Across the Borderline
Octavio Quintanilla’s roots lie deep in both South Texas and Mexico. And his work dwells between worlds—geographic, cultural, and emotional.
Texas border poet. Mexican American literature. Poetry crossing borders.
“Hey, Andy? We need Spider-Man’s help again.”
I was sitting on the few steps that led from our kitchen down into the garage, where my father and his childhood friend Edgar were working on our washing machine. It was an old brown Sears model my dad bought ten years before, when he worked in the Sears warehouse in Norfolk, Virginia. They needed some light, and at the time, you would not find me without my little Spider-Man flashlight.
I held my flashlight as they fixed the washer. I felt awe watching them work, and I got a little fleck of pride because they needed my help. They addressed the mechanical problem, and they invited me in by not calling My flashlight a flashlight, but by calling it Spider-Man.
I’ll never forget the tenderness with which these two working men treated me.
Poet, painter, and professor Octavio Quintanilla portrays a similar moment in what has quickly become one of my favorite poems in the world, “Hombres,” from his collection The Book of Wounded Sparrows, one of ten finalists for the 2024 National Book Award in Poetry.
In that poem, Quintanilla’s uncle brings home a deer he has shot. Men gather in the ritual of butchering the deer on an outdoor table “built sturdy for times like these.” As they work, they drink beer, talk, and look at the stars. Quintanilla is little, pressing himself against his father’s legs, “curious about death.” He knows he “will be alone one day, / in a field all atremble with evening.” Still, for the moment, he is surrounded by “the torsos of the men who loved me.”
Here he is reading that poem.
Texas border poet. Mexican American literature. Poetry crossing borders.
Octavio Quintanilla reads “Hombres,” a poem from his collection The Book of Wounded Sparrows.
Quintanilla has many poems about relatives, and in plenty of those you’ll find a quality that permeates much of his work: nepantla, a Nahuatl (Aztec) word meaning “in the middle” or “in between.” Chicana philosopher Gloria Anzaldua popularized the term, using it to refer to being between two cultures, as Quintanilla was, living on both sides of the border between the United States and Mexico. When he was nine, his parents sent him and a younger brother to live with their grandmother in Texas. Now, in his work, Quintanilla often speaks across borders: between those two countries, between two languages, across the grieving chasm between life and death, and across swaths of time.
He is also a phenomenal visual artist, creating frontextos (the term blends the Spanish for “border” and “text”), stunning marriages of visual art and poetry. His love of the visual started young, during childhood Christmas and summer trips to see his parents in Mexico, when his mother would present him with a stack of popular Mexican graphic novels. There was no television, so reading graphic novels, mythology, and abridged versions of classics had a deep influence on him, especially in terms of the compression and slight otherworldliness you will find in the three new poems he contributed to Salvation South’s celebration of National Poetry Month.
What started in childhood persisted after high school, as Quintanilla would paint on leftover drywall his father brought home from construction jobs. Quickly, his friends began to see him as an artist and his teachers began to see him as a writer. That validation is a through line to today: His frontextos are fascinating multidisciplinary works of art.
Texas border poet. Mexican American literature. Poetry crossing borders.
You can read how he creates frontextos—and see more examples—here.
His newest book, Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours, published just last month, won the Ambroggio Prize of the Academy of American Poets. In it, Quintanilla writes, “I want to think where I’m going will be free of borders.” In his work, he has created just such a place.
Andy Fogle: Tell me about where you grew up and what it was like.
Octavio Quintanilla: I was born in South Texas, the Rio Grande Valley, by the border, and then my parents moved to Mexico. My dad was a farmer. He worked the land and lived in a small town. I went to school down there, and lived there until I was nine, when my grandmother’s husband died. She decided to ask my parents if we could come live with her and go to school in the U.S. At the time, my little brother and I were going to school in Mexico, and we kind of had the golden ticket, because we were American citizens. I knew that at some point we would come to the States, because everybody wanted to come to the States.
AF: But only you and your little brother came to live with your grandmother in this country?
OQ: Our parents and [other] siblings stayed behind, so it was just my brother and me. I was nine, he was eight, and we went to live with our grandmother, who was a wonderful woman. She lived in Harlingen, Texas. It’s something that we don’t really talk about as a family, but obviously our parents got convinced that they should let us come and go to school, because of the better life, better future, all that stuff. And so we did. The Book of Wounded Sparrows is basically about that dislocation and separation. It’s such a complicated thing because obviously I wouldn’t be here talking to you if that had not happened. But at the same time, I can’t imagine how hard it was for our parents to let us go.
“If it weren’t for literature, and if I had not been a reader as a kid and as a teenager, I think I would have had a hell of a time, because you are always at the border of things.”
AF: Yeah, I have two kids and just imagining that is physically painful for me.
OQ: I mean, imagine how horrible. I don’t know the details. My mom still lives, and I want to talk to her about it. But it’s such an emotional subject, because it’s something that you never heal from. It must have been horrible for our parents to finally say, “Yes, take them,” for the sake of a better life. And it’s hard to be here sitting with you—with all the privileges that I have—and to think, “Man, if I was my father or mother I wouldn’t let my kids...” I mean, I don’t know, you know? As a grown ass man right now, I don’t think I would let my kids go at all, but they were different times, man, different times.
AF: What’s the Rio Grande Valley like?
OQ: It’s like its own little country, right between Mexico and the rest of the United States. You even have a checkpoint right there by Kingsville, Texas, which is in the Corpus Christie area if you’re coming from the valley up north to San Antonio. And you have all the markers of it being this very independent place with its own mix of Tejano [Texan/Mexican] culture. As a teenager in South Texas, you do feel a sense of isolation from the country south of you and from the rest of the country north of you.
AF: There’s a lot of in-betweenness in The Book of Wounded Sparrows. You’re between two countries, between two languages, between time frames—the past and the present. And you’re speaking across the border of life and death, through grief. There are all these borders to negotiate. You mentioned being a teenager, and adolescence itself is a biologically and socially in-between time, trying to figure out how you negotiate the territory between being a kid and being a grown-up, trying to find the way, to read the map.
OQ: Yeah, and unfortunately, there’s really no map other than literature, and even that map has its own dead ends, right? If it weren’t for literature, and if I had not been a reader as a kid and as a teenager, I think I would have had a hell of a time, because you are always at the border of things. You’re at the border, waiting to cross, but you’re afraid, or you don’t have the means to make the crossing. Here I’m speaking metaphorically. Or you cross and you want to return to where you came from, or you make the crossing and what you find is not what you wanted. But fortunately, I had different means of expression: writing, reading, playing music. I always had those things, which makes me think about kids who might have had my type of traumatic experience or worse, but not the creative outlets. Those are the kids that really make me kind of sad, right? I mean, damn, I’m one of the lucky ones. I don’t know if I was born loving art or if I was just lucky enough to say, “Oh shit, I like reading and I like writing, and here’s how I can express myself.”
AF: That’s a big deal.
OQ: Part of that teenage experience for some of us is feeling trapped. After the border, to the north there’s two hours of nothing between the four counties in the Rio Grande Valley and the rest of the United States. You go south, and south doesn’t remember you. South also others you because you look like them. You look like a Mexican, but you don’t speak Spanish correctly, or they imagine you have more wealth or more access or more privileges. And then you go north, same shit. “Oh, you look like a Mexican.” So that’s truly living in between spaces, as Gloria Anzaldua calls it, “nepantla”—this concept of living in between.
AF: Right.
OQ: Learning how to navigate more than one form of being. I learned that as a teenager. Not because I knew it, but because I read books that allowed me to fly, not go south or north, but go up. I think that’s what saved me in a way. And then I think about other kids who didn’t have that, you know? Who struggled, who went the wrong direction, who took out their emotions in twisted ways.
AF: I use that same verb—“save”—when I talk to my students about the arts. I wasn’t actively headed down any kind of dark path when I fell in love with the arts in tenth grade. And I knew I wanted to devote my life to the arts somehow. But once I got to my thirties, and I looked back at my late teen years and most of my twenties, I could see how having discovered the arts at fifteen gave me some stability, and made it a little easier to bounce back and pull through some things. And it might sound like hyperbole, but I don’t know that I’d be alive if I didn’t have the arts. I fucked some things up badly when I was twenty-four, but the arts gave me a way of understanding myself, seeing things a little differently. They kept me a couple of extra steps away from the brink.
“We talk about art and the power of art or literature almost as if it’s a given, but you really know the meaning of it when you really are the one finding ways, finding solutions, finding beauty in a shitty world.”
OQ: I completely understand what you’re saying. That would have been me. My brother’s story is his own story to tell, but as a witness, I think at one point he was going down the wrong path because he didn’t have a creative outlet. Thank God he had a loving family, and we brought him back, but it’s not just him. It’s all his other friends from school who had traumatic experiences. Their path was different, man. I don’t know what happened to those kids who I grew up with. Sometimes we talk about art and the power of art or literature almost as if it’s a given, but you really know the meaning of it when you really are the one finding ways, finding solutions, finding beauty in a shitty world.
AF: Can we talk about one poem in particular? You’ve got quite a few devastating, gorgeous poems about your dad in The Book of Wounded Sparrows, but I’d love to get into “Hombres” some.
OQ: That poem is made up of different components of different memories that compose one narrative. I was thinking of when my uncle took me hunting for the first time—out there in the woods in South Texas. I didn’t want to kill a deer, so I think I killed a little snake or something. My uncle had a plumbing company with maybe fifteen employees and sometimes they’d bring a deer or two home and it was a ritual, you know? Flaying the deer. It was around this table outside, under a tree and there was some type of fire going, the men sitting or standing around, smoking and drinking beer.
In my first book, If I Go Missing, there’s a poem (“Matanzo del Marrano”—“pig slaughter”) that’s very similar to “Hombres” in tone, in which the speaker reflects on how his American brothers are trying to recreate the ritual of slaughtering a pig during the holidays. My family’s from the land, from the country, so you don’t go to H-E-B and buy pork, you know. You kill your pork. So those rituals that had killing almost at the center of them were also communal spaces. The men came and talked, the men came and shared stories, the men came and dreamed, right? They laughed. And sure, sometimes they got in fights once the whiskey or tequila or whatever was flowing—but as a little boy, it just felt so good to be around them, man. To feel protected. Like a little prince, with these rough-looking guys, laborers, construction workers. I’ve never felt safer in my life. And that poem is trying to honor that, honor those men who sometimes we don’t talk about.
Often, we talk about violence and despair and abandonment and all this BS, man. I’m talking about my Mexican-American community. But not everybody’s like that, you know? I grew up with a tight-knit family where men loved their kids. Yeah, some of them were drunks and some of them were this or that, but goddamn, they loved their kids. I grew up with that. I wanted to capture that moment of being a little boy and just watching men and dreaming one day to be like them.
AF: All of that—I was eating it up. That’s one of my new favorite poems. I observed a similar thing with my dad and his friends growing up.
OQ: Where’d you grow up?
AF: I grew up in Virginia Beach. Southeast Virginia. You mentioned how you had gone out with your uncle and you didn’t want to kill a deer, and I see that sensitivity in the poem. I was definitely a sensitive kid, and that wasn’t always valued by my dad or his buddies. There’s something different in that poem as well: “I am small, pressed myself against my father’s legs, / the massive animal on the table / built sturdy for times like these.” And “I am curious about death, but I’ve never seen / the meadows where the grown men go, / never alone to rub wilderness / all over my arms and chest.” I love that longing in there...to be a little kid and want to be big like these guys one day. The poem’s finish is just so brilliant: “the dying light’s bristle against my face, / the torsos of the men who loved me / laced with the earth’s skin.”
“I don’t see a lot of poems where a male poet talks about the men who were there for him, who loved him with purity, and with toughness, too. Around them? The safest feeling ever.”
I remember before my dad would shave, he’d grab my hand and rub it against his stubble, or even rub his stubble against my cheek, you know? “I need to shave, don’t I, boy?” That scratchiness and my amazement that I too would get whiskers someday.
OQ: Yeah, exactly!
AF: Your word choice there—that the dying light “bristles”—reminded me of those whiskers, of a time when I was looking up to manhood while I was outside of it. Bless you for doing that.
OQ: Thank you. Absolutely. I think all of that plays into those types of memories, especially those of us who grew up with a father like that, right? The type of father who might have never articulated a love for you, but everything they did was love. All that is there. And obviously the poem expands a bit metaphorically into almost a short meditation on death: What’s out there in the unknown? What kind of man am I going to become? Will I be like this? I want to be like them guys, but I don’t know if I’m ready. And what if I’m not? It’s so interesting how a memory like that sticks with you—small memories that years later you mythologize. You make them bigger than life. But these guys are not small characters in this boy’s life. They’re as big as the animal on the table. I wanted to write about that partly because I don’t see a lot of poems where a male poet talks about the men who were there for him, who loved him with purity, and with toughness, too. Around them? The safest feeling ever.
AF: Poems like “[You take a picture of your father]” and “Psalm” are so beautiful and sad and tough and tender. Were you taking care of him at any point or just spending a lot of time with him?
OQ: I lived with my folks until I was about twenty-three. The thing about my father is he had a second-grade education. My mom, maybe seventh grade. But they valued education. They valued books. They imagined their kids “living better lives” than they did. In 1992, I graduated high school, and my whole family came and he started working construction. He was in his late fifties and he started working at a cotton gin. I don’t think any of us knew he was suffering from diabetes. So he climbed a ladder one day—and when you have diabetes, sometimes you get dizzy—and he fell and hit his head on the concrete and had serious memory damage for a long time. He got some of it back, but he never fully recovered. In If I Go Missing, I have a poem about that called “Sleepwalker Never Wakes Up.” I’d be talking to him and happy because he was into our conversation but then I’d realize that he was talking about something that happened in 1970.
AF: Right.
OQ: I think my whole family partook in everything he went through. At one point, I used to call him the underground man because we would tell him, “Hey, take your medicine.” He’s like, “I’m not going to take my medicine.” In Spanish, he’d basically say, “No, I’m not going to do anything.” We’d say, “Hey, take care of yourself; don’t eat sweets no more.” But everything that we told him not to do, he would do.
AF: Sounds kind of like my dad.
OQ: Yeah. So after a while, I was like, man, this guy’s the underground man from Dostoevsky, he’s just totally going against himself, you know?
That other poem “[You take a picture of your father]” actually happened, man. For the last few years my father and I would see each other and talk a bit, and there was a little disconnection, a little distance. But the day before he died, dude, I was in the valley and he was in the hospital and I went to see him. We talked for like an hour. We just talked. He was telling me about family I didn’t know I had, and I left as if I had forgiven him and he had forgiven me.
I drove back to San Antonio that afternoon. Then early the next morning, my brother called. “Hey, Dad got really sick.” I’m like, “Shit, I’ll drive back.” It’s four hours south, so I head south. On my way there, my brother calls again. “Hey, Dad’s dead. He passed away.” It’s one of those things where it kind of makes you believe in God. Of course I felt bad that he passed away, but my soul was at peace because we had talked that day before at the hospital. And I had just bought a new cellphone and I remembered taking a photo of him and that’s how that poem was born.
“I felt bad that he passed away, but my soul was at peace because we had talked that day before at the hospital. And I had just bought a new cellphone and I remembered taking a photo of him and that’s how that poem was born.”
AF: Wow.
OQ: And that poem has to do with how we want to say something without words. I feel like we said everything we had to say. It was like he knew we were not going to see each other again. And we didn’t. So that’s one of those poems that documents not just an event but a really emotional event.
AF: Do you have any memories of being in love with or wowed by language? You say in one poem that you loved watching someone draw the tic-tac-toe sign.
OQ: That line was really just a metaphor for my love of watching others work. I remember as a little boy in Mexico going to my father’s fields, and I just watched him work out there. Sometimes a friend would come and help him out and I’d just be watching them work—their bodies working. And I could sit there all day. Until they made me work!
AF: “Octavio, get over here!”
OQ: Yeah. But nowadays, it also has to do with my love of watching artists work. One way that I kind of became at ease with taking myself seriously as an artist was by watching artists paint. It demystifies the process, as opposed to seeing the final product only as a work of genius. It is that rite of watching others, whom I love, work. I just love watching construction workers work or people at the freaking McDonald’s. I notice shit like that, you know, because it’s a rhythm. It’s a music.
I’ve done all kinds of work–labor jobs, gas stations—but I also make art. And one of my earliest memories as a little boy is my mom taking me to a school in Mexico because I wanted to learn. I must have been three. Is that how far back you can remember? Two, three?
AF: Something like that, yeah. You start to get fragments around age three.
OQ: I remember sitting on a desk and I wanted to go to school and my mom would try to teach me how to read. When I started reading, she was my dictionary. I was always asking, “What does that mean?” And then I realized I loved to see words on the page, not even understanding them. Even now, it sometimes takes me weeks to start reading a book because I just want to look at the pages and the space and the words. Especially poetry where the poet might be playing with form. I’m like, “I just want to see this.” Then finally I’ll start reading. So I think my love for language started when I saw the words, the letters themselves making words I could not read, but I knew there was something great in them.
When I first came to the states to go to school, I didn’t know English, and they put me in an English-speaking class. And my teacher told me in Spanish, “I’m not going to speak in Spanish for you.” And she paired me up with a kid named Marco to translate for me. So there was this little kid who would tell me, “Oh, you know, this is what she said.” And I was a good student, right? We would take spelling tests back in third grade and I would get As. I would get the highest marks even though I didn’t know English.
AF: No kidding.
OQ: You want to know why?
AF: Why?
“I became a good writer because I wouldn’t talk in class. I was probably one of the smartest kids in my classes, but I wouldn’t talk because I didn’t want to be laughed at because of my accent. So what would I do? I would put everything in writing.”
OQ: Because I would pronounce the words the way they sounded in Spanish so they would stick and I could memorize them. For example, “table.” I would think of it as “tahb-lay,” and I would write it down. I mean, I just love words, even not knowing their meanings. I love books.
Once I started writing in English, I became a good writer because I wouldn’t talk in class. I was probably one of the smartest kids in my classes, but I wouldn’t talk because I didn’t want to be laughed at because of my accent. So what would I do? I would put everything in writing. And since fourth grade, I’ve always had teachers tell me, “Wow, Octavio, this is beautiful. This is wonderful.” I remember in fifth grade, we had to write a story, and my teacher came over to me and said, “This is great. Did you write this?” “Yes,” I said. “Keep writing,” she said.
And then it kept happening. Teachers would validate my writing. So I realized, this is where the power is. I didn’t want to speak too much because I wasn’t comfortable. I felt like I would sound dumb or mispronounce words. But I realized I didn’t have to speak in class to show them I was smart.
Writing became this thing that spoke for me, without me speaking.
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Andy Fogle is the poetry editor of Salvation South. He is the author of Mother Countries, Across From Now, and seven chapbooks of poetry, including Arc & Seam: Poems of Farouk Goweda, co-translated with Walid Abdallah. He’s from Virginia Beach, spent years in the D.C. area, and now lives with his family in upstate New York, teaching high school.
