Cuentista of the Borderlands: An Interview with Denise Chávez

Denise Chavez and covers from her novels

Denise Chávez burst onto the literary scene in the 1980s, part of a groundbreaking wave of Latina writers—Gloria Anzaldúa, Ana Castillo, Sandra Cisneros, Julia Álvarez, Cristina García—who cracked open the white, male-dominated canon to make space for nuestros cuentos, our stories. From that moment on, Chávez has written with unflinching heart and fierce intelligence, portraying the borderlands as both wound and wellspring, crucible and cosmos.

Rooted in Las Cruces, New Mexico, Chávez draws from the sunbaked soil of working-class Latina life to build rich, resonant storyworlds. Her prose is a kind of literary curanderismo—healing through rhythm, revelation, and rage. Like others in our matri-literary lineage—Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Cherríe Moraga—Chávez resists boundaries of geography, language, and form. She conjures cocinas simmering with chile colorado and stories, stoops echoing with laughter and whispered sorrow, mujeres navigating the sacred and the sensual.

Her literary journey began with coming-of-age, The Last of the Menu Girls (1986), introducing the mesmerizing, raza-rooted and soul-deep protagonist, Rocío Esquibel. In Face of an Angel (1994), Soveida Dosamantes, a waitress-philosopher, wrestles with faith and survival. Then came Teresina Ávila in Loving Pedro Infante (2001), seeking solace in the flickering light of El Colón Theater. Her memoir-manifesto A Taco Testimony (2006) celebrates family, food, and culture, while The King and Queen of Comezón (2014) offers a bawdy, tender portrait of longing, gossip, and desert truths. Most recently, her novel-in-scenes Street of Too Many Stories (2024) marks a literary homecoming—fierce, funny, lyrical, and fractured, with echoes of Elena Garro and Juan Rulfo.

But Chávez’s impact goes far beyond the page. As founder of Libros Para El Viaje/Books for the Journey, she’s distributed more than 50,000 books to refugees, incarcerated youth, senior centers, schools, and underserved communities. And through her directorship of Museo de La Gente/Museum of the People, a community archival resource center, Chávez preserves and uplifts the music, food, art, and literature of the Southwest. Her Casa Camino Real Bookstore is both sanctuary and archive.

In conversation, she reflects on the soulcraft behind Libros Para El Viaje, the labor of storytelling, and the healing force of memory. She also shares a glimpse of her next work-in-progress—a multilingual novel (in French, German, Spanish, and Latin) inspired by Esequiel Hernández, the high schooler and goat herder fatally shot by Marines near the U.S.–Mexico border in 1997.

Frederick Luis Aldama: It’s been a long time, Denise. Too long.

Denise Chávez: Sí, Federico.

FLA: Let’s jump right in. How do you see your work as an intervention—intellectually, creatively, politically?

DC: All of the above. Since 2016, through Libros Para El Viaje, we’ve given out over 50,000 books to refugees, veterans, students, migrants, folks at soup kitchens—you name it. In 2012, I opened my bookstore, Casa Camino Real, in the heart of the Las Cruces historic district and on the Camino Real. It’s now a cultural space and community hub.

I live just 42 miles from Juárez. We are on the frontlines of a militarized border. New Mexico houses the world’s largest collection of warheads. We’ve always been treated as disposable. The myth of "The Land of Enchantment" hides deep wounds—cancer clusters from nuclear testing, systemic neglect.

And yet, there’s power here. We are a place of innovation and story. Our borderland culture and its people a great location of innovation and change. Look at the incredible writers that have come out of El Paso and the US-México border: Ricardo Sánchez, Abelardo Delgado, Alicia Gaspar de Alba, and my primo, Benjamín Sáenz. Look at all the people that have either worked or lived on the border—Cormac McCarthy, Abraham Verghese, many others.

FLA: You and others are holding back a kind of culturicide.

DC: That’s right. It’s a form of cultural preservation. I think of my Tía Chita—Lucía Madrid—a lifelong teacher. She started a lending library out of a grocery store with Havoline Oil cans turned bookends. The first book? A Sears catalog. People from Ojinaga would cross in chalupas just to borrow a book.

She was honored by presidents, appeared on the Today Show, Good Morning America. But the inspiration went deeper. My Aunt Lucy was the first Hispana graduate from Sul Ross University in Alpine, Texas. Seven siblings—all teachers. My grandmother, María Antonia Luján Rede, learned English while traveling with a settler family across the U.S. They believed deeply in education.

FLA: And your connection to Esequiel Hernández is personal.

DC: It is. My Tía Chita, my mother Delfina’s younger sister, was his teacher. He was a high school sophomore, herding goats near Redford, Texas. Marines in ghillie suits shot him in the back. They left him to bleed. Thought he was a drug runner. He was a kid with a sketchbook.

I’ve visited his memorial with my cousin Enrique Madrid. There’s still his hut, his paintings on adobe walls. The site breathes sorrow. That story is the backbone of my new novel, Failure at the Altar.

FLA: You say writing is a way to live with truth.

DC: It is. I ask myself: what do we write in evil times? We write evil, and we write the healing. Street of Too Many Stories is set in Encantada, New Mexico—it takes on the illusion of the dream, the vision of enchanted New Mexico. You meet four families on Encantada Street, their helpers, the older Mexicana who takes care of all of them. You meet animals, dogs and cats. The ancestral spirits come in through the windows to check in on their relatives and yes, those strangers, to see how they are doing. It’s not a traditional novel. It’s a chorus.

FLA: The form is experimental.

DC: I call this book an opera of voice and characterization. It's not your traditional novel, and it covers many things we don't talk enough about in our Hispano culture: alcoholism, sexual abuse, mental abuse, all kinds of abuses. I grew up in a family of alcoholics, the second generation were drug addicts, and so many lives were filled with sadness and abuse. We don’t see that much about the deep issues in our writing.

FLA: Your background in theater really comes through here.

DC: I started writing plays at Madonna High School. I had great teachers. One of my proudest early awards was the Talamantes Performance Spanish Award. I wore my teacher's suit in a school play. Creepy but memorable.

Then I studied at NMSU. Herschel Zohn cast me in Uncle Vanya at 17. That experience changed my life. We did Gorky, Chekhov, Mother Courage, all the classics. Later I studied with Paul Baker at the Dallas Theater Center.  I even did Lysistrata in a Greek chorus taught by a director who couldn’t believe Americans lacked rhythm.

But I learned. I learned to listen to movement, to let voice build a world.

FLA: Theater is woven into everything you do.

DC: Yes. It shapes how I write. I always refer to myself as a performance writer. Street of Too Many Stories could easily be a play. The set’s on the cover: a failed wedding dress, a piñata, a dog, desert mountains.

FLA: Do you have a favorite work?

DC: That’s hard. They’re all like cats. You love them differently. But The King and Queen of Comezón holds a special place. Arnulfo Olivarez, one of the protagonists, is dear to me. That novel is about love, longing, misdirection—and the itch that never goes away. Novena Narrativas too. I performed that one woman play for many years all over the US. Now, The Ghost of Esequiel Hernández is consuming me. It’s multilingual—Spanish, German, French, Latin. Because the devil speaks many tongues.

FLA: And your work continues, day after day.

DC: I get tired. But we are meant to spend ourselves in this life. One day I took a three-hour nap instead of mailing books.

FLA: Your activism.

DC: It’s never-ending. Some days, I'm mailing books. Other days, I'm finding old posters of Reies Tijerina in storage. Or discovering three boxes of signed Caramelo copies Sandra Cisneros gave me.

I'm a book hoarder, yes, but every book, every piece of art has a person it belongs to. A young girl once asked me if she could take a Madonna vinyl record. She had nothing in her mochila, nothing in her bag, but the hope of that Madonna record, the hope of being a normal person, of being in a place where you have a record player and you could live with love and not fear, of being carried away in the middle of the night, or ICE coming to your door, was everything to her, and yes, to me. Another woman asked for three Isabel Allende novels on the book table. She had nothing. Just that need to hold a story. These encounters sustain me.

FLA: And your forthcoming anthology—We Are Here to Represent: Stories of Service and Love?

DC: I've been working on an anthology of stories of people who have served for years. I haven’t been ready to publish it because I really had to write my own story of service first, or maybe adjacent to it. All I can say is, unless we understand that we are here to serve others and not to be served, our lives will become very, very small.

FLA: Any final words?

DC: I’m in a time of beatitude. I’m older and I’ve been reflecting a lot lately on legacy—what we leave behind. I have books and posters stacked high, yes. But I also think about where my archives go. Will they end up in a collection? In a library? Or in the Museo de La Gente/Museum of the People, a community archival center I have been working on for many years?  Or will they stay right here, in Las Cruces, in the desert that raised me? Who will care for the ephemera of a life lived in service to story? When we forget that service is at the center. When we stop listening to the stories that surround us, it’s too late. But I continue to dream, serve, and believe in giving.

Living as I do, entre mundos/between moving worlds, I hope to continue to tell stories that illuminate, resist, and heal.