Jeff Troiano: First of all, Alejandro, who was Tin Tan?
Alejandro Murguía: Tin Tan was a Mexican actor, a satirist, who learned his chops on the border, so a lot of his humor is actually informed by English. When you watch his films now, you've got to know English to get all his puns and jokes. While Cantinflas represents the humble guy who never gets a break, Tin Tan is the hipster, the zoot-suiter. He always incorporated the popular music of the time in his films. He even recorded a few records; he was a very competent singer and musician. So I named a magazine after him.

What was the focus of Tin Tan? How long did you publish it?
Tin Tan was the first Chicano magazine to have an international perspective, a Latin American perspective, as well as local Chicano writers. We published it for three or four years back in the late '70s.

Were you solely publishing back then, or were you sending out your own work as well?
At about the same time, I was writing a lot of stories and getting some of them published. Heirs Press published my first collection of stories. It was called Farewell to the Coast. Heirs was one of the first San Francisco magazines that incorporated Latino writing.

How was the Chicano culture perceived in those years?
We had recently left the 1960s, which in modern political history marks the beginning of the modern Chicano. At first we were hardly acknowledged. In fact, in an early issue of Tin Tan we published a forgotten letter and painting by Frida Kahlo. She was just beginning to gain recognition at that time, and that recognition, in large part, is due to the Chicano/Latino community in San Francisco. Galería de la Raza, for instance, and Tin Tan, on a smaller scale, said, "This is an interesting woman. Let's honor her; let's praise her." Mexico had basically forgotten her. She was either unknown—or known solely as Diego Rivera's wife.

Were the themes in your writing basically Chicano themes?
Yes and no. Farewell to the Coast was similar to This War Called Love [Murguía's newest collection of short stories] in that many of the stories take place in San Francisco. The second book, Southern Front, is set almost exclusively in Nicaragua and Costa Rica. There are some reflections of the barrio, but most of the book deals with an international experience.

Do most Chicano writers today focus on the barrio?
In my opinion, that's one of the hang-ups about Chicano writing—it tends to be much too provincial. In general, it tends to separate itself from the rest of Latin America. It doesn't include us in a global or international context, and that's unfortunate. I think it has something to do with our own development as a culture—our writers, in general, have not had international experiences. They haven't traveled; they haven't been involved in struggles outside of our own community. What happens in Latin America affects us, and what happens in the rest of the world affects us.

Are Chicano writers writing mostly in English?
Mostly, yes, with some incorporation of Spanish or caló, which is our rich, metaphoric barrio slang. It's the language Tin Tan uses.

Is there anything about the Chicano literary scene that annoys you?
What disturbs me most, because of our provincialism, is that not enough Chicano writers take stands on the key political issues that affect Latin America. In the 1980s, for example, very few Chicano writers spoke out about U.S. policies that dramatically affected El Salvador and Nicaragua. It should have been our priority as writers to address these horrible situations. Many Chicano writers who claimed to be political did not speak out—and in fact accepted money in the form of grants and endowments from people like Ronald Reagan to promote themselves. It seemed to me a huge contradiction. I don't want to be identified with that sort of writer.

Who should we be reading now among the contemporary Chicanos?
Raul Salinas, from Texas, deserves much more recognition. Not only does his work survive after so many years, but his whole historical and political background is amazing. Jose Montoya from Sacramento is another great Chicano writer who hasn't received enough attention. His career has been a four-decade trajectory of great work.

What's it like for an unknown Chicano writer trying to get published?
It's very difficult. The New York book publishers are not really going to roll out the red carpet for you. Your work is basically going to be presented in smaller magazines; it's just not going to get the attention it deserves. It's ironic because the Chicano community is starving for writers; it's starving for films and plays. It wants to see itself reflected in contemporary media, and it's capable of absorbing as much writing as we can produce.

Where can I buy great Chicano writing in San Francisco?
The independent bookstores tend to be a little more sensitive to our writings. Modern Times has an excellent selection of Chicano literature. Casa del Libro—Books on Wings—is great. And, of course, City Lights takes a great interest in our work.

When did you first work with City Lights?
In 1994 they published a book of translations that I did of Rosario Murillo's Angel in the Deluge. Rosario is a Nicaraguan poet. Prior to that I edited an anthology for City Lights called Volcan: Poems from Central America. That was the first anthology of Central American writing to appear in the United States. It's still in print after about 20 years, so I guess there's still an audience for it. And, of course, City Lights published my new collection, This War Called Love.

If you had to claim influences on your writing, who most inspired you?
At different points in my life many different writers influenced me, but I remember picking up Bob Kaufman's book and being very turned on, reading his work, and meeting him in San Francisco when I came up here as a young poet. He inspired me because he was a non-white Beat poet; he had so much jazz and riffs in his work. I was 18 or 19 when I first read Kaufman's Golden Sardine. It gave me a sense that I could incorporate my own things into my writing. García Lorca and César Vallejo were also very important to me, as was an obscure Egyptian writer, Albert Cossery, who wrote a book called Men God Forgot. He impressed me because of the people he wrote about, regular men, everyday people. In my short stories, in that first collection, I was greatly influenced by Guillermo Cabrera Infante, the Cuban writer.

I noticed that the Spanish words within the text of your new book are not italicized. Isn't that out of the ordinary?
Every editor that I work with has their own spin on that, but in an ideal world Spanish words would not be italicized because they are not foreign. Sometimes it's preferable to italicize so that a word, like carnal, is not confused with the English word. More and more Chicano writers are choosing not to italicize. And some Spanish words are hardly foreign to an English speaker anymore.

Are you concerned that non-Spanish speakers won't understand some of your language? For example, the word pedo, as in "that's when the pedo started."
Some readers won't get it, but in California, in the Southwest, they're going to understand. Newyoricans will get it. And there are always dictionaries for those that don't. And here's something to think about: Did anybody ever ask T.S. Eliot or Ezra Pound if someone was "going to get" the ancient Greek or Latin they used in their work?