Latino Hispanic Culture, Art and Film at Bullfighter’s Cafe

Interview with Barbara Renaud Gonzalez, author of “Golondrina, why did you leave me?”

What/who was the inspiration behind your book?
As the oldest of eight children, I thought my mother told me everything…when I turned forty, I asked her “how did you cross the border, Mami?” Silence. Golondrina is based on this secret.

What books are on your nightstand now?
Anacaona by Edwidge Danticat, The Hummingbird’s Daughter, by Luis Alberto Urrea, Burgher’s Daughter, by Nadine Gordimer, and People of the Book, by Geraldine Brooks.

If you were casting for the movie version of the book, who would be your picks for the main characters?
Hollywood doesn’t always equal great actresses for this kind of role. For Amada Garcia Mistral – a very very good Tejana actress from the world of theatre. Jesse Borrego (from San Antonio) to play Lazaro and a superb Latina actress from Los Angeles to play Lucero.

For anyone planning a trip to your state, what’s on your “must see/must do in Texas” list?
1. Salute! Bar International on St. Mary’s Street (where the great accordionist Esteban Jordan played for many years) and the music on Friday nights will get you dancing like a loca, inspired by the fusion of conjunto-jazz. You don’t need boots to dance here.
2. You must go down to Brownsville and walk across the International Bridge (and the Rio Grande) to Matamoros.
3. You must go to Huntsville, to the “Walls” and see the prison industry. More than a quarter of a million –mostly men — are in prison in Texas today. Then you’ll understand #1. And start over.
Forget the Alamo!

About the book:
The golondrina is a small and undistinguished swallow. But in Spanish, the word has evoked a thousand poems and songs dedicated to the migrant’s departure and hoped-for return. As such, the migrant becomes like the swallow, a dream-seeker whose real home is nowhere, everywhere, and especially in the heart of the person left behind.

The swallow in this story is Amada García, a young Mexican woman in a brutal marriage, who makes a heart-wrenching decision–to leave her young daughter behind in Mexico as she escapes to el Norte searching for love, which she believes must reside in the country of freedom.

About the author:
Bárbara Renaud González, a native-born Tejana and acclaimed journalist, has written a lyrical story of land, love, and loss, bringing us the first novel of a working-class Tejano family set in the cruelest beauty of the Texas panhandle. Her story exposes the brutality, tragedy, and hope of her homeland and helps to fill a dearth of scholarly and literary works on Mexican and Mexican American women in post-World War II Texas.

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Article written by Aurora Anaya-Cerda,
owner of La Casa Azul Bookstore

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