J. Estanislao Lopez’s forthcoming collection, We Borrowed Gentleness, deals with the transience of borders, cycles of generational violence, and the perseverance of the American Dream on the immigrant experience, among many other topics. A Mexican-American himself, Lopez took the time to sit down with Mexican-American writer and reviewer Joanna Acevedo, who asked him about assimilation, the fluidity of borders, education, and tools to hope for the future in this interview. 

Joanna Acevedo: So, the first question I wanted to ask you was about the Texas/Mexican border. The Texas/Mexico border is a disputed, tenuous territory. Can you talk about the fluidity of that border specifically and how your collection relates to the cycles of change, war and violence?

J. Estanislao Lopez: Yeah, so, in the book I am describing a family, based on my family. And that family has deep roots in the Texas and Mexico region, for decades and even centuries and I'm thinking about how violence was pushing almost like a tide against these families, you know, including my own, but more than my own, so many families. One direction and then another. I think that when you talk about the fluidity of the border, you're thinking of that poem, “Laredo Duplex.” Am I right about that?

JA: Yeah, definitely.

JEL: It has that line: “Another war pushed us north.” So I was thinking of how my family was pushed north by violence. During the Mexican Revolution or Mexican Civil War. And then, only to be met by the racial violence of the Texas sort of white supremacist regime. Especially around the time of the Mexican revolution, you see. A huge kind of program to get rid of Mexican Americans in Texas, and throughout Texas, sort of spearheaded by the Texas Rangers. So anyway, I wouldn't call myself a historian, by any stretch of the imagination, but I do think a lot about these issues and how my family has moved In this region. But you almost don't like the word fluid because fluid suggests that kind of gentleness and it's been anything but gentle, right? It's been shoved through, you know, with a murderous force.

JA: And for a lot of people it's not fluid at all anymore, it's become very static.

JEL: Yeah, absolutely. It becomes very rigid depending on the zeitgeist of the decade. I guess I'm getting a little political here, but based on what profit America is centering towards, sometimes there's this kind of zeitgeist where Americans want a lot of cheap Labor and then you'll see more lax policies when it comes to immigration. At a certain point, though, the economic profit that they see from that is threatening that their—I don't say their— because right, we are Americans too—but it's threatening the cultural value they see in preserving whiteness and white supremacy. And that's when you see the border become more rigid.

JA: Yeah, my great grandfather's family came here to work on the railroad. They were bringing whole families to Kansas to relocate. And that was in the 1910s.

JEL: There's all kinds of strange stories in which Mexican labor have been invited to this country. Only to be expelled or deported later, depending on the political climate of time.

JA:  And I know that in the 1900s Chinese laborers pretended to be Mexican in order to get into the U.S. because the Chinese were so discriminated against.

JA: As a Mexican-American in Texas—and this relates to what we were just talking about—but the pressure to assimilate is strong. Can you speak on the poem I'm thinking of? “Diaspora”? Can you speak on the need for a national identity that is not American and the realities of being an American born Latino? And also, we were just talking about this, but can you talk about punishing Hispanic students for speaking Spanish in classrooms and the pressure to speak English.

JEL: That was such a hard poem to get right. I was thinking about the relationship between the Mexican American identity and whiteness and its proximity to whiteness. In that poem there's a brother who is very assimilationist. And the speaker is a little passive, he’s not taking the moral high ground in that poem so much as resisting the assimilation. He's a very passive speaker, as my speakers tend to be and I’m not having the speaker do a lot. I think a lot of these poems have a very meditative aspect. I think my style overall is a very meditative style and so these speakers are kind of in their heads, maybe too much. So, is there a space, right? And this is a conversation we're having today, is there some kind of way to relate to our heritage and how we are racialized as “other,” while at the same time acknowledging how many of us sort of buy into whiteness and anti-blackness and white supremacy?

You know, I don't know if you've ever had this experience, but I know in my family I've had the experience of a baby being born and a grandmother complimenting the baby on how light their skin is. And so that creates a conflict. That creates a complicated intersection. And this is true for people who are half white, but it's also true for someone who would not consider themselves half white because Mexican-American identity for the most part is, you know, one word that people use is mestizo, which is a combination of indigenous and European traits.

JA: Right.

JEL: So it gets really messy and it gets messier when you look at political movements in Texas, at least, because there are times when Mexican-American movements express solidarity with Black Americans and the fight against white supremacy and there are times when Mexican American groups use their proximity to whiteness for their benefit at the expense of Black Americans and Afro Latinos. Many Latino groups, you know, rather than fighting white supremacy, they just wanted to be treated as white. 

JEL: So, anyway, back to the poem. I'm thinking about all this and I'm thinking about these expressions. And how they can manifest in these very private relationships in these private, family conflicts. My own experience is one in which some of my family is on the left and some of my family is conservative. So, you know, I think I get to witness or observe fairly closely how easy it is for Latinos in Texas, maybe across United States to be in a sense, fatalist to give up on the fight against white supremacy and say you know if you can't beat them join them, which has happened to other immigrant groups, right? The Irish, the Italian, all these immigrant groups who were seen as “other'' at first, eventually just bought into white supremacy, so long as they were included. The Mexican-American identity is and is always in danger of falling into that same trap.

JA: There's an overwhelming stereotype that all Mexicans are illegal immigrants, regardless of how long they've been in this country. I've gotten this stereotype, and I was born here.We are mostly the children of immigrants, and you're talking in several of your poems about your parents’ dreams for you and the immigrant experience. The American dream, success, can you talk about how poetry has been part of your American dream and how you do or do not subscribe to this idea or how your parents did?

JEL: That’s a big question but that’s also a big answer. So much has changed, I think, around the rhetoric, the rhetoric of the American dream. I think my parents clearly bought into this idea. And I don't know if I can hold that against them, considering some of their experiences that they've shared with me. Because, you know, we all need something to aspire to, and I can’t blame them for falling prey to this idea that there is a level of financial and social capital you can achieve no matter who you are, where you come from, where you are safe, secure, as are your children. Every parent wants to ensure a safe and secure future for their children, of course. Now here, I stand on the other side of that. I'm college educated. You know I'm a teacher. I think they probably feel like they've achieved that, they feel like they've secured a better future for their children than they had. 

JEL: But, I think we might be getting to a point where we're abandoning this idea of an infinite progression. I think we're getting to a point, and maybe I'm maybe I'm particularly cynical about this, but we're getting to a point where we see how certain systems in place that were working to the benefit of our parents are the same systems that are feeding into the growing disparity in the top minority of income earners and the average income earner.

JEL: I don't want my kids to have a bigger house than what they started. I don't want them to have fancier cars than where they started, I want them to be a better person than I was. If I do subscribe to some kind of aspirational dream for their future is that they can sort of undo some of the harm that's been done by their forebears.

JA: I think that works right into my next question, which that is you write a lot about generational trauma and the trauma can be passed down from the mother or father to the child, you also talk about being better than your parents, so can you talk about the undoing of cycles and the way trauma cycles tend to repeat themselves?

JEL: Oh, I am careful about saying that I'm better than my parents. I think, maybe, I'm more aware, because of the context in which I was able to achieve an education about these issues that my parents, maybe did not have access to. I don't know if i'm better than my parents, but I'm definitely more aware of the larger forces and larger causes, and I definitely interrogate those structures. Like where we were talking about earlier, the American dream. So I don't want to say I'm better than my parents. 

JA: Maybe more cognizant.

JEL: Yeah. And the undoing of cycles. Can they be undone? They can be veered away from, I hope. My growth is not over, that's for sure. I'm still on a journey. And we hope. We have this idea—I think you and me and most people who are curious about ourselves in the world hope that by educating ourselves, we can improve ourselves. Now, whether that pans out… 

JEL: You know, history is long and life is short. That's our that's our hope, that's our current strategy; is that we're just more aware, we give more names to these patterns of violence and trauma and abuse and by naming them we gain power over them, which is a concept, you know by naming something you gain power over it, it’s as old as the Bible right? Who knows if that's actually true, if that actually holds any water.

JA: Nietzsche said something about that, too.

JEL: Also, it was a big thing on Supernatural if you watch that show. Once you knew a demon’s name you could exorcize it. 

JA: Right, right.

JEL: But anyway, so that's our current strategy, and I'm just a small participant in this study of whether it will work and whether I can be better than my father, whether my children can be better than me through this strategy of education and naming. But who knows.

JA: Yeah. 

JEL: That’s the hope. 

JA: Another theme in your collection is the cruelty of children and how ugliness can be accidental, but then you also talk about your own children and their innocence. I remember that poem where your daughter nicks her ear on the counter and then you have the duck cloth with the blood. Can you speak on how these two things coexist?

JEL: I'm very resistant to any kind of romanticism of anything. And in fact I think the love of our children, as important and vital as it is to those of us who are parents, is also one of the greatest sources of evil and oppression. You know, there are many people who espouse values that are so progressive and have such a strong sense of justice until it might harm their children, or it might prevent opportunities for their children. Right? Not in my backyard, not in my school. As an educator I see this so much right. They pause their sense of social equity and justice because, ultimately, they want the most for their child and if that child happens to be a someone who regularly benefits from privilege, then so be it, and in fact let's up that privilege, let's amp it up, let's get them more, so I think in the book I explore that super complicated aspect of our relationship with our children. That there is nothing inherently saintly about children or our relationship to them. It's as complicated as our adult relationships.

JA: I think that that's a perfect segue into my next question which talks about the poem “Speaking Ill Of The Dead” where your grandmother tells your mother, “I'm sorry I could never love you, but I tried.” And then your mother forgives her. And this also relates to the title of the collection itself, which is We Borrowed Gentleness, so, can you talk about how grace and forgiveness and gentleness are woven through the collection?

JEL: Yeah, I needed a counterpoint to all my cynicism and my darkness. My hopelessness.

I don't know if her forgiveness is a point of light by any means.

JA: I thought it was.

JEL: I don't know if you've noticed, but I am very undecided about a lot of these characters in these poems. They are mirrors of my family, maybe because I'm also just undecided about my family. I'm not completely certain that that is an expression of forgiveness or acceptance or if it's just a point of surrendering to the brutal reality. I don't think there is one clear answer, I think, you can read them all simultaneously. That might be the most brutal point of the book, in fact.

JA: That's why I saved it for last.

JEL: It was definitely tough to write, and it was tough to listen to. Not the poem, but, you know,  obviously it's coming from experience and intimacy with characters like these, so I hope that a reader who needs grace to be there will find grace there and a reader who is approaching this issue from another way finds what they need there. And the title We Borrowed Gentleness 

is equally ambiguous, I think. It’s a line from the concluding poem. I didn't want to say “we were gentle”; I didn't want it to be something static, as if, as if the problem has been solved. When the speaker and the father who, throughout the book, the father, in my mind is the same character, for the most part, Although you know as a reader you might go through the book and figure different fathers, these fathers as separate fathers. I'm not totally in control of that aspect of the book, but in my mind that it's one father and. There's this moment at the end that resembles some kind of redemption, but that verb “borrowed” is also kind of muddying those waters, right, making it a little unclear, are we redeemed or are we just in one arc of the cycle? 

JA: Yeah. 

JEL: And after that line “we borrow gentleness” it's “we couldn't speak.” So the question is why couldn't they speak? Was it the moment of epiphany or was it a moment of knowing that whatever you say next will depart from that gentleness back into whatever it is, you know toxic behaviors, toxic relationships? 

JA: So is it a moment of lasting grace, or is it a fleeting one?

JEL: I hope you're not asking me because I don't know.