Two Poets, Two Revolutionaries, Two Friends: Gioconda Belli and Margaret Randall Converse

[MUSIC] Good afternoon. I’m president Garnett Stokes, and it is my pleasure to welcome you to this unusual and very special University Libraries’ Willard Lecture. Unusual because, for obvious reasons, We can’t hold the lecture in the Willard Room of Zimmerman library as we would normally do. Indeed, as the endowment requires us to do, except in the most unusual of circumstances. And believe me, the last seven months certainly qualify as that. But as I mentioned, this is also a very special lecture, 17 00:00:55,760 –> 00:00:57,200 for it’s an opportunity to celebrate the life and work of a very remarkable woman and extraordinary New Mexican.

01:03 - A graduate of Highland High School here in Albuquerque, who attended the University of New Mexico and went on to make her mark in 25 00:01:10,460 –> 00:01:12,095 the New York City art scene, the political and literary movements of Cold War Latin America, and the art and culture of the Southwest. I’m talking of course, about my friend and fellow Lobo, the writer, scholar, artist, poet and activist Margaret Randall, one of the boldest and most influential voices of her generation. Here at the University of New Mexico Center for Southwest Research and special collections. We’re very fortunate to house Margaret Randall’s manuscript and photographic archive, the crown jewels in our collection for those studying Cold War Latin America, US and Southwestern poetry, immigration law, or photographic art and portraiture of the southwest and Latin America. Thanks to the efforts of over a dozen campus units and outside donors who worked hard to bring it here.

02:02 - The collection is now yours to enjoy and explore, a resource to both educate and inspire. Now this afternoon, you’ll have the opportunity to be inspired by Margaret Randall herself, on whom I was proud to bestow an honorary UNM Doctorate of Letters in 2019. As we present her in conversation with the writer, poet and activist Gioconda Belli, titled “Two poets, Two Revolutionaries, Two Friends.” I hope you’re ready to be captivated by this discussion between these two dynamic and powerful women who have much to talk about. My thanks to the University Libraries, Feminist Research Institute and other departments and donors for bringing us this program.

02:47 - And to all of you who are joining us, from wherever you may be joining us, for this year’s lecture. Now volume up, lean in, and enjoy the conversation. >> Good afternoon and thank you, President Stokes for that introduction. I’m Dr. Liz Hutchison, professor of Latin American History and Director of the Feminist Research Institute at the University of New Mexico. The 2020 Willard Lecture at University Libraries features a conversation between two remarkable women, Margaret Randall and Gioconda Belli.

03:20 - Before I introduce our speakers, I’d like to thank Thomas Jaehn and Fran Wilkinson of the University libraries for supporting today’s events. I’m also very grateful to the many UNM units and donors who have supported the acquisition and processing of Margaret Randall’s papers and her photography for the UNM Center for Southwest Research. In today’s conversation, you’ll hear a great deal more about the life of Margaret Randall, a US-born lesbian feminist, artist, activist and scholar who grew up in New Mexico and at age 24, moved to New York City, 106 00:03:56,000 –> 00:03:57,290 where she interacted with some of the great creative minds of the last century. Writers, musicians, dancers, avant-garde theater people, and, most predominantly, abstract expressionist painters. In 1961, Randall moved to Mexico City, where she founded and for eight years coedited the iconic bilingual literary magazine El Corno Emplumado.

04:20 - And from there she moved on to live in Cuba and Nicaragua, returning to New Mexico in 1984 when she famously contested US deportation orders against her. Randall has published over 40 collected works of her own poetry, along with works of essay, Translation, memoir, and scholarly works on the Cuban revolution. Recognized as one of the most important US poets of her generation, Margaret Randall has received many accolades, including her selection in 2006 and 2018 as the sole English language poet for the Festival Poesía de las Américas in Mexico City, a lifetime achievement award from the government of Chihuahua, Mexico, The poet of two hemispheres prize in Quito, Ecuador, Cuba’s Haydeé Santamaría medal, and, In 2019, an honorary Doctorate in Letters from the University of New Mexico. We welcome Margaret Randall back to UNM. We’re also honored to be joined today by Nicaraguan Gioconda Belli, a Sandinista, a feminist, and an internationally renowned author of multiple works of fiction, poetry, children’s literature, and political essay. After joining the Sandinistas in the early 1970s, in 1975 Belli was forced into exile and, until the 1979 victory, traveled throughout the world representing the Sandinistas, particularly in Europe.

05:50 - Occupying a number of important cultural and political positions in the new Nicaragua after 1979, Belli quit the party in 1994 in protest of Daniel Ortega’s policies and leadership. Belli’s work as an important literary figure began in 1988 when she published a novel, The Inhabited Woman, which has been translated into over a dozen languages and put her on the world literary map. Her 2000 memoir, The Country Beneath My Skin, shook the world of Latin America revolution and remains an essential text for those who hope to not only understand the Sandinista movement, but also the misogyny of male-dominated revolutionary movements. Among Gioconda Belli’s many, many honors, 177 00:06:36,780 –> 00:06:37,825 we can list the prestigious Casa de las Américas Prize for Linea del fuego, The Premio Biblioteca Breve and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz prizes in 2008 and in 2018, the Oxfam Novib/Pen Award for freedom of expression. Gioconda Belli comes to us today from her home in Managua, Nicaragua, and It is both an honor and a pleasure to welcome Gioconda Belli, to speak now with Margaret Randall for the 2020 Willard lecture at UNM.

07:08 - >> Thank you very much Liz well I am thankful to Margaret for trusting me to introduce her book and have a public conversation about it. I was all ready to come to New Mexico on April 19th. I was ready to be in a crowded auditorium, even missing the coughing of people, yet here we are. A tiny virus has stopped the world and we have taken refuge in the virtual world. I am in Managua, it is the rainy season, our spring everything is alive and green.

07:49 - Thanks to Elizabeth Hutchison, of the University of New Mexico for your help and tireless work to put this together and honor your doctor honoris causa, Margaret Randall. I am humbled and happy because Margaret Randall, one of the phenomenal women in my life, has revealed in her own words the many facets of her journey to become the force of nature she is today. I finished another pass at Margaret’s memoir, I Never Left Home, with gratitude and tears. Authenticity in this day and age is becoming a lost art of being. It was so much of our lives when we were young.

08:41 - Had it not been because a friend pushed me to write what I felt, I would have never written poetry. I would feel things and think that to use them, so to speak, and not let them just fly like exotic birds sailing from my breath would rob them of their authenticity. So to read of a life led in authenticity was a nostalgic, profound, quasi-religious experience. Margaret Randall drank the cup of freedom she has sculpted for herself, even when at times she knew it could poison and kill her. Not many humans dare do that. How many human nights and days have been spent making decisions between a preconceived understanding of duty and what our own sense of self, our pursuit of happiness and fulfillment, compels us to do? How many of us have embraced this? Fields could be covered, especially with women’s bodies.

09:55 - Follow your bliss is a magnet, I often see on refrigerators of people who have chosen, 256 00:10:03,320 –> 00:10:05,650 like Thoreau said, to live lives of quiet desperation. But it would not be fair to qualify Margaret’s search as just following your bliss. It would be more appropriate to say that she went on a search for her own humanity and the humanity of others. A search for a way to quiet her heart, telling her things had to change, that life had to have more purpose and more generosity. She went on the road as a young woman, found the sixties’ energies, the poetry within her, but did not stop there.

10:48 - >> Her journey of discovery took her from her home in New Mexico to New York, to Mexico, to Cuba and then Nicaragua. For 23 years, she embarked in a quest, and her quest allowed her to discover her abilities to see and taste her own life and the life of others from the lens of a camera, the sound of a tape recorder, the vibrations of her poetry and her prose. She built communicating vessels between cultures. She became a chronicler of her time, of revolutions. In the process, she also gave birth to her children, found and lost loves, she kept searching within herself and found Barbara, found a home for her love, and a port to anchor without folding her ship’s sails.

11:47 - It is indeed rare to come across a will such as hers. She followed a straight and committed path to find a vision of a just and fair society with freedom, equality, and solidarity. She confronted one of life’s more contorted dilemmas: is it selfish to go after a calling, an ideal? To submit one’s children, one’s parents, lovers, and friends to the topsy-turvy life one has chosen for oneself. Margaret dealt admirably with these contradictions through the guilt and heartbreak they often entail. Only an absolute belief that one is doing the right thing, Precisely the least selfish thing one can do, allows this option.

12:40 - Towards the end of her memoir, Margaret tells us about the children she took with her on this journey. They are all adults, a man and three women. By now, they’ve realized what an enriching life they had, and the results of their mother’s wandering and commitments are four strong, principled, good solid human beings. To further introduce our conversation, I will read a stanza, a veritable self portrait of this uniquely brave woman. It is a poem called “Like a Flower’s Pollen,” from her more recent collection, A Starfish at the Beach, the Pandemic Poems.

13:26 - She writes, “I have stood with the few/ against the many,/ played my part/ in herculean wars/ as comrades fell/ about me. I have battled a government/ trying to deport me/ because it didn’t like/ what I wrote/ or that I was a woman/ who wouldn’t say I’m sorry.” To not repent of one’s life, to not feel sorry, to tell it as it is and be proud and humble at the same time is the spirit that inhabits Margaret’s memoir. It is beautifully written, interspersed with what I think are some of her best poems and you must read it. Now for the best part of the evening we get to questions.

14:16 - Margaret: “discovering destination as I move,” you say, “has been my modus operandi.” Reading this memoir, I had instead that distinct feeling that there was an instinctive agenda that you even with its contradictions, had developed a solidarity with the other, a curiosity even that propelled you in the quest, you take us along in this book. Am I right? Had you discovered something about yourself that pushed you into this quest? >> Yes, Gioconda, you are absolutely right. Before answering your question, though, I’d just like to say how moved I was when I heard you talking a moment ago about what we felt 30 years ago, 40 years ago. How not just the two of us, but so many people we knew and loved, the hope that we had for humanity, for social change, for making a better world.

15:31 - You know, as time goes on and we’re sort of having to content ourselves with less and less and less and less, it’s a good thing to remember that time, that world. And it’s also exciting and a little bit amazing to be able to sit down with you for this conversation. It’s been more than 30 years since we’ve seen one another in person, although, I have followed your work of course, and I’ve read some of your books during that time. And now, still grappling with a pandemic that’s ravished the world,that’s ravishing the world, and made international travel almost impossible and forced us to replace live events like the one we wanted to have with virtual ones like this one. I’m grateful that we can have this public conversation and talk about things that I know mean a lot to both of us.

16:33 - To answer your question, I think that I knew from very early on that I needed to find something better, a better world, to help make that world. But I don’t think that I knew that I knew that. I grew up in upper middle-class family, white family in New Mexico, in the provinces of the United States. A pretty protected upbringing. But something had happened to me as an infant. I was the victim of sexual abuse on the part of my maternal grandparents. I write about this in the book.

17:19 - I had completely blocked out memory of that incident, of those incidents because they were more than one. But I think intuitively, subconsciously, anyone who is victimized as a small child somehow searches for justice because you know that you have experienced something that is unjust, And you may not understand it, you may not even remember it. I didn’t remember it for many, many years until I was 50 years old in psychotherapy. But I always knew that somehow I wanted to know how other people live. I wanted to know what their problems were, I wanted to try to understand them better, I wanted to learn from them.

18:14 - And I think that that motivated my move from New Mexico to New York, and then to Mexico, and to Cuba, and Nicaragua, and finally back to the United States. So I think that I’ve only come to realize that very recently in my life, when people used to ask me 10 or 20 years ago, you know where I got my interest in social justice, I used to say, well maybe from my father who was a very just man. And you know, I think some of it may have come from him, but I think the deepest part of it came from that experience that I had and couldn’t understand as an infant. >> Wow, because I was going to talk about your father a little bit because I think he was also a person who gave you a lot of love for the others. I mean, I loved your father in the memoir, he sounds like an amazing guy. >> He was an amazing man, yes.

19:16 - >> Yeah, and part of your strength I think comes from having had that father because I had the same experience. My mother was like yours, a little aloof, and my father was instead a very loving… He was my accomplice. >> [LAUGHTER] [OVERLAPPING] Exactly. Same for me, yes. And I’m glad that that you found that he came across like that in the book because I wanted to be fair to both of them and you know, to draw them as accurately as I could. But I think I’ve got some very nice things from my mother as well. But my mother was more complicated. She, I’m sure had been abused by her father, who was the man who abused me.

20:05 - So she had those things to contend with, and my father was just an extraordinary human being. >> We were lucky. >> Yeah. >> Because my mother was like yours, she loved the theater. I mean, she gave me so much, but she didn’t give me the affection that my father gave me. So I wanted to ask you this, we are talking about all these places you have been, this times you have lived, I get your title of the memoir, I mean, you lived 23 years in Latin America. You kind of came into yourself, but you tell us that you never left home.

20:53 - What do you mean by that? >> That’s an interesting story. I should say, to begin with that I have an original title for the book, which was “Workbook.” I wanted to get the sense that it was an unfinished, even though I’m almost 84, that it was an unfinished life, an unfinished memoir, and so I thought that “Workbook” would be a good title for it. Unfortunately, or fortunately, I don’t know, Duke University Press did not like that title and they wouldn’t accept it. and so as very often has happened to me in recent years, I had to go to Barbara, my wife, to try to figure out – because she’s very good with titles – So she was the one who came up with the title: I never left home, and I think it works because what I hope it says anyway is that although I did leave home many many times, I never really left the home that you spoke about in your first question or in your introduction, which was the home inside of me, or we’re always sort of searching for that home that lies within us. >> That center, no? >> Yeah. >> It is what I feel about Nicaragua.

531 00:22:12,750 –> 00:22:16,330 >> I was fascinated by the woman you kept 22:16 - dreaming of that turned out to be your great, great aunt, Hannah Pollack. Made me think of a therapy called “constellations,” where one is invited to take a journey into the past, and connect with their ancestors. Because supposedly, there are things that these relations are still solving through us. Could you tell us why it was important to find her, and what was this kinship about? What did you feel? >> That’s an interesting point, there’s actually a photograph of her in the book. I didn’t know her name, I didn’t know who she was, but I frequently dream things that are useful to me in terms of my writing or even in terms of my thinking and feeling.

23:07 - Back in the early years of coming back to this country, with the immigration case, and all that that meant in terms of my life. I began to have these dreams in which this woman would appear, and she didn’t tell me her name. I wasn’t even that clear on what she looked like, but I was very clear, on what she was telling me. I had a number of dreams, one after another, and she would always come, she would always stand there, she was clearly from Hannah Pollacks’ generation, the way she was dressed and so forth, the way her hair looked, and she told me a lot of things about her life as a woman back in the late 1800s. So, basically what she was telling me was, you’re lucky [LAUGHTER] not to have been born when I was born, and she made me feel grateful for the kinds of changes that women were able to struggle for in my generation, in my life.

24:16 - But at the same time I realized how much we have to still struggle for, how much of the journey is yet to come. And then I went to teach at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, shortly after I, a couple of years after I came back to United States, and I taught there for nine years. And in Hartford I found relatives that I had no idea I had, they were cousins of my mother, aunts and uncles in my mother’s family. My parents had never mentioned these people to me. And I was giving a poetry reading one evening at Trinity and I read a poem about this woman, without naming her, just saying, this is this woman who comes to me in my dreams and so forth.

25:11 - And one of my mother’s cousin’s was at this reading, and after the reading, she came up to me and she said, “I know who you’re talking about, and she looks very much like you, and I have a photograph of her.” So a few days later she brought me this photograph and that’s how I learned her name and what relation to me she had been. For many, many years I kept her photograph up above my desk just reminding me of the women who came before us because we stand on their shoulders, you know. >> Absolutely, it’s very fascinating, I went once to this constellation workshop. And I was writing about an ancestor of mine and it’s unbelievable because they really make you see some things that are, it’s a little bit like new agey, but it has a point.

26:13 - You do with a role of thread, you throw it back, and back, and back and you realize that there is a link between us and those who came before us, it’s really interesting. [OVERLAPPING] So tell us a bit about the experience of discovering that Randall came from Reinthal, and that your paternal grandfather was Jewish. They decided to start a new life and the same thing was true of your mother, I think, no? Did you find this acceptable? Did you ever identify yourself as a Jewish person or did you cut all the ties with that? >> That’s a very good question, its also very complicated and it’s one of the questions that I tried to answer in most detail in the book. Of my brother and sister and myself, the three of us, the three siblings, I was actually the only one of my parents’ children who was born with the name Reinthal, And I have a copy of my birth certificate in which Reinthal is crossed out a few years later and Randall is put in its place. So I asked my parents from a very early age, I would ask them, “why is this?” you know, I had seen a copy of my birth certificate and I wanted to know.

27:44 - and I also wanted to know why my paternal grandmother was named Reinthal, but my father was named Randall. So I found out that my parents had changed their name, basically it was my mother’s idea. My mother was also from a Jewish family, not just my father. They were both from Jewish families, but my mother was really anti-Semitic. She would not have said that, of course, she would not have admitted it, but she had been taunted as a child because of being Jewish and she claimed that she never wanted her children to go through that and so forth.

28:23 - So she was the one behind the name change, in terms of my parents, what my mother wanted was what she got, my father always went along with it. So I’m not sure that he would have made the name change if it hadn’t been for her. But throughout years and years since I grew up, and I would periodically ask my parents to tell me why they did this, why they made this change in our last name, they would always say, the typical things, that it’s easier to spell, this that and the other thing. Until very shortly before my mother’s death, she finally admitted to me that she just didn’t want anyone to know that we were Jewish. So in terms of your question, “do I feel Jewish?” – I don’t really feel Jewish because I didn’t grow up in Judaism, I’m also completely non-religious, I don’t really feel a part of any religious expression.

29:25 - But I do feel Jewish in the sense historically, I mean I identify with the victims of the Holocaust. I identify always with the oppressed, so in that respect, I do feel Jewish, but not religiously. >> Now you set up in this memoir to talk about time and place, but before we go with you to New York, I would like you to talk about the restrictions you felt as a woman. But also about the liberal attitude of your parents with their bodies and sex. You say your mother told you that she preferred you had sex at home, better to do it in a safe place, that’s fantastic.

30:15 - [LAUGHTER] She even took you to be fitted your first diaphragm when you were a teenager, I did that exactly with my daughters three decades later. So you didn’t grow up with a negative idea of sex, and I have wondered if that made us break through the conventions of womanhood, having a healthier attitude about sex. Because I am convinced that female biology and sexuality are the foundations of discrimination and patriarchal domination. And I think having had that sense of acceptance of our bodies, of our sexuality, might have helped us in understanding feminism and understanding our power. I don’t know if you agree with me. >> It’s really interesting to hear you say this, it’s giving me a lot to think about that I must admit, I haven’t really thought about it before.

31:21 - I think you’re right, that it was important that my parents were very liberal in that sense, not just about sexuality, but really about everything. I can remember as a teenager, my friends would come to the house and talk with my parents and with me about many things they couldn’t talk about with their own parents. And so my house was a nice place for us to be in that sense. And yet it was complicated because my parents didn’t have a good marriage sexually or in any other way. And so I also received that message, which was a difficult message as a young woman, especially as a young woman growing up in the ‘50s, which was such a repressive period in the United States and I think around the world.

32:13 - So I had a lot of mixed messages in that respect, I think that I really learned a lot, I hear you say that you did this with your children. And I can imagine you doing it, and I can imagine because I know you that you did it very authentically. But I don’t think that my parents did it that authentically. I mean it was humiliating for me when my mother took me to be fitted for a diaphragm before I had any desire to be physical with a man. It was also humiliating for me to think that she wanted me to be making love with somebody in their house, it didn’t happen.

32:57 - She encouraged it but it didn’t, I rebelled against that. I think where I got my first image of a really strong woman, sexually and intellectually and creatively was when I began to have mentors. The first one was Elaine de Kooning, who was a painter in New York in the Abstract Expressionist Movement, and we became very close when she came to New Mexico, and I later followed her to New York. And I think it was women like Elaine, rather than my mother, who really were models for me in that respect. And I’ve tried to model that with my children, I don’t know if successfully or not, you’d have to ask them.

33:50 - Yeah, I think you’ve given me something to think about. >> [LAUGHTER] Good. >> Because I think that it’s a very mysterious area. My mother was amazing that way but it was the same thing. She would tell me about how to be a woman was wonderful, she made me feel so good about having my period, that I felt sorry for my brothers who were never going to have their period [LAUGHTER] but at the same time she gave me all these mixed messages. So you got married and I did the same to become independent basically, and then you traveled to Spain.

34:35 - After that you left your husband and went to New York. Your friend, you were just talking about her, Elaine de Kooning, introduced you to that world. You were obviously influenced by the sixties and the place and the people you met. You also began writing poetry. Was it there where your consciousness and desire to change the world were born? Tell us a bit about that time and place and some of the amazing people you met. I loved your story about Allen Ginsberg, about asking Allen Ginsberg for you to come and meet him.

35:16 - What I want you to do is, we already talked about where your consciousness came about. But I imagine living through the sixties, it must have been really become part of a different, more adult kind of consciousness. Tell us a little bit about what happened in New York. >> It was very important time for me. Not just the people, the people were extraordinary, and it was the first time that I lived among people who saw art as work, who saw politics as work, who saw social change as their work, not something you did. Parents in those days and I think still today often say to a child who wants to be a poet or a painter, “yeah, but what really are you really going to do? You can do that in your spare time,” because they see those things as secondary and primary is making a living or if you’re a woman getting married and having someone take care of you and so forth.

36:30 - New York was extraordinary for me in the sense that I lived among all these people for whom their creativity was the main thing that they did. What I saw and what I experienced was that you could do that. You could make that be the main thing. Of course, you had to have a job, you had to work to eat and pay your rent, and so forth. But that secondary, so it was reversed. Of course, the sixties, you mentioned the sixties and I tried to give the sense in this book. What an extraordinary period that was. I think it’s very misunderstood these days.

37:10 - There’s very few books about the sixties that satisfy me, that really make me feel what I felt back then. We had such a sense of change and you did too in Nicaragua. I mean all throughout Latin America and the world, It was a period when we believed we could change the world. When we believed we could do things. I’ve learned in terms of art, of my poetry, I started to write seriously in New York. I learned discipline from these people. I learned that it wasn’t all about inspiration, that you had to work at it.

37:47 - But I also had some very fortunate experiences. I got a job. I worked as a waitress and a secretary and things like that for a while, but then I got my first job that really meant something to me. It was at a small organization called Spanish Refugee Aid, and we aided the Republican refugees of the Spanish Civil War who were in detention camps in France or in North Africa. And so it was a charitable organization but it was also political. I think there, beginning to understand what the Spanish Civil War had been was very important to me.

38:34 - My boss was Nancy MacDonald, who was an extraordinary woman and also a mentor to me. The board of Spanish Refugee Aid had Hannah Arendt on it. It had Dwight Macdonald, it had Margaret de Silva, it had a number of really great minds, and so as a very young woman I didn’t understand half of what they were talking about. But I began to absorb those ideas especially from people like Hannah Arendt. Mary McCarthy was also on that board. So that was important. And then knowing some of these great artists and theater people, musicians, jazz musicians, Thelonious Monk and people like that was extraordinary.

39:29 - I think those four years in New York were just fundamental for me in that respect. It opened me to the world. I think I produce the book, my first poem about my first political demonstration. It was about a cause that nobody even thinks about anymore. That was important to be able to know that you can get out, you can demonstrate for things, you could raise your voice, you can make yourself heard. >> Did it change your relationship to men? Were you a well-behaved girl during that time? [OVERLAPPING] >> I wasn’t well behaved.

40:18 - All the women of my time and that generation. I went from man to man and had many many short affairs and so forth. So it didn’t really change me in relation to men but I think it did leave a knowledge in me, a deep knowledge that the way men and women related to one another at that time was just wrong. And it’s interesting because the few relationships that I have with men still who I met back then, that mean something to me, were not lovers. They were friends. >> Another important milestone that happened in New York was the birth of your son Gregory. You chose to be a single mother.

41:12 - Was it a very hard decision? In what way did it change your understanding of what it meant for a woman to be a mother? >> It changed it completely. It changed it absolutely, and it was not a hard decision for me. It was hardly a decision. I don’t even know what the word decision means, because in my life I’ve had the impulse to do this or to do That, and I just follow some kind of innate deep knowledge that I can’t often even articulate in words. I had been married as you said before. It was a bad marriage to get out of my parental home, and that didn’t work. I didn’t know whether I would ever find a man who would make a good husband, where we would make a good relationship together.

42:06 - But I very much wanted the child, and so I just decided to have Gregory. It wasn’t a hard decision, that was almost an automatic decision. And living in that world with painters and poets and so forth, they just loved Gregory and it was completely natural and wonderful. >> Sounds like Cortázar’s Rayuela, you know where they say the mother has a child that she brings around like a package, but it has a bad ending. I’m glad Gregory had a good ending. >> Cortázar and I actually used to talk about that.

42:51 - >> Really? I love that chapter of Rayuela, it is Unbelievable, it is one of the most amazing chapters where the little boy is with all of them. What made you decide to move to Mexico? You mentioned you wanted to spend more time with Gregory, and also the ease to find child care. I was very happy to hear Biden and the Democrats include into the program and platform for affordable childcare, because I think we owe women a great debt, because the values of society have not taken into account childcare, and we would have needed childcare that would be state of the art, well staffed, programs available for working women. I would say that it’s a major cause for women’s advancement, >> That they are held back because of the lack of childcare. That very agonizing decision many women who work have to make.

44:11 - You either work or you take care of the children because you cannot afford childcare. So that pulls women back from whatever career or something they might have. So tell us about how Mexico changed your mothering, and did this influence your decision to have more kids? >> Well, that’s a very interesting and also contradictory story. [LAUGHTER] When I mentioned that it was just so easy for me to have Gregory in New York and it was so natural, that’s absolutely true in the sense that Gregory with my situation as a single mother, and Gregory is my son, were accepted by all my friends and they adored him and so forth, but it was very very difficult in terms of childcare, as you say. If childcare today is a problem for working mothers, imagine what it was like in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s in New York City. It just didn’t exist.

45:17 - Elaine, of course, Elaine de Kooning always had these wonderful ideas and she found this very expensive school called the Dalton School. Where the high school students girls, not the boys, had a class where they took care of three infants. The school received these infants in day care, as a way of teaching their young women and young high school women how to care for children. Elaine got me into that program when Gregory was six months old. No, when he was six weeks old, and then it ended when he was six months old.

46:04 - That was wonderful, although I had to take two subways and a bus and then walk and take him uptown and come downtown to my job, and go uptown in the afternoon to retrieve him. But, that solved it until he was six months old and then I didn’t know what to do. And so I found out about something called Jewish childcare, I went and I tried to convince them that my son was Jewish although he hadn’t had a bris and that was a problem, and I threw a tantrum in the office. I for many years thought that that tantrum was what had gotten them to accept Gregory into this Jewish childcare program, but I later discovered, and I think this was partially behind my wanting to move to Mexico, leave New York City, is that although Gregory was very well cared for by a family in Jewish child care, I discovered, I sensed and then I confirmed the fact that one of the goals of Jewish childcare was to take these children for Jewish parents who couldn’t have children. Of course, they didn’t steal the children, but they began to tell the mothers, “imagine you’re a single mother, you’re not wealthy, you can’t give your child opportunities and we can place the child with a family that would really give them opportunities.

47:36 - Wouldn’t you like to have that happen?” When I realized that that was the goal, I was just terrified. I knew, I guess, that they couldn’t take my son away from me, but I just didn’t want to have anything more to do with that. And so I remembered because I had been in Mexico, that in Mexico you can have home help. You can have a maid working for you. I hadn’t yet gotten into the whole issue of the problematic aspect of that. And so that was one of the reasons that I went to Mexico.

48:10 - I also think that, I was a little bit tired of New York by that time. I realized that I was a poet, that I was a writer, but that I could do that any place, I didn’t ask to be in New York to do that. >> Yeah, that’s a great thing about our job, that we can do it anywhere. Well, now we come to El Corno Emplumado, which is such an important part of Latin America history and also of your history. And Sergio Mondragón, this became one of the most important chapters of your life.

48:49 - What did you want to accomplish? How did it come into your head, to do that? There’s so many letters in your memoir, artists giving a high evaluation of the magazine. I know it is still considered, I think the most prestigious and significantly cultural vehicles ever that served as a bridge from Latin America to the United States and more cultures. So, tell us how was it? How did it begin? A little bit to whet the appetite of the people who are going to be reading your memoir. >> Yeah, I’ll just play a little bit about this because actually my chapter on Mexico is the longest chapter in the book. It’s 70 pages long and a lot of it is dedicated to El Corno.

49:47 - When Gregory and I arrived in Mexico, I had been given the telephone number of a Beat Poet in the United States Philip Lamantia, who lived in Mexico. When he was visiting in New York and he said “When you come to Mexico, here’s my telephone number, look me up” and I did. That was where I met Sergio and I met a number of other poets from different countries in Latin America. There were quite a few Nicaraguan poets actually there. Ernesto Cardenal was part of that group and Beltrán Morales, a wonderful Nicaraguan poet who died tragically, quite young. Then Fernando Valle.

50:33 - >> Mejía Sánchez, no? >> Right, exactly. There were quite a few Nicaraguans, There were of course, quite a few Mexicans. There was Raquel Jodorowsky from Peru. Although she and I were the only women, once again, almost everyone were men, but there were two women. We would meet at Phillip’s house in the evenings and read to each other, and I think we soon realized that we couldn’t really understand each other’s work. Even if we understood the language, even if the Latin Americans knew a good amount of English, we knew some Spanish, we had never read Vallejo or Neruda or Huidobro, and they had never read, Whitman or Williams or Pound.

51:21 - We just didn’t know each other’s influences, and we began to realize that we really needed some kind of a vehicle, a magazine, or some kind of a forum where we could do a lot of translation, good translation and where we could make Latin American poetry accessible to North Americans and vice versa. I guess the two of us who really took that idea to heart were Sergio and I. And of course, as was always true, has always been true in my life, my intimate personal life was very interwoven with my public life or professional life, creative life. And so we fell in love, we got married. I had two more Children, two daughters, our first Sarah and Ximena, with Sergio. We then gave birth together to this extraordinary project which was El Corno Emplumado.

52:23 - In eight years that the magazine existed, I think we published more than 700 poets from 30 countries. We weren’t able to really fulfill our dream of making every issue bilingual. That was just too hard and took too much time to raise the money and walk the streets and read the manuscripts that were coming in, and shepherd the magazine through the printing and distribution. We did everything by ourselves with a little bit of help sometimes, but basically it was the two of us. The magazine had an average of about 200 pages every three months, it was a quarterly.

53:09 - So we did have a few issues where we were able to have them completely bilingual. One of Mexican poetry, one of Cuban poetry, but mostly it was just the poetry in Spanish and the poetry in English, which wasn’t always the same poem. Then also essays and letters. Our letters section was just great because poets would write to us from India, from Finland, from Greece, from Australia, and they would tell us…it was as you say, a wonderful experience. It’s a magazine that is still being referenced today. I just did an event yesterday, as a matter of fact, with Mexico’s Library of Congress in which we spoke for an hour about El Corno.

54:05 - >> El Corno was, and especially now where all those magazines at least Latin America, I think in Colombia, they have the best that are still paper. But there is still, I think Critica, Argentina or Uruguay, Crisis, I don’t remember exactly a name. You mentioned that you felt at home in Mexico, and you also tell us about breaking up with Sergio and meeting Robert. You dedicate little time to your different relationships, that caught my attention. You skip writing about their emotional repercussions, of the ending and new beginnings, and men come and go, and seem to live like props, [LAUGHTER] seem to leave no trace in your memoir. I imagined you made that choice.

55:13 - >> I wanted you to talk a little bit about that. Did you make that choice or that’s how they are kept in your archives? [LAUGHTER] >> [OVERLAPPING] I did make that choice. I certainly hope that they don’t come off as props, because I don’t think of them as props. In fact today, I have a very good relationship with Robert, with Sergio, with the men I’ve been married to or lived with. I think we getting along much better now than when were married.

55:49 - I think probably I didn’t want to dwell too much on the drama in the relationship or what eventually broke up the relationships, because it was important for me in this book to tell the truth about my relationships, not just with men but with everyone. I think there is enough about each of these men so that it can be obvious to the reader why the relationship ended. But break-ups are there due to both people, they’re not just due to one. I’m sure each of my ex-husbands has, I know they have their own stories. I’m happy that these days and especially I think my children are happy that we get along, their fathers and mothers get along, their mother and fathers get along.

56:47 - I never wanted in this book for it to be gossipy or vindictive in any way. I didn’t want to dwell on unresolved problems, I wanted to lay the problems out. I didn’t want to hide them, but I also didn’t want to dwell on that part of my life. >> It was interesting, I was thinking that you got married. Do you think there was a little conservative little girl still within you that made you get married, because I had many men, but I didn’t marry all of them. [LAUGHTER] Not all of them. But you married a lot of them. >> No, I didn’t actually.

57:35 - I married Sergio because it was important for us not just to live together, for me to get Mexican residency, but I did not marry Robert. Yes, I was romantic perhaps with my very first husband, with Sam, but I don’t think that any of my later marriages had anything to do with conservativism on my part. Sometimes I had some legal reason to do it, but it was very important though for Barbara and me to get married, because marriage equality was an important political statement. >> But you married somebody when you came to States. >> Yes, I did. Again, we could’ve lived together, but it was helpful to my immigration case that we were married.

58:35 - We didn’t get married for that reason, but it was helpful and that’s why that decision was made. >> Now let’s talk about your escape from Mexico. It’s like a thriller that part of your memoir, my God, and you sought to seek refuge in Cuba, but tell us about your escape and then tell us why did you decide to go to Cuba after that. >> Well, I’m glad you asked that because when I was thinking of what I would like to read today from my memoir, I thought that since I knew your questions, we’re going to be about places, countries, Mexico, Nicaragua, Cuba etc. I thought that maybe it would be interesting for me to read precisely from this chapter, which is the only chapter in the book which is not about a place.

59:34 - It’s about being stateless, suspended between Mexico, which I was escaping, and Cuba where we went to take refuge. >> Don’t tell me about it, because people are going to listen to it when you read it. >> Right, but I do want to situate it by saying that I was the victim of political oppression after the Mexican student movement in which I took part in 1968. In 1969, I was forced underground and had to find my way out of Mexico. I’m not going to read the whole chapter, but I’ll read some excerpts.

00:25 - The chapter starts with a wonderful quote by the Mexican novelist Elena Poniatowska. She says, “There where you don’t Understand, in the whitespaces, in the emptiness, write I love you.” [LAUGHTER] The chapter starts like this, “Interlude as in limbo, a place no longer mine. I had been evicted but not allowed to leave. And I was not yet anywhere else. It wasn’t like having one foot in one place and one in another.

More like not being 01:03 - able to feel the ground beneath both my feet. No longer in possession of place. In the summer of 1969, El Corno Emplumado was forced to cease publication and I was forced underground. When my youngest daughter Ana was just three months old, armed paramilitary operatives came to our home. I was upstairs in bed, ill with what would turn out to be severe kidney disease, and never saw their faces. Robert handled the intrusion alone. But in the intervening year I came to imagine that I had seen those two men, one of them wielding a pistol.

01:47 - I could describe them physically, what they looked like and wore, how they sounded and moved, the threat they brought into our lives. They came to our home accusing me of being a foreigner who was running a sweatshop and wasn’t paying social security benefits to my employees. Robert naively invited them in, explaining that we had no sweatshop or any exploited employees, and assuring the intruders that in any case I wasn’t a foreigner, but a Mexican citizen. He would get my passport as proof. As soon as he handed it over, one of the men said he had to go out to his car for some paperwork. He would make this Right, he insisted. The next thing I knew, Robert was running up the stairs toward our bedroom shouting, “They have your passport! They have your passport! They got away!” I roused myself.

02:42 - Gregory was traveling with friends, but our first impulse was to collect our two older girls from school. If the repression was upon us, we wanted this much of the family as possible together. Waiting for Gregory to come home was agony. A week later he did. Meanwhile, I reported the passport theft at our local precinct and was told to apply for another. When I did so, it was declined. Waiting characterized this time. Waiting followed by more waiting. Robert, had to leave his job; He was the one who went out, tried to make contacts, acted as a liaison with our friends at the Cuban embassy and others.

03:24 - I mostly stayed behind closed doors and curtained windows. Who could we talk to about what was happening to us? Only a few close friends. We felt we had to be careful, as well, with visitors from outside the country. It was hard to know whom to trust. I remember a visit from Saul Landau and Nina Serrano; At first, we hesitated to give them a full accounting of what was going on, then heard ourselves pouring the story out in all its messiness. We waited. Then waited some more. I must have wondered if this was it, if I would die in this unexpected trap set for me by who knew which antagonistic forces; Because at one point I found myself writing with a sort of feverish desperation, attempting to set down a record of what my life had been to that point.

04:21 - Were the unspeakable to happened, I think I wanted to leave my story, my version of events, for those coming later. Without doubt our greatest problem was hiding with four young children. It was hard to explain to the oldest three why they had been taken out of school so abruptly, why they could no longer play with beloved friends, why it was even imprudent for them to peer out the windows from our various hiding places. Ana was an infant but certainly intuited something. Within a couple of weeks Robert and I made the painful decision to send them all to Cuba.

05:02 - The Revolution was taking in thousands of youngsters at the time, sons and daughters of leftist activists who were engaged on the front lines of a variety of Third World struggles. The parents of some of those children were imprisoned or dead. Others were still fighting. Gregory was eight, Sarah five, Ximena four and Ana a newborn. We believed that putting them in the Revolution’s care was the only way of keeping them safe. Too many bodies of movement children had shown up on the Pedregal, the city’s volcanic outskirts: macabre warnings to their activist parents.

05:47 - >> Then I go on to say: We made our arrangements. I had to wean Ana from one day to the next. I vividly remember watching Robert depart with her and the older children as they left for Mexico city airport, where the Cubans had arranged for them to board a flight to Havana. In that more humane time, Robert was able to accompany our kids to the plane itself, even boarded, get them settled and kissed them goodbye. In the depths of her cellular memory, I know that Ana has never forgotten that moment.

06:22 - In my last image of her she was wearing a pale pink onesie with a white collar. As the car disappeared, I tasted a mix of anguish and relief. Those 2.5 months during which I attempted to buy my way out of Mexico remain surreal in memory. I needed to obtain a replacement passport, fake or real. It turned out to be much more complicated than I could have Imagined. With our movement in shambles, Old channels that might have handled such problems no longer existed. A month passed, and then Two. A third began. I was starting to feel numb, as if the impasse might go on forever. My longing for the children, uncertainty around when we would be reunited. Periodic kidney attacks, and nicotine withdrawal, because I had stopped smoking, were the outward signs of inner anguish. Finally, an acquaintance introduced us to someone with contacts in the Mexican Mafia.

07:33 - He assured us he knew a man who could help. It seemed we were about to find a solution to months of frustration. I left my hideout and went to a beauty parlor in a part of vast Mexico City where I wasn’t likely to run into anyone I knew. “I think my husband is seeing another woman,” I told the attendant as she placed the plastic cape about my shoulders; “I want a complete makeover.” When I emerged from the salon several hours later, my long brown braid had been cut and my hair dyed a shiny blue-black and tease into a fashionable bob.

08:12 - My unruly eyebrows were tweezed pencil thin. Lip color and nail polish completed the disguise. I don’t think my own mother would have been able to recognize me on the street had we run into one another that day. I got some very conventional looking clothes, a navy and gold stripe knit dress, and I went to one of those little stalls where you get passport pictures taken. I opened my eyes as wide as possible, and then had pictures taken for what I thought would be a viable passport.

08:55 - Robert and I then purchased airline tickets under false names and we flew North. My departure from Mexico City is summed up for me in the taxi ride Robert and I took from our last hiding place to the airport, from where we would fly to the city of Chihuahua where the comrades who helped with my escape would be waiting. I remember looking out the window of that taxi, wondering if I would ever see those familiar streets again. A terrible nostalgia filled me. Our Cuban comrades had assured me that once outside Mexico, they could help me get to the Island via Czechoslovakia. This was one of the only viable routes at the time, and the safest given my situation.

In Chihuahua City 09:44 - we were met by Señor Garcia. We’d been told we would recognize him because he was missing half the little finger on his left hand, but when the plane rolled to a stop at the small provincial airport, we didn’t have to guess. He was waiting on the tarmac. and then I write about how he was supposed to take me the next morning to this official who was going to give me a false passport but only got there, our hopes were shattered because it turned out that the passport that he was able to provide for me was just some kind of strange document that residents of Chihuahua used to cross the border if they had to work in the United States. I had no other option though, so I paid the 200 that he asked for it. I took the false document, and then had to figure out how I was really going to get out of Mexico city because I knew I couldn’t use that document.

10:48 - [OVERLAPPING] What a story, incredible, I can’t imagine and Garcia figured it all out. He decided to smuggle me out of Mexico in the back of a refrigerator meat truck. So that’s how I actually get out of Mexico, with these sides of beef, shivering and so forth. And then got into the United States, and from there took a bus into Canada and then flew to Paris and stayed on the outside of the security line, and then flew the Prague. Robert, on the other hand was legal and had legal papers, was able to just fly to New York and then legally to Havana via Madrid.

11:41 - So I’m going to end by reading just this incredible scene in Prague. I got to Prague. I was met by a Cuban comrade from the Embassy. I was taken to a hotel. And then days passed. I thought I would be going right on to Havana, but in fact, I ended up spending 19 days in Prague for reasons that I described in this chapter. But I was in a hotel where there were a few other Cubans and we gravitated towards one another. Some of them were Cuban students who had been studying abroad.

12:25 - Some of them were musicians who had been performing in Europe, and one of them was a pilot of a Cuban plane. So we began eating dinner together and at this hotel, and this is where this scene that ends the chapter took place. I say, or I write: the story about the pilot is as good a prelude as any to my years in Cuba. We introduced ourselves a few days before. Francisco was as frustrated as I; His replacement part had been promised for several weeks and waiting was getting tiresome.

13:10 - One night at dinner he asked me what my story was. I mentioned my children and the fact that they had preceded me to Havana. Francisco stared at me: “Do you have photographs?” I pulled out the fraying images I’d kept with me over the preceding months and pushed them across the table. Francisco looked at the pictures and began to laugh. “I can’t believe this,” he exclaimed.

“Your youngest peed on 13:37 - my trousers when the stewardess brought them into the cockpit. The boy wanted to look at the controls.” It took me a moment to realize that the man sitting across from me had seen my children more recently than I. He had flown them from Mexico City to Havana. Immediately our interaction became excited, overflowing with a complicit exchange of details and images. Others at the table stopped talking, stunned by our conversation.

14:07 - “I knew they were traveling alone,” Francisco said. “The four of them were being taken care of by the plane’s stewardess, and a government official met the flight.” He looked at my pictures again. “I’ll bet you miss Them,” he said. >> I think I mentioned that, and you also mentioned that, the book has a number of poems inserted here and there. 1774 01:14:36,565 –> 01:14:39,040 Before getting back to your questions, I’d just like to read the poem that ends this chapter. It’s called “With Gratitude to Vallejo.” One day, it will be my turn. Luck of the draw even for me./ One day, almost certainly not in Paris,/ a chance in seven on a Thursday,/ The door that burst open on December 6, 1936 will close.

/ 15:09 - It will slam shut or settle like velvet/ until its light dims completely,/ the rhythms of its tongue gone still./ My turn, not because I have tied my wrist bones on wrong,/ braided anxious fingers,/ stumbled into the abyss/ or laughed when I might have cried./ I breathed available air,/ loved in every way I knew/ Followed my map to a place beyond canyon walls./ After the door/ swung open between my mother’s thighs/ and before my turn’s arrival/ my children and their children will reach/ for places I cannot know while I am warmed/ by a love that dares speak its name,/ black words on white pages,/ this nest woven of numbers and sky. >> Amazing. You have such beautiful poems in that book. I was moved so many times.

16:29 - I loved one towards the end, I felt very identified, that is called “Everyone Lied.” [LAUGHTER] I can identify with that. Now that we’re going to talk a little bit, I don’t know how long we can go on, but I will try to shorten the questions. I remember you in Cuba, so well, when I went. I think I went to be a judge for the Casa de las Américas prize or something and I went to your house. You had a nice flat in El Vedado. I remember Ernesto Cardenal had told me that he had met you.

17:16 - In that book of his called In Cuba he mentions your passage there, that you have no idea the impact that it had in my life. It said we all have many shoes or I only have a pair of shoes, but I know that everybody in Cuba has a pair of shoes. I thought that’s such an amazing simple way to put what the search for justice is about, and for equality. But at the same time, with time I began to think, do we have a discourse, a Quasi-religious tendency to equate poverty with virtue? Because that’s very part of the revolutionary movements, no? You have to be a saint, 1842 01:18:19,015 –> 01:18:21,985 you have to leave everything behind. You have to be willing to sacrifice, and especially material things are considered not very good for you.

18:32 - I think that goes against the way we are, our creative spirit, as human beings. Also, it tends to leave it to the state to change your circumstances, it’s like you become, of course you can enjoy art, culture, et cetera, but you become somebody who is super dependent on the state and who has to have this discipline of spirit to renounce and understand poverty as a saint who knows real virtue. 1858 01:19:18,010 –> 01:19:21,050 Did you feel that in Cuba? >> This is really such an interesting and important question. I didn’t really feel that in Cuba because the Cuban Revolution when I lived there in it’s second decade, which I think of as the glory years of the Revolution, everything was great at that point still. It was never emphasized that we, the people, must be poor or must sacrifice what they had or not have beautiful things.

19:55 - In fact, just the opposite was emphasized. But they wanted everybody to have more, not some people to have less. But I think the problem in Cuba and certainly in Nicaragua, and in many other places comes when the Revolutionary movement becomes the state. Then so many other things have to be taken into consideration, and certainly we’ve seen that in Cuba. I remember actually the book that you mentioned Ernesto did, In Cuba, I had a chapter in that book, he had a chapter, but it was about me.

20:34 - It was called “To the Supermarket with Margaret Randall.” It was based on the fact that I was taking him to our neighborhood supermarket and showing him how we bought things. Everything was rationed at that time - how we used the ration back and so forth. I remember having discussions with Ernesto. We didn’t agree about this. I saw him as being, because of his religious belief, much more involved with the idea that poverty was a good thing, was saintly. I didn’t agree with that.

21:12 - We had some discussions, but of course it was his book and it was a very successful book. I think that this is the great problem that revolutionary movements haven’t solved: Its how you combine the economic opportunities for everybody, education for everybody, health care for everybody. Those big issues, work for everyone who wants to work, et cetera. With the more spiritual side, and when I use the word spiritual, I’m not using it in a religious sense. But I’m using it in the sense of: we all have our own spirituality, our need for beauty, for art, for creativity, for asking Questions, and the discourse as you say can become very vitiated.

22:08 - I can remember the moment in Cuba, and I write about this in the book, where I stopped believing everything the leadership said, and it was the moment that I discovered that the genocide being committed in Cambodia was really a genocide and not an invention of western journalists, which was what the Revolution said at that point. To learn to be fervently committed to change, to revolutionary change, and yet at the same time to be able to ask questions, is I think incredibly important to the future of humanity. >> I love Gramsci when he says that if you don’t let the intellectuals be critical, revolution is going to become bureaucratic. That’s what has happened in many places. What did you think about, because you met the crème de la crème of human intellectuals. >> Were welcomed and embraced, and then something turned and you became… were feeling isolated.

23:24 - Do you think the state began to feel that you were too dangerous to be left free, independent? Because that’s the feeling I get about the limits of freedom. >> Absolutely, yeah. I lost my job, some friends ceased coming around, other friends came around always, and it wasn’t easy for them, but they did that. I found out more about this in recent years, I was not going to leave Cuba and move to Nicaragua until I could get an answer for why this was happening to me. It turned out it was really, I think, because my home was a magnet for many Latin American revolutionaries, and artists, and writers, some of them are Trotskyists, some of them are Maoists, some of them didn’t follow the Cuban line. That was certainly looked down upon, I think, by the Cuban Orthodoxy, and I was very very feminist by that time, a very outspoken feminist and that probably didn’t help me either, but there were always people in Cuba like: Haydée Santamaría, como Alfredo Guevara, close friends like Víctor Rodríguez, poets and writers like Arturo Arango and so forth; Reina María Rodríguez, who remained friends, who remained close, and who did it.

25:11 - You know the Revolution, as you know very well in Nicaragua, revolutions are made by human beings. There are bureaucratic human beings, there are narrow minded ones, and there were visionaries. Sometimes one side wins temporarily or permanently and sometimes it’s the other. >> In Nicaragua we have had that experience, because I think that most of the visionaries of the Sandinista were dead when the revolution triumphed. [OVERLAPPING] The national director that we had was not the best people or the most intelligent people.

25:53 - The more seasoned, the better manipulators the Ortega brothers were the ones that gave themselves the credit for having won the Revolution, having won the struggle, and they began to take positions of power in the government, in the army, and yes, they were not the brightest, and we are seeing now in Nicaragua a level of malice and intrigue that we are [OVERLAPPING] suffering. >> You started this interview by talking about the hope that we had so many years ago. It just made me remember that and how innocent we were. We thought that, we knew that the United States was going to do everything in it’s power to wreck the Revolution. But we couldn’t have imagined that our own comrades would be so power hungry and criminal as you see today with Daniel and Rosario, so it’s tragic.

27:17 - >> [OVERLAPPING] Unfortunately, a lot of Sandinistas are still fighting, that kind of thing. But Sandinismo has become a bad word in Nicaragua. I mean, the young people, to have been a Sandinista, has become like a guilt that you cannot get rid of. It’s very sad. >>It means a lot to me Gioconda that my memoir seemed right to you, seemed good and was readable and so forth. I’d like to just mention your memoir which came out 20 years ago.

27:58 - But The Country Beneath my Skin, I think, is one of the great memoirs of Latin America. You wrote it at a time when it was much more difficult to write some of the things that you wrote, than it is for me today. I mean, 20 years have passed and we can now talk about things that history has shown that we were right about. But, you wrote your book at a time when your voice really needed to be heard on certain subjects. You wrote with such courage and such integrity and such dignity about, not just your life, but what it was like to be a woman in a revolutionary movement led by powerful men.

28:48 - It just was extraordinary for me to read that book. I read it first in Spanish, then I read it in its English translation, which I think is very good. I must have put 20-30 copies to give to people. I can remember that certain people I knew in Nicaragua were very angry about the book, and I understand why, because they didn’t have the kind of courage to confront difficult subjects. You know, everything for some people back then, for so many people was just black and white, was either good or bad.

29:26 - You were able to evoke the Sandinista movement and the Nicaraguan Revolution in a way that told its stories of valor, and Beauty, and significance, but not shy away from telling other truths. [OVERLAPPING] I think your book was one of the first that made me understand that you can do that, we can do that. We don’t have to be all for something or not for something. Those are for less courageous people. I just want to thank you for that publicly. >> Yeah, they would not forgive me that I said I had made love under Somoza’s desk.

30:13 - [LAUGHTER] [OVERLAPPING] >> But I think a lot of people, like you, the same experience you have had about having people calling you about your memoir, a lot of people [inaudible] have told me that they have come to Nicaragua because of my memoir. So it’s so nice if you have [OVERLAPPING] touched somebody’s heart. In Nicaragua what I think it was important for you was the women. You came in contact, because I think that was a very revolutionary things that happened in Nicaragua. The participation of women, the strength of women.

30:56 - For me, for example, that was what I felt was the more authentically… a change that came over this country that was more authentic and more profound. [NOISE] You wrote Sandino’s Daughters. What did you think about? Do you think I… [OVERLAPPING] >> I absolutely agree with you. I think it was one of the great gifts of the Sandinista women to the World. I had been writing books, oral histories with women since I got to Cuba actually. I had written several before. Ernesto invited me to Nicaragua just after the victory to interview women for sending his daughters, the book that would become Sandino’s Daughters.

31:47 - Those stories they remain today, so energizing and so inspiring. I think of all of my books, I have 150 published books, and I think of all of them it’s the book that still today, I may get a letter from somebody saying that they read this book and it changed their lives. It made many people go to Nicaragua, It wasn’t me, it was you, it was the women, their stories, and then as you know, after the defeat of Sandinista, Sandinismo in 1990, I went back and I did another book. Sandino’s Daughters Revisited, which was very interesting because all of the women in the second book credited the Sandinista movement for awakening them, for giving them political consciousness, for giving them agency. But they also, once the defeat was there, could talk more honestly about how some of the men acted and it wasn’t pretty. >> All right.

The other thing I 33:01 - wanted to say is that I remember you so well when we worked together. How tireless you were, how incredibly… you worked so hard. But also, I remember you being very sad. I think that was when you talked about going back home. Because I remember once you told me you had gone to get your license, and when the guy took your hand to get the fingerprints, that you realized that nobody had touched you. You had not had human touch and you began, I think, to want to leave.

33:42 - And then I thought, well, all these circles in your life, at the end one realizes is the search doesn’t have to be in different places. Because the amazing thing is that the places help you go into yourself, uncover things about yourself, but in the end it’s such an intimate look for, like the center of power. And you found your center of power in New Mexico, and you found your lesbian identity, you found love. It was an amazing Journey, Margaret. This book is really so important, and you represent so many aspects of the life of a woman. You have had so many experiences that are extraordinary. You are humble in the book.

34:55 - It is not a book of somebody bragging about their life, it’s you really reveal your struggle. I really congratulate you on this book. It’s really beautiful and I hope many people read it. [NOISE] The only thing we have left is, but I think we have done it. [LAUGHTER] It’s being quite long. It was the fight to regain your citizenship that you have the McCarran-Walter Act. I also had a very hard time. I found a relationship through Michael Maggio, who was also my lawyer because of the McCarran-Walter Act >> Yes, and he was my lawyer, and what a great loss when he died.

35:46 - [NOISE] I agree with everything that you just said. No matter where one goes, if you’re authentically looking for yourself, you eventually find yourself. It probably doesn’t matter whether you’ve left home and lived in other countries or not. At the same time I feel so fortunate to have lived in Mexico, and Cuba, and Nicaragua, to have worked there, to have had my children go to school there. Not to just know about these places, these extraordinary places from a newspaper or from a history book, but to really have experienced them. So I feel very grateful for that.

36:30 - Yes, I remember that time that you described when we were working together, I really had, I guess what we might call a nervous breakdown and you probably remember that the Contra War was heating up. We were all working very long days. I remember the number of cups of coffee we used to drink at our office. I’d drink 10 or [LAUGHTER] 12 cups of coffee a day. Everybody did though, [OVERLAPPING] [LAUGHTER] and I was a lot older than the rest of you. You were my immediate boss, but I remember that I was in my 40s and you all were in your 20s.

37:12 - In that respect, it was also probably harder for me, I needed to get home. I needed to come to my language too. As much as Spanish is the language I speak with three of my children, it’s a language I speak a lot, it’s a language I love, but I’ve never been able to write poetry in Spanish. So I needed to come back into contact with my native language, with my landscape, to New Mexico, I had no idea I was going to fall in love with a woman or come out as a lesbian. I had no idea actually that I would have to fight so hard to remain in the United States. But [NOISE] all of that is told in the book, and I guess we should leave something for people who want to get to read the book. >> [LAUGHTER] Absolutely.

38:01 - >> I’m so grateful for this conversation [OVERLAPPING] Gioconda, it’s been wonderful, absolutely wonderful. I just thank you for your thoughtful questions and for your spirit, because I feel that our spirits are very much aligned. >> Yeah. Well, thank you. I told you already that for me the book was very moving. I am very happy we have lived through these times. [OVERLAPPING] Very often when I get very depressed, I think about the French Revolution.

38:43 - After the Revolution went through the terror, it was 100 years before they really had a republic. I think maybe these processes take so long and we only live a very short time. A very big kiss to you. Thank you, Margaret. Thank you for [OVERLAPPING] the university. >> Thank you Gioconda. Thank you so much. >> Okay. 1 1 .