Los Angeles has long and very deep connections to Mexican identity. “Migrants,” you write, “…are, more often than not, people who have made a conscious attempt to cut ties to their past.” How does that intersect with the myth of reinvention specific to Los Angeles?
In this case, that central thread is my life, my experience as father, husband, citizen, and as a son of Guatemalan immigrants and a witness to history.
But, as with a novel, it’s important to think of the thread of experience that holds it all together. History, critical theory, observation, even a bit of travelogue. With this book, I’m trying to make use of all the instruments in my storytelling orchestra, so to speak. Sometimes you are entirely inside the subjectivity of one character others, you might step back into the perspective of an omniscient narrator. When you write a novel, you learn to play many different narrative notes. How do you strike a balance between facts and data and the personal dimension here? In this book, I was able to tap into the lessons learned from 30 years of listening to Latino people tell me their stories. By doing that reporting and that research, we inevitably discover things and meet people we might not have seen or met otherwise. Most importantly, writing nonfiction well requires the writer to take a deep dive into the reality around them. This gives the narrative an authority it might not have otherwise. Having said that, the power of nonfiction comes from the pact and promise you make with the reader: You’re saying, in effect, everything here will be “true,” factual, every “character” you meet will be a person in real life. Well, you can ask that question both ways, right? I think writing novels has helped my nonfiction tremendously, because there’s a degree of emotional and aesthetic commitment you make to a fictional narrative that most nonfiction doesn’t have. What do you feel nonfiction offers in terms of storytelling that fiction doesn’t?
Du Bois, Richard Rodriguez, and many others. I had many great models in that regard-Eula Biss, Claudia Rankine, W.E.B. In Our Migrant Souls, I’m working in a new genre, one with a long and wonderful tradition in the United States: the critical essay. My earlier nonfiction always began with journalism, with reporting. Like Baldwin, I wanted to write something that was a declamation, a lament, a poem about the injustices and insults suffered by Latino people, and a celebration of their power and resilience. First, being a professor at a public university where my classes are often filled with Latinx students and second, having reencountered the work of James Baldwin, and especially his fierce, book-length essay The Fire Next Time. This book was born of a collision of two events in my life. Recently, he and I corresponded about the book via email.Ĭan you talk about the process of writing this book, compared with your previous works of nonfiction? Our Migrant Souls continues the author’s decades-long investigation into who we are and our place within the structure of American empire. I’ve followed the trajectory of Tobar’s work since the publication of his debut novel, The Tattooed Soldier, in 1998.
What emerges is not only a powerful meditation on the complex nature of identity, but also a long and tangled history of migration and the manifold ways immigrant bodies and psyches have been tempered by the larger forces of colonialism and capitalism. I n Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino,” Héctor Tobar dissects the often slippery term Latino and its place in our national lexicon.
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