A Conversation with Anjanette Delgado
Anjanette Delgado, editor of Home in Florida: Latinx Writers and the Literature of Uprootedness.
Anjanette Delgado is the editor of a new anthology, Home in Florida: Latinx Writers and the Literature of Uprootedness, out November 16th from the University Press of Florida. Undomesticated recently spoke to Delgado and discussed the complexity of Florida and how Americans see and experience it in different ways.
Undomesticated: Thank you so much for talking to us about your gorgeous new book. I know it’s a cliché to say you can’t judge a book by its cover, but yours is stunning and gives the reader a glimpse of what’s inside. These stories all center around being uprooted, the corollary to which is belonging. We’ve featured Patricia Engel’s books in Undomesticated before, thanks to Angie Cruz, and I love Engel’s early story in your collection, “La Ciudad Mágica.” It’s a story that is honest and open and may make some white people feel uncomfortable. In it, white Miami residents speak loudly on the street about different communities in the city, comparing Guatemalans, Nicaraguans, Mexicans, Panamanians, Colombians, Ecuadorians, and Brazilians. At one point, a man says, “We want to get away from the Miami kind. They’re the ones taking over.” This happens as he’s buying empanadas to go, and it really boiled my blood. Can you talk a little about how you decided to start the collection with this story and how you decided to arrange the stories, essays, and poetry?
Anjanette Delgado: Of course, but first let me address the cover. It centers on a painting by Cuban American artist Nereida García Ferraz and depicts her mother arriving in the United States sometime in the 1960s. I had seen the painting and it had stuck with me because it encompasses both sides of displacement. The being bereft, having just arrived, no longer tethered to what birthed you, and the arriving in a new place that doesn’t know you yet, and sometimes has no desire to.
I love that it’s our cover.
As to the arrangement of the anthology, and Patricia’s wonderful essay opening the book, my compass was emotion and progression. Because, every piece in the book is amazing, but how could I arrange them, how could I craft a journey of emotion so that the reader could experience the progression of uprootedness/rerootedness through the work? In other words, uprootedness is not an event, but a journey. Patricia’s essay shows us what is here before we arrive, what we see, what people tell us, say of us… later, that will evolve (or not), or the displaced will change, make the landing place home, understand who they are and why they left, understand their own search to belong to earth sometimes not originally their own.
Undomesticated: Thank you. That’s so vivid, even for people who have yet to read the collection. Vera’s story, “Rite of Passage,” is also brilliant. I particularly felt moved by this passage: “My memory of being bored in Disney World also remains. I am a lucky man: in the twenty years I’ve lived in Florida, I’ve never had to return. The unending lines for access to rides endured under insane levels of heat must have taken their toll, I’m sure, but more, still, the empty enjoyment that I felt even as a child, the sense of being in a hypocritically happy world.” Can you talk about what Disney World as a tourist destination means to you? Is it easy or even possible to separate the baggage around it from the American Dream?
Delgado: It’s funny that you mention Vera’s essay because that is the exact passage that caught my eye. He’s a very exquisite, very precise kind of writer, and he’s fearless. Reading that, I realized I felt the same way, but had never dared to say it. How fake and manufactured things can be in more-and-much-better land, and how hard it is to separate that (the baggage you mention) from the ideals that may have brought you here in the first place.
Undomesticated: Cuban writers figure prominently in your collection. But one story about the Cuban diaspora comes from Panamanian American writer, Carlos Harrison. In “Other,” Harrison writes about growing up in Panama, Michigan, and Florida with his Panamanian mother and white American father. Harrison always feels like an outsider due to language and culture. He and his family move to an area in Miami called Riverside, a poor Jewish neighborhood that’s affordable for his family. After his father’s death, his mother remarries a Cuban immigrant, and he still doesn’t feel like he fits in. I felt a chill down my spine when he wrote about what became of Riverside: “Now it was ‘Little Havana.’ The Jews were mostly gone, replaced by the influx of Cubans. The world had changed around me. Now it changed at home.” I had no idea Little Havana was a Jewish neighborhood, although maybe I’m just forgetting. The last time I was there was 17 years ago when I was with a Jewish group on our way to Havana to visit the Cuban Jewish community. What was the most surprising or personally meaningful thing you learned from these stories?
Delgado: Carlos’ piece in particular is one I am very proud of. He’s a journalist and a historian of people’s stories. He’s not yet used to writing about himself. But I asked and he said he didn’t think he had anything “interesting enough.” A few minutes later he starts talking about his dad, Don Harrison. I saw the story, literally begged him to write it on the spot, and I’m so glad he did.
What I learned from these stories is that as weird as my uprootedness seems to me (how it came about, the reasons, when it happened, how I handled it or didn’t), I am not alone. As Reinaldo Arenas once said, uprootedness is a fact of life. We are mobile beings for a reason. Not planted in soil. We move. What does that do to us? To people we love, who love us? How do we change places? How do places change us? In between those things there is loss and heartbreak but also love.
And that’s precisely the other thing I learned: love. I love these writers. I loved their work before, some I knew personally. But working with them all these months, being the receiver of their many kindnesses, of their trust, I’ve just fallen in love with each of these beautiful amazing untethered humans. I love them. They’ve rooted me. Claimed me. I’m theirs.
Undomesticated: I completely know what you mean! I edited an anthology about Hong Kong and I still remember first reading those stories and feeling like I was the luckiest person in the world at that moment. Can you talk a little about how you felt when you received the stories, essays, and poems in your anthology?
Delgado: Exactly like that! Moved, humbled, touched, embraced, blessed. Keep in mind, these are the writers I admire, the ones I want to write like. To have them trust me with their work? I am still pinching myself.
Undomesticated: I really do love how these stories come together. Can you discuss how you came to the idea for the book in the first place? Was it difficult to find a publisher?
Delgado: Here, the publisher found me. One day, Stephanye Hunter, an editor at UPF, contacted me. Patricia Engel or Chantel Acevedo had referred her to me. She wanted to do a book and she was thinking Florida and Latinx. We hit it off and then I stumbled on the interview with Reinaldo Arenas that I quote in my intro… and so we added the concepts of home and uprootedness and worked on finding out whether there was a space in which those two terms didn’t exclude each other. And let me tell you: my experience with Stephanye and UPF has been amazing. They love the book as much as I do and they show it in every possible way. Let’s just say, I call Stephanye my book mistress and leave it at that.
Undomesticated: That sounds like the perfect way to end this interview so people can rush out to order your book! Thank you so much for this conversation. I hope readers will look at Florida in a new way after reading your book!
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