Finding His Roots--and a Powerful Voice

“I only write,” says Victor Villasenor, “about what I know.”

Pain, then, seems an obvious theme because Villasenor knows few subjects as intimately as he knows pain.

He experienced internal pain, for example, through each of the 265 rejections that preceded the release of his first novel, “Macho!” (Bantam) in 1970. And he endured physical pain from vicious motorcycle and horseback riding accidents that, doctors told him, he never should have survived.

“There’s no reason,” he says, “that I’m not dead.”

Yet Villasenor shrugs off those memories. Those scars, after all, have healed. But there’s another pain that continues to burn. And when it boils over, he says, “I want to load up my guns and go killing.”

It’s a pain he’s carried since childhood when, as the son of Mexican immigrants, he was told he was something less than his white classmates. Teachers hit him to keep him from speaking Spanish at school, where he was also taught to hate his heritage.

“I was castrated,” he remembers. “It was horrible.” But for now, at least, his guns remain holstered because Villasenor has found a mightier weapon.

“Now what I do,” he says, “is I load up my words and go writing.”

And those words have apparently found their mark: Villasenor’s most recent works, “Rain of Gold” (Arte Publico), a 1991 release, and “Wild Steps of Heaven,” released by Delacorte Press last month, have transformed him from a struggling writer into one of the preeminent Mexican American voices in literature today.

“The reason is the things he’s writing about,” says Anita Cano, co-owner of Cultura Latina Bookstore in Long Beach and an associate professor of Spanish at Cal State Long Beach. “He’s writing about the search for one’s roots. A lot of books have been written [about] the journey north from Mexico. But not with the passion and emotion he writes with.”

Villasenor will participate Sunday in a panel discussion on the immigrant experience at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at UCLA.

In “Rain of Gold,” which was recently translated into Spanish, Villasenor writes of his parents’ emigration from Mexico to Southern California around the time of the Mexican Revolution. With “Wild Steps of Heaven,” he adds to the story, concentrating on the experiences of his father, Juan, who witnesses the tragedies of war, the horrors of poverty and the fall of his once-noble family in Los Altos de Jalisco. It’s a revolution-era version of “La Familia,” dealing as it does with the travails of a large extended family. And it’s a tale that has a deep resonance throughout the Southwest.

“Everyone recognized their family in the story, and they made an immediate, immediate connection,” says Cano, whose mother fled Mexico for East Los Angeles in 1917. “It was as if he was speaking for them.”

Villasenor, however, is aiming for a more universal audience.

“I’m not writing just for Chicanos,” he once told an interviewer. “I’m writing for the whole world. I want to be like Tolstoy, like Homer, like Shakespeare.”

*

Dressed for a book signing in a western shirt and jeans and wearing cowboy boots, a kerchief and sporting a belt buckle roughly the size of a satellite dish, Villasenor looks like a rancher--which, in fact, he is. His 5-acre spread in Oceanside--where he lives with his family and Casanova, his trusty steed--is known locally as Rancho Villasenor and its mailing address appears at the end of each of his books.

Villasenor, who speaks in a gravelly voice made even more hoarse by a recent promotional tour that took him to 18 cities in nine states in a month, frequently switches from English to Spanish to emphasize a point or express himself more forcefully. But in either language he’s as blunt as he is in print, peppering conversations with provocative statements and words that rarely appear in family newspapers.

Part of Villasenor’s attraction is the fact he doesn’t ignore the racism, ostracism and displacement that permeate the stories of many Mexican families who resettled here in the years before World War II.

Born in Carlsbad, Calif., less than two years before the U.S. joined the fighting, Villasenor, 55, remembers his father talking of the hunger he suffered during his journey north. Years later, despite having become wealthy as a liquor-store magnate, Juan Villasenor would sleep with plantanos and bread under his bed because he still feared waking up hungry.

Victor Villasenor never experienced that kind of hunger. But he had other problems, such as dyslexia, which made reading difficult and caused him to drop out of school in the 11th grade. With little education and no certain future, Villasenor set off for Mexico.

“There everybody spoke Spanish,” he says in mock amazement. “And I saw high-rise buildings made out of glass. And I saw Indian excavations [from] before Columbus. And then I realized that I’m somebody. That they lied to me!”

While discovering his past, Villasenor also found his future, for in learning about his heritage, he taught himself to read. Things that had long been denied him--the truth about his culture, the power of the written word--were suddenly revealed together. The impact took his breath away.

So when, at age 20, he returned to his parents’ 166-acre ranch in San Diego’s North County, he came back with “una rabia de ir a matar gringos”--with a rage to go and kill gringos. “My father said, ‘Eso no es valor [that isn’t brave]. What is brave is to do something worthwhile with your life,’ ” Villasenor says. “He said ‘What I did to get revenge on this country is I got rich. And I became a Republican.’

He challenged his son to get even not with bullets, but with his brain.

*

Villasenor remembers planning for an early retirement, figuring that, in a year or two, his fame as a best-selling author would make him rich.

In reality, he wrote for 10 years without earning a dime. The rejection notices arrived with regularity, but that didn’t make them any easier to accept. After opening one, Villasenor beat on a stucco wall until his hands were bloodied. Still enraged, he punched a hole in the wall with his head.

Awaking the next morning, he says, “I had a headache--[but] I started writing again.”

He had little choice, really. Despite his father’s warning, he knew the day he stopped being a prisoner of his writing he was a sure bet to become a prisoner of the state.

“Every time I quit, I began to feel sick with rage. It was only when I would write that I could get the rage out,” he says. “I was preparing to become a mass murderer. I had that rage. And it’s real. I just feel lucky and grateful to God that I found another way to get it out.”

Even then, the power of Villasenor’s writing was obvious; he just had to learn to control it. So at the urging of a local college teacher, he began writing, then rewriting, then rewriting again until he got it right. It was a long and painful--if ultimately rewarding--process that led to the selling of a novel, “Macho!” The story of a migrant farm worker, it earned Villasenor rave reviews--this newspaper compared it favorably to the best of John Steinbeck.

Later came a nonfiction book, “Jury: The People vs. Juan Corona” and the screenplay for the 1982 PBS film “The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez.” Success, however, hasn’t made the act of writing any easier. In “Rain of Gold,” for example, Villasenor spent six months on one 20-page passage.

“Six months!” he shouts. “Every day. Sixteen, 15, 18 hours a day. On 20 pages!”

Villasenor, who makes little effort to mask his emotions, suddenly goes quiet, buries his head in his hands and warns his listener, “I’m going to start crying.”

And he does. The weeping goes on for several minutes, in fact, before Villasenor heaves several times and manages to choke out an explanation, “It’s been so hard.”

Between them, “Rain of Gold” and “Wild Steps of Heaven” took 16 years to write--and Villasenor says there are three more books on his family’s history to come. Indeed, it has been a long and difficult journey, but the pain has played an important role. Even his dyslexia, which continues to make reading difficult, has contributed to his success by making his writing more active and alive.

“When I see a page,” he says, “the first thing I see is all the white. And [then] the words start moving. So because of that, the world to me is always moving. The whole word to me is verbs. I don’t see nouns. Everything’s always moving and growing.”

The rage of the past is not gone, the author promises, but he does appear to have it under control. Perhaps that’s because the things he learned at home and that had been denied in school--ethnic pride, for example, and a sense of worth--once again surround him. For Villasenor, who detests the very idea of linear thinking, the circle of life is now complete.

“I’m complete with every human being on Earth,” he says. “I live my life completely every day where I have nothing left over. Every day is a good day to die.”