Date: Saturday, October 25, 2008

Featured Speaker: Patricia Santana

Patricia Santana was born and raised in south San Diego.  She earned her Bachelor’s degree at the University of California, San Diego in English and Spanish Literature, and a Master’s degree in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Los Angeles.  Her award-winning stories have been published throughout the United States in such literary journals as Puerto Del Sol, RiverSedge, Chiricú, San Diego Writers’ Monthly, and included in Infinite Divisions: An Anthology of Chicana Fiction.  Her stories and novel have been required reading in several college English classes.

In manuscript form Patricia Santana’s first novel, Motorcycle Ride on the Sea of Tranquility, won the Latino/Chicano Literary award.  Later, as a published work, Motorcycle was selected as a Best Books for Young Adults 2003 by the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA), and was also San Diego Magazine’s 2003 Book Award winner in fiction.

The novel takes the reader into the Chicano community under the shadow of the Vietnam war, “carrying us,” says writer Rudolfo Anaya, “into a deeper understanding and acceptance of the changes set in motion within the Chicano community of the 1960’s and the ripples those changes created.”  Told from the point of view of fourteen-year-old Yolanda Sahagún, this coming-of-age novel explores the changes—both psychological and societal—that took place in one American barrio as a result of the upheaval of the 60’s.  The painful transformation of Chuy is also a transformation for the whole family as they learn how to be Americans as well as Mexican Americans.

Ms. Santana’s second novel was published this past spring.  Ghosts of El Grullo is a story of Yolanda’s initiation into womanhood as well as her fierce struggle to make sure her family does not dissolve.  Family and sexual politics; love, death and abandonment; the struggle to resolve a personal identity in the context of a shattered, first-generation immigrant American family—these are the hugely painful obstructions Yolanda must surmount or incorporate into her own being as she makes her life’s journey. 

             “This novel,” said one member of the National Book Critics Circle Board of Directors in speaking of Ghosts of El Grullo, “is of particular significance since it’s one of the few to map out a college student’s awakening consciousness in Southern California’s Moviemento era.”

Patricia is a fulltime Spanish instructor at Cuyamaca College where she heads the Foreign Language department.  She has also been invited to teach as a visiting lecturer for the Literature Department at the University of California at San Diego where she taught intercultural creative writing.

She is the proud mother of Deborah, who lives and works in D.C but promises to come back to California one of these days; and of Isaac, who contemplates the meaning of life and lovely women amid the redwood trees of Santa Cruz.  Both keep Patricia young, honest and ever-wondering if they turned out to be great children because of their parents or in spite of their parents.  Do we ever really know for sure?