In this interview with Carolina Monsivais (poet and co-founder of the El Paso Women’s Writing Collective), poeta Michelle Otero discusses her new book, Malinche’s Daughter. In this collection of essays, Otero draws on the figure of Malinche as she details her own journey dealing with child sexual abuse.

I don’t remember the first time I heard her name—it seems she’s always existed on the margins of my consciousness—but I remember feeling it should be whispered. She was one of those women, like the No Name Aunt in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior. I’ve always been drawn to these figures, particularly the women—the ones who talk too much or don’t talk enough, the ones shunned by their communities, the ones who have somehow brought shame upon their people.

I wanted to call things what they are. The Spaniards didn’t arrive in the Americas. They invaded. Malinche was not Cortés’s lover. She was his property. He owned her. Their relationship wasn’t based on equality, but on domination. Where there is domination, there is no love.

I wanted Malinche to know across time that someone has her back. This is what I’ve wanted when I’ve felt the backlash of speaking the truth about racism or sexism or patriarchal violence, someone who will say, “I hear you,” and will stand by you as people call you disloyal or ungrateful.

I’m a writer. I have a voice. That’s an incredible privilege. I feel I have a responsibility to leverage that privilege for good—to speak the truth, even when it’s uncomfortable, to stop patriarchal violence, and ultimately, to heal. Continued

Professor Norma Cantú writes that Otero’s stories “…take us to Mexico and back, but it is also a trip to the past and to spaces of conflict and tension, finally coming home to that space where we are “born and re-born.”

Read an excerpt from the book here, and/or the full interview with Michelle by Carolina Monsivais here.

Malinche’s Daughter is published by Momotombo Press, the Latina Letras project at the Institute for Latino Studies, Notre Dame University

(No, not that Emma Perez)

El Paso poeta/writer/professor Emmy Perez is the author of Solstice, published by SwanScythe Press. Currently, she is Assistant Professor of English & Creative Writing at the University of Texas-Pan American

Emmy Pérez grew up in Santa Ana, California. After graduating from Columbia University’s M.F.A. program, she received poetry fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, North American Review, New York Quarterly, Crab Orchard Review, and other publications.

In Spring & Summer 2006, she taught poetry in a juvenile detention center in El Paso as part of The Spoken & Written Word Poetry Project for underserved young adults that she founded and directs with the literary organization BorderSenses. From 2000-2005, she taught writing at the University of Texas at El Paso, most recently as Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and Director of the West Texas Writing Project Summer Institute 2005.

As a member of the Women Writers’ Collective of El Paso, she has also helped organize readings that feature women writers to help raise awareness about issues related to women in the border community and beyond. She has taught writing to adult education students, women prison inmates, and college students. She has also facilitated writing instruction for adult education classes near the Navajo and Zuni reservations and for women prison inmates from Montana and Oregon at the McKinley County detention center in New Mexico. Emmy lives in El Paso’s Lower Valley.