surprising connections.

And just as Vanessa Riley showed us in Island Queen how much more diverse and intermingled British society was during the Regency era, I learned from that museum visit and from this book by Fajardo-Anstine how much richer the history of the American West is beyond the kind of whitewashed version most of us know. In an interview with PEN America, Fajardo-Anstine says:

Not being able to identify with canonical literature of the American West was alienating. I was made to feel an outsider in the homeland of my ancestors. Some of the greatest feedback I have received from Sabrina & Corina is from other young Latinx and indigenous women who feel newly inspired to pick up the pen … I think you will see in the next decade that we are coming for our rightful place in the center of the canon.

I just love that so much, and I do love that she does honor her Latinx, Indigenous, and even Filipino ancestors in her stories. It was kind of fun to learn that her great grandpa, Alfonso Fajardo, had immigrated to the US from the Philippines in the 1930s …

So, in the first story, Sugar Babies, for instance, the girl in the story, Sierra, finds bowl shards and human teeth. The site is soon taken over by anthropologists who don’t allow the public to see the dig site, upsetting Sierra. She asks, “Why not? We should be allowed to … It’s where we’re from. It’s our people.” Later on in the story, work stops on the site because of a formal petition filed by the Natives in the area.

This reminds me of something that happened recently — in August actually — when a professor of anthropology at San José State University got called out by Indigenous scholars like Diné poet Jake Skeets and Cherokee scholar Joseph M. Pierce, for writing this, frankly, white supremacist, colonialist op-ed in The Mercury News arguing against the California Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. It’s so troubling.

This professor took issue with folklore and oral tradition being among the ways that “cultural affiliation” — so, that’s the minimum requirement for repatriation or the return of artifacts like human remains — can be established. She also argued with the part of the law that states, “If there is conflicting evidence, traditional knowledge shall be provided deference,” because, she says:

Traditional knowledge, like oral traditions, is rarely recorded in written form … Furthermore, oral traditions, and tribal traditional knowledge in general, are awash with tales of creation, mythical creatures and supernatural events.

It’s so patronizing …

T: I know!

V: But what really bothers me about this whole thing is that somehow, she doesn’t understand that these are ancestral remains of living people who just want to bury their dead, because she basically sees them as objects for studying the past. And her insistence of the written word as the only kind of acceptable truth is also problematic, especially, as we’ve seen, how much is omitted by those who write or have historically written history.

And actually another scholar Saidiya Hartman calls this the silence and the violence of the archive, which she encounters in her own research about Black History. She says:

It is a history of an unrecoverable past; it is a narrative of what might have been or could have been; it is a history written with and against the archive. …

The irreparable violence of the Atlantic slave trade resides precisely in all the stories that we cannot know and that will never be recovered.

T: Yeah, it’s so true. You know, because of this book, I have similarly recognized there is so much of that history, as Fajardo-Anstine mentions in one of her interviews on her YouTube channel — “Chicana — Indigenous history from Southern Colorado / Northern New Mexico” — that I was so unaware of, and it made me want to dig in a bit more to start to learn more about it; that complexity between the indigenous communities and the Spanish conquerors. And in that research, I had found three starting pieces that helped me to start to recognize those ties (and there’s so much more that I will need to learn), but I want to share this with everybody, and obviously afterwards as part of the transcript, we’ll include these as resources. But one of which is an article from the Historic Denver Newsletter written in 2019; another article written for NPR on the Chicano movement in Denver in 2011; and last was a CBS local news article on a History Colorado exhibit in May of this year that talks about the forgotten history of the Hispano and Chicano influence on the shape of Colorado. There’s a number of resources as well that I’d like to acknowledge from Instagram of Native voices that I’ve been following, which have been incredibly helpful and voices of people who have been doing this work for so much longer, such as @illuminative, @westsuweten_checkpoint, @ainamomona, @tainolibrary, and @tainoindigenous amongst many, many others. And lastly, I find your connection to Insurrecto fascinating and interesting that we can make those connections with previous stories we have read.

So, I similarly love how Fajardo-Anstine discusses some of her motivations to show her history in her fiction. And she does this in an article for Bomb Magazine with Tommy Pico titled, “Invention and Subversion: A Conversation by Kali Fajardo-Anstine & Tommy Pico,” and in this article, she notes:

Denver is the adopted home of my ancestors, the urban area where they first came together in the 1930s. It was the place where they decided to lay down roots, creating a unique convergence to form my ancestry — Picuris Pueblo, Filipino, Mexican, European, Jewish. To me, Denver represents the space where the creation of a person like me is possible. But I didn’t see my personal history reflected in the state’s official story and early on I began to wonder why this was. My K–12 textbooks focused on European settlement from east to west, and from the time I was a little girl, I was angry about the invisibility of my Denver in the mainstream. Simply put, the city contributed to my creation and the creation of countless people like me. I wanted to show that in my fiction.

And going back to the quote from Tommy Orange, it reminded me of something I read on the Conservation Colorado website by Anna Cordova, the lead archaeologist for the City of Colorado Springs, where she states:

As one of two city archaeologists in Colorado, I am often frustrated that, as a field, archaeologists put people in the past. One of my big goals is to bring modern Indigenous peoples’ experience into light and show that our traditional cultural practices have endured and will continue.

I believe fields of conservation and archaeology could improve by bringing the Indigenous knowledge, the Indigenous science, to life. We can decolonize western thinking when we stop thinking about humans and nature as being separate from the land. We are not separate from it. Our impacts to the land are great, but we are impacted by it as well….

I really find Anna’s quote similarly powerful and a voice that should be amplified, especially in counter to the oppressive quote from the anthropology professor at San Jose State University.

V: I love that you found that quote by Anna Cordova because that’s another way that Indigenous people are erased — forgetting about Native historians and scholars doing the work to decolonize the academy. And it’s probably a good time to remind listeners to check out our Discover Books By Native Authors list on bookshop.org/shop/theliftuppod, which features nonfiction titles like the excellent primer, An Indigenous Peoples History of the United States, by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz …

So back to the book, a theme that recurs through a number of the stories like “Sabrina and Corina,” “Sisters,” and “Cheesman Park,” is the violence against and the disappearance of her mostly working class brown women characters. In an interview with Bustle, she spoke about her research for the story “Sisters,” and how many of the open, unsolved missing persons cases in Colorado were of women with Spanish surnames. She also noticed that the media would barely register these disappearances, unlike when white women went missing, like Laci Peterson, or Natalee Holloway, or most recently Gabrielle Petito. In a way, it reminded me of two other books we read, Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season and Mieko Kawakami’s Breast and Eggs.

And it was so fascinating to find out that Fajardo-Anstine and Kawakami found each other’s books and connected through Instagram, then they got to interview each other in ELLE last year!

T: Wow!

V: Yeah. And what each of them said about violence being an inevitable part of being a woman in their respective societies was really striking. So, Fajardo-Anstine says:

I come from a long line of Colorado women, many of whom have endured great violence. Whenever these acts were repeated to me as stories, the elders in my family delivered these tales in a restrained, methodic tone. This is what happened, and someone died. I think for a lot of my characters, their emotions live under the surface between the cracks of what isn’t said. Their closed exterior is a form of self-protection, something that is both part of who I am and also hardwired into my family’s storytelling traditions.

And Kawakami says:

When I decided to write the life of a woman, I guess it was really obvious to me that [violence] was going to be a part of it. This is the reality I’ve seen throughout my own life, the streets I know, places where poverty and violence are commonplace.

Now that I’m in the publishing world, most of the people around me belong to the intellectual class, an educated elite … On the one hand, they probably never experienced violence in its most obvious form, but on the other hand, they weren’t able to live life for themselves … So there are all kinds of violence. … When women are assaulted, they’re unable to speak up, out of fear of being punished further, because of the conservative stance of society, but the reality is virtually every woman who has grown up in Japan has been sexually victimized at some point in her life.

Both these authors are determined to represent their lived experiences as marginalized women in their fiction. But the point isn’t the violence, but how their characters manage to exercise agency and transform their situations despite being powerless and oppressed in different ways.

And I actually found the ending to this story, “Sisters,” hopeful, despite the protagonist Doty Lucero losing her eyesight after she’s assaulted then gaslit by the white man she’s set up on a date with. Throughout the story, Doty is obsessed with, perhaps even attracted to a Filipina woman, Lucia Barrera, who had disappeared and was presumed dead, only to be returned to her parents months later.

The final scene is at the wedding of Doty’s sister Tina. We see how Tina looks after her, fixing Doty’s makeup. And despite the sadness of the situation, we see the potential of a new beginning for Doty with a woman, who may or may not be Lucia, who, for the first time, makes her feel seen. I just love the sensuality and hopefulness at the end of the story and will just read a bit of it so our listeners get a sense of Fajardo-Anstine’s writing:

It was many hours into the reception when a girl with an easy, somewhat deep voice asked Doty if she’d like a drink … The girl sounded familiar, and the unseen parts of her, her voice and perfume, were musical and sweet in the way they collided. One gin and tonic turned to three and soon the girl blurted out an apology before asking Dotty what happened with her eyes (it wasn’t that they were ugly, just turned every which way). …

“I had an accident.”

“Oh, no,” said the girl, scooting closer to Doty and squeezing her hand. “I bet people say you’re lucky it wasn’t worse.”

“As a matter of fact,” said Doty, “no one says anything about it at all.”

T: Yeah, I really do appreciate how so many of the stories are connected not only in this collection, but also to books we have previously read and featured earlier on in our podcast. I mean, how amazing that Fajardo-Anstine and Kawakami found each other and shared these points of commonality between their work and motivations! Just going back to the interview Fajardo-Anstine did with Tommy Pico for Bomb magazine, she notes about writing these perspectives around violence against women:

Yes, I used to be afraid to explore violence in my work. I was embarrassed by the things I had gone through, of the violence my ancestors had endured. But over time, I learned not to be ashamed of the ways in which I am wounded. That isn’t my burden. My burden is to tell the tale to help free others of that shame.

And I fully understand that sentiment, and the sentiment of using this medium to help not only illuminate the issue, but to free others from shame. And it’s such a powerful and important point she makes here.

It’s also interesting that you mention “Sisters” here, because Doty’s story is exactly what I was thinking about as we discuss this theme. That story did evoke so much feeling — it had me screaming, why did this have to happen to Doty when she was the more feeling, more caring sister who wasn’t searching for a guy; who was weary of Joey but not believed by her sister when she expressed her discomfort? How does Tina feel — does she even think she is responsible for this or is she blinded by her bliss with her new Anglo husband and potential prospects? But you raise a point that I didn’t initially see, and that there is the potential to move forward in a hopeful way.

In “Cheesman Park” I was also bothered by how quickly others dismissed the violence some of the women in this story faced, just like in “Sisters,” especially law enforcement. So, I’ll just read a little bit:

Afterward she gave me a pamphlet on victim’s rights. I had never called 911 before and as I stood there half naked and shivering, I wished I hadn’t. A detective called the next morning. In a booming, breezy voice, he told me he understood how scared I must be, but pressing charges would mean a trial. It could take weeks, months, to convict this guy. It’ll be tricky, he explained, especially since you two weren’t technically dating. I eventually agreed. What I wanted most, I told him, was to go home. “Good Choice,” he said. “By the way. I’m looking at your pictures right now. You’re Spanish or something, right? You could be a model. Something in those eyes.”

V: Ugh, gross!

T: I know, seriously! And it hits really close to home given the light that is being shown on the disparate ways in which domestic violence and abuse has been historically managed or shall we say mismanaged, as well as going back on your point around missing persons cases in the US and the disparate or in many cases lack of media coverage on missing persons of color compared with Caucasian missing women. And this is a similar issue we are also seeing in the UK, and there are similar initiatives to lobby for equal coverage that’s being advocated for.

But then also recognizing that there is an element of the inheritance of trauma here — both in the way Liz’s mother’s sadness is also reflected in Liz’s face, and the way in which her abuse doesn’t seem to be a surprise to her mother, but she tries to get Liz to power through it with exercise. And I can’t help but feel that as Liz studies her mother’s face and her mother’s experiences, she is also reflecting on her own, particularly when she says:

As we rode the elevator, I studied my mother’s face, the corkscrew-shaped scar dangling along her jaw. It had never occurred to me, but there was a time before that scar, before my mother knew my father, when her face as still unbroken and she was still young.

And how Liz uses her body to save the homeless man from abuse, and recognizing Monica as a manipulative and abusive person and taking her own stand to break from Monica and break from that cycle of abuse. It kind of goes back to your point on how these characters start to exercise their agency and look towards transforming their situations despite their historic abuse and / or oppression.

V: Yeah, that’s a good point about how the trauma these characters experience isn’t just because of their current circumstances , and a lot of times, it’s actually unacknowledged trauma that gets passed from one generation to the next …

So, another theme that comes up in stories like “Galapago,” “Tomi,” “All Her Names,” and “Ghost Sickness” is gentrification and displacement. And there’s a physical displacement that happens, but also a socioemotional one, especially among younger generations who are trying to navigate their place in gentrified society.

“Galapago,” for instance, is a story about a young woman, Alana, who’s trying to convince her grandmother to move out of her house and into a senior home. And I love how Fajardo-Anstine writes this scene from the grandmother’s perspective:

Alana had been suggesting for years that Pearla sell her home on Galapago and rent an apartment in a building for seniors. The Denver housing market was booming, Alana often said … Even houses on the Westside were going for a half million dollars. But Perla had been on Galapago for sixty-two years, since she married Avel, when they were the first in the family to own property.

“Gramma, did you hear me?” Alana took a swig of water and used her thumb to clean a smudge on the glass. She spoke louder. “It’s more social, easier to take care of.” …

Pearla laughed. Her granddaughter looked so bossy in her career clothes, but whenever Pearla looked at her, really looked at her, she still saw Alana as an eight-year-old girl who had come to live with her grandparents on Galapago Street after her mother, Mercedes, died.

Eventually, an armed robbery does finally convince Pearla to move; but the way Fajardo-Anstine writes this story, your sympathy lies with the people who struggle to stay and survive in the one place they’ve known all their lives as home, and that includes the nineteen-year-old robber, who is just as much a victim of these strangers moving in, the “couples with expensive cars and Anglo names [who] had moved onto the block altering houses and gutting the yards” of the neighbors Pearla once knew on Galapago Street.

And this story really resonated with me as a New Yorker, especially in this pandemic, which has exacerbated housing insecurity among so many people — including those we publicly celebrate as “essential workers” — in a real estate market that’s glutted with multimillion-dollar luxury apartments.

T: I completely agree — there is this theme of displacement that runs as a common thread through some of these stories. And I might even go further and note that in some ways, the impact of gentrification enhances or exacerbates that feeling of displacement, and the need to either strive for that life or “rebel” or try to get away from it.

For example, in the story “Tomi,” which I think also is a great example of the themes of family and redemption — something that would have been awesome to explore, but I know we’re almost out of time — you know, I can’t help but feel that some of the choices made are in part due to the impact of gentrification and not knowing where you fit. At the beginning, when Cole returns from her short stint in prison she notes that “…the gentrification reminded me of tornadoes, demolishing one block while casually leaving another intact. Our block, Vallejo Street, was unrecognizable.” And then when her brother Manny parks in front of the house they both inherited from their parents, she notices that there is glass high-rise blocking their view, almost overshadowing them. Manny then notes, “Yeah, real fancy. It also ruins my view of the stadium. These property taxes are fucking me,” said Manny. “But we were here first. I’ll be dammed before I move to the suburbs.”

Which I found interesting because we encounter the subtext of the impact of gentrification on Cole, Manny, Tomi, and Natalie throughout the story. I wondered how did this feeling of displacement impact Nicole — was that a contributing factor to why she acted out, landing in prison? It’s an interesting question to explore. Equally, why did Natalie leave — and in tandem with this theme, why did she leave her son and husband behind? There is this part in the story where Cole is taking Tomi to the library on the bus, and she noticed the changing landscape, which I think is important to this point:

The bus drove through a part of downtown where new metallic apartments jutted into the skyline, mimicking the view of the mountains. Traffic swarmed and coughed under the city’s haze and healthy looking young people rode bikes through the streets, past the homeless who curled under wilted cardboard … “See that house?” he asked, pointing enthusiastically at a newly remodeled bungalow. “I think that’s Ronald’s house. Where my mom lives now.” I stared at the house, trying to imagine Natalie in a home like that. It didn’t seem plausible. It had a clean, square lawn and in place of an ancient cottonwood, infant trees were held upright with tiny ropes. The house even had a three-car garage and a basketball hoop beneath an American flag. “I don’t think she lives there,” I said. “Your mom wouldn’t like a home like that.” But as the bus rounded the corner, Natalie’s Honda pulled into the driveway and we both grew quiet.

And in reading that, I think back to so many of the stories in this book, and so many of the female protagonists who either stay in their current situation, or strive for those seemingly upgraded situations at varying costs to themselves. For example, as we see in the story “Any Further West,” when Desire Letica Cordova leaves Saguarita, Colorado for San Diego and they move into a house on Casey’s property, her daughter Neva notes:

The carriage house was nothing like our home in Saguarita. Palm trees and hibiscus butted against the front door, which opened to a small elevated stoop where cement steps and a white iron handrail led the way to Casey’s courtyard … my bedroom was a tiny eggshell space, while my mother’s was large and airy with her queen-sized bed dead center beneath the ceiling fan … The windows were always open, allowing in stark sunlight and city smells … “Ah, for the love of God,” my grandmother would tell me over the phone. “What a phony paradise.”

And as we progress through this story, we see Desire struggle to keep up appearances by stealing to give her daughter a birthday party in this new town even though they didn’t have the money, or enduring an up and down relationship with Casey in order to hold onto this new life.

Reflecting on this story also brings me to “All Her Names’’ and Alicia’s relationship with ex-boyfriend Michael and husband Gary and how she bounces between her various identities and names, both ones that she “owns” and the ones bestowed on her by others. There is a part early in the story when Michael is picking her up for an errand before they go tagging that I found interesting and missed the first time around until I looked it up.

In his worn leather jacket, Michael gestured toward Gary and Alicia’s concrete-and-glass house, a black square among the updated Victorians. “Where to, my little gentrification Malinche?”

And I didn’t know what Malinche meant, so out of curiosity looked it up to understand what role it had in the story and what meaning to Alicia’s character. Malinche, according to an article written for NPR in 2015, “was an Native American woman who aided Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés, with whom she had a child. In many ways her story parallels that of Pocahontas, but she’s often invoked as an Uncle Tom.” So, the term could be interpreted as being akin to being a traitor to your people. However this NPR article explores a bit more deeply to help understand more complex nuances and the fact that free will was probably not an option in her case.

But it was interesting to come across this in the story and try to understand its context here, as it starts to set out the divide between Alicia’s old life and new life, a schism that we see grow deeper as we carry on in the story, especially when Michael and Alicia are being chased by the police later on and the method she employs to get them out of trouble. And I don’t want to give it away as it’s a really interesting story, but re-reading it with this new context of understanding Michael’s “nickname” for her in the opening scene, I think also give us the opportunity to understand the title of the story and how this contributes to a feeling of displacement, as well as the sentiment when Alicia later says “I’ve always been able to find the North Star. It was one of those things my dad taught me, so that I’d never get lost. What does it mean that I can’t find it tonight?”

V: Yeah, “All Her Names” was one of my favorite stories in this collection as well, and that line speaks so powerfully of what’s lost beyond physical displacement …

So, I’m afraid we’re out of time here, and actually, I can’t believe it’s a wrap for Season 2 of the Lift Up! Thank so much to all of our listeners all over. I feel like I have to mention each country by name, since your support and encouragement just means the world to us. So, thank you to the US, the UK, Australia, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Canada, the Philippines, Japan, Taiwan, Mexico, Ireland, Singapore, Romania, and new this season, listeners from Germany, the United Arab Emirates, India, Hungary, New Zealand, Sweden, Spain, Brazil, Iceland, Italy, Hong Kong, Poland, Slovenia, Indonesia, South Africa, and Colombia! Our 17 episodes have had over 1,200 listens so far, so thank you from the bottom of our hearts!

T: Yes! Thank you all so, so very much! It seriously means so much to us that you are still listening and engaging!

V: So, Tamara and I are taking a break for the holidays and look forward to a new season in the new year. In the meantime, you can catch up on episodes you’ve missed and keep an eye out for reading recommendations from us. And if you enjoy listening to the podcast, please tell your friends to tune in and follow us on our Instagram page, @theliftuppod. You can support the show and local booksellers by purchasing books for yourself or your loved ones as holiday presents on bookshop.org/shop/theliftuppod. Again, thanks for listening and being a part of Season 2 of The Lift Up Podcast! Our family wishes yours safe and happy holidays!

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