Achy Obejas

Achy: We came from Cuba. My parents were from different towns in Cuba and they met in Havana. At some point they determined that they had differences with the Cuban revolution, so we fled Cuba in a boat. A 20-foot boat, a there were 44 of out total. We landed in Miami. We were there for about a year and a half, and in that year and a half my parents did a variety of jobs… everything from dog groomer to waiter at a Chinese restaurant to farm workers picking tomatoes.

They were both hyper-educated people. They were both the first people in their families to—in the case of my dad, it was the first person in his family to go beyond sixth grade, and in the case of my mom it was the first person to go to college—but they were both ambitious in terms of bettering themselves and imagining a different life. They had both gotten doctorates. My dad had degree in law from the University of Havana, and my mom in pedagogy.

When they got to Miami none of those skills really transferred in any kind of immediate level. And my dad wasn't really keen on being here. He always imagined that we would be here for a brief period of time, and that history would play out the way it always has, which is that some unlikeable person rises to power in a Latin American country and the US government then topples that person, and puts in someone perhaps even more unlikeable but more tolerable to the US. And so the idea was to wait out the moment when the U.S. would interfere in Cuban politics. We know how well that worked out.

But my mom got to the U.S. and said “Uh oh, no, I like it here. I'm not in a big hurry to go back.” As much as she missed her family and she missed her friends and it was a big adjustment, I think she saw greater possibilities for us here. She played the game of 'we'd love to go back' her whole life really, until so late in the game that it was safe to say “Well, I think if it was possible to go back, we might go visit, but we wouldn't participate at this point in rebuilding Cuba, or whatever.”

My dad started to scheming to, not necessarily go back to Cuba at that point, but to get us back to Latin America. At some point it dawned on it him that it was taking a little longer than he presumed it would. He didn't want us to be Americans, he wanted us to be Cuban, he wanted to be Latin Americans, so he started scheming to set up a business in the Dominican Republic. My mom was absolutely not game for that, she was not interested in going to a country that was considerably less developed than Cuba and much poorer than Cuba, and where there were a lot of Black people. My mom is racially mixed, or was racially mixed, and one of her signature impulses is always to flee from all things Black.

Nia: When you say “was” racially mixed, is it past tense because she passed?

Achy: Yes, both my parents are deceased.

Nia: OK, I was like, “Was there some point where she stopped being—

Achy: Stopped being racially mixed? (Nia laughs) No, they both are deceased. I'm still adjusting to the tense with my mom because her death is pretty recent. She died in January.

Anyway, she did not like the idea of moving to the Dominican Republic in that all of her hard work to advance the race, i.e. marrying my green-eyed Jewish father, would be undone by our inevitable coupling with people darker than us and her. So there is at that point a U.S. government department called Housing Educational Welfare and they had a program to resettle Cuban refugees. The program was designed to address two problems, three problems, that the government saw. One was a tremendous shortage of teachers. In the '60s there was a great shortage of teachers. This was before people figured out that if they were teachers they could avoid the draft. And the other thing was, they were trying to figure out what to do with all these Cuban refugees who were coming over, many of who were quite educated. Lastly, they were trying to disperse refugees from South Florida, because Cubans were starting to congregate and concentrate in South Florida. That was another plan that worked out really well, the dispersing of Cubans from South Florida. (laughs)

Nia: I think you're being sarcastic? I can't tell what you exactly what you mean.

Achy: Well, I mean the idea that they would spread Cubans out to all these different places to get them trained as teachers in the US, this was the plan. And obviously, I mean they had people in Wisconsin, they had a program in Wisconsin, one in Indiana, I think there was one in Iowa as well, I don't remember anymore. There were like 36 families that ended up in Terre Haute, IN. My mom signed us up for that program behind my dad's back.

Nia: Ohhhhh.

Achy: She forged his signature on the application, And he got accepted, not her. I mean, she didn't apply for herself, she applied for him. They accepted him, and she was struggling with how to tell him she had done this. (laughs) When his business foray, whatever it was, I don't know what it was, in the Dominican Republic fell through, the project to move to Indiana then became this “Wow, and here I did this as a backstop!” not “I did this to trump your Dominican Republic fantasy.” (both laughs)

We moved to Indiana where my dad proceeded to have a pretty serious nervous breakdown. We were living in a dorm, I think there was 36 other Cuban families. We were all in the same dorm, it was called the Mary Stewart dorm at what was then Indiana State College, what is now Indiana State University. I remember the rooms were, basically they were dorm rooms. My parents had a Murphy bed that they pulled down, and my brother and I slept in the kitchen on cots that would be pulled out at night. So it was basically a studio, four people living in a studio. We had one of the larger apartments, I remember. It was at the end of the hall, those were a little bigger than some of the other ones. People with more than two kids had an apartment in the center of the hall, which was like a suite because it was an actual one bedroom. And we were there

when my dad ended up getting interned in a hospital—

Nia: For the breakdown?

Achy: For the breakdown. In Rockville, IN. So technically he vacated his slot in the program. But they moved my mom into it. My mom was actually always the better candidate because it was a program to create teachers, and my mom had been a teacher, and had been a social worker, but my mother spent a lifetime making sure that my dad was 'the man.' It was crazy shit like, they both had doctorates. My dad went by Dr. Obejas. My mom went by Mrs. Obejas. If you asked her why she would say “Oh, it would be confusing to have two Dr. Obejases.” But it just sort of left him as the degreed and titled character. She wasn't deferential, but made it look like she was at least deferential. It was sort of funny because he wasn't someone who demanded that, so it was sort of a weird combo of the two of them. He really didn't have those kinds of hang-ups. And he would go out of his way to say that she also had a degree, and she would demure. It was a very weird dynamic that the two of them had around those and many other issues.

So they moved my mom into that slot and she did great. At the end of the program people were getting jobs all over the place, but my mom only applied in Indiana because once my dad got out of the hospital they accepted him and about three other people—this was a one year program—but there were two or three other people who for whatever reason ended up having to defer, but they let them sort of complete the program on their own time, and my mom didn't want to be far from my dad. So we ended up in Michigan City, IN. She had other job offers in Indiana, some even closer to Terre Haute, but she picked Michigan City because it was on the lake.

Lake Michigan in Michigan City is like an ocean, I mean it's like an ocean in Chicago too, it's just a monstrous body of water. It's just unbelievably powerful and alluring and it reminded her of the island, and in Michigan City in particular because, unlike Chicago which is a city, so the lake front is all industrialized or at least manicured, so it doesn't have any sort of natural sensibility to it, Michigan City is just dune, after dune, after dune. Just these incredible, beautiful rolling dunes. The first apartment that we had in Michigan City, when my dad was not living with us, we lived on the beach. We had a third floor apartment and from my mom's bedroom you could see the water. There was a little balcony outside the living room and every morning, no matter how damn cold it was, my mom would make coffee and go out on the balcony and have a minute to herself before she froze her ass off (both laugh) and then she'd rush back in. That was her ritual. When he came back from the hospital, and when he, when he finished his t—I mean we saw him, you know he visited and stuff.

Nia: How long was he at the hospital?Achy: You know, it's hard to know. I don't think it was quite a year, but it was close. I've heard six months, I've heard eight.

Nia: So this was not a regular hospital, this was a psychiatric facility?

Achy: Yeah, and we weren't, of course, told that, we were told he was sick, but we weren't told what it was. I didn't realize what it was until many years later when I went to college and I went to a little tiny school called Franklin College and met somebody from Rockville, IN, which is where the hospital was, and I said “Oh, my dad used to be in that hospital, and I used to visit Rockville a lot and I remember this and this and this” and she just looked at me and she said “Wow. I've never seen anybody so casual about having somebody in a mental hospital,” and I was like, “What are you talking about?” She was like “Uhhhh.” (both laugh)

Nia: That was awkward.

Achy: Yeah. She was horribly embarrassed. She was like “I'm sorry but I don't know what your family told you and maybe there are other kinds of internments in that hospital but it's a mental hospital. And I was sure she was out of her mind, (Nia laughs) but I had a car, and so I got in my little car, drove to Rockville, and sure enough not only was it a mental hospital, but the receptionist was the same woman—

Nia: Oh god.

Achy: --who had been there when I was a kid. I recognized her immediately, I didn't think she would recognize me because she hadn't seen me since I was seven or eight, but the minute I said my name she remembered me, and she remembered my dad, she remembered my brother. It was pretty emotional to discover that that's what it was.

My family denied it actually, when I went back and said “Hey, you guys weren't really upfront with us.” Which I get totally, we were little kids, we wouldn't have understood what it meant. And we were struggling with assimilation and trying to figure out how to fit in, in a world that was completely alien to us, and learning a new language, and we had enough on our plates. I get it.

It was just amazing to me that the myth was just so hard to break, that even when we were adults it was impossible to get them to tell the truth, that my mom said “No, that is not what it was.” She was very protective of my dad's image. What did she say? He had tested positive for tuberculosis, and they had quarantined him for that reason, but that it was a silly quarantine, because a lot of people in the tropics don't actually have the disease, but test positive because you've been exposed to it, which of course is true. It's a perfectly reasonable explanation of a condition that was not the case. (both laugh) So that was a real interesting moment there.

But anyway, that's why we were in Indiana, and that's why we grew up in Indiana.

Nia: I kind of want to go back to your mom and her mixed-ness also her anti-Blackness if that's OK. Did your mom identify as mixed?

Achy: No, absolutely not.

Nia: And do you identify as mixed, or as a person of color?

Achy: I identify as a person of color, but it's hard for me to pinpoint what the mixed might be. I mean I don't really know the level of mixture with my mom, she never said. It was really hard to look at my mom and not realize that she was mixed, I mean she was light-skinned but her features did not correspond to what we normally think of as white people. And she had kinky hair, which she worked really, really hard to keep straight at all times.

Nia: Are we talking about her being mixed with Indigenous or mixed with Black or both?

Achy: Oh no, mixed with Black. There's almost no one in Cuba who has an Indigenous background. When people in Cuba talk about being mixed, it's usually with Black people, sometimes with Chinese, rarely with Arab or Jewish people. Racially, that's pretty much the gamut.

The Indigenous people in Cuba pretty much disappeared post-conquest. They died by the gazillion because of disease. And the great Cuban myth about the Indigenous is that at some point they realized that they could not defeat the Spaniards, that the Spaniards had tools, weapons, and at that points numbers, that way outweighed them and they were basically done for; that their destiny was basically to be slaves, a concept that they didn't have, or to die. So they chose to die, and they had a mass suicide by eating dirt.

Nia: That's referenced in Days of Awe.

Achy: Right. There was a reservation outside Havana, a town called Guanabacoa, but that was 100 years ago. And so presumably people from Guanabacoa have some Indigenous blood. When I went to the eastern side of the island I remember I called a friend of mine in Havana I said, “Well, I found all the Indians that you guys said don't exist” because there's a slew of incredibly dark people on the eastern side of the island with super straight hair, and if you dropped them into the US, if you saw them, you would identify them as typically native. But in Cuba they identify as Black. So who knows what their actual mix is, but their identity is Black, so what are you going to do? I'm not going to argue with somebody about what they think they are.

Nia: Right. Do you mean Black African? So Black is a term that gets used in different ways—

Achy: They mean Black African, they mean descended from Africa.

Nia: OK, that's super interesting. (laughs)

Achy: Or in some more immediately cases descended from Haitian people who come over, but ultimately the la cuna, the birthplace is Africa. And there's a certain prestige to the African connection in certain Cuban circles, not in all.

Nia: When you say prestige, you mean it would be preferable to be identified as African than as Indigenous?

Achy: Oh, absolutely over Indigenous, because first of all there's no Indigenous identity. But I think also the Indigenous on the islands, and particularly in Cuba, weren't very advanced compared to the Indigenous on the continent. The Aztec and the Mayans were building spaceships practically. They had advanced mathematical systems, they understood architecture, astronomy. They had very, very advanced systems for irrigation. I mean there was a really sophisticated civilization on the continent, and then when you go down to South America, ditto with the Incas.

The Indigenous in Cuba, and on most of the islands, were nowhere near that. They had very rudimentary tools, their pottery was extremely simple. The Cuban argument, the popular Cuban explanation for why this is so, is that the terrain on the continent is very rough and if you lived here you had to figure stuff out, whereas the Indigenous in Cuba were basically living in some sort of Eden, and didn't really have to work very hard at architecture because things grew pretty easily, and didn't really have to work at animal husbandry because the fishing was so incredible and so easy. They didn't even have to go very far, they didn't have to create very sophisticated vessels to get plenty of fish to eat.

I'm not saying any of this is true or not, I'm saying this is the sort of popular explanation for why this is. The one thing that's attributed as an invention to the Tainos, the Indians, and the Ciboneys that were in Cuba is the hammock, which Cubans always love to point out to people, and it's always like, “¡Imagínate! La hamaca! You can imagine their life, if their greatest invention is the hammock!” Just imagine what that means. They were laying around all day long, rolling tobacco—which is also Indigenous to Cuba, tobacco—and smoking these beautiful cigars, hanging out. (laughs) No wonder the Spaniards couldn't do much for them in terms of slavery, they'd never worked a days in their lives! The Cubans had sort of turned the Native islanders lack of sophistication by modern standards into a plus.

They didn't want to work because they never had to work. I mean the truth is the vast majority of Indigenous on the island, and on the continent, died because of diseases that they had never encountered before. I mean, the Spaniards basically were like a virus buffet.

Nia: I guess one of the things that I'm really interested in is how race is constructed differently in the US versus other countries, and then also how racism operates differently in the US versus other counties. I'm realizing there's so much that I don't know about the way that race is constructed in Latin America. So I had no idea that there's not an Indigenous identity in Cuba at all, and I'm still have a hard time (laughs) wrapping my mind around that.

Achy: Certainly, objectively when I went to the Eastern side of the island I was astounded that people didn't identify that way, but they didn't. And it was really clear,

when I suggested it, it was considered crazy. And that's obviously not true on the continent where there are these large Indigenous populations. I mean everybody on the continent has a much greater appreciation of their local Indigenous than people in the Caribbean. It's curious though because in Puerto Rico there is a sense of their Taino culture, and frequently when you talk to people who work in culture in Puerto Rico in particular you hear people talk about the three strands that make Puerto Rico, the European, the African and the Indigenous. No one ever talks about the Indigenous in Cuba. Really, if you named a third group in Cuba, I would put money that they would say the Chinese.

Nia: That's super interesting. So, then, Cubans generally consider themselves White and/or Black, and/or Chinese? (laughs)

Achy: No, White, Black, or mixed.

Nia: OK.

Achy: People of my parent's generation gravitated toward Whiteness in a much more pronounced way.

Nia: I was really hoping to finish Days of Awe before I came. I guess I have 100 pages left—

Achy: That's all right.

Nia: The father of the protagonist is very… I think he kind of fetishizes Spain and everything Spanish.

Achy: Because people of his generation did. I mean he's loosely based on my dad, but not really because my dad wasn't that dark or somber. And my dad was alcoholic, and my dad was violent, which Enrique was not. But the notion of the Spanish fetish came a little bit from my dad, not because my dad had it as badly as I wrote Enrique but because it was there, I mean, I can't even tell how many times my dad said, “we're descended from Spain, we can't be people of color,” and my mom would be sitting at the table and we'd be looking at her going “Ohhh, OK?”

Nia: How did she feel about it?Achy: She signed on, she signed on pretty badly. I mean, I don't think it was something he convinced her of, I think it was something she aspired to on her own.

Nia: So how did you come to a POC identity when your parents were in such denial about theirs?

Achy: Well, I don't know that my dad was all that mixed to perfectly honest. I mean his grandfather came from Spain. His Cuban ancestry all came within a very secretive crypto-Jewish community—

Nia: You use the word “crypto-Jewish” a lot in Days of Awe. What does it mean exactly?

Achy: It means secretly Jewish. And so how mixed that might be given the exclusivity of their interactions for marriage and reproduction I don't know, I mean it's hard to tell, really. You know, my grandmother on my dad's side looks... pretty dark... but it doesn't—

Nia: I feel like you wanted to say Black, but then didn't?

Achy: No, no, no. She looks pretty dark, but what I was going to say, she's probably Sephardic. We know she was Sephardic, but my point is her darkness probably comes from a Sephardic heritage as opposed to an African heritage. So it's hard to tell, you look at those photos and you go, “Ehhh, it's hard to know with these guys,” my dad's side's very tough, hard to tell. With my mom's side it's also hard to figure things out because my mom's family was in Cuba much longer than my dad, but that's also why the likelihood of mixture is much greater.

My mom is also someone who is the probably darkest in her family, the most obviously not white person in her family. Her sister looks white. It's funny because my dad's 80th birthday, the party, my brother said something about we should honor all of our relatives including our Black ancestry and my aunt, my mom's sister says, “Ah, their so far back, I don't think they count anymore.” Which my brother and I were just amazed by, because in a perverse way, it was the first acknowledgment that we'd actually had officially, not that we needed it, but it was the first acknowledgement that in fact, oh yes, we do have Black relatives, thank you. (laughs)

Nia: That's so deep. (laughs)

Achy: It was like, great. It was really, it amused my brother and I, we were high-fiving. It was on the record! (laughs)

Nia: That’s so intense though, to grow up with this understanding with your brother that you were part Black but to not have your parents acknowledge it on any level until far until your—

Achy: It's weird because they didn't acknowledge it as a racial thing but they acknowledged it culturally, indirectly, all the time. That's was the thing that was always so perverse. Because we weren't white American. This was the thing that was so interesting to me, when the census came around, my mother never marked white.

Nia: What did she mark?

Achy: “Other.”

Nia: OK.

Achy: And then she would write in “Caucasian, Cuban origin.”

Nia: This was even after they added the, was it like...

Achy: When they added “Hispanic?”

Nia: Yeah.

Achy: Which was back in the late 70s.

Nia: But then there’s like “Hispanic (white)” and “Hispanic (Non-white)”.

Achy: Well that's recent, that's very recent.

Nia: OK.

Achy: At one point Hispanic was it's own racial category and my mother would still mark “Other- Caucasian, Cuban origin” and my dad would always marked “other” no explanation. (both laugh)

Nia: Interesting.

Achy: Even though they were constantly publicly protesting their whiteness and asserting it, on some level they understood that whatever white meant in this country, they weren't white. The truth of the matter is that in Cuba they were white. I mean, it happens to me. When I travel to Cuba, in Cuba, I am white, but here, I'm not white. Even if I actually claimed to be white, it would be tough to pull off because the definition of whiteness here has not frequently included Latinos, and my Latino-ness sort of always marginalizes me in this. I am light-skinned and I pass. Nobody follows me around in the 7-11.

Nia: That's something that your character in Days of Awe talks about.

Achy: Right. It's a real test. My brother gets followed around in a 7-11 if he lets his hair grow. I don't think now that he's an older man with very, very short hair that would happen to him, because he's also pretty light-skinned, but when he was younger he had this gigantic afro, and his facial features, depending on what he's wearing, where he is, and the group that's hated in the moment, my brother can fall into any of those categories. After the seizure of the American Embassy in Tehran in 1979, everybody in LA thought my brother was Persian. When he lived in Israel, everybody thought my brother was Israeli—

Nia: What kind of Israeli? Like white Israeli?

Achy: Yeah, and in Michigan City when he was a lifeguard and got really, really dark, people thought he was Black. You know, light-skinned Black, but Black. So he's an

interesting sort of racial character because I don't have that chameleon quality that he has.

I think more for me than my brother, curiously enough, the identification as person of color was a very slow process, I think. I remember after the assassination of Martin Luther King in my third or fourth grade class, they brought in counselors, they were doing this all over America, because this had been a big ugly thing, and they divvied the room up, and they had the white kids in one circle and the Black kids in another circle and there was a Lebanese girl and I who didn't fit into either circle, according to the teacher's definition, so we knew we were flawed in some way. If we’d wanted to pass we couldn't have. And I remember we started our own little circle. But you know, stuff like that happened all the time, we were always being reminded that we weren't part of the mainstream.

Even though in Michigan City we had a very close relationship with the Jewish Community, and in that community there were parents who at least on the surface seemed very similar to my parents, parents who came from different countries, parents with accents, parents who had had a different growing up experience.

Nia: Were they mostly Ashkenazi?

Achy: They were overwhelmingly Ashkenazi. But nonetheless, walking into a home who's parents had an accent was much more familiar than walking into a home who's parents had a southern accent which was a lot of the other stuff you got in Michigan City cause a lot of the whites in Michigan City in the 60s had come up for jobs in the mills from the south. Even though Indiana is not a Southern state, it is culturally very Southern, and in that particular period of time because jobs were so abundant in the mills, people came up from other poorer parts of the country, and the south was a place where, you know, it was very poor. So, my neighbors across the street from the beach house, the first place we lived in Michigan City, were from Texas, and they had a big ol’ Confederate flag up in the living room—

Nia: And so you felt more comfortable with the Ashkenazi Jews? (laughs)

Achy: Sure, but I didn't understand the symbolism of the Confederate flag at all, and in fact neither did my mom. In fact we played with the Marshalls—that was the name of the family—we played with the Marshall kids all the time and we were over there all the time and we loved them. We thought they were great. And they played with us. It was the first time I heard the word 'spic' because one of her uncles used it to describe us and I heard him, and I had no idea what it meant. It wasn't until my dad came up for a visit, and my dad saw the Confederate flag, and he knew what it meant. He was like, “Uhh, we want to be careful with those folks” and sort of laid it out for my mom. Suddenly we had restrictions about going over to the Marshalls', like we could play with the Marshall kids and they could come over, but the Marshalls never watched us again.

Nia: Oh, I see.

Achy: It was absolutely discouraged. If we said “oh we're going to go over and play at the Marshalls' my mom said “Oh, have them come over, I'll make blah-blah.” Anything so that we would not be there.

Nia: She didn't want you to be solely over the Marshalls' supervision.

Achy: Right, and it totally came from my dad. My dad missed a lot of stuff culturally but he also got a lot of stuff. Initially my dad was much more the cultural arbiter. As time went on my mom became a much sharper observer and had a much better sense than my dad did, and it was interesting to watch that switch, too. Because my dad ended up working in a very placid little town, not Michigan City, a little town called Chesterton, close to us, and I don't think he had the kind of exposure to broader American culture that my mom did.

Michigan City has a Black population, Michigan City has a much greater income equality, and always did, and had a Mexican population that my dad didn't have in Chesterton. So she was much more integrated and socially sort of involved than he was. And she was very much involved in her union, which my dad was not, my dad was actually kind of wary, and I think had he been married to somebody else he might have been anti-union, but my mom was a very strong union supporter and very, very active. And in fact when I took a job with the Chicago Board of Education many, many, many years later, and there was a teacher's strike, and I crossed the picket line, my mom was really upset. Not mad, but just horribly disappointed and really spiritually kind of crushed by it.

Nia: Why did you cross the picket line?

Achy: Why did I cross the picket line? It was a new job. I was very young. And, I'd been on the job, I kid you not, 48 hours.

Nia: Before the strike started?

Achy: When the person who hired me got fired and the strike started. The whole thing was chaos. And there was a new, for the first time ever, Latino president of the board of education, and everyone was saying this is about destroying him, this is about not giving him a chance to do the right thing, and—

Nia: That's that what the strike was about?

Achy: The strike was about a lot of things.

Nia: But that's what they were saying the strike was about?

Achy: That was one of the reasons why.

Nia: OK.

Achy: Basically when this all fails it's going to be on George Muñoz. He was fairly new to the board, too. And one things that happened was that a lot of the Latinos on the administration sort of congealed around George and making sure that it didn't get put on the spic, you know. That was mostly why, I had sort of become friendly with him, and he had immediately sort of shone a light on me and I worked with him very closely for a few years. In retrospect, I probably should have just walked away and kept doing what I was doing, but—

Nia: Which was?

Achy: I was freelancing, which was a very precarious existence.

Nia: Still is. (both laugh)

Achy: Yeah, probably more precarious now actually, I think, than back then. And you know, I crossed the picket line. We talked about it, I talked to her before I did it. And I told her, I said “If you absolutely do not want me to do it you should tell me,” and she said, “Well you have to make these decisions yourself.” She said, “You know exactly how I feel, there is no ambiguity to how I feel.” And I thought about it and I did it, and it was, it was hard, it wasn't a real simple thing. I would cross the line and go to my office and sob for the next hour, I was kind of worthless—

Nia: So you were not a teacher, and you were not part of the teachers—

Achy: Oh no. I was a press person for the Board of Ed.

Nia: Oh, OK.

Achy: Oh no, if I was a teacher I would have been striking.

Nia: Right.

Achy: Without any question. I was not a member of the union at all. There was no union for me, and my people were not on strike. My mom's preference would have been that I not cross that line. No. My god, if I had been a teacher and crossed that line I think my mother might have disowned me. (Both laugh) That's a whole different ballgame, whole different ballgame there.

But Chicago's also a city that's very corrupt, so it's the kind of small grassroots corruption that is actually kind of almost comical, but can also mean incredible big bucks. There was a big movement in the Latino community for charters, charters run but Latino community, organizations blah blah blah. One of the most powerful Latino organizations in the city, UNO, managed to get literally millions of dollars, like 200 millions of dollars to start doing their own charter schools. It turns out later that the president of UNO is Rahm's best buddy in the whole world. Turns out later that they were channeling millions

of dollars to companies run by their relatives, the entire extended families of all these people were getting rich of this thing.

Nia: Like building contracts?

Achy: Building contracts and concessions, and all kinds of things were going family members, the whole thing was just a disaster. And sure the guy resigned from his position, but most of those contracts remained intact, and nothing was done to change the system. You know, this guy got caught, he didn't go to jail, he lost his job, big deal. (Nia laughs.) And everything remained the same. They put in, supposedly, new criteria for doing this, but the contracts that were in place remained in place. So everybody got paid, at least that year, and I'm sure they figured out another way to come around this. This is one of the reasons why nothing ever moves forward. It's a very corrupt, at the sort of innards-level, city.

Nia: So depressing. (laughs) I mean what are you supposed to do with that? How do you begin to fix it when it runs so deep?

Achy: You know what, it's been really interesting to be here because—

Nia: That was the other thing I wanted to ask you. Do you still have a place in Chicago?

Achy: We still have a place in Chicago

Nia: So you still consider yourself to live there—

Achy: No, we live here. We've actually put our place up for sale. It was a heartbreaking decision.

Nia: So you've lived in Chicago for a long time?

Achy: I've lived in Chicago since 1979. I've lived in Chicago my entire adult life. One of the things about moving to Oakland was sort of realizing that I will never know Oakland the way I know Chicago. I may well end up dying in Oakland and will never love Oakland as deeply as I love Chicago. Chicago just has so many important moments in my life, crucial moments, moments where I grew up, learned things, defining moments. I'm 59, so there aren’t that many defining moments left. (Both laugh.) But moreover, I'm not going to spend 30 years in Oakland. It's unlikely that I'm going to spend 30 years in Oakland, and if I spend them I'm not going to spend them the way I did in Chicago in my late teens and early twenties. I mean, I know every fucking corner of Chicago, and that's never going to happen in Oakland, no matter how committed I am to getting to know the city. It just was a different kind of place.

But one of the things that about being here is you realize what Chicago looks like from the outside, and you realize what you've contributed to the system when you're inside by sort of surrendering to the culture of corruption, because absolutely politically radical

people in Chicago will say things to you like “Well, what can you do?” or “That's just the way it is,” or “They're absolutely unbreakable,” and you're a reporter and breaking any kind of story about corruption is an uphill battle among other things because whoever your editor is, is going to have qualms about it. And whoever the editor is above that is going to have qualms about it.

Nia: Because they're worried about losing their jobs?

Achy: Everybody is worried about... And also you lose perspective, it's like, “How big? Come on, that's not that big of a deal,” and then you realize ever fucking other place in the world it is a big deal, whatever that little corruption was. You get used to the corruption being so overwhelming that you forget—

Nia: It's just becomes the norm.

Achy: It just becomes the norm, it's like whatever, you know? (Both laugh.)

Nia: It's so deep and so depressing. What is even the point of journalism at the point?

Achy: Right, and you just really lose perspective on. I remember sitting in at editorial meetings at the Tribune and we would talk about stories and we would talk ourselves out of it because it seemed petty or it seemed silly.

Nia: Could you give an example?

Achy: Well, here's a story that I proposed a zillion times that I could never get off the ground. I was covering the arts, so I had to sort of focus things on that way. One of the things I realized very early on was that all of the major cultural institutions in Chicago— the Art Institute, the Museum of Science and Industry, all the major things, the Illinois Arts Council, blah blah blah—all of the boards were the exactly the same people goddamn people.

Nia: Like, not just the same family, but—

Achy: Oh, it was absolutely the same families. Like there's a Pritzker on every board in Chicago. That's a guarantee, OK. But it was almost comical, like especially when it came time to diversify the board, there's like the same Black guy on like 17 different boards, and the same Asian-American woman on 17 different boards. And at one point it started to happen to me, that I became a sort of high profile Latina, and I was being invited to everything, which is actually what drew my attention to the story. I was being invited to be on the Chicago Foundation for Women board and on the this board, and on the that board, and it was like there have got to be other people. Surely they have got to know other people. There are a million Latino's in Chicago, literally a million fucking Latinos. I remember explaining in the arts and features editorial session, how this is not a healthy thing. (Both laugh.)

Nia: Seems pretty straight-forward.

Achy: How it inhibited innovation and blah blah blah blah blah, and just starting at the blank faces, and I would get arguments like, “Who else would do it?” It was just a fascinated resistance to it. We never got it off the ground. I actually took the story to a friend of my who is the editor of StreetWise, the homeless newspaper, and they did the story. And of course they did it very differently than the Tribune would have done it because the Tribune had resources that poor little StreetWise didn't have. And of course it had a certain response from the communities of color, and of almost zero response within the community that it was actually addressing because it was StreetWise, the homeless newspaper. Probably the guys on the board at the Museum of Science and Industry didn't even know what it was. So you know, it was that kind of frustration.

But that explained the fact that these boards were these same people and overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly monied, explained why there were no Black curators anywhere. It explained why there were no people of color in any position of authority except for the goddamned Mexican-American museum, and it explained why, again with the exception of the Mexican-American museum and to some extent DuSable Museum-- those two existed outside of the orbit of things because they had specific focus as Black and Latino arts—they explained why shows were so removed from the community that they were in, why the satellite projects through all these things only appealed to people who lived downtown and on along the coast of the lake. These things were really quite evident in how these museums that were living on a lot of tax breaks and many of them on free park district land, and had a mandate to serve the entire city, in fact were not. But, who cares?

Nia: Your editor was like, “there's no story here'?

Achy: There was no story there. And then the criticism was like, not understood. It was just like, “Well, what do you expect? This is who sits on boards.” (laughter)

Nia: Is this why you don't do journalism anymore?

Achy: It was a really depressing situation.

Nia: But seriously though, is that why your focus is more on creative writing now? What inspired your transition from journalism to creative writing?Achy: My career in journalism was always meant to be short, it was never about staying there. I was interested in journalism as a way to make a make a living from writing, but I wanted to write, and I needed to learn how to do other kinds of writing. I knew that I wanted to write.

I've always written poetry, and I've always also understood that I couldn't live off poetry. I didn't really see myself as a writer of fiction until I was an adult, even though I wrote fiction, it was very little, and so feeling very inclined towards poetry as sort of the sole thing I did, understanding that I couldn't possibly make a living off of that, being very

engaged with my surroundings and always, having a way with words, I guess, it seemed like a way to make a living. And then as an adult when I realized, no I actually like longer form, I actually like prose, I actually like fiction, I need to figure out how to do this. That is, I need to figure out how to make a practice in which I can do this, in which I can actually make a living off this, or make a living related to this. Eventually journalism became diminished as I got better at doing the other one.

I liked journalism in my time. I loved it. I was one of those people who would, before the advent of the internet, when I had a big story coming out I would literally sleep at my desk and wait for the first print off, and I would smell the news print, I loved that stuff. I loved seeing a byline, and I loved getting reader reaction, good and bad.

Nia: This is before comments sections. (laughs)

Achy: Right, this is clearly before comments, all long before— this is back when it was print. That was all beautiful to me. I loved the feeling that you had a mission and a purpose, and that you could make a difference. Whether that difference was writing a review that saved a wonderful production that nobody was seeing and suddenly everybody was seeing because you wrote something to elevate them, or writing a story about some political hack who was not worth electing. All of it felt very engaged and important and like a contribution was being made. But I spent a lot of energy and I had a lot of success, but I also had a lot of heartbreak and journalism began to change in ways that were less interesting to me.

I actually thought the advent of the internet was going to be really interesting and good for the news, and I no longer think that. I'm not sitting here wishing for the good old days, because there's plenty wrong with the good old days, and I think it is what it is, and the internet is a magnificent thing in so many ways, and I am totally committed and addicted to it so I'm not going to sit here and be a hypocrite about it. But I think between the 24-hour news day and the internet, I think news has been a real casualty, and the way people consume news has been really perverted, there's been no reflection the way when you used to get news once, twice, three times a day. I mean the story didn't get updated much more than that. If something was really, really hot, the newspaper used to put out a special edition at 4:00 or something like that. We used to call it the red streak, and it would come out at 4:00 and it didn't go to anyone's houses, it was just those newsboys out on the street, and that was kind of cool. You always had the sense of immediacy because you were in it, you were running around, there was a group, there was the team of people.

Journalism now seems so solitary to me. So many blogs, and so many people working from home. And believe me I am not in any way, shape or form damning that because I am one of those culprits who really started that working from home thing. I was one of the first people the Tribune let work from home. I begged and pleaded and dragged them into letting me work from home. I didn't want to come in to the office 9 times out of 10, and they accommodated me, so I'm part of the precedent-setting disaster. But I do think there's something about a group of people who see each other every day, or see each

other with some frequency, and debate and talk about the news in person, face-to-face, and that sort of stuff is missing. There's just so very few places that do investigations now, and very few places that do any kind of robust local coverage because newspapers are just really diminished.

I mean, the Oakland Tribune in my time, when I was in high school and college, used to be a premier newspaper in this country. I remember being at Indiana University, and thinking, “Man, I would love to work at the Oakland Tribune.” I didn't even dream of the Chicago Tribune, that was beyond any possible dream, that was what I would eventually grow into. But the Oakland Tribune, that was accessible. It was a mid-size paper, you could aspire to it. And it was a great newspaper, it did investigation, it had amazing political columns, it had a pretty vigorous arts coverage, and it was in a city that was full of stuff that was happening.

Now you look at the Oakland Tribune, and now it's just a sad little 8 sheet, 10 sheet thing. Every time someone hands me the Tribune at a Pride thing where they're always giving it away and try to get you to subscribe, it makes me want to cry, you know, because it's just so small. I find that I don't read that much local news anymore. Part of it is I'm not engaged in journalism, and part of it is because I very deliberately try to pull myself away from the habit of reading three, four, five newspapers a day which is what I used to do when I was involved in journalism, because that consumes phenomenal amounts of time.

Nia: Also emotional energy. (laughs)

Achy: And also emotional energy. But you know the thing is I've got a three, almost four year old, and I've got a family, and I would prefer to read the Elena Ferrante novel, and I would like to write, and I would like to take a walk in this beautiful weather. I'm also in a different place in my life. I'm not killing myself to read the latest record reviews. I remember a time when I would be panting at my mailbox waiting for the next issue of The Advocate, and I don't do that anymore. I don't care about the Advocate anymore.

Nia: The Advocate has probably changed a lot since then.

Achy: Yeah, but you know, anything that was queer. Lesbian Connection, whatever. I just don't care that much. My emotional world is more intimate now. I like Ellen DeGeneres, but I really don't need to know that she's dismissing divorce rumors again. It's just not my thing.

Transcribed by Joyce Hatton