Helena Maria Viramontes, Writer : She Had the Last Word in Picking Career

Her passion for the written word, Helena Maria Viramontes remembers, probably began as a young child.

It was in the bathroom--the only private place in the small East Los Angeles house shared by 11 family members--that she would sneak peeks at the encyclopedia that her father forbade her to handle because it was not yet paid for.

The encyclopedia volumes and a Bible purchased by an older sister were the only books in her house while she was growing up. “In essence, these were the books that I always felt were the truth,” she says.

Having broken through economic and cultural barriers, the 37-year-old Irvine resident now writes her own truths, mostly in the form of fictional short stories that reflect her indignation at the oppression of Latinas.

“I don’t want any more stereotypes thrown out there,” she says of her concern that her stories not be misinterpreted by non-Latinos. “But the statistics are the type of reality that I am close to, that my own sisters lived, that I have lived. I cannot afford not to write about them.”

Viramontes’ writings have won critical acclaim, including a first-place award in the UC Irvine Chicano Literary Contest. In 1989, she received a $20,000 creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. A collection of her stories is in its third printing.

She offers poignant, sometimes violent tales of women trapped by their gender, sexuality and class in a male-dominated world. In one story, a housewife reflects on her lost life of cooking and cleaning. In another, a teen-ager’s budding sexuality means that her father does not trust her to go out without a chaperon.

“ TU ERES MUJER! (You are a woman!),” he thundered, and that was the end of any argument,” Viramontes wrote.

That dialogue could easily have come from her own home, where she tricked her father into signing a college entrance form.

“I remember this so clearly, because my father said ‘No! Over my dead body will you leave this house!’ ” she recalled.

The fourth of nine children, she was the first woman in her family to attend college. Remembering the chismes , or stories, she heard older women tell around the kitchen table when she was a child, Viramontes acted on her urge to write.

She remembers taking five buses from the barrio to the UCI campus, hoping to perfect her craft through a master’s program. But she found a different struggle there. Academic advisers, she says, discouraged her from focusing on Chicanas.

“I am a very simple person,” she said, “and I knew that if I write about love, and I knew that if I write about trying to help people and give voices to those who are so silent, I knew I could not go wrong.”

Viramontes’ current projects include a novel based on the life of Modesta Avila, the first convicted felon of Orange County, and a half-hour screenplay recently adapted from one of her short stories.

“I would like to write a script that would sell,” she said. “And I would like to, one day, buy my mother a house.”