“Luis Alberto Urrea Tells a Quintessential Mexican American Story: In His Novel The House of Broken Angels, Luis Alberto Urrea Tells an Epic Tale of Immigration”, 2018-02-23 (; backlinks):
…Urrea’s family’s story, too, connects him to a larger political context. He is the son of a Mexican father “who looked like Errol Flynn” and a “New York socialite” mother; he was born in Tijuana, and the family moved to San Diego after he contracted tuberculosis as a young child. “I was dying”, he explains. “They moved to the US to keep me alive, and settled in Barrio Logan.” …In San Diego, when Urrea was growing up, his father drove a bakery delivery truck and his mother worked in a department store. “We didn’t have any money”, he says, describing his mother taking him on “a couple of buses” on Saturdays to the public library downtown. “I maxed out my library card every week by checking out 7 books.”
Urrea says that his “entire world consisted of a miserable Catholic school and the porch of my home”, where he read. He describes himself as a voracious reader then, especially of science fiction. He initially didn’t enjoy poetry, he recalls, but he loved music. His appreciation for poetry was awakened in junior high when a teacher introduced him to Stephen Crane. “I felt the world pivot”, he says; that sensation was amplified when he discovered the poetry collections of such favorite musicians as Jim Morrison, Bob Dylan, and Leonard Cohen, as well as John Lennon’s short stories. “I just started writing”, Urrea says. “I tried to create poems and short stories in the mold of my heroes. It was a fever. I just had to do it.” Urrea’s mother gave him her typewriter and also sewed together about 40 typewritten pages of his early creative efforts into a book. She also, through “force of will”, motivated him to apply for grants to attend the University of California, San Diego, where he majored in writing.
…Sadly, it was his father’s murder—in Mexico, where he’d traveled to raise funds to help pay for Urrea’s college tuition—that led to Urrea’s being published for the first time, in 1980. Unable to process his grief, he wrote an essay about having to pay the Mexican police $2,941.56$7501977 to retrieve his father’s body for burial. His professor showed the essay to Ursula K. Le Guin, who was leading a writing workshop at UCSD at the time, and she invited him into it.
“Suddenly, I was with Ursula Le Guin, learning to write for real”, Urrea says. “It was transformative.” Le Guin subsequently included the essay in an anthology she was editing [Edges]. “Up until that point, I didn’t think somebody like me—a blue-collar kid from Tijuana and the barrio—could get into real books”, Urrea adds. “I thought I’d probably just print my own books.”
But that was only the beginning: after graduate studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Urrea held a series of jobs while he wrote the first of his 4 nonfiction books…