In December 2014, I had just completed my first semester of a creative writing MFA in Boston and was home for the holiday break. Mileage may vary for those in MFAs—and elsewhere, I’ve shared some my own small and large battles—but my first sampling of fiction workshops and rhet/comp teacher training were like opening doors and windows to let in the smells, sounds, and feel of a summer shower. Motivated by my newfound desires to write, I visited one of my hometown’s biggest used bookstores, hoping to find anything to inspire or challenge me—that is, anything to further fuel me.
Within the poetry section, I stumbled upon a signed copy of Ofelia Zepeda’s 1995 collection Ocean Power: Poems from the Desert. I flipped through its pages, delighted to find poetry set in the urban and rural Sonoran Desert landscapes I had known all my life. One poem, in particular, resonated immediately, “People on Wayward Journeys (Russian Thistle, Russian Tumbleweed).” Over five short stanzas Zepeda’s poem personifies the titular, parenthetical shrubs, narrating their movements across Arizona’s central and southern deserts, cities, and freeways. From the opening stanza, my chest swelled with surprise and recognition:
They have no use for traffic lights
or crosswalks.
They take fate into their own hands
and roll across streets
in Chandler, Mesa, Coolidge,
and other cotton-field-infested towns[i].
If I had previously read a piece of literature that mentioned Mesa by name, I don’t recall. Despite its status as the third most populous city in the state, to anyone I’d ever met outside of Arizona, I was from “Phoenix” or the “Phoenix area” because saying “Mesa” was like saying anywhere else they’d never heard of.
Not so with this poem. It mattered that its subjects traversed these specific parts of the eastern and southern Salt River Valley. So, for the first time in my life, Mesa became a place in which literary things happened—even a place in which literature had been produced and disseminated. Before I knew anything else about Zepeda or her writing, I knew her as the poet who had inscribed my hometown into an aspirational, bittersweet piece about beings who “make trails across the desert…[and] know no boundaries…[as they] continue on their wayward journeys./Origins unknown./Destinations unclear.” Of course, I had to learn more—about her, about Ocean Power, about our shared homeplace and how to render it via literary expression.
Having been away for months—and knowing I would stay away for at least the next few years—maybe I identified with the uncertainty and longing in Zepeda’s words. After all, my admission and participation in a creative writing MFA remained to me as a lucid dream, like I might rupture the entire delicate enterprise at any moment and revert to the underemployed, rudderless existence that had driven me to chase an ambition as outlandish and improbable as wanting to be a writer. Maybe, even then, I knew I was destined to return home, no matter in what condition, because of how undeniably connected I felt to the urban Sonoran Desert—a place holding many of my relatives beneath its endless white, summer skies and within its warmed, mountain-stilled nights.
Regardless, I eagerly paid the $10 for the used book and referred to it frequently thereafter. Thus began my search for more of Zepeda’s writings, as well as those of her contemporaries and predecessors, as I suddenly imagined myself aspiring to learn all I could of this tradition, one I hadn’t previously considered as such but felt energized to engage and expand upon. If my early dabbling with creative writing had awoken in me a desire to write, it had also reminded me of my long-sensed absence for literature reflecting what I recognized as Arizona life. Finding the used copy of Ocean Power signaled the end of that absence.
Although anecdotal, my encounter with Zepeda’s poetry, and its subsequent impact, illustrates the power of what scholar—and one of my MFA professors—Katerina González Seligmann terms “literary infrastructure.” Embarking from their research work in the Caribbean, González Seligmann describes literary infrastructure as:
industry that includes publishers, editors, and mechanisms of national, regional, and international literary
circulation…also…smaller-scale institutions that provide literary training, facilitate and promote the circulation
of literary texts, and consecrate literary value, including commercial, noncommercial, and academic or state-
supported cultural projects. Finally…literary infrastructure also includes the smallest-scale variety:
independent presses, literary magazines, literary associations, and specialized small-book production[ii].
I remember when they introduced this concept in a course, and I remember feeling further clarity for myself and the world. González Seligmann’s notion compels me because of how it communalizes what can too often feel like isolated acts or products. An author, for better or worse, becomes the sole-credited individual responsible for making literature. Perhaps, on rare occasion, an as-famous name like Gordon Lish transcends the anonymity of editorial-side work, but he and others like him are exceptions, not norms.
Meanwhile, used bookstores, through discounted prices and impassioned workers, help keep certain works available, functioning as indispensable archives, promoters, and distributors within Arizona’s literary infrastructure. Especially for readers who most identify with Zepeda’s words—her deep affection and care of the land and condemnation of its exploitation by agribusiness and other environmentally destructive forces; her tender memory and the relatives who populate her fondest and harshest personal episodes; her undying yet critical hope for working-class, migrant and Indigenous communities—recovering her work in a used bookstore aligns appropriately with her poetic vision. Proof our belonging and our dreaming can transcend onerous capitalist forces and elitist, racist exclusions[iii].
I returned frequently to this bookstore, hoping to find more authors I’d missed, and was repeatedly rewarded for my persistence. To my growing enthusiasm, authors such as Alberto Ríos, Stella Pope Duarte, Patricia Preciado Martín, Luci Tapahonso, and Laura Tohe, as well as publishers and imprints such the University of Arizona Press, Sun Tracks, Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, and Camino del Sol gradually transformed from curiosities to people and entities all connected through their efforts to write, edit, publish, and promote (literary) Arizona realities, histories, and aspirations. I have since come to consider them (and others) akin to literary elders, ancestors, and contemporaries.
Eventually, these habits around seeking and recovering Arizona authors and histories became my path home. During the final year of my MFA, as I talked with friends and professors about the dreaded “what’s next?” phase for all who attend an arts program, I came to terms with the fact that I wanted to keep writing—and to keep researching. This led me to apply to a PhD program at the university down the street from my childhood home. The institution granted me admission, and seven years later—thanks to supportive faculty, invaluable lessons in critical research methods, and the ubiquitous embrace only home could provide—I graduated. Along the way, I wrote and published a book of fiction and a few works of poetry, defended a doctoral dissertation centered on Zepeda, as well as two of her Arizona predecessors—Yoeme poet and memoirist Refugio Savala and Chicano fiction writer and activist Mario Suárez—and obtained a faculty position at another of our state’s public universities.
In addition to including many of the aforementioned authors within the curriculum of my creative writing and literature courses, I continue to patronize used bookstores, purchasing and trading books, contributing (I hope) to the maintenance of our infrastructure and traditions facilitated thereby. I have no grander conclusion than to acknowledge the otherwise unrecognized infrastructural work that made possible my creative and professional life. I didn’t know I could come home until others showed the way, didn’t know how many of us it takes to sustain this fragile ecosystem.
[i] From “People on Wayward Journeys (Russian Thistle, Russian Tumbleweed),” Ocean Power: Poems from the Desert, University of Arizona Press, 1995, p. 57.
[ii] From “The Void, The Distance, Elsewhere: Literary Infrastructure and Empire in the Caribbean,” Small Axe no. 62, July 2020, pp. 1-16.
[iii] See: Kapoor, Maya L. “12 Books Expelled from Tucson Schools: Seven Years After Arizona Banned Mexican American Studies, Some Want it Back,” High Country News, June 27, 2017.
Oscar Mancinas is a Rarámuri-Chicano poet, prose writer, and teacher. He was born, raised, and still resides in Mesa, Arizona’s Washington-Escobedo Neighborhood. His published works include the 2020 short fiction collection To Live and Die in El Valle (Arte Público Press), as well as the poetry collection des___: papeles, palabras, & poems (Tolsun Books). Contact him or find more of his work at: https://oscarmancinas.wordpress.com/.