Trini. Estella Portillo Trambley
CONTEMPORARY CLASSICS BY WOMEN
Allegra Maud Goldman
Edith Konecky
The Parish and the Hill
Mary Doyle Curran
This Child’s Gonna Live
Sarah E. Wright
Daddy Was a Number Runner
Louise Meriwether
Paper Fish
Tina DeRosa
Published by the Feminist Press at the City University of New York
The Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10016
Published in 2005 by the Feminist Press
Originally published in 1986 by Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona
© 1986 by Estela Portillo Trambley
Foreword © 2005 by Helena María Viramontes
Afterword © 2005 by Debra A. Castillo
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or used, stored in any information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without prior written permission from the Feminist Press at the City University of New York, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Trambley, Estela Portillo, 1936-
Trini / Estela Portillo Trambley; foreword by Helena María Viramontes; afterword by Debra A. Castillo.
p. cm. — (Contemporary classics by women series)
ISBN 978-1-9369-3209-2 (ebook)
1. Mexican American women—Fiction. 2. Tarahumara Indians—Fiction. 3. Women immigrants—Fiction. 4. Women landowners—Fiction. 5. Illegal aliens—Fiction. 6. Indian women—Fiction. 7. Feminist fiction. Icsh I. Title. II. Series.
PS3570.R3342T7 2005
813’.54—dc22
2004028533
The Feminist Press gratefully acknowledges the contributions of the National Endowment for the Arts towards the publication of this book.
Cover design by Dayna Navaro
09 08 07 06 05 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
To Megan Anne Copeland
God’s child,
beautiful and brave
Way back, it seems, in 1982, I had only known Estela Portillo Trambley through her first collection Rain of Scorpions (1975) when I invited her, along with Lorna Dee Cervantes, to do a reading I had organized for UC-Irvine’s Cross Cultural Center. She was already famous for her play The Day of the Swallows (1971) and for receiving the Quinto Sol Award for Literature (1972), in addition to her editorial role in El Grito’s first all-women issue (1973). I had never met her and while I waited in anticipation at John Wayne airport, I had seen nothing more than the photo on her book cover. Since I hadn’t been able to raise enough money for her honorarium, travel, and hotel, I was astonished that Portillo Trambley would accept my invitation to stay with my husband and me at our home in Orange County, California. I was beside myself with hospitality worry and pre-event jitters when Portillo Trambley got off the plane and approached me because I was holding her collection. I must have been quite a sight.
I was a graduate student pursuing an M.F.A. in Creative Writing at the time, the first Chicana to be admitted into the fiction concentration since the program’s inception. The campus itself was situated in Orange County, California—Bob Dornan and John Birch territory—enough said. Though the place proved to be extremely challenging to the soul, its one major saving grace at the