>>Good morning and welcome to Global Perspectives I'm David Dumke.

Today we are joined by Doctor Cecilia Rodriguez Milanes.

Thank you for joining us today, doctor.

>>Thanks for having me.

>>You have written a lo about the immigrant experience based on your own life.

You grew up in new Jersey of Cuban immigrant parents.

How did you get in this - and you teach literature now, I should, I should, I should add and literature, a lot of it.

Latin literature, Puerto Rican literature.

I'll let you explain your own career here in a second.

I want to start, though.

How did you get to this point where this is your focus of your work?

>>Well, I have to say, it was growing up in a community of storytellers.

When I say this, my mother gets mad.

There weren't really very many books in my house.

How do you say that?

But it was kind of true.

Because they were immigrants.

And my brother and I were born in New Jersey, and we spoke Spanish at home.

We didn't speak English until we went to school.

Public school.

And this community in northeastern New Jersey had a lot of immigrant from all over Italian, Polish.

There were, from all over the Americas and all over the Caribbean.

And we went to a Spanish language church, and they would tell stories of their homelands.

And I would like to sit around the adults and listen to the stories that they would tell.

And I was always fascinated by that.

And I think that that's kind of the thing that got in my head that I really liked stories.

And I like telling stories, and children love telling stories, and they love stories, too.

Sometimes we say those stories are lies because kids are, you know, they learn how to do that by, you know, there's their books at school or the books that they're read that are read to them.

And I remember in public school we had like a period where we had library time, and I really loved the Mother Goos collection of poems and stories.

And I would take that book out over and over and over again.

And I have to say the school is no longer around.

But I took it up.

I took that book home because I just loved it.

>>The statute of limitations is up here.

>>Yeah the school has been demolished.

There's nobody there living anymore.

It's now a block of houses.

P.S.

Number 7 Samuel Roberson School.

And so that was my first sort of inspiration.

And then when you become a, you know, an adolescent, then all those hormone and everything is very dramatic.

And what happens is my parents move us from New Jersey to Miami, and it was devastating for me.

And I was going to mis all my friends in high school.

It was one high school for my town.

I grew up in Bayonne New Jersey, and I was going to go to school with all of my friends.

And then I was in Miami and I didn't know anybody.

And so I started writing letters.

I would write about how sad I was and how boring it was, and how hot, and how much the sun burned.

And nobody wrote back.

Very few people wrote back.

So then it was like, okay I guess I'm writing for myself.

So that's how it started.

And, I really loved the English classes.

I loved taking the English classes in college, but I thought I would be a reporter because I said oh, reporters get paid to write.

And I thought that was an exciting job.

And I went out and did several interviews, and it was really fun.

I really enjoyed that.

But then I was told, well you can't put your opinion in.

I was like, what?

I can't put my opinion?

Well, what's the fun in that?

So I said, well, what other kind of writing could I do?

And so I sort of switched gears into more literature and creative writing.

And I ended up at the University of Miami and studied creative writing, and I was very fortunate.

I'm one of the few people, probably in the world who could say that they studie creative writing with two Nobel Prize winners.

So at that time, Isaa Singer used to winter in Miami, and he would come to University of Miami in the spring semester, and he would sit with us and tell us great stories, and we would read to him our stories.

And that was like, amazing.

And then what happens?

I go to grad school and Ton Morrison is the Schweitzer chair at SUNY Albany and she was a professor there.

So I got to study with her too.

So yes, I was I'm very lucky in that way, watching and listening to these master artists and very different, different styles, but both incredible.

>>How did you develop your your own style?

Number one.

But how did you blend then in your life essentially into your into your writing?

>>I started out writing about family members that were in the circus.

They were the Flying Farias in the, Ringling, Ringling Brothers circus.

And one of the sons fell and died.

And it was like very, you know, traumatic.

And I was fascinate by their lives, you know, going from city to city and performing night after night.

And so Miami always has the Ringling Brothers.

They used to have the Ringling Brothers come every - also and I think in the early, part of the year, and they would set up down at the Miami Beach Convention Hall, and I would just go there and talk to people who were working with the animals and meeting them, you know, the hosts and the clowns and whatever.

So I starte writing a collection of stories about the circus, and then sort of strayed away from that.

I graduated from the University of Miami.

I got to work in an art gallery, which I thought was really great, but I missed school.

And so I went back and got a master's degree in literature at Barry University in Miami.

And I chose to write about Toni Morrison because she was my favorite writer.

And her work really inspired me to look at closely at the relationships among girls, and particularly in Sula.

Those two girls, Sula and Nel.

I thought, wow, those girls are a lot like me and my friends.

We were that age and I was reading a lot of, Hemingway.

Believe it or not, I was reading a lot of Hemingway, and I was very impressed by his very direct and simple and stark style.

And I was like, I really like that.

And I read his I'm thinking, is it Farewell to Arms or For Whom the Bell Tolls?

I'm trying to remember-- >>I am too actually as you-- >>Which one is it?

The one about the the that he fights in Spain.

But the way that he structured the English, it was in passive voice, like Spanish is.

And I was like, this is fascinating to m because you're reading English, but in my head I am hearing it in Spanish.

And I thought, I want to do that.

I want to do that.

So I liked his style.

I liked how he sort of interprete Spanish structures in English.

And I thought, that's, you know, that's kind of the direction.

Was he a misogynist?

Absolutely.

I read his letters.

He was he was, just a lover, you know, he married four times, but he was also not a very nice spouse.

But his style was was really, for me, very, inspiring.

And then reading work by Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston I took my first women writers of color class at the University of Miami, and I was like, wow, these are amazing because I had just read canonical literature and you know, occasionally Gwendolyn Brooks would be thrown in or, you know, so that was sort of the the sort of culmination is like the wome writers of color and the style.

And so I started to, write stories, particularly around 1980 when the Mariel boatlift happened.

I lived in Miami, and I was watching the news and reading the Miami Herald, and I had an aunt that came through the Mariel boatlift, and I was fascinate by their stories, and I realized that many of their stories were not really being told.

They were not in the newspaper, they were not on the news.

And so I felt like these people deserve to have their stories told.

So I wrote a bunch of stories about Marielitos and that ended up being my dissertation.

>>Incredible.

So you you've you've now flash forward, you've written three books and you have a new project, which is a video essay called Dancing Danny.

Tell us about that, particular work.

>>So Dancing Danny is, sort of, a tribute to my brother, who passed away in 2015.

He was younger than me.

He was three years younger.

He had lots of health issues and a very, very challenging adult life.

And I wanted to remember him as a young, very wild and sweet boy that he was.

And my mother was purging.

She was getting rid of things.

And I have all these boxes of pictures and videos and these super eight films and something in inside me said, you know what?

Don't throw away.

Give it to me, I'll find something to do with it.

And I started to watch these videos and I was like, oh my gosh, he was so cute.

He was so sweet, very energetic.

He had like his, you know, so healthy.

Right?

And then I thought, I want to do something with these film strips.

And so from the time that I got them, I want to say, gosh, I, I can't remember.

Maybe it was just like after he died.

And then I started to look at them and there wasn't a digitizing.

There wasn' a digitizing machine on campus.

So I had to go off campus to, a company that digitized and they digitized about an hour worth of these super eight films that are three minutes long, generally silent, sometimes in black and white, sometimes they're in color.

And my mother, love photos, loves taking pictures.

And so she always was taking pictures of us.

And she had one of those little super eight cameras and she recorded everything, all the birthdays, all the holidays.

And I was thinking about these thing as documenting a period of time.

Not just of immigrant family trying to aspire to the middle class, but also look at the furnishings, right?

Look at the way that the men dressed.

They were always wearing jackets and button down shirts and the kids for birthday parties, always dressed up with fancy clothes.

And I thought, this is very interesting because this is not our time today, right?

>>Right, right.

>>An so I said, okay, well, let me, let me go through these things and start picking to make a film.

And that was in about 2018, but then Covid happened, so we couldn't do very much of anything.

And then I hired a couple o film students to help me edit, because I didn't know how to edit, but I knew what I wanted to see on the on the film.

But I wrote an essay first.

I had seen the films.

I didn't know what the ultimate product was going to be with the final product, but I kne I had to write about it first.

And when my brother first died, I wrote so much.

But it was just too hard and it was too challenging and made me too sad.

So I had to put it away.

And then I wrote this essay and it was like, I don't know, maybe 12, 14 pages.

And it was just sort of the right size for a film.

And so we recorded it here somewhere on Research Park.

I recorded it, and then I work with with students sat next to them and we looked at their computer and said, this one, that one, no this.

Scanned a lot of photo and Dancing Danny is the result.

And it was a lot of work.

A lot of people helped m because again, I couldn't edit.

>>Did you know where you were going when you started doing this?

I mean, you had all this material.

You knew you wanted to do something with it, but it's like, this is not your your career hadn't been in in blending different mediums.

>>No, no, but so many people were doing it and I was really interested.

I mean, I thought at first I would just have it running behind me when I would do readings because, you know, we'd be invited to do readings and I'll just put these things up to have some distraction for the audience to look at.

But then I thought, wouldn't it be interesting to combine the writing with the video?

And so that's why I started to do that.

I didn't know how it was going to end up.

And the first, student tha work with me was, a film major, but he also played trumpet, and he found a, free trumpet.

You know, online, a little audio piece.

And we played it through the whole film and the journal that wanted the piece said, it's it's really too sad.

So can you change some of the music?

And I was like, yeah, I guess you're right, you know, because we want to end it in the happy way.

>>Right.

>>And it's about dancing.

You, you couldn't dance to that trumpet.

You reall could not dance to that trumpet.

And I talked about disco dancing and I talked about salsa and Cuban dancing.

Something like, oh, yeah, we need to have some other music in here.

And so one of my colleagues, Doctor Kevin Meehan in the English department, he helped me because he makes films, too.

And we found some free music online and he helped me incorporat it.

And so, you know, the final result has some more music in it, and I'm much happier with it.

Absolutely.

>>Tell us what the reception has been.

People who, who, who, who view it and read and.

>>Oh, I tell people, you might need tissues because it it does have some sad things, but it's also, you know, sweet it's it's a sweet tribute to family, to immigrants, to community.

And I think that people of our ag will recognize themselves in it.

Oh, yeah.

We used to do that.

And I remember when, Halloween costumes, we had to wear those plastic masks.

There's a, I think a scene where we're in the playground, for Halloween parade, and there's all these funky plastic masks.

>>Right.

>>And the kids wouldn't be caught dead in today.

And the cars, you see the cars, from the 60s and 70s.

I think there might be some footage from the 80s.

Yeah, there's definitely footage from the 80s in it, but it goes it starts like in 1962 or 3.

It goes all the way to the 80s.

>>Well tell us a little about the angle on the immigrant and community aspect of this.

I know there's a memorial very much that's very close to you about your brothers specifically, but about the bigger picture of of other immigrant families that have gone through i who still go through it today.

>>Yeah, we lived in an apartment with six, apartments, apartment, three story apartment buildin and everybody was an immigrant.

And there were Polish, there were Dominican, Cuban, and, the upstairs neighbors that moved while I was in starting about to start kindergarten were Cuban, two Cuban sisters, and they ended up being our babysitters.

And they had lived in Elizabeth and they moved to Bayonne which was a much quieter town.

Elizabeth was not quiet at that time.

It was burning up most of the time.

Newark was also really kind of dangerous.

And so Bayonne is only about three miles by one mile, and it's really made up of all these blue collar folks.

And so all the kids were all about the same, status.

We either lived in apartments, very few people had homes that were maybe two story homes or two family homes.

And so there were not a lot of backyards.

The backyards might be very small.

So kids played outside in the street, and it's that kind of, epic where, you came home when the lights came on the street lights came on.

We had the run of the block.

We rode bikes, we played stickball in the street or football or whatever.

When you get a little older, you were permitted to go to the park.

That was about three blocks away, and everybody looked out for one another in the sense that, if there was an Italian lady sitting on her porch and she saw you doing something, she would call you out on it.

Somebody would say, I'm going to tell your mother.

And so we, we we had a kind of, childhood with a lot of freedom, but also vigilance.

>>How similar was it when you moved to Miami and you were exposed t a different immigrant community?

>>It was very different because we moved into a a Jewish neighborhood, that had veterans homes.

These were built during the 40s.

So they're small homes and originally there were homes for retirees in this area where I lived in North Miami Beach.

There were no sidewalks.

The the lawn went out to the street.

So if you wanted to walk you had to walk in the street, which was beyond my comprehension.

It was like, how does this place not have sidewalks?

And it was so hot and it was not used to it because, you know, up north, the sort of smog covers some of the sunlight, but there was nothing to protec me from the sunlight in Miami.

And school was, I don't know how far it was, but I was close enough that I was supposed to walk, and it was just terrible.

I would, I would it was just awful.

And my school was predominantly white.

They they had to integrate it with, students from Liberty City.

So about five busses of African-American kids would be brought in to integrate our school.

There were just a handful of Latinos on, on the campus.

And so I felt really lik I had landed in a foreign land.

I didn't recognize anybody.

I realized that I understood African Americans better than the Jewish kids, because there were children of doctors and dentists and lawyers.

And I was like, I have never been exposed to people of that class.

So I did find my little group eventually.

But high school was really hard.

It was a really, really har until I started to go dancing.

And then I found my people.

>>I think dancing is the theme we're seeing.

Tell us a little more about your other your other works.

>>So my first collection is a collection about, Marielitos, Ballesteros and other exiles.

That's the title.

So it's set in South Florida.

So it's all about these recent arrivals from, Cuba.

So starting in the 60s, 70s, 80s and even into the 2000.

So those are all based in in, in Miami or South Florida.

Then had a little book of poems published called Everyday Chica.

And I had already started performing with music.

My husband and my colleague Kevin Meehan, my husband's not Kevin, my husband Jorge Milanes and my colleagu Kevin, we started to play music to the poems because I was inspired by, jazz poets like, Quincy Troupe that I did a residency with.

And I said, oh, we could do this.

Can we do this?

And so we started to perform with music.

And I asked the publisher, do you think that you would support a CD of poems with the music?

And they said, why not?

We haven't done it, but let's do that.

So then I had a little CD published, with the music and then the last collection that I published, is focused on, different kinds of immigrants, but mostly Latin, Latinx, and a lot of storie about girls, because I thought girls in the Latin community are told to behave, to be compliant to, you know, not make a fuss.

And I thought, that's dangerous.

That's not good for girls.

They need to say no, they need to fight for themselves.

So I had stories in there wher I was focusing on girls lives.

Not all of them, but a lot of stories about girls.

>>Women of color has been a specific topic of interest of your have so expand on that a little.

And then you just explained with with girls there, but you have all these different stories.

How does this how does that drive you?

>>It's the writers that I so admire.

You know, like Toni Morrison, Alice Walker and I, I didn't kno that there were Latina writers because when I went to school in, the early 80s, they they weren't publishing very much.

The first sort of breakout star of Latin literature is Sandra Cisneros.

And I didn't discover her until I was in grad school.

So in grad school is whe I start to really teach myself and read and read and rea and find these amazing writers like Judith Ortiz, Colfer, and Julia Alvarez.

And, there's so many now, there's so many writers that so inspire me.

And so finding stories about women of color, communities of color was, for me a way to say, yeah, I have stories.

There are stories from my community that I need to share also.

>>Why do you think those stories weren't shared?

You know, decade ago, you're seeing more writers, women of color now, but you didn't in the past.

>>I think like the 80s were the sort of breakout decade where they were really publishing Kitchen Table Press, was publishing, you know, a lot of work.

And, and black women became editors.

Toni Morriso was an editor at Random House, so she made it part of her job to publish people like Gail Jones and Toni Cade Bambara.

And so that's where you start to see more and more writers there.

The the thing with the Latinx literature is that there's a lot of West Coast and East Coast.

So in the West Coast, in the southwest, you have a lot of writers of Mexican-American background, Chicano writers, and they were publishing in the 70s and in the 60s.

But they didn't, you know, in the East Coast, we didn't see that work.

It wasn't being taught.

And so-- >>It's more a regional phenomenon.

>>Yeah, I believe so.

And then, you find Puerto Rican writers that start to publish in the 70s.

And so that community, the Nuyoricans, you know, they start Pedro Pietri and, Tato Laviera, Sandra Maria Davis, they're the founder of the Nuyorican's Poets Cafe.

But here I am in New Jersey, and I didn't know that that there were any Cuban American writers.

And so it was, amazing to start discovering people that were writing about folks that I knew and understood.

And not to say that, you know, those are other works.

Those other works were very powerful for me and in a way empowered me to contribute.

>>How do you capture the voice of, you know, you, you, you, yourself?

You know, we're saying you grew up speaking Spanish before you went to school and that's a common experience of of immigrants and children of immigrants in the United States.

How do you capture the voice that is blended this English that you're taught, and the Spanish that you grew up with?

>>I lov listening to middle school kids, especially middle school kids that are Hispanic because they are the most artistic linguists.

They make up words, they create things.

And, you know, having children.

I loved being around my kids and their friends and the way that they would talk.

And it's the way that we did as teenagers blending English and Spanish.

So I have I could you could say I'm nosy.

I love listening to people talk.

I love listening to al the different Spanish accents.

And so, you could say I have a good ear.

>>Do you have that ea when you're reading literature?

I know it's funny to kind of say that.

>>Yeah.

>>You have to hear., you're listening.

>>I think you're right.

You do.

But, like, I think about Zora Neale Hurston, she has three different accents and tones going on at the same time, even on the first page.

So it's like you kind of need to know how it sounds.

But if you don't, if you come to that text and you've never heard an African-American from the South speak, you're going to lose a lot.

>>So just for for viewer who are interested in learning more about some of these, some of the writers that may not be as well known, where do they where do they find them?

>>Oh my gosh, you use Doctor Google, you know, contemporary Latino writers, there's a lot of writers that are doing performance pieces but they also write, in print.

I am just teaching right now the wonderful historical novel by Julia Alvarez, In the Time of Butterflies, which is based on the Trujillo dictatorship and the sisters that were murdered because they were part of the underground.

And it's such a powerful book, and I've taught it many times and I love Julia Alvarez's work.

You know, she she writes poetry, essays and fiction.

And so you can if you you can pick whatever genre you like, but you can't go wrong with Julia Alvarez.

And then I'm really happy that I taught a, UCF alum.

Her name is Jaquira Diaz, and she wrote a powerful memoir called Ordinary Girls.

And I just taught that a couple weeks ago, and the students were very moved by it.

In fact, their second papers I had 33 students and I think 12 of the papers were about Jaquira's book.

>>Wow.

>>It's a powerful memoir.

She talks about growing up in Puerto Rico and then growing up in Miami.

And so she even talks about you know, going to college here.

So that's a great book.

>>You did make a cameo in the book that-- >>I got a thank you.

>>All right.

Excellent-- >>I got to thank you in the book.

>>Well, one more question.

We're out of time.

Unfortunately, this is gone very quickly.

Tell our viewers where they can find, Dancing Danny.

>>You can just go to your browser and look for Dancing Danny.

And then my name is Cecilia, because it'll come up.

It's published in a place called Constellations.

It's a it's a publishing site, and it includes the video, but it also includes an essay that I wrote about making the video.

So and I'm really proud of that essay.

So if you see the video you should read the the essay.

>>Well, thank you so much for joining us today.

>>Thank you to having me.

>>Really appreciate it.

>>Thank you.

>>And thank you for joining us.

We'll see you again next week on another episode of Global Perspectives.