Fifty Years of Publishing, Chicano/a Studies, and Border Duende: An Interview with Gina Valdés, Winner of the Américo Paredes Prize for Poetry
From activist, educator, poet, and writer, Gina Valdés’ full length poetry collection Border Duende is a tenderhearted, often humorous, poetic journey crafted “under the spell of two tongues.”
Pictured left, Gina Valdés. Pictured right, front cover of Valdés poetry collection Border Duende.
Gina Valdés was born in Los Angeles in the segregated California Hospital during WWII. At the age of one, she experienced her first migration—north to south—and at nine, her second migration—south to north—growing up bilingual and bicultural on both sides of the United States-Mexico border. Her older sister Martha introduced her to poetry at the age of six, their grandmother's books of Mexican poets, which among them, Sor Juana, Juan de Dios Peza, and Amado Nervo. The poetry spellbound her and the enchantment never left. Valdés was the recipient of a full Regents' Scholarship and received a B.A. degree in Creative Writing and an M.A. degree in Spanish Literature from the University of California, San Diego. In addition to teaching beginning ESL and every level of Spanish, Valdés has taught Literature and Writing for twenty-five years, at UCSD, UCDavis, UCLA, SDSU, The University of Washington, and Colorado College. She published her first poems in the New Age Journal in 1975, and has continued to publish her work in journals, anthologies, and textbooks in the U.S., Mexico, and Europe, in five languages, in ten countries. She is the author of two bilingual poetry chapbooks, Comiendo lumbre/Eating Fire and Puentes y fronteras/Bridges and Borders, a novel, There Are No Madmen Here, and an award-winning poetry collection, Border Duende, published by FlowerSong Press. She resides in San Diego near family amid diverse and abundant fauna and flora. This year, 2025, Valdés marks fifty years publishing fiction and poetry.
Gina Valdés and Avery Castillo communicate via email correspondence to produce this written interview exploring ancestral lineage and memory, acts of poetic witness, and the creation of Valdés poetry collection, Border Duende.
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AVERY: It is an absolute honor to be in conversation with you, Gina. To get us started, I’d like to situate us in its origin. Where does Border Duende begin?
GINA: This poetry collection took a long path. I completed it, sent it out and it was soon accepted for publication. This was around the year 2000. When my father and sister both died of illness, the manuscript no longer felt right. I took it back thinking I would revise it in a year, but I kept writing new poems and taking out old ones and ended up with a very different manuscript—one I liked better and closer to the present one.
“Acts of Protest” is a good poem to start the collection, not only because it’s about a beginning, a birth, but because it establishes the explosive world and time of that birth, in a country and society that discriminated against certain groups, including my family and my community. From the title and first line, a rebel voice emerges, a child destined to witness and resist and to reclaim power. This gives context to the poems that follow, so readers can experience them more fully. There is also humor in the first lines that will surface in other poems, a gift from my mother who often used humor as one form of resistance.
AVERY: Considering your poetry collection Border Duende chosen under the Américo Paredes Poetry Prize, with Américo Paredes being a significant pioneer or “the father” of Mexican American Studies and voices, how do you see/hear your Mexicana-Chicana (feminine) voice in this space? What motivations have you experienced to arrive here?
GINA: I've always felt affinity with poets, especially those of my Mexicana/Chicana culture. It started early at the age of five listening to my older sister recite Sor Juana and feeling awed. At six I was reading and memorizing her and other Mexican poets. Later, in the U.S., the first Mexican-American writer I discovered was Américo Paredes, and his borderlands, bilingual, bi-cultural expressions felt so familiar, as did the poetry of Juan Felipe Herrera, Alurista, and José Antonio Burciaga. When I discovered the powerful women's voices such as Bernice Zamora, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Sandra Cisneros, and others, my affinity grew, and this feeling of connection continues with present day young raza poets.
I began publishing poems and stories in 1975 in a wide range of magazines and I soon noticed that mine was the only Spanish surname in the journal, and one of a few women. This became one of the motivations to keep on writing and sending out my work.
One quality that has helped my life and writing is perseverance. My writing faced many rejections, but also a lot of my work was accepted for publication, and sometimes editors added a note of praise that was very encouraging.
When I returned to college, after a long break, I met other writers, editors, publishers, and professors, most of them activists, who became a mutual support group. I still know and work with a few of them.
AVERY: I greatly admire your writing for the ways in which they attune all five senses. Particularly thinking of your poems “The Hands” and “Border Tango” in the first section or “Slowing” and “Walking on Earth” in the concluding section of the collection that dance well off the page. These poem touch on cultural and internalized tunes. What sense(s) do you consider to be your most significant in terms of uncovering, or finding, specific musicality in your poetic lines?
GINA: I danced before I walked, shaking my shoulders to Cuban music, my father played the guitar and sang romantic Mexican songs, and my elder sister was a pianist. In my teens I danced to live Cuban and Puerto Rican bands. I also love chants, Native American and from other cultures. I recall going to open-air markets in Mexico, how the bright colors and variety of aromas, flavors, and voices stirred all my senses and heightened my perception. I still have this experience at farmers' markets, but perhaps a combination of sight and sound are my strongest.
AVERY: Many of your poems explore experiences with attempts of erasure—erasure of language, erasure of land, erasure of people, erasure of identity. Yet, the poems themselves act as witness, resistance, and reclamation from these experiences. Can you share your thoughts on witness poetry and how such acts of writing have impacted your attention to these details (on and off the page)?
GINA: I learned early on from Sor Juana that language, writing, and poetry are powerful—how her words uplifted women. I was born at a time and place when discrimination against Mexicans was blatant and institutional. And in Mexico, women didn't have the vote. When they finally got it, an aunt and her friends went to vote with rolling pins, just in case! The women in my extended family met often, formed circles and spoke of their experiences. I listened, remembered, wrote, and became witness.
Later, I became an activist student and professor, focusing on the development of Chicano Studies, the protection and empowerment of women, and the Peace movement. The most impactful and challenging experience was the 1993 UCLA Hunger Strike to upgrade the Chicano Studies Program to a department. It was organized by students, and I was one of the two professors directly involved, keeping them hydrated and taking part in negotiations. It was a harrowing experience for several reasons: I was teaching two classes, one with 70 students, my TA was jailed, there was a (failed) attempt to arrest me, and (also failed) attempt at bribery, the administration offering me generous benefits if I stopped my activism. There was conflict among the Chicano professors, and the entrenched resistance of those in power to share it. After two weeks, we ended the Hunger Strike, with limited success, but we set the foundation for future Chicano students and professors to achieve the goal of a Chicano Department.
In twenty-five years of teaching, this was my most difficult time.
AVERY: In your titular poem “Border Duende,” there is silence, mystery, and urgency in migration, with an unspoken yet palpable guiding mystical presence or duende. How does enacting Mexican folklore/realism help you write about complex experiences, such as immigration, displacement, border-crossing?
GINA: Living in Mexico, I was attuned to how the natural and supernatural exist side by side. When I’ve read my poems in Mexico, Mexican poets have come up to me and said, “Hongos, hongos, or ‘Mezcal,’” alluding to the Nahua practice of drinking mezcal and/or taking mushrooms before writing poetry and chants, something I haven’t tried! But I like that they can hear an incantatory and psychedelic quality of some of my poems.
By enacting Mexican folklore and realism when writing on experiences such as migration, that Mexican reality comes to life in the world of the poems. The right words come up to create a specific mood and tone, the listing of images and metaphors, repetition and personification, and all the senses show up, so the seen world appears more vivid and the unseen a little more visible.
AVERY: One of my favorite poems in your collection is “Butterfly Woman” for its ars poetica and unflinching feminine confidence. There are many other powerful feminine images and voices enacted such as in “Rainbowoman” and “Between Worlds.” Where do you find this voice? How do you care for it/maintain its tone and clarity?
GINA: That feminine voice comes from growing up in a house of women, many of them powerful. At any time, our small house held my mother, her sister, my two sisters and me, my paternal grandmother and great-grandmother, my father's sister, and a teen girl my mother brought home from an orphanage!
At times when it wavers, I invoke the power of these women. And I also read work by and about women who didn't allow erasure. I'm thinking of Kahlo, how deep pain couldn't stop her from creating amazing life and art; Dolores Huerta, at 95 still walking her talk, Si se puede!; and the Buddhist nuns, starting with the Buddha's stepmother, who have advocated for their right to enlightenment!
AVERY: You have dedicated this collection to your parents and sister. The call-back to ancestors and close relatives is a consistent thematic link between the poems. How does invoking ancestors and familial lineages bridge you into the now?
GINA: Often, especially when feeling challenged, I call on ancestors by expressing a feeling of deep gratitude for the gift each one has given me and feel my strength returning. But, as I mentioned before, I have always felt compelled to be a witness to and resist the attempts to disempower us. My paternal grandmother, Mama Chole, has been my greatest source of help.
A healer, Mama Chole, saved my life when I was dying of Whooping Cough at six months old. My doctor gave me two weeks to live but she took me to her house and found a way to heal me. Two weeks later I was still alive and well. Something similar happened at six and at fourteen. After she passed away, when I’ve needed help, I’ve called on her after praying or meditating and I’ve felt her presence and heard her reassurance that all would be well.
AVERY: As Border Duende enters the world, what do you hope readers will sit with or take away from your poems?
GINA: My wish is that readers will hold Border Duende as a gift. That when reading it, they will like poetry a little more; that they will be spellbound by poetry the way I was as a child and still am; that they will read between the lines and hear the silences to fully experience the poems; that they will be touched by the stories of a resilient people, relevant to our own difficult time and that they will feel the delight of recognition or of discovery, that spark of inspiration, and find food for thought. Now, people will be able to read these poems at leisure, and my hope is that each reader finds several poems that have a strong effect on them.
Once, I read “The Hands” to a large group of hearing-impaired young women, with one translating it to sign language, and at the end, all the women jumped up, raised their arms, and shook their hands in the air!
When I've read poems from this collection to different audiences, the response has often exceeded my expectations.
AVERY: Lastly, I would love to ask who are your poetry influences/maestras? Is there a particular contemporary you are reading that excites you? How so?
GINA: My poetry influences appeared early: my mother's verbal wit and playfulness, her code-switching and humor, my sister's nimble mind and dramatic readings, my grandmother's poetry collection and her journals, la maestra Cuca who taught me how to read and write is all I needed to read and write poetry for the rest of my life. And yet, others appeared from everywhere: Neruda and other Spanish-language poets, the Sufi poets, Rumi and Hafez, the ancient Chinese and Japanese, Li Bai and Tu Fu, Basho and Izumi Shikibu.
One contemporary, among others, I deeply admire is Joy Harjo, for her celebration of Native people and cultures, her musicality, her Native mysticism, and for her boundless grace and generosity.
Any great poet or poem thrills and inspires me.
AVERY: Gina, your work as a Chicana activist, educator, and poet has been vital, creating paths for many to continue advocating for Chicano studies and persevering through storytelling. Thank you so much for sharing your time and knowledge with us.
Order your copy of Border Duende
Border Duende by Gina Valdés, winner of the Américo Paredes Prize for Poetry. Prickly Pear Publishing & Nopalli Press and FlowerSong Press.
In the poetry collection, Border Duende, Gina Valdés offers intimate portrayals of lives lived in the United States-Mexico border region, in evocative and inventive language.
Avery Castillo is the production editor for FlowerSong Press and host of Essentially Poetic, a Monthly Reading Series for Community Building. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Texas Tech University and is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.
