Growing up five miles away from the San Jacinto battleground, Emma Perez was constantly faced with the Texas Revolution.
In school, she learned about the Battle of the Alamo, but the stories only ever glorified the vanquished American “heroes,” never revealing the perspective of the people already living on that land.
“You’re pretty much confronted with that all of your life. They start in grade school with the myth … of all those men who supposedly died valiantly,” Perez said.
As a self-described “Chicana historian, feminist theorist and creative writer,” Perez pulls from all three roles in her writing. In her newest work, “Forgetting the Alamo, Or, Blood Memory,” which will be published in 2009, Perez tries to destabilize what has been accepted as history and “to tell the other stories that never get told.”
Perez will be on campus today for a reading hosted by the César E. Chávez Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies.
“Forgetting the Alamo” is told in the first person by Micaela, a young “baby butch” who comes of age during the Texas Revolution and witnesses the greed and the massacres that occurred afterward, as well as the transformations in the lives of her family caused by the violence.
“And she falls in love, of course, with a black Indian woman,” Perez said. “Because you have to have a love story ““ otherwise, what’s the point?”
Perez will return to campus two decades after receiving her doctorate in history from UCLA in 1988 and more than three decades after first arriving on campus as an undergraduate.
“I landed (at UCLA) around ’76. It was cool, it was good, it was fun ““ more fun now, I think, because it was hard then to have a queer-of-color mask,” Perez said.
In her writing, historical and fictional, Perez challenges the idea that history is stable or strictly factual. She said both creative writing and history are about the ways in which stories are told and interpreted.
“I mean it goes back to the way the victor writes the story,” she said. “(History) becomes the nation’s patriotic story and a way to bring together the people, and certain voices get omitted. … Voices from the margins, any voices that are poking at the nation are getting silenced.”
Perez said she works to move voices from the margins to the forefront, a project that has made progress but will still take time.
“Some historians use novels to teach because it’s a way of getting us to understand society and culture,” Perez said, describing fiction as a way to record people and lifestyles in a given moment. “Any and all fiction rewrites history.”
The interest in rewriting history first struck Perez during the ’80s when she was working on her master’s degree at UCLA.
Perez was excited by new and different academic interrogations of gender and class, though she was aware that she still faced limitations.
“Queer-of-color voices were not taken as seriously, I think,” Perez said, also mentioning the frustrations of seeing racism, sexism and homophobia, even within different progressive movements.
For example, she said, a feminist movement might push for the Equal Rights Amendment while ignoring issues of class and race, whereas in race and labor movements it was sometimes hard to be queer.
“People are still categorizing too much,” Perez said. “You’re either this or you’re that. You can’t be a queer person of color.”
Perez said her writing grew out of the excitement and frustration she felt while witnessing the different but limited perspectives on race, gender and class. She was also drawn to the socialist feminist criticism being produced in resistance to ideas of “traditional history.”
In spite of her strong theoretical impulses, though, Perez’s fiction is focused on characters and their stories.
“There are audiences who will pick up fiction who won’t pick up a theoretical book,” she said. And though she does see her work as targeted toward a lesbian audience, she thinks “Forgetting the Alamo” will also appeal to those interested in the specific historical moment of the Texas Revolution.
“I write for lesbians. I write for Chicana lesbians. I write for women, for men, for people who are allies who want to understand different kinds of realities,” she said.
As a historian, Perez said, she also loves a good story, and for her writing fiction is a more personal process.
“We take our emotional lives and we put it in our characters, even when they’re characters we’re not,” Perez said. “I have some pretty evil characters, evil white men, and I don’t see myself in them at all, but I still can get into that emotional reality.”
In terms of her own writing, Perez described her aesthetic as drawing on a strong sense of storytelling.
“I love theory. I love lyrical language. I love novels that are told, stories that are profound and literary and have a lot of metaphors,” she said.
Perez recognizes that fiction is harder to break into for marginal voices and that it is easier for her to get her academic work published. Even though she had already written a novel and a theoretical work, “The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History,” Perez still had difficulty finding a publisher for “Forgetting the Alamo,” shopping the novel with different alternative presses and an academic press before it was accepted by the University of Texas Press.
“I mean, it’s a Chicana-lesbian Western. Where do you put that? There’s no genre for that,” she said.
Yet, for Perez, fiction is what keeps her happy ““ and busy. On Wednesday, as she spoke from her home in Denver, Perez kept her 21-month-old daughter Luzia home from day care since she knew she would miss her during her visit to Los Angeles.
As “Dora the Explorer” played in the background, Perez explained that she speaks to Luzia in only Spanish; her partner speaks to their daughter in English.
“My academic job is my day job; it lets me send my baby to day care,” Perez said about balancing teaching, writing and raising her daughter with her partner. “It’s not easy. You just stay up later or get up earlier. You make time.”
But in spite of challenges in the publishing industry and with finding time to write, Perez stresses the importance of pursuing one’s passions.
“It’s hard right now, but you know you can’t let that stop you. … It’s all scary; right now professors are getting their tenure taken away,” Perez said. “So you might as well do what you love.”