ACWWS Talk Di Tings: With Ana Menéndez (Part 1)

Thank you, thank you. It's great.

This is a good question. You know, I wrote that story partly in New York City and partly in New Delhi when I was living there. And I remember telling that joke at some gathering in India and in Pakistan. Tell us a little bit about the joy? Yes, the joke. You want me to tell the joke? Yes. The joke is a well-known Cuban joke, and as it turns out, I've since learned almost every culture of migration has a version of this joke. So I'll tell you about the reaction in India and Pakistan. But briefly, the joke is: There's a little Cuban mutt who gets off the boat and he's wandering around the streets of Miami, looking at everything and saying, 'Oh, how beautiful!' So he sees this lovely French poodle and, being a not very important mutt, he says, 'You know, you're so cute. Would you like to get married and have beautiful puppies?' And she looks down her nose at him and says, 'I'm sorry, do you know who you're talking to? I am a French poodle of distinction and you are nothing but a mutt.' And he sort of gathers himself up and says, 'Well, here in Miami I may be a mutt, but in Cuba I was a German Shepherd.' So I told that joke in India and in Pakistan, and older people in the room just erupted in laughter because, of course, they have their own very painful history of partition and of having to flee one's land. For no one was somebody, or imagined oneself to be somebody, in the place they were from. And so I've since found... This book is almost twenty years old now, which is amazing to consider. Twenty years old, and it still resonates. That joke, when I tell it to groups, you don't have to be Cuban. And so I think that's a very long way of answering your question of why it was such a popular story. And I think that's one of the reasons: we can all, I think even people who have not migrated, can look back to high school perhaps when they were somebody. We all have this feeling of existing in two places in time. And one was perhaps better or had more potential. And I think it taps into that very human feeling.

Exactly, status is relative.

Yes, it has indeed. Although it has been enormously creative, so it has filled that part of me. But thank you for the question because it's an amazing program and I love to talk about it, so thank you for giving me the chance to talk about it. You plug it a little bit. It is an absolutely amazing program funded very generously by the Mellon Foundation; we're very grateful for their support. It's a big grant to promote the humanities and to support transfer students from Miami-Dade who are pursuing humanities degrees. The Mellon Foundation together with all of us at FIU at Miami-Dade feel strongly about the importance of nurturing the whole human being in the way that the humanities does, and ensuring that students are supported when they make that decision to pursue their humanities because the wider society doesn't always offer that support, unfortunately. And why did I take the job? I felt very strongly in our times about doing something positive for the arts, for immigrant students, which comprised most of our cohort. I remember never forgetting that first day when I asked everybody who had at least one parent born outside of the United States to raise their hand. Almost every single person gives me chills—almost every single person among those sixty students raised their hands. So this is a very powerful asset that we have in Miami, that we have at FIU, at MDC. To be able to work with this group of students to nurture their talents and their interests was something that I just couldn't pass up, even though yes, I have had no time to write, which is not a huge loss to the world of course, but it is to me because writing does fill me. But as I said, there has been so much imagination that has been required to build this program from the ground up in terms of programming, what we offer students, how we deliver it. It has filled that need that I have that I think all artists have: to create new things, to bring these things in, to be right. I've been very fortunate, my career as an activist. So there are lots of different ways; sometimes you do have to take time away from the writing to focus on something else that is equally as important.

Yeah, I want to mention that the word 'confidence' came up again and again in the post-bridge survey that we did. And that to me was just the best outcome of the week: to have a majority of students independently say that in their comments was what it's about.