I met Alex Espinoza in San Antonio in 2003 at Macondo, a weeklong writers’ workshop that meets every summer. He captivated readers with his story of two radically different boys who befriend each other and get into mischief. That story is now a chapter in his marvelous debut novel, Still Water Saints (Random House, $23.95). Set in the fictionalized Agua Mansa in Southern California, the linchpin of the novel is Perla and her Botánica Oshún. Customers from all walks of life come to her seeking cures, advice, hope, or change for a 20. Perla dispenses all with equal care.
Still Water Saints was simultaneously released in English and Spanish in January, unusual for a first novel. The book’s translator, Austinite Liliana Valenzuela, joins Espinoza for a bilingual reading at BookPeople Friday, March 2.
Austin Chronicle: One of the things I love about your book is that you don’t sensationalize Chicanos or Chicano culture. Was that deliberate?
Alex Espinoza: It was. I think perceptions of what it means to be a Chicano in the U.S. is that it’s an either/or. My biggest challenge was that I was writing a book set in a botanica, but I didn’t want it to be “magical.”
AC: There’s an accepted hyperbole used to describe Latino cultural traditions, or made magical as you say, but you make them ordinary without diminishing their value.
AE: I received a lot of criticism that I was trying to write “that book” and was advised to not use the botanica. But the fastest way to get me to do something is to tell me not to do it. My book is responding to a lot of that criticism. I thought it was important to get close to that stereotype but skew it.
AC: Who are your influences?
AE: One of my favorite books is [Toni Morrison’s] Beloved. It tells what happens when you try to silence your legacy: It comes back to bite you in the butt. I’m fascinated with Dogeaters by Jessica Hagedorn. It’s this wonderful book set in the Philippines with different narrators telling the story. I wanted each of my first-person chapters to sound radically different, so I revisited [Hagedorn] a lot. Another inspiration was Dagoberto Gilb’s Woodcuts of Women. It’s like an advent calendar – you open one section and get this small picture, but as a whole, it’s this huge landscape. I was blown away by how he did that.
AC: I appreciate your desire to broaden ideas of Southern California culture beyond surfers and Latino images beyond gangbangers and farmworkers.
AE: You know, there’s a constant debate about what you can or can’t have in Chicano literature. In the end, I said, “Screw you; I’m going to write the book I want to write.” 
This article appears in March 2 • 2007.