Danny Alarcon (author "Lost City Radio") : L.A. v. Miami

What do you think of L.A.?

Each time, I like it more and more. In this weird way, Oakland exists more in the orbit of L.A. than it does San Francisco. It’s something about the lifestyle of Oakland, I think. Maybe the driving culture, the fact that it’s a little more spread out, it’s more of the arrival point for immigrants. I think of L.A. right now as being the capital of Latino culture in the United States, in the way Miami might once have been if it weren’t so . . . wack. I feel like Miami is where the ruling classes of our various countries go to shop, whereas L.A. is the place where the working classes come — to work and pursue the American Dream. Like L.A. is a necessity and Miami is a choice. That’s why I love L.A., and I think Oakland has more of that than San Francisco.

The city is really active in this book, almost taking the form of a character. What do you see happening in cities today?

I see them as places of real cultural exchange. Necessarily, people are having to blend, having to decide what is vital and what is not about their culture and their identity, having to take on new identities, new languages, new customs. You also have this overlay of globalization happening now, and that just makes everything stranger. You have kids coming from the Andes who won’t listen to any of the music their parents listen to, who won’t listen to the quote-unquote traditional music of the past. They won’t even listen to salsa, the pan–Latin American sound. They’ll only listen to electronic music. It’s like skipping over entire centuries.


Why did you choose to write Lost City Radio in English, or not put any Spanish in it?

Tough question, I don’t know. I thought about it. I think to give it that kind of it’s-not-placed-anywhere feel. It’s very realistic, but it’s not entirely grounded in this world. There’s no TV, you can tell it’s Latin America, but it also could easily be lots of other places. I wanted it to exist just above this commonly agreed-upon reality

Do you write in Spanish?

I don’t. I read it. I write e-mails. A lot of the work I do for Etiqueta is in Spanish. [Alarcón is an editor for the Peruvian journal Etiqueta Negra.] If anything, if in English I have five or six ways to say something or express an idea, in Spanish, only two or three will come. It just takes much longer to learn Spanish. That said, I think of it as an accomplishment that I can read a novel and enjoy it in Spanish. When I decided I was going to get my Spanish up, the first book I read was Amor en el Tiempo de Colera [Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera]. It took me like two and a half months, but I did it.


Are you American?

You mean what kind of passport I have? I don’t think there’s any contradiction in saying I’m American and also Peruvian. I think Peruvian-American is not a set of words that exists, not the way you say Mexican-American or Chicano, and people understand that. But the fact is, we’re going to need a much broader vocabulary to describe types of Americans that exist. I have a lot of affection for those two words that mean nothing basically, for the word “Peruvian” and the word “Latino.” I don’t think I would be able to really explain what those words mean or explain to you, or why I have such cariño for those two ideas.

It’s a weird word, “Latino.”

It’s a bizarre word. What does a recent immigrant from Guatemala have to do with a fourth-generation boriqua from East Harlem? Or those folks from Colorado who don’t speak Spanish? But it’s still an idea that I find somehow broad enough to say something about who I am.


What do you think is going to happen to Latin America next? They’re still working through all this, right?

Yeah, but we’re working through something different now too. The U.S. has been ignoring Latin America since 9/11. And then it seems like last year the U.S. snapped and was like, “Oh shit, we have to pay attention now.” Chávez is, of course, the prime mover of this. They look down, “We got Lula [in Brazil], we got Kercher [in Argentina], we got Evo [Morales in Bolivia], we got Chávez.” Peru could have gone to Humala, easily, easily. If Chávez had just kept his mouth shut, it could have gone to Humala. You have Ortega back [in Nicaragua]. You have this entire sea change.

What Chávez is saying is making perfect sense to a lot of people. You’re like, “Maybe I don’t like the way he says it, maybe his style is not the most couth, maybe he’s a little rough around the edges.” But a lot of people are like, “Well, he’s clearly not lying. Look at what they’re doing abroad.” Chávez is not popular in Peru at all. Mostly because he won’t just keep his mouth shut. He interferes a lot, throws his weight around in a way that Peruvians find unseemly, or in a way that offends our own sense of nationalism. There’s many things about Chávez I admire, but the fact that he’s, like, not ever going to leave bothers me a great deal, makes me very sad for institutionality.


Is the U.S. a Latin American country?

Increasingly. California is. I always say this: There's something about L.A., even the white people are Mexican. I was trying to teach my niece Lucia to say, No mames, guey [which is an affectionate phrase tossed around male friends, but roughly translates to “Don’t be a dickhead, dick”]. It’s not Peruvian at all, but it’s totally Californian, it’s totally Mexican. [Laughs.] “You know, you’re going to be a Latina in Oakland, you better learn how to say it.” She’s 2½ years old. But she’s going to get it.

But now, Alabama, Iowa, Minnesota, New York City is even Mexicanizing.

It’s funny it is causing this kind of nativist uproar. To a certain extent, that’s natural, but I don’t understand the nativist anxiety, because I’m not native.


But the shifts freak people out.

I remember my dad took me to New York to go to school; the waiter would come by and speak Spanish, and my dad would be like, “I’m from Peru, where you from?” And the waiter would be like, “Who the fuck is this guy?” You don’t have that natural intimacy when you see another Latino like we did in Alabama. Finding another Latino in Birmingham was always an event. It’s gone by the wayside, like the way people used to clap when the plane landed. They don’t do that anymore. They do in Latin America.

Why is it important to keep writing fiction in the media age, where we’re saturated with information and text and media and signals?

If you’re a writer, you believe there are certain things that fiction can accomplish that can only be accomplished in fiction. There are certain things that movies can’t do, that music can’t do, certain things that Web sites can’t do, radio can’t do. If you believe that, then you’re a writer. If you don’t believe that, then you should do something else. I think that a novel is the closest you can get to walking in someone else’s shoes, both as an artist and as a consumer of that art. I think of art, all of art, as running around the question of what it means to be alive now. A novel allows a reader to commune with other people’s experiences in a really intense, really real way, and I don’t think that other media can do that exactly in that same way.