Introducing a new literary voice in a corporate age is not an easy acheivement. That is what makes the arrival of Brando Skyhorse such a revelation. He wrote what he knew and the result is the summer's most original read: 'The Madonnas of Echo Park.' But, wait until you discover the backstory behind the author and his extraordinary first novel in this Personalities Interview.
The business of making art today is one of great caution and speculation. Regardless of the medium, those who control the great houses of populist art and entertainment seem to only be interested in a sure-thing instead of nurturing an original vision.
Enter Brando Skyhorse.
The 36 year-old Los Angeles native knows quite a bit about the publishing world. After graduating from Stanford University and the writing program at the University of California, Irvine (with classmates Alice Sebold and Aimee Bender) in the 1990s, Skyhorse estabished a successful career as an editor until early 2009. Then he switched gears and decided to unleash his own literary voice. The result was "The Madonnas of Echo Park," which was published in June, 2010 by the Free Press imprint of Simon and Schuster.
Without ever having even published a short story, Skyhorse initially gathered together a group of stories for a collection that was to be titled "Amexicans." The stories, which were composed over the course of three years prior to his departure from his last editorial post, morphed into "The Madonnas of Echo Park." Taking the addage of "write what you know" to heart, Skyhorse focused on the streets that border Silverlake and downtown Los Angeles, but read between the lines to discover a striking personal saga.
The novel is richly detailed, offering varying perspectives that collide into a singular narrative from an evolving neighborhood in the shadow of downtown L.A. (Think Gabriel García Márquez fused with Junot Díaz.) Standing tall in the center of the mutli-cultural din is the young Aurora Esperanza, who ultimately becomes the reader's guide through the emotional lives of disconnected family members, housekeepers, day laborers and other denizens struggling to co-exist and survive in the city of Angels. (And there is even time for a milagro at a bus stop.)
The immigrant experience may very well be the defining narrative of the United States in the 21st century. When juxtaposed against its literary rival, the self-confession, the results can be breathtaking as exhibited by Skyhorse's startling author's note at the start of the book.
"This book was written because of a twelve-year-old named Aurora Esperanza," he begins. "In the 1980s, before I knew I was Mexican..."
It is a powerful introduction to the events that comprise "The Madonnas of Echo Park," but it also presents a second narrative that remains to be explored by Skyhorse himself. Imagine going through childhood existing and living as a Native American, but in reality you were actually Mexican-American? That was the case for Skyhorse, who discovered the truth at the age of 12.
In our recent phone conversation to discuss "The Madonnas of Echo Park," Skyhorse proved as charismatic as the protagonist of his debut novel. Articulate, engaging and unfiltered, the conversation would often veer away from the book as we both offered up our own unique family secrets. Revelations became a strong theme during the interview, particularly since much has been made about Skyhorse's author's note: it is a total piece of fiction.
"Because I do think it’s an interesting story," Skyhorse said. "And I do think the story kind of informs how you read the book and as you go through the universe."
In this post-James Frey era of best selling "memoirs," Skyhorse has no intention to avoid exploring his own life story in print. In fact, his next book, will be an exploration of his mother's decision to keep his true ethnicity a secret and the journey that followed. Here's more of my conversation with Skyhorse as we talked about being Latino, living in the 1980s and the secrets that become as wonderful as the fiction we choose to create.
JORGE CARREON: I saw your book in the window of Borders in Pico Rivera and it caught my attention because Echo Park is quickly evolving into L.A.'s next big neighborhood.
BRANDO SKYHORSE: I know. That’s amazing, isn’t it? I never would have thought I’d see that day happen.
CARREON: Let's start with the Author's Note. It’s an unusual way to start a book. Usually that’s the kind of thing you save for an interview or any kind of personal appearance to give people a context. Why did you want to open the book with that particular piece of information, particularly since it isn't true.
SKYHORSE: There have been people who’ve read it like “Oh, I read author’s note and thought it was this real thing that actually happened to you, then I realized it was fictional, blah blah blah…” So, I guess the two part question is “Why did I open with that?” and “Why did I use the fictional author’s note?” Taking the second question first, when I was writing this book there were a state of memoirists a few years ago, because this book has been in progress for about maybe four years. And there were a state of memoirists who had been accused of putting blatant falsehoods into their memoirs. And one of the memoirists in particular who was accused of doing this, his penance was writing an author’s note. The revised edition of the book had an author’s note. And I thought, “That’s so fascinating” because if you didn’t believe what was in the memoir, why would you believe what was in the author’s note? You know what I mean? Would it make a difference? So I thought, “That’s really fascinating.” It’s just those two words: “author’s note.” For some reason, it’s that idea. It gives whatever you’re about to read that unmistakable pillar of truth. And I thought, “Wow, I want my novel to have an author’s note, because I want to do that. I want to write a book where somebody comes into my fictional universe thinking “this is absolutely 100% true”, and then realizes it’s not true at all. So there’s that literary impulse. But from a more personal standpoint is that… when I was growing up, I didn’t know that I was Mexican-American. I thought I was Native-American. And then when I found out when I was about 12 or 13 years old, I was encouraged to lie by my mother because she was living her life as a Native-American as well. So, if you had met me growing up, you would have thought “Oh hey, this is Brando Skyhorse, he’s by blood Native-American. He has a Native-American father, a Native-American mother and this is who he is.” And then you would have realized if you had gotten to know me, if we had become friends at the time, no, that wasn’t the truth at all. He was actually Mexican-American and he had this complicated relationship with his stepfathers and his mother and everything else. So I wanted to write something fictional that would be representative of that kind of experience, of actually getting to know me. Does that make sense? Does that sound too weird?
CARREON: It sounds awfully Meta.
SKYHORSE: Yeah, it probably is. Very Meta, you’re right. Very very Meta. I think I wanted something that kind of captured that experience. I think it’s interesting. You tell people a certain thing and you say, “This is the author’s note. This is the truth.” And people kind of accept it on face value. And I thought for many years that was what I did with my background and that was what people did when they met me about my background, and I guess I wanted to kind of play with that because I feel that having that experience for the first early part of my life kind of spun me off in a different direction than if I had just grown up being Mexican, you know what I mean? If I had just grown up thinking I was Mexican, having a Mexican name, I would have had a very different life, very different set of experiences. So I wanted something to kind of capture that.
CARREON: I guess in this age of self-confession, the concept of truth is already being manipulated to a certain degree.
SKYHORSE: Yeah, exactly. And I think, again, the idea that this is in a novel. And the fact that novels don’t really have to play by the same rules as a memoir does. I’m writing a memoir now, and I would obviously never do anything like that in a memoir, because for me, the memoir that I’m working on now is about the search for truth. But for me, I in particular love novels where the author kind of gets drawn into their own narrative. And whenever that happens, usually the results are kind of hit or miss. Sometimes the author does that and it is exciting, but generally its like a post modern stunt, because the author doesn’t really risk anything. So I thought if I’m actually going to do this, if I’m actually going to try to pull this off successfully, I feel like I have to risk something. And for me, the risk was this acknowledgement that for years, I told people I was something that I wasn’t. And that’s not necessarily something that was easy for me. It wasn’t an easy thing for me to acknowledge. It wasn’t an easy part of my past to acknowledge. But I felt like, if I’m going to be on a book tour, or if I’m going to be answering questions from people like “Wait, why would a guy named Brando Skyhorse write a story about a bunch of Mexicans from Echo Park?” That would come up. That question would invariably come up. So I guess I also wanted something that would kind of put that front and center.
CARREON: How would you define the Latin experience in Echo Park? I think we equate East Los Angeles as being the true identity of Latino Los Angeles. We forget that the city is much bigger than that. I think we take it for granted to a certain degree. But also Echo Park is such a mix of all types of Latinos, not just Chicanos, not just Mexican. It’s everything else too.
SKYHORSE: Absolutely. You’re right. And the Latino experience, you have to remember, at least for me in the 70’s also involved different ethnicities, because there were still not an insignificant number of white people who were living in the area, a number of Vietnamese people who were immigrating. I remember in my neighborhood we had a high influx of Cambodian refugees because of the Vietnam War. So we had Cambodians; we had Vietnamese; we had this potent stew. So I think in terms of how it differs from East Los Angeles, I feel that the area in particular, Echo Park was somewhat inoculated from some of the larger issues that afflicted some of the other perhaps grittier parts of East LA. I remember growing up there was gang violence, there were shootings, but it was never with this raw urban intensity. And I don’t know if that’s because of the area, the geography, the layout, because it was very pastoral. Maybe I remembered things differently as a kid. A lot of these times when you have these coming of age stories set in areas that have gangs, the descriptions are very gritty, they’re very harsh, they’re very abrasive. To me, its kind of fascinating that you have elements of that, but you have this sort of pastoral, I don’t want to say oasis, but to me it kind of felt that way. So I think that perhaps that sort of diffused what could have been a very raw, urban experience with something that was more tranquil and more pastoral. I don’t think I can really address the much larger issue of the Latin experience, because I can only really speak to my own experience. I can only speak to where I was in Echo Park at that place and time. And I fully acknowledge that even my experience was somewhat conflicted given the fact that I was being raised as a Native-American yet at the same time my grandmother who never really conflicted with my mother’s narrative of events or how I was being raised, she spoke fluent Spanish, she talked to everybody in the neighborhood. I always called my grandmother the unofficial mayor of Echo Park. She always knew everybody in the neighborhood; she talked to everybody. She could go to the Chinese laundromat. She could go to the Mexican burrito stand. She had a root full past that allowed her to integrate with all the different parts of the neighborhood. I think it’s hard for me to answer that question because I feel I can only speak for my own specific experience. And again I fully acknowledge that my specific experience was colored by the fact that I was part of one camp, and then kind of part of another camp.
CARREON: We share that in common, which was experienced by a lot of Latinos growing up in Los Angeles, particularly if they come from either second or third generation families. My parents are from Mexico and I grew up in the suburbs. I always felt Pico Rivera was almost like a little microcosm of Mexico, but it remained an incredibly powerful example of America.
SKYHORSE: Yeah, definitely, I think that’s absolutely true. And I think that’s something I tried to pick up on in the book. If you lived in an area like Echo Park, and I know that a number of the families that my grandmother knew… My grandmother was sort of the one that was like my connection with the outside world of our house. My mother was very, I don’t want to say in for, but my mother didn’t really do a lot of exploring; she didn’t really talk to too many people in the neighborhood. She had her sites set elsewhere. But my grandmother knew a lot of people. She bought a house there with my grandfather in 1952. So from the time that my grandmother started living in the area to the time that I sold the house after both my mother and grandmother died within a year and a half of each other in 1999. We had been in the neighborhood for almost 50 years, which is an enormous amount of time. So seeing not only that kind of transformation, but seeing the fact that many of the people she had dealt with didn’t speak English, which you didn’t really need to in Echo Park, because if you needed to get your check cashed you knew somebody at the check cashing place who spoke Spanish who could do that for you, or somebody at the Pioneer grocery store. There was a grocery market called Pioneer that had been there for years. If you opened up a little, not a credit card account, but if you opened up a little script account with them, you could cash your check there. So it was entirely possible to live this entire life in the middle of Los Angeles without speaking English and without leaving the neighborhood. You had basically all of your own amenities there. And you had your own little pockets of culture. Your own pockets of people you talked with, people you shopped with, people that you went to the Laundromat with, all these sorts of little pockets that clustered around each other. So in a way I think that’s right, the idea that you could live this very Mexican life in the middle of Los Angeles, and kind of be undisturbed by the outside influences as it were; outside quote unquote American influences.
CARREON: Talk a bit about just how the novel came together. The ethnic experience in American fiction is one of the foundations of our national narrative since it's an immigrant country. Talk about how this came together because you could have easily gone the route of the memoir first, which is sure-fire way to get noticed.
SKYHORSE: Yeah, that was really kind of bullheaded on my part, given the fact that I’ve worked in publishing for ten years and I know that the memoir, by a significant margin, sells more than literary fiction. Literary fiction is the hardest type of book to sell. It’s the hardest type of book to get consumers interested in. Just on any level, on any sort of metric imaginable, it’s incredibly difficult. I think, for me, I wanted to work the fiction that reflected my own specific, unique, kind of weird, background and upbringing. And I felt that was something that I hadn’t seen. I already knew that my actual story, being raised as a Native-American for a number of years, after being born a Mexican, then kind of trying to navigate through the world. I already knew that that story would be interesting enough to publishers, that if I could ever harness the talent necessary to tell that story properly; because for years I tried to write that book and I just wasn’t good enough of a writer, I just wasn’t very skilled. I look at the early drafts of the memoir I did, and they just all kind of suck. They were just really bad. So I felt like if I ever had that talent, I could probably get a publisher interested in that. But the fiction was what’s important to me because I feel that fiction for many years in this country was where people got their news, and I know that sound really old fashion. But if you look at Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” or books in the 60’s and 70’s, fiction is kind of like where the pulse of the country is. Hell, take a look at Jonathan Franzen’s “The Corrections” for instance. That was a book that, to a certain degree, predicted this national malaise that our country has been stumbling through for the past seven or eight years. And I feel that good fiction really can do that, and to me that’s really exciting as a writer, as a reader of fiction. And I felt like there hadn’t been something that had done that about my particular area, not that I had read. That’s not to say that it hadn’t been published. It’s just that I hadn’t come across it. So I wanted to do something, which really captured that in a very specific way for me. And 
again, that’s where all the 80’s pop culture comes in, that’s where Morrissey (pictured right) comes in. That’s where you have these elements that may seem familiar: the day laborer, the cleaning lady. They are set against this template that’s, at least in my mind, kind of different, kind of unique, unusual; something that takes a different approach. And I feel that, as somebody who avidly reads books and supports books, and wants independent bookstores to succeed… I feel like a neighborhood like Echo Park, they need that; there needs to be a chronicle; there needs to be a document. And I think that fiction is still the best way to do that. People can make movies. There’s all sorts of ways in which creative artists can get that document on record. But for me, fiction, it’s the only place where you have the expanse necessary to tell a complete story the way it deserves to be told. So that’s where that impulse came from.
CARREON: This omnibus narrative where you have all these different threads that collide against each other, you took some very specific imagery, like Morrissey, for example. I think I grew up with a more Anglo sensibility. And I didn’t find my ethnicity until I actually understood who I was as an adult. Did you ever have a period like that in your own life; was there any kind of ethnic self-loathing?
SKYHORSE: Yeah. I think my mother could probably give you a much better answer to that question if she were alive. I think that she so hated the idea of being a Mexican as if it was something ordinary, as if it was something to be denigrated. The idea that she would go to such an extreme length to not only re-brand me as a Native-American, and that’s basically what she did. She re-desdfsd me into a Native-American. And she did the same thing for herself. And I can understand that impulse. She was very active in the American Indian movement, which was in the late 60’s and the early 70’s. I was born in 1973. And that must have seemed very exciting to her. Her native-American name was Running Deer Skyhorse, and her Mexican given name was Maria Teresa. Answering truthfully, if you could be Maria Teresa or Running Deer Skyhorse, which one would you be? I know which one I’d be. So I can understand that idea of being that common Mexican girl just wasn’t interesting, or wasn’t exciting, or wasn’t validating for her. Obviously I can say this after many, many years of distance and thinking about things. When I started to poke holes in my mom’s inconsistent story about how I was raised as a Native-American, and I realized “oh, wait a minute, all of these things that she’s telling me are not making sense”. She specifically told me “you can’t tell anyone. This is a secret. You can’t tell anyone that you’re father is Mexican and that you are Mexican. Blah blah blah…” It was this big deal. So I thought, well it can’t really be that bad can it? People are going to react that negatively? The first time I got around to telling other people was when I was in high school, when I started dating this girl. The first girlfriend I had was in 12th grade, and she was Vietnamese. And we’d been dating for maybe about a month or something. And I thought “this is the love of my life, so I better come clean with all of my secrets”. So I told her “hey by the way, I’m not really Native-American, I’m Mexican.” And she broke up with me. And the reason that she gave me, and this is something that I’d heard from, I can’t tell you from how many different people I heard this from on my book tour. She broke up with me because she said “When I first came to this country, Mexican girls were the first ones that were cruel to me, that were mean to me; they teased me because I had a flat chest and hairy forearms. And I don’t want anything to do with that.” And so I felt this overwhelming sense of “Oh, my mom was right. My mom was actually right about something; this is something to be ashamed about.” And at every single venue of this book tour that I’ve been on, that I just got back from. I’ve had people come up to me telling me their parents had the same sort of little family secret that nobody in their family could discuss. People would come up and say “I’m a Mexican, but I was told I was Indian.” Or “I was told I was Spanish.” Or “I was told I was something else. You can’t tell anyone outside this family that you’re Mexican because we’re going to be treated differently” or whatever the reason was. So I think in terms of ethnic self-loathing, yeah, I think there was a healthy amount of that growing up. But I think there was more confusion than anything else because my mother was such an inconsistent dispenser of facts. I didn’t know half the time what part of her story was true; what part of her story was to be believed. And it was only, I’m ashamed to say, after my mother died and my grandmother passed that I felt like I could come to some sort of reckoning about this life that I’d lived and this life that I’m living now. Someone at a reading asked me “so, now that you know the truth, why don’t you just go back to your Mexican name?” And that’s certainly a valid question but for me, and maybe this is some sort of masculine machismo type thing that’s rearing in, it’s like, I can’t carry the name of a man who abandoned me when I was three. I can’t do that, you know what I mean? I can carry the Skyhorse name and I can feel comfortable with that and I can feel comfortable with telling people that I’m Mexican-American but my last name is Skyhorse because one of my step-dad’s was named Skyhorse because for a few years he actually raised me. I can feel comfortable doing that but I can’t carry that name. That doesn’t mean I’m any less Mexican. It just means that that part of my life, the life that I would have had if my Mexican father stuck around, that’s done. That’s a scenario that cannot be played out in any significant way. The only thing that can happen is kind of moving on from here on out, you know? Sorry that was kind of really a long answer. But yeah, that was definitely an issue.
CARREON: Secrets in general permeate the Latino experience altogether. Every family has its own lore, whether or not you need to know about it is always up to the people who keep the lore.
BRANDO SKYHORSE: It’s funny; you said the whole idea of the Latin male and the father fighting. It’s good to know that my mother was actually a Latin male, because that’s basically what we did from the time I was 15 to the time she passed away. It was very important for me to have some sense of, some idea about what had happened to my Mexican father. Because, like I said, once I sort of pieced together the narrative, there were a few existing photos that my mother hadn’t destroyed. Maybe up until the time that I was 3 or 4, I can’t really confirm the age. That was basically the last time he was around. But he was basically a full time dad up until that point. So I wanted to see if I could find him. So I thought well, I’m writing this memoir; it’s about my step dad. There’s going to be this big question: “what happened to your father?” So I thought how difficult could it be? My mother told me many conflicting stories how he’d been deported back to Mexico; he was a wetback; he was ignorant; all these horrible things. So I figured, oh what’s the worst… Let me spend an afternoon. So I go onto Whitepages.com, literally the first thing I do, and I type in his name; Boom, there he is! There he is hiding in plain sight. I wrote him a letter. This happened in March of this year actually, so this is just kind of going down right now. So I wrote him a letter and he called me back a week later. And he’s living in Whittier, CA. He lives basically 20 minutes away by car from Echo Park. He started a whole new family, married another woman who’s named Maria, has three beautiful daughters, so I have three half sisters. And he has the whole family and this whole thing. And he said “When you’re in LA, come on out.” So I went out, during the Memorial Day weekend I had to do some pre-publicity for the novel, and I saw him. And I have to say it was a very important, cathartic experience to not only meet him but to meet my half sisters as well. Because for me, having lived a significant portion of my life with only my mother and my grandmother, and this round robin of stepfathers. And then when my mother and grandmother died, I felt like I had no family. Every Thanksgiving, every Christmas, not to sound like, “Boo hoo, poor me,” I wouldn’t have any place to go because I didn’t have any family. So to go from no family to having all of a sudden this entire part of my lineage, and my blood basically out in Los Angeles, was very interesting for me. I don’t know how much of a significant connection I can have with my father at this point. He’s 61 years old. He’s basically lived a whole life. He’s had this whole new life with his new family. But at the same time, it was really significant for me to meet my sisters, to meet people who I felt connected to in some significant way. And maybe that’s because you have siblings that experience maybe isn’t as immediate, or doesn’t have that desire to connect with other people who are related to you, but for me it was so crucial to have this knowledge that there’s these three girls out there, and they’re all wonderful, they’re all amazing. It was really significant for me. It actually has put the book that I’m working on now, the memoir, it spun it off in a very different direction because when I started working on it, when I actually sold my publisher the proposal in early 2009, I didn’t know any of this. So the book was basically just going to end with me like “yeah I had a bunch of stepdads, crazy stuff happens, life goes on.” But now I feel like the book has a very different trajectory and hopefully maybe has a more positive ending. Because for me, the most important thing I’m taking away from all this is that I get the opportunity to learn how to be part of a family again; I basically get to start over. And that’s kind of cool. Very few people, after their family members have passed away, get that chance, that opportunity, to do that again. And, again, I don’t know if it will be perfect, I don’t know if it will all shake out, but I know that they’re there, they know that I’m here, and I think for now, that’s kind of enough, you know?
CARREON: Your ethnic self is very much in place. If there was a moment when you felt any doubt, it must have gone away a long time ago, because these characters, particularly Aurora, is she you to a certain degree?
SKYHORSE: Yeah, you’re absolutely right. She is my literary doppelganger. And thank you by the way for saying “your ethnic self is in place,” because I think that’s something I’ve been very conscious of for a very long time. And whenever you write a work of fiction, you’re always coming from the position of “where’s this guy coming from, what’s his background,” you know what I mean? The idea of an ethnic writer. There’s always that idea of “Oh, this guy… does he have street cred”, you know what I mean? There’s all this ridiculous nonsense. If you were a guy from the suburbs, its like “Oh, is he from the right part of the suburbs?” It’s this whole baggage that you don’t really have to deal with and you don’t have to unload. With Aurora in particular, yeah, I feel like I wanted to write a character that had those same kind of issues and concerns. She’s not me in the sense that she’s more obsessed with Morrissey. I think I went through my all-consuming Morrissey phase years ago. I hope I moved past that. I think that her concerns are different than mine. And obviously she looks at the world in different ways. She was more athletic than I ever was in high school. I think that in terms of how we see the world, Aurora is an incredibly, not compassionate, but she’s a character that looks at the world in the way, with the same wild eyed wonder that I look at it, and kind of approaches things from that perspective. And when you follow her journey… Obviously the book can’t really end. There’s no way to end other than with her journey. When you go on her journey and you see how it wraps around the entire neighborhood, you see that basically her journey is the neighborhood’s journey. The whole idea of, all these people in the neighborhood are basically on the same journey that Aurora is on. So I feel like all of those characters, to a certain degree, embody parts of my personality. But Aurora probably distills it down to its purest essence.
CARREON: The immigrant narrative is going to be the one that defines us, particularly at this point in our history. And I’m glad this book is here because I think we need to be reminded that it takes a lot of people to get the village going.
SKYHORSE: Yeah, you’re right. I really appreciate that. That’s really meaningful to hear, man. And I absolutely feel the same way. And I think that’s something we kind of forget. So my hope is that, with the book coming out, and me putting it out there… Again, the audience for literary fiction, as I said earlier, is so infinitesimally small compared to television, compared to movies, compared to everything else. Literature, for me, is still the one place where drastic change can be effected. There’s just something about the power of a book that personally I don’t feel any movie, any television show or piece of music can really touch. And I hope that people feel moved when they read this book, especially the people who are in the neighborhood now. I would want people who are living in the neighborhood now, not only long time residents, but transplants too, to come to this book and see the neighborhood for not only what it used to be, but what it is and maybe what it can be in the future. That would be really important for me.
"The Madonnas of Echo Park" is currently available on Amazon.com and other booksellers.
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L.A. Stories: Go face to face with Brando Skyhorse as he discusses "The Madonnas of Echo Park."
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