In Myriam Gurba’s essay collection, Creep: Accusations and Confessions, the author unpacks the complexities of a word that we often take for granted. Gurba describes her experiences with creepdom through an academic and journalistic lens, a lens of humor, a compulsion, and skill with a beautiful and complicated legacy in her Mexican family.
I first interviewed Gurba about her fiction writing for The Normal School in 2015, and it was striking to see how she expands her depictions of youth and the convictions of her girlhood curiosities and Gothic body. Gurba is forthright in her meditations on border politics, diaspora, and autonomy, especially regarding children’s humanity on the periphery.
Monique Quintana: When I interviewed you in 2015, you shared that you think children shouldn’t be sanitized in literature. I appreciate that idea because sanitizing children negates the fact that children can cause harm, and it also denies the harm that adults inflict on children. One of the most striking moments from the book is when you show Richard Ramirez as a boy walking through El Paso’s Concordia Cemetery in the essay “Cucuy.” This moment is so honest and tender. There’s also a preceding line, “To escape, Ricard crept along sidewalks, sand, and dandelions.” This made me hurt for what might have been. In regards to the depictions of brown children in contemporary literature and media, what do you want to happen, especially in regards to undoing the harm inflicted by Whiteness?
Myriam Gurba: I still believe what I said years ago about not sanitizing childhood and representations of childhood. I’m committed to representing childhood faithfully, particularly childhood experienced by children who are made multiply marginalized, and I’m committed to representing childhood as experienced by members of the Mexican diaspora living in the United States. The book is, in some ways, committed to the project of exposing how white supremacy twists and perverts the notion of childhood, in particular, childhood for racialized kids. I wanted to portray the adultification of racialized kids, and I also wanted to demonstrate how that happens in specifically gendered ways. For example, I write about how that happens for a figure like Richard Ramirez, and I contrast that with a figure like my cousin, Desiree, who has another marginalization that she has to endure, which is living in the United States as a girl child. I do believe that white supremacy was responsible for many ways in perverting both of their experiences of childhood on U.S. soil.
Quintana: When you look at Ramirez aesthetically, he styles himself according to Whiteness. His whole image is very Jim Morrison-like. I connect to that idea of the harm the U.S. does in trying to get brown kids to assimilate.
Gurba: Definitely. I didn’t include this anecdote in Creep, but when I was doing research for it, I came across a memoir by a woman who had been a student in a Texas elementary school as a child. She was part of the Mexican diaspora and describes how once one of her teachers, who was a white woman, identified one of her classmates as potentially carrying head lice. She forced that classmate to walk to the front of the class and undergo a head lice inspection. That was in a Texas classroom, and I imagine that these may have been the experiences that Richard Ramirez and his siblings had when they were attending school. These were the experiences that inspired their hatred of school because in the biographical writings I have found about Ramirez, there’s this emphasis on how poorly the Ramirez children performed in school, but I think that had far less to do with the Ramirez children’s natural academic aptitude than it did with the Xenophobia and the racism that they faced in Texas classrooms, that their parents were in denial about because their parents believed that the U.S. dream was intended for everybody and did not realize that no, it’s intended for some people and the Ramirez children are excluded from that project.
Quintana: The line where you talk about your grandfather hoarding the printed word is brilliant. It made me think of the material lives of the Mexican family. It made me think about one of my grandmothers collecting gaudy Christmas ornaments in the attic, and rats would come in and eat them, as well as my other grandmother’s rosaries, idols, and doll collection. It made me think about a compulsion to hold onto things and display many things around my house and on my body. Your grandfather hoarded the printed word. What other kinds of material things or collections of things did you get lost in when you were growing up? How would you describe Chicana maximalism and excess and how it’s set apart from patriarchy and capitalism?
Gurba: I was fascinated by my grandfather’s hoarding. My grandfather hoarded newspapers and magazines and kept them in a room where no one was allowed in unless he invited you in (laughs); like a vampire, you had to be invited in. He never invited women (laughs). You could only go into that room if you were a male person. The exclusivity of that room where he kept all these paper objects made the room so attractive because I was not allowed there. More than anything, all I wanted to do was breach that perimeter and explore what was in that room, and I never made it happen. The closest I got was the doorway; I still remember the smell. The smell was titillating because it smelled of moldering paper. That was a fantasy I had, penetrating this room, but it never actually happened.
In the United States, my parents were drawn to clutter and were given to a cluttered aesthetic, which, as you mentioned, is common in Mexican diasporic homes. I’ve talked to my parents about that clutter and asked them their theories about hoarding because there’s a disproportionate number of hoarders (laughs) in our community. My father made an interesting point about that. One of his theories is that it’s a trauma response to material loss we experienced during the Mexican Revolution. So many of us lost so many of our possessions that, to this day, we’re attempting to keep our treasures near us and on display to remind ourselves that we’re here and that we’re alive.
I grew up in an apartment and a series of houses. They always had clutter. My parents would buy traditional clay ceramics from artisan families in Tlaquepaque, which is in Southern Jalisco. We had a lot of Mexican ceramics that cluttered our home. One of my favorite artworks was a ceramic statue that represented a human figure split down the center so that the left side of the figure was incarnate and the right side was skeletal. The figure represented the duality between life and death, and that figure sat in the room where we watched T.V. (laughs long and intensely). And I loved that my parents put something so morbid in that space because I felt it was a reminder to always make a place for death because you can’t outrun her, so you need to honor that she’s always present and that she can take you at any moment. She’s kind of part of the family (laughs).
That attraction to clutter manifested in my own behavior as a child. My parents told me when I was a little girl, I had this strange habit that would manifest around bedtime. At bedtime, I would get this anxiety about my toys being away from me. I would get all of my favorite toys, get into the bed, and arrange the toys on my body (laughs), so I would be ringed in toys and dolls, and there was one toy I really liked. It was a handheld game where you tried to get these small B.B.s into a hole inside this plastic container. I would have that toy in my hand so that I could play with it before going to bed, and I would have to sleep carefully, so I wouldn’t disrupt the toy mountain, and my parents never scolded me for it; they were like, well, that’s just how she wants to sleep, and she manages to sleep with all this shit on top of her, so that’s how I slept as a child, with all my possessions on top of me, just in case.
Quintana: You see your elders doing this, putting these grotesque things around them, and then later on, you find yourself doing that, and then you say, why do I do this to myself? You’re repulsed by it, which brings you great joy, right?
I see a lot of the idea of spectacle, the grotesque, in the Gothic. The image of the falling woman impacted me immensely when I was reading Creep. Strangely, I watched Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo for the first time as I was reading your book, and the image of the falling woman is the pulse of that film. The film left me feeling revolted because it’s about a creep directed by a creep. We know that Hitchcock was horrible to the women he worked with. The main character of the film is a misogynist who’s really a necrophiliac who becomes more and more fixated on this image of the falling woman. I also began to think about the artist Ana Mendieta and her husband, Carl Andre. I thought about how men get away with things.
Returning to Vertigo, that film was set against a backdrop of California landscapes and structures. All of it through the white male gaze. The final scene even has a looming figure of a nun in a mission bell tower. In your essay, “Tell,” the image of you and your friend Renee Jr. dropping Barbies from the window resonated and put things in a feminist framework. It also made me think about your writing in the Gothic and how your work counters the white Gothic canon. I see your work as archiving the West, in particular California, and that’ll mean a lot to future readers who are feminists. How do you see your feminism and love of the Gothic deconstructing the Western and reexamining images like the falling woman?
Gurba: A Gothic style is ideal for narrating the conquest of the West because it’s a horror story that continues to unfold. Horror tropes that have their roots in the Gothic are ideal mechanisms for that type of narrative. I have long been attracted to Gothic storytelling. I was raised on Gothic storytelling that was oral. I was fed stories by my grandmother. I was fed stories by my aunts and uncles. I was fed stories by my parents that were incredibly grotesque and filled with horror and supernatural elements as well. For example, when I was a child, one of my favorite stories that was relayed to me verbally was about a woman who made tamales using the meat of children. I was told that story when I was seven or eight years old, and it set a tone and established my tastes. I heard this story as a child, and I think of that story as being a Mexican story, but it’s also an Indigenous story because that story is an updated or modern retelling of the Tlahuepuchi, who was a native monster of Nahuatl origin, who was a bloodsucking entity who would eat children, in particular infants, and would shapeshift, she would become a bird. In the story that I heard about the tamale maker that ate children, she was able to capture them because she would shapeshift and become a bird.
Those were the verbal stories I inherited. Once I started reading Gothic U.S. writers, it also helped to entrench my taste. One of those writers is William Faulkner, and the story that made an impression on me because it was so deliciously grotesque was “A Rose for Emily.” What teenage goth girl doesn’t love that story? Another Gothic touchstone for me was the writing of Carson McCullers, specifically her novella, The Ballad of the Sad Café. It is populated with these classic grotesque characters who are also Queer. I began to come to an understanding about my Queerness when I was going through adolescence, and during adolescence was also when I found that very Queer gothic literature that had been produced in the U.S. I began to realize that was work I could locate myself within and also locate Queer ancestors in. I became attracted to it, so those influences were my first tutors.
Quintana: Creep has a journalistic bent, which moved me in many unexpected ways. In your piece on American Dirt, you talk about brown people getting killed once they cross the border to the U.S., and that was profound for me. Whenever I read your work, it conjures my childhood obsessions. I was obsessed with the silent film actor Ramón Novarro as a kid. I am trying to remember exactly where I first heard about him. I believe I learned about him through sensationalist journalism.
Gurba: I remember how I learned about him! Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon had an entry about him and his murder. I loved those Anger collections when I was a teen. I bought Hollywood Babylon at Kmart when I was around twelve or thirteen. I remember seeing Jane Mansfield on the cover, and I was sold! Then I read about Ramón Novarro.
Quintana: Old Hollywood was my jam when I was a kid. His story got to me for many reasons, and reading your critique made something click in place for me. Novarro left Mexico with his family for the U.S., and he worked towards the ultimate dream/fantasy of becoming a Hollywood star. And after this happened, the U.S. killed him with violence and tried to bury and forget him because he was Mexican, because he was Queer, because he crossed over. And because I finally made this connection, I’m grateful you included “Pendeja, You Ain’t Steinbeck” in Creep. The piece was first published in Tropics of Meta. I’ve worked with their editors before. They’re doing important work, and I believe that piece landed in the right place at an integral time. Looking back from when Tropics of Meta first published your essay, how do you feel about the current intersections of journalism and art, especially regarding border politics, whether it be U.S./Mexican or other borders globally?
Gurba: I love the journalistic approach being taken to the representation of the Latin American Diaspora by a writer situated in the U.S. One of those writers who are doing that work is Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, the author of The Undocumented Americans, and she was explicit in that she was taking that approach by invoking Joan Didion and New Journalism. She embeds herself within these communities in which she is a member as a person who is undocumented. I love that that is happening, and I love that our work is being published and exists so that it can provide a counter-narrative to garbage like American Dirt.
Ultimately, American Dirt is a novel intended to conjure cheap thrills, which is fine. If a person wants to read a tawdry narco novel for cheap thrills, by all means, do so, but I hope people can be honest with themselves and others about what they're reading. That was the critique that I was launching. It wasn’t that I was saying don’t read that, but you can’t read a tawdry thriller that’s written for the white gaze and tell me that you’re interested in social justice. Don’t pee on my leg and tell me it’s raining. That was my critique, which got twisted and misread by a lot of folks, but it was going to be twisted and misrepresented by people who don’t want to reckon with their bad behavior and legacies.
Quintana: Near the end of “Cucuy,” your students cheered when they heard about Ernesto Miranda’s fate. That was a powerful moment in the scene. How do you talk to young people, particularly girls, about retribution? How do you give them permission to use violence against creeps?
Gurba: I taught Civics for some years, and when I taught Civics, I would try to present a curriculum that was teen-centered and POC-centered because that would up the interest level of my students. When it came time to learn about the rights of the accused, I figured that would be a perfect opportunity not only to explore how those rights came to be, how they’re applied, and how they’re invoked, but we could also learn the social history of people in the Mexican diaspora in the U.S. Southwest.
I taught the story of Ernesto Miranda to the students, and what I was attempting to do was kill two birds with one stone. I wanted my students to understand their rights as people who might stand accused at some point in the future, and I wanted them to know how to use those rights. I also wanted them to understand that the person who the Miranda warning was named was not a female person; we’re not talking about a woman named Miranda, we’re talking about a person with the surname Miranda, and that person was a rapist. That person was an incredibly normal and banal person.
So often, we are socialized into a misunderstanding of sexual assault perpetration, and part of that mythology is that it’s an exceptional event committed or perpetrated by exceptional people. I want to dispel that myth as early as possible. What I wanted my students to understand was that the reason why Ernesto Miranda’s mugshot looks so familiar is because sexual assault perpetrators are familiar people. They are our families; they are our communities. That’s who’s most likely to hurt us. I wanted to instill that understanding in my students so that we can shift rape culture, and that has to happen early. I would have that lesson, and then I began to expand on that lesson.
I came to teach psychology later on, and I would teach about trauma and trauma responses. One of the suggestions embedded into my lessons was that people who experience sexual assault who fight back and use self-defense tend to have better post-assault outcomes in terms of their mental health. They tend to heal much more quickly. I told that to my students. That resistance correlates to better mental health outcomes. I told my students, “You have permission to get angry if this happens to you. In fact, I’m giving you that permission. And you have permission to talk about it. And you even have permission to fight back.” And then I’ve asked my students, “Has anyone ever encouraged you to fight back?” and they would say, “No, no one’s ever encouraged it.” We would have a conversation about, “Why? Why has no one ever encouraged you to fight back? What would be different if every victim fought back?” We would have those sorts of conversations.
What I noticed when we would have those conversations was a shift in body language. At the start of those conversations, my female students’ body language would look very guarded. By the end of the conversation, when I gave them data that supported the notion that they could be angry and that anger is good for mental health, that self-defense can be good for mental health, that resistance can be good for mental health, they were suddenly sitting with their shoulders back, they were suddenly sitting straight in their chairs, and there was a stature that communicated empowerment.
Myriam Gurba is a writer and artist. She is the author of the true crime memoir Mean, a New York Times Editors’ Choice. O, The Oprah Magazine, ranked Mean as one of the best LGBTQ books of all time. Publishers Weekly describes Gurba as having a voice like no other. Her essays and criticism have appeared in The Paris Review, Time, and 4Columns. She has shown art in galleries, museums, and community centers. She lives in Pasadena, California.
Monique Quintana is a Chicana from Fresno, California, and is the author of Cenote City (Clash Books, 2019). Her work has also been supported by Yaddo, the Sundress Academy for the Arts, the Community of Writers, and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center.
Author photo: Geoff Cordner