Amalia Ortiz Wins American Book Award
October 1, 2020 - San Antonio
Spoken Word Champion. Amalia Ortiz performs one of her pieces during a poetry slam session in 2019. As a creative, Ortiz can be seen frequently performing her music and poetry in the city. Photo: B. Kay Richter.
By Valeria Torrealba- Staff Intern, San Antonio Sentinel
On Sunday, October 25, activist and spoken-word poetry revolutionary author Amalia Leticia Ortiz will be awarded the American Book Award in Oral Literature for her groundbreaking work, The Canción Cannibal Cabaret & Other Songs.
Set in a dystopian future fantasy, The Canción Cannibal Cabaret & Other Songs encompasses the journey of a female activist group actively fighting for justice against discrimination, racism and the prejudice against the embodied Chicano culture, all led by La Madre Valiente, an anti-capitalist, feminist and activist icon for the Black Bards and Red Heralds.
The embodiment of a revolution comes with spite, vigor, tenacity and a knack for social justice challenges. In her latest work, published by Aztlan Libre Press, Ortiz encapsulates the oppression and discrimination that Chicanos in Texas have faced, all in a female-headlining punk-rock band.
Orchestrated by La Madre Valiente, the revolution in Ortiz’s story seeks to break gender roles and stereotypes, with a forceful delivery of the female-led activist group fighting against a totalitarian and tyrannical government. “It started off as rewriting songs,” said Ortiz. “I use the word “repurposing”, so, you look at Weird Al — he parodies. I use songs and parody them, [but] parody makes it sound like its making fun of something, and maybe it is, but there is satire in there.”
Ortiz chose to repurpose a popular medley of songs and relate them to her experiences at the border and as an artist. She repurposed them in the hopes of having it be relatable not only to her experiences, but also as a way to engage the audience and have them reflect on their own experiences — all while also providing political commentary.
“The very first song we repurposed was London Calling by The Clash, I turned that into La Frontera Te Llama when I perform,” said Ortiz. “And I’ll see that when I perform, I’ll see people kind of laugh, but they’re not laughing because it’s funny, but because it’s surprising. [La Frontera Te Llama] was written in response to being back at the border, 25 years later after having grown up there, and there is a wall. It was a gut reaction to the wall and the changing of the borderland I grew up in. I decided I wanted to do a collection of repurposed songs.”
When asked about her inspiration behind her book, Ortiz spoke fondly of the need to “protect her aesthetic” and fit the world of spoken-word poetry and music into academia. Her punk-rock gender-breaking performance and work is a less-than-traditional one, one that sparks up the realities that women face today.
“When you watch the show, it’s the soldiers who are singing these songs, dressed like ‘glam’ soldiers — the reality of the play is that you’re in this post-apocalyptic world, watching one of these bands trying to enlist you into their army,” said Ortiz. “They roam the wasteland, trying to gain momentum in this revolution, aimed at protecting the weak and the marginalized. If you look at each poem individually, it really is all of these issues that I feel powerless to change. The only way to really change them is to organize and to build movements behind each one. That’s where I came with the idea of these women organizing a revolution to change these things that literally are killing us today.”
Tension has been bubbling and resurfacing for the Latin American and Native American communities in the United States. Ortiz’s novel and award comes at a time where recognition is most important, and social turmoil continues to rampage through the United States. San Antonio has one of the largest Hispanic communities — yet, with the political climate as of late, Texas is one of the states where these communities face the most discrimination.
“Most of the songs are repurposed, but all of them are political,” said Ortiz. “It really was my last year of graduate school that I took a class in prose poems, and one of the assignments was to come up with a prose poem for a hero, and that’s where I came up with The Poctaclypse, The Rise of the State, and The Birth of the Mujerista Resistance. It’s the story about the female refugee in a post-apocalyptic world who becomes the leader of a feminist revolution.”
The Canción Cannibal Cabaret & Other Songs encompasses the journey of a female activist group actively fighting for justice against discrimination, racism and the prejudice against the embodied Chicano culture, all led by La Madre Valiente, an anti-capitalist, feminist and activist icon for the Black Bards and Red Heralds. Courtesy Photo.
For the past ten years, Aztlan Libre Press, operated by Juan Tejeda and Anisa Onofre, facilitates in uplifting the voices of those who need it most — the Chicano and Native American communities being amongst them. Tejeda, a Chicano activist, musician, educator and publisher strives to bring the world the stories and representation of Chicano and Native American culture, which is what Ortiz’s book has accomplished.
“Well, obviously, to put Native American, Chicano and other Latino voices out there, that, for the most part in mainstream media, we still are invisible, right?” Tejeda said. “Where do you see, you know — Native Americans, Chicanos and Latinos, on film and in television? If you’ve kept up with this Dignidad Literaria movement after the American Dirt book came out, looking at big publishing and major publishing in the United States, I think we are totally underrepresented in terms of the staffing and editors of major publishing that make the decisions of who gets published.”
Dignidad Literaria is a group of Latinx authors who hope to bring awareness to the lack of representation of Hispanic cultures in literature, much like Aztlan Libre’s mission.
“A very small percentage of our authors get published by the big publishing companies,” said Tejeda. “There’s a lot of great writers out there that are not being published, and young writers that are coming up that deserve to be published.”
Ortiz has found the success of her novel and the award a welcomed surprise. When the book released in 2019, Ortiz expressed the difficulties of getting sufficient reviews and recognition for her work.
“It was extremely surprising,” said Ortiz. “I’ve won an award on the Texas-level for my first book, so I was extremely optimistic about the second book, because it was my master’s thesis. My first book really was just a collection of poems written over fifteen years. My second book, I felt like, ‘Okay, I went to graduate school’ and really tried to get a grip on technically what I was doing, and I felt like I already had a strong artistic voice. I don’t know, I really felt like it was pointed towards defending my aesthetics, but also speaking to a more academic, literary audience. It was definitely a bigger recognition than I had hoped for. It really exceeded expectations.”
Ortiz desires to dedicate this coveted award to writer Rudolfo Anaya.
“In the event that they’re not able to let us give speeches at all, I’d like to dedicate this award to Rudolfo Anaya,” said Ortiz. “About a year ago, before the book came out, Juan Tejeda received a handwritten letter from Rudolfo. It is just the nicest thing I would want anyone to say about my book. He got it, he dug it, he said, ‘I hope you win all of the awards’. I have a feeling that he is the person who brought attention to my book. I have to dedicate the award to his memory, because I can’t express how touching and meaningful it was to see him stop and take the time to hand write a glowing letter about my book. In my heart, I feel like he had something to do with this award.”
Valeria Torrealba is an opinions columnist and public relations assistant at the University Star, a student publication of Texas State University. Email her at reporter@sasentinel.com