In 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. 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’ve followed the trajectory of Tobar’s work since the publication of his debut novel, The Tattooed Soldier, in 1998. Our Migrant Souls continues the author’s decades-long investigation into who we are and our place within the structure of American empire. Recently, he and I corresponded about the book via email.
Can you talk about the process of writing this book, compared with your previous works of nonfiction?
This book was born of a collision of two events in my life. 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. 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. My earlier nonfiction always began with journalism, with reporting. 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. I had many great models in that regard—Eula Biss, Claudia Rankine, W.E.B. Du Bois, Richard Rodriguez, and many others.
What do you feel nonfiction offers in terms of storytelling that fiction doesn’t?
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. 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. This gives the narrative an authority it might not have otherwise. Most importantly, writing nonfiction well requires the writer to take a deep dive into the reality around them. To research, investigate, report. To engage with the lives of others. By doing that reporting and that research, we inevitably discover things and meet people we might not have seen or met otherwise. In this book, I was able to tap into the lessons learned from 30 years of listening to Latino people tell me their stories.
How do you strike a balance between facts and data and the personal dimension here?
When you write a novel, you learn to play many different narrative notes. Sometimes you are entirely inside the subjectivity of one character; others, you might step back into the perspective of an omniscient narrator. With this book, I’m trying to make use of all the instruments in my storytelling orchestra, so to speak. History, critical theory, observation, even a bit of travelogue. But, as with a novel, it’s important to think of the thread of experience that holds it all together. 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.
“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?
Los Angeles has long and very deep connections to Mexican identity. It was, as most people know, once a part of Mexico, and you can feel a kind of Mexican spirituality that might not be quite as strong in other parts of the U.S. Having said that, I think Latino energy and ambition are powerful forces in all major American cities, and even most midsized ones. You can get a small taste of it in a place like Portland, Maine, for instance, where I recently ate some first-rate pupusas. When I travel to such places, what I really feel is a taste of Los Angeles, the model of urbanism that Latino people have created in Southern California. The soccer leagues, the Spanish-language media, the rasquache aesthetic in Latino neighborhoods in Omaha or Detroit: all those are forms of cultural expression that were perfected in Southern California and exported across the United States.
You include the stories of your students in Our Migrant Souls. How do you teach them to be vulnerable on the page?
I start by being vulnerable myself and by trying to embrace that “Latino” quality our mothers often seek to imbue in us: humility. Then I talk about vulnerability, honesty, and complexity as central elements in storytelling. I tell my students that most often it’s the complicated and painful things about the people we love that make their stories powerful and more faithful representations of the truth. If you write “My immigrant father is the smartest and most loyal and hardest-working person I know,” that’s wonderful. But if you complicate the portrait by revealing a few of his all-too-human flaws, his insecurities and foibles, then his great and transcendent qualities feel more real and affect the reader more. I found it only takes a little encouragement to get young writers to embrace those ideas in their storytelling. Once you get them going, it becomes this amazing flood of narrative.
This book offers an intimate and unvarnished self-portrait. I’m wondering what that was like for you.
Well, it came with a price. My father was very upset when he read my account, in the pages of the New Yorker, of the infidelities that led to the end of his marriage with my mother. And my mother, in her wonderfully indirect way, suggested that maybe I shouldn’t be airing the family dirty laundry. Ni modo. I told them that if my students were brave enough to be honest about the messiness in their families, I should be too. As I said before, I think the incredible strength of my parents, and their love for me, comes through all the more when you see them as complete human beings. Beyond that, the process of thinking about my family in relation to race ideas in the United States was moving for me. I came to realize that the aspects of our story that made me feel “broken” (migration, family separation) are constants in the history of the United States and the history of humanity.
As more Latinos settle into U.S. communities that have not been typical migration destinations, how do you see this further complicating notions of Latina/o/x identity?
I’ve seen this phenomenon unfolding for a generation now. I remember visiting relatively new Latinx communities in Kansas, Alabama, and North Carolina in the early 2000s. Now all those places are starting to elect Latinos to public office. Latino identity has always been incredibly complicated: it’s an Indigenous, European, Black, and multinational identity. Think, for example, of how different it is to grow up Dominican as opposed to Mexican. And yet, despite these differences, the idea of a pan-Latino unity is stronger than ever. Why? Because, in the eyes of assorted racists and demagogues, Latino immigration is the greatest threat to the order and prosperity of the United States. The demagogues have lumped us all together into a “brown” threat to the identity of the nation. Latino was invented as a term of solidarity in the 1970s; it’s the most natural thing in the world, when you’re under attack, to make alliances with people who are close to you, culturally speaking. That’s what’s happening now, all over the country. Pretty much all the major “race” identities in the United States were created in this fashion. To me, Latino is a synonym for mixed, and it’s also a synonym for unity and solidarity.•
MCD OUR MIGRANT SOULS: A MEDITATION ON RACE AND THE MEANINGS AND MYTHS OF "LATINO," BY HÉCTOR TOBAR
Alex Espinoza is the author of Still Water Saints, The Five Acts of Diego León, and Cruising: An Intimate History of a Radical Pastime. He’s written for the L.A. Times, the NY Times Magazine, VQR, LitHub, and NPR's All Things Considered. The recipient of fellowships from the NEA and MacDowell as well as an American Book Award, he lives in Los Angeles and is the Tomás Rivera Endowed Chair of Creative Writing at UC Riverside.
