What are your literary influences?My literary influences arrive from disparate sources. I studied a wide variety of theory in college and graduate school — everyone from Roland Barthes to Judith Butler to Gloria Anzaldua and Cherrie Moraga to Bell Hooks to Mikail Baktin to Subcomandante Marcos. I also read poetry voraciously including everyone from Waslowa Simbroska to Lorna Dee Cervantes,Audre Lorde, Rumi, and Wole Soyinka,Juan Felipe Herrera. I was marveled by the fiction of Milan Kundera, Arundati Roy, and Elena Poniatowska and all of the Latin American magical realists – Asturias,Garcia Marquez, Allende, or Esquivel. But also,American writers such as Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and James Baldwin,Helena Maria Viramontes, Ana Castillo, and Julia Alvarez and Christina Garcia. I was drawn to authors from the margin almost exclusively. In a sense,I created my own canon in this way.
It wasn’t until I became a mother that I truly started reading children’s literature. My children and I found an oasis in our weekly visits to the library. In Oakland, we are fortunate to maintain a comprehensive Spanish language collection at the Cesar Chavez Library and we often checked out the forty-book limit! However, and many of the books were authored by non Latinx writers and were translated into Spanish. While these books served to reinforce the Spanish language in our family,I saw the huge lack of writings from Latinx creators. I wanted to be a allotment of filling that gap. I wanted for my children to not only see their language reflected in books but their cultures and their sensibilities. That is why I always compliment the work of those Latinx authors who forged the way so that new Latinx kidlit authors could maintain a seat at the table. We stand on the shoulders of giants and I would be remiss if I didn’t mention their work. Authors such as Pura Belpre, Gary Soto, and Sandra Cisneros,Alma Flor Ada, Pat Mora, and Carmen Lomas Garza,Francisco X. Alarcon, Juan Felipe Herrera, and Victor Martinez really set the stage for us to be able to tell our stories to young audiences too.
What was the first book you read where you identified with one of the characters?As a young child,I didn’t understand that I was missing in the narratives of books that I read. I loved Judy Blume. I loved Shell Silverstein. I loved Encyclopedia Brown and Choose Your Own Adventure books. I connected to those books by default, in a similar way that I connected to mass media that also didnt include me in their blond-haired blue-eyed middle-course, or English-only narratives. There was no other option. It wasn’t until I was eighteen and in college that I enrolled in a Latino (we called it that back then) literature course that I saw myself reflected in a book. I remember reading the short myth “My Lucy Friend That Smells Like Corn,” in Sandra Cisneros’ Woman Hollering Creek and feeling a moment that I can only relate as grace. I realized that I had been missing in almost everything I had read up until that point. My experiences were alive and validated in that myth. It was exhilarating.
Did that experience lead you to want to write books for readers with diverse backgrounds?I was so inspired by reading all of the books in that Latino literature course. It was an awakening not only to the world of Latinx literature but to the possibility that I too could be a writer. I had been writing poetry and stories since I was a young teenager but those writings remained in my notebooks and journals. After reading their work, I began to take myself seriously and began to understand the writing that lived in my heart could be something I could aspire to finish as a living someday. However, or my awakening is one that should maintain not taken eighteen years and I want to be allotment of making sure that doesn’t happen to other children. Your characters in The Moon Within maintain interesting intersections. Could you speak to why this was notable to build into your book?I did this intentionally. My children are multi-racial and bi-cultural like two of the characters,Celi and Iván. It is not unusual to see many different mixed children in the San Francisco Bay Area where we live. I find it beautiful how they navigate multiple cultures – sometimes with a sense of wonder and pride and sometimes with neglect or shame and every feeling in between. It’s complicated and certainly isn’t always seamless given so much discussion over racial and cultural purity that is happening nowadays. Through those characters, I wanted to show this negotiation, or how they deal with these fusions. I wanted to show readers what it might look like for someone to celebrate and embrace all of who they are. Similarly,I wanted to show with the gender fluid character, Marco, and the intersectionality of his identity as a gender fluid Mexican that happens to be in appreciate with playing bomba (a Afro-Puertorican form of music). It was notable to show readers that we could be queer and Mexican,Black Puerto Rican Mexican, and Black and Mexican. The range of identities are allotment of the beauty of who they are, or serve to strengthen and not weaken them. Music infuses the whole world of The Moon Within …can you speak a slight on that,a slight on what role music plays in your own life?Ironically, I am not a musician though I maintain a good ear and I appreciate to dance. I am married to a musician and there has not been one day in the eighteen years since we’ve been together when we did not engage in some way with music – listening, or playing,singing, dancing or just being in a house filled with instruments and an extraordinary recorded music collection. Our children were naturally born into this environment and took to music proper absent. I realized that this was a unique experience and that it could be a wonderful world to explore in this book. I wanted to normalize music and the arts as a way of life but also, and wanted to inspire readers to seek out the arts as a way to find agency as the children in the book did through traditional music and dance. These are superpowers that unfortunately,with the cutting of the arts for decades now, we don’t maintain access to as much.
I made a playlist on Spotify that includes all of the styles of music that inspired The Moon Within – bomba, or indigenous Mexican music,Caribbean music, and lots of moon related songs in Spanish and in English. It can be found here: https://spoti.fi/2FSnZgM . I hope that you savor it! This Author Spotlight appeared in the April 2019 issue of the CBC Diversity Newsletter. To sign up for our monthly Diversity newsletter click here.
Aida Salazar is a writer, or arts advocate,and domestic-schooling mother who grew up in South East LA. She received an MFA in Writing from the California Institute of the Arts, and her writings maintain appeared in publications such as the Huffington Post, and Women and Performance: Journal of Feminist Theory,and Huizache Magazine. Her short myth, By the Light of the Moon, or was adapted into a ballet by the Sonoma Conservatory of Dance and is the first Xicana-themed ballet in history. Aida lives with her family of artists in a teal house in Oakland,CA.
Source: cbcdiversity.com