“I had an aunt, blind in one eye, she wore cat glasses with glitter in them and was always smoking...she would tell us crazy stories...our grandmother believed that if she burned incense it would hook her up with Jesus pretty well...so all over her house there were grey columns of ash. I asked my aunt what these grey columns were and she told me they were the souls of dead men...and she said if you touch them you are going to unleash their spirits...,” says Luis Alberto Urrea.
Few writers are good speakers too. Urrea brings with him a flair for dramatization...He says storytelling runs in his family. His father told great stories and about his proverbial aunt he relates yet another story, “...in Tijuana they had this crazy kerosene heater. They would turn the lights off and this heater would cast orange green light and my aunt told us this ghastly story for one Christmas...an ancestor Urrea was riding through the cemetery when he saw a beautiful girl...he picked her up saying she deserved to be in a better place. He was so excited to have such a pretty girl close to him...he was just about to turn around and say something dashing when he saw her face and it was a skull with no flesh coming to bite him...”
Urrea’s latest book is “The House of Broken Angels”. He has written several books on border issues (Mexican-American). Having grown up in Tijuana, he uses that as a metaphor to say, “Everybody has felt pain and heart break...all of us have lived in a Tijuana dump...pain is inevitable, misery, optional...I am choosing to live in joy...it is easy to keep dwelling on sadness, it takes you to death...I want to show people shame does not make you shameful.... A lot of us don’t want to be who we are...we struggle in life just trying to accept who and what we are...somebody is either on a diet, in therapy or doing something to improve themselves...that is a universal struggle...we want transformation and that fuels your relationship with people, with a place, with artistic pursuits, spiritually...maybe we are realizing what we are...”
As he navigates between heartbreak and hope, Urrea says the best advice he received was from a professor, for the piece he wrote upon his father’s death by saying, “If you want me to feel something take control of your writing...let me feel it for myself...” Urrea says, “For me it meant to get control not only of my language, it had to be put in context....He meant get that experience into a controlled piece of art. Chaos or hysteria did not honour me or my father...you need technical mastery of what you are trying to do.”
An entertaining speaker with spirit, he says when he was told to change his name to improve marketability of his books, he added Alberto to it.
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