I came up fighting and surviving. I came up expecting to be good at what I did and wanting to catch up, get better, to be better. To not talk it but do it. Where I was, wasn’t where I wanted to stay.

I started working at thirteen because I needed money to take care of myself. Making my own money was my own power, my own independence. I worked through high school and through undergrad and grad years where I fed my starving brain. Soon a husband and father, I worked in construction for sixteen years, mostly as a high-rise union carpenter. I wrote stories when I could. When I published a book of fiction that won national literary prizes, change dropped on me suddenly. Though the only courses in English I’d ever taken were the required freshman ones at junior colleges, I became a professor in a well-established and high-quality mfa program. As a student, with no family money support, working, I’d focused on surviving and catching up with other students who always seemed to have gotten their skills and knowledge genetically at birth. Now a professor of graduate writing students, I saw how few like me there were. With my new job, I decided I would let a couple of Chicano students, dreaming of becoming writers, audit my mfa workshop. That got me yelled at loudly, the recognizable roar that preceded getting fired at any construction site. I relented by starting what we called the “illegal, undocumented workshop” that met weekly at my Austin apartment, outside the university’s vigilance. (Three of those went on to publish notable books.) In time, more brown students began applying and entering the program. But with system, history, dominant culture milieu and money and mores, I decided to go another route.

My writing career was doing fine (e.g., multiple times in The New Yorker). My life template had changed though. It wasn’t just my own battles and survival anymore. I became we. Do what for others what was never done for me, for you, for us. Build ladders, throw ropes down, and we climb over walls.

I considered moving on to big name universities. Good for me probably, as a play in new academic vita game for writers, but they were even less my world, not much better than what I already had as a job. And probably fewer students from the neighborhoods I knew. Then I interviewed at the University of Houston, Victoria, a school not on anyone’s map—a tiny college with oil endowed literary ambitions at the time, in a region that was first an outpost in New Spain, and then Old Mexico, until it became Texas. South Texas, where UHV was, is what I would still call Chicanolandia. The small undergraduate student body was close to 70% Mexican American, 25% Black. At the interview, when the then president asked me if there had ever been an HBCU type of college campus for Mexican Americans, I decided to push my chips all in.

I believed in a new Texas. Not a kind of progressive’s paradise of no guns or less football (naively hopeful, my eyes ain’t that glazy), but one that had become culturally aware and maybe grateful for the Mexican influence on what has become the American Southwest’s allure. Of what made Texas not de donde vienen los vaqueros, but cowboy country. I’m old enough to remember the India worship of the hippie era, the Beatles and the Maharishi, incense and Nehru shirts. There was a similar era passing through then, in the love of the musician brothers Flaco and Santiago Jimenez, or Lila Downs. In much of the new Texas, in SanAnto and Htown but especially in tourist-focused Austin, taking off was a new breed of merchant love for all that was Mexican. Its tacos de todos tipos and moles from black to yellow was not just the food but the cuisine. Spanish colonial was a design style and theme. Huipiles were better than peasant blouses. Frida Kahlo was embraced everywhere as a goddess icon and motif. Bold color was no longer cheap barrio paint, it exclaimed a joy and beauty which openly crossed the frontera.

Huizache was conceived in Victoria, Tejas, and was born in 2011. It was the offspring of the job I was offered and accepted, to teach a class and create and then direct a center for Mexican American literature and culture we called CentroVictoria. Though I had had success in the literary biz—what’s considered success, little money and income from it aside—mine was as surprising to the industry as it was to me. I knew it was rare, strangely so considering the demographic size of the MexAm community. One major reason was that there were no mainstream venues, magazines or book publishers that were owned, run by, or financed by a Mexican American—not even editors. We are a poor people. We do exist, but our stories do not exist, unless it is through a category of “us” that represents us in their eyes and experience, through their writers. Huizache magazine’s goal and purpose was to stand tall on a national stage and be our voices and our culture and our own art and our history by our talent and storytellers. Through our own editors who know us, our families, because they are us. No costumed bravado for attention, no it’s-all-in-me bragging, no whining and complaining to or shouting at them for this and that, just doing it, being it, being us for us. But of course Huizache’s for them too, for our own country to see and know our history, our culture here in our own country where we are so little known or seen.

Huizache is a magazine centered in us. Not a magazine that, to seem diverse and open, makes sure to have one Asian, one Black, one Brown in its table of contents. It was and is meant for the dominant literary world to learn about all of us as we are, to stomp down their stereotypes, cliches, and tropes about us, to imagine us in the larger American market. It is and was also for our writers—dismissed and ignored elsewhere—to learn what a professional magazine publication is and does when it is run looking for our best work and the craft and talent it expects, seeing the quality that gets bound in each issue.

And Huizache has succeeded. It has received attention in the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, San Antonio Express News, El Paso Times, Houston Chronicle, Dallas Morning News, The New Yorker, and NBC News. And its spectacular list of contributors are easily seen by our readers, but the national recognition they carry with them is often overlooked. Winners and finalists in, awards and fellowships from: MacArthur Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, National Book Award, pen Faulkner, National Book Critics Circle, pen/Hemingway, United States Poet Laureate, Whiting Foundation, Lannan Foundation, Pushcart Prize Stories, Best American Poetry, Best American Short Stories, Best American Poetry, and O’Henry Prize Stories.

 

The country was Obama’s when I took this job. While I was feeling the cooling breezes of a new Texas, I was ignoring that old heat, that I still lived in red hot Texas. Thus I was unprepared for the Trump presidency fall of 2017 when I received an email saying that uhv wanted to end my presence, and thereby what I wrought, on their campus. Unique because I was a tenured full professor, I was not alone. They got rid of all the aged arty “dreck” they had hired with year-to-year contracts (ones with major New York books and anthologies), and they ran off the expensive avant-garde publishing house Dalkey Archive and its creator, both given a treasure chest of promises to move from a lifetime in Illinois for this unknown corner of Texas. Down with those art set ideas and ambitions, with pride—and responsibility—in getting hsi (Hispanic Serving Institution) status. When it received that status, and its income for it, their president (replaced) had a huge version of Huizache’s first cover in the meeting room of his large office, its art by the great César A. Martínez. That was gone, too.

Anti-art is like anti-mask in a pandemic. Education is believed to be a pro-business enterprise, good for good jobs in oil and shale.

Of course legal engagement commenced between them and me. They believed that I was being uppity, they didn’t need to follow my or any contract (a shockingly hidden fact unknown when doing academic business with the state of Texas). That I should either retire submissively, or accept work that would, anywhere else, be like a hazing for a beginningest lecturer in English (which is not what my academic degrees are in), the lowest last minute hire with all its low baggage. It is true that it did not include janitorial duties, so maybe I do protest too much. I was a graveyard shift janitor my senior year of high school. The hours were sometimes hard, but I liked the work, and at 17 I really liked the money. But my credentials are honored greatly on the vast majority of university campuses across this country, even within the UH system, where at their main campus they have an entire creative writing program of faculty with vitas like mine, just none Chicano or Chicana, Latino or Latina, Latinx.

Their disrespectful thinking became clearer when it came to Huizache. In their “or else” demands, my work in CentroVictoria, which was the magazine, went ignored. There was no mention of it. As if Huizache just happened somewhere, somehow, and they got Hispanic credit. During our litigation, I asked several times if they would commit to funding it at the beginning of September until the end of August so I could do the magazine’s work without having to tell contributors or artists or production people yes, but … the issue might not happen…and I didn’t want to go into because. The university refused to answer. The only responsible action I could take was to put Huizache on hiatus status. That hiatus began in 2019, after our eighth issue appeared.

In 2022, the university cut CentroVictoria. Which ended Huizache. The dismissal is evidence of the value they placed on it and what it represents and does for their university’s vision of itself. That is, what our community is and means to them. It was a trumpian move. They did to Huizache exactly what they want and have wanted to do with me and what they think of me and the effing caballo I rode in on.

Is it surprising that Texas didn’t respect such a premiere MexAm mag? With its wonderful history of treating us so lovingly along the long border and inside all its cities, legal and penal system, and government bodies? Honestly, sadly, embarrassingly, naïvely for certain, it was to me. I really believed the old Texas and its bigoted disregard for our historical value was over. I really believed in a new Texas, that a new history was being made.

But my creation Huizache was not going to be done just because Texas wanted to garbage it. There were other states and regions and cities, especially unbeknownst to certain universities in Texas, where Chicanos have a well-established history. That began with the United Farm Workers in the early ’60s with Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta. The union originated in the Central Valley of California. The Chicano movement could be said to have begun simultaneously, but Chicano literature’s official start was more 1970, on the publication of “El Louie” by José Montoya, who was also in and from the Central Valley of Califas. His brother Malaquias Montoya was a seminal and early leader of the Chicano Art Movement. The Central Valley, in other words, is the Chicano homeland. Where else should Huizache go to be embraced with joy and respect? To whom else but to the fine fiction writer Maceo Montoya and the university where he is a tenured full professor, the University of California, Davis. Maceo is heir to a family tree that is as rooted to a land as a huizache tree, and he is now heir to a magazine that is grateful for that lineage and history. Proud as I am of what Huizache has done thus far, I am as proud to pass it forward to this man’s lead, as excited to see what comes, relieved that it has such an ideal new home.

Ladders are standing, tied ropes hang down—climb!