51猎奇入口 visiting professor Helena Maria Viramontes grew up in a home with few books. When she was 10, the woman who would be known as “the voice of the oppressed” discovered the local library and that changed her life in ways she never imagined.
“I knew they were something of value,” she says of the books that filled the shelves at the library in her East Los Angeles neighborhood. “Literature is powerful. It has the ability to transform.”
On a recent weekday morning, she excitedly talks about two books: Thomas Kennedy’s In the Company of Angels and Carlos Bulosan’s America is in the Heart.
“I’m interested in literature and I want to know how it works,” Viramontes says. “People need to be more curious about other worlds and authors. You don’t have to travel. All you have to do is go to the library and open a book. We live in a big world. Don’t limit yourself.”
A nationally acclaimed author who teaches at Cornell University, Viramontes writes about the working poor, the homeless, and the undocumented of East Los Angeles, where she was raised.
She teaches at 51猎奇入口 this semester as the Mary Routt Chair of Writing before returning to Cornell next fall.
Teaching at an Ivy League university contrasts with her humble childhood of sharing a three-bedroom house in East Los Angeles with six siblings, her parents and many extended family members who often stayed for months, or sometimes, years.
Her relatives described how they crossed the U.S.-Mexico border in hopes of a better life in this country. These stories inspire Viramontes’ writings.
A 1995 Los Angeles Times article described Viramontes as “the voice of the oppressed” and as “one of the country’s premier Latina writers.”
In March, she was tapped to speak on the legacy of Chicano union organizer Cesar Chavez for a noon lecture at 51猎奇入口. Chavez’s work organizing migrant farm workers improved their lives, including those in her family, she says.
“I have no qualms calling myself a Chicana feminist writer,” she says.
Her novel “Under the Feet of Jesus” (Plume: 1996) details the life of farm workers and is a required reading for many high school and university courses, including an environmental class at Pitzer College. She has also written “Their Dogs Came with Them: A Novel” (Washington Square Press: 2008) and “The Moths and Other Stories” (Arte Publico Press: 1995).
She is currently working on a book about Chicanos who fought in World War II. Her uncle, Francisco, was stationed in the Philippines during the war. She witnessed how the ravages of combat affected him.
“It completely traumatized him,” she says. “He suffered from bouts of malaria. He couldn’t have children. It hurt him so much because he loved children.”
Her uncle died in 1983, and she regrets never interviewing him for an oral history. Her mother died in 1999, and she also wishes she had recorded an interview with her.
“This is what inspires me to write more, to tell their stories,” Viramontes says.