Pat Mora
(b. 1942)

Pat Mora has written many award-winning essays and poems about her experiences as a Mexican American. She uses rich sensory language to share her observations and communicate her unique perspective. "I take pride in being a Hispanic writer," she says. By sharing her heritage, Mora voices the feelings, experiences, and dreams not only of Mexican Americans, but also of all people who grew up on the border between two worlds.

Mora was born in El Paso, Texas, a city located on the border of Mexico and the United States. In the early 1900s, her grandparents migrated to El Paso to escape the revolution in Mexico. As she grew up, Mora and her family frequently visited the Mexican city of Juarez, just across the border from El Paso. As a child, the two cities blurred in her mind to become one large, diverse home.

Growing up in two worlds was sometimes difficult for Mora. As she became older, she learned that some people treated Mexicans with little respect. At school, she often hid her ability to speak Spanish to prevent others from treating her with scorn. Later, she recognized the sadness of this decision, and realized that hiding her Spanish heritage was hiding an important part of herself. She now takes great pride in her dual perspective. "I make it a point to stress my heritage and the fact that I'm bilingual," she says.

After attending university in Texas, Mora dedicated herself to helping others learn. She taught middle school, high school, and college students in El Paso. She also married and raised three children, William, Elizabeth, and Cecilia. After a divorce in 1981, Mora began seriously to consider her life as a writer. She wrote her first two collections of poetry to celebrate her Southwestern heritage, the strong women in her life, and her connections to nature. Her first collection, Chants, was published in 1984.

Mora believes that one reason she did not start writing sooner was that she had few models to follow. "I'd never seen a writer who was like me, bilingual, Mexican American." She hopes that her writing will inspire others to write, thereby increasing the amount of Mexican American literature that is published. "Anthologized American literature does not reflect the ethnic diversity of the United States," she says. "I write, in part, because Hispanic perspectives need to be part of our literary heritage."

Sources of inspiration books were always a fundamental part of Mora's life. She says, "I am a writer because I was always a reader. I love words and their power to move us, to entertain us, to make us laugh, to comfort us."

Mora's family experiences, such as the time her Aunt Lobo danced on her 90th birthday, have inspired many of her poems and essays. The powerful desert landscape has also energized her creativity. "Many of my book ideas come from the desert where I grew up," she notes. "The open spaces, wide sky, all that sun and all those animals that scurry across the hot sand or fly high over the mountains."

Traveling beyond the Southwest expanded Mora's range of experiences. In her third collection of poetry, Communion, she described places as distant as Cuba, New York, and India.

In 1989, Mora moved from El Paso to Cincinnati, Ohio, and the transition was both difficult and enriching. Mora missed the desert landscapes of her youth, but gained deep insights into the United States interior. Today, Mora divides her time between Cincinnati, where she is a professor at the University of Cincinnati, and Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Mora is a disciplined writer who maintains a regular writing schedule. She works hard to overcome the problems faced by all freelance writers, such as gaining financial security, but she feels that her greatest challenge comes from within. "Personally, the hardest thing about being a writer is facing the gap between what I hope to write and what I write. I'm not talking about quantity because I'm very disciplined, but about how a piece of writing is seldom as effective as we want. We want those words to fly right off the page into the reader's heart."

Like many Americans, Mora is bilingual; in other words, she is capable of speaking in two languages. Mora says she is "English dominant," meaning that she feels more confident expressing herself in English than in Spanish. She loves the Spanish language, though, and she cherishes her ability to view the world from two language perspectives.

Theories on bilingualism differ, but most experts agree that people who speak more than one language can think in each one. They do not need to "translate" from one language into the other.

One intriguing aspect of speaking multiple languages is the idea that language can shape our thoughts. Many bilingual people feel that they form different ideas or impressions depending on the language in which they are thinking. Some authors say they form ideas in one language and then write about them in another.

Sharing the experience of being bilingual with readers can be difficult. Mora writes almost exclusively in English, though she did write a Spanish ballad in memory of her father. She includes many Spanish terms in order to evoke the specific sounds and phrases of her Mexican heritage, and she takes care to provide translations for readers who do not speak Spanish.

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