A Chat with Olivia Peña.
This transcript has been edited.
Evan Fleischer: Why The Mission? Why start a story with a sidewalk funeral? Why this story?
Olivia Peña: Well, I was born and slightly raised in San Francisco — I was definitely born there —
EF: (Laughs.)
OP: My parents are divorced, so I lived split between The Mission and where my Mom lives, which is in Vacaville, a little bit north. It was an interesting split arrangement: my Mom actually worked in San Francisco, so we'd go to school and then every day after school, she’d drive us to my Dad's house and we'd stay there till three in the morning. She’d drive us back, we’d go to school, and we’d do the same thing. And every weekend we were at my Dad's house.
So my whole childhood was literally in The Mission near 24th street. And, just, like, the color and the vibrancy of it when I was a child, it was such a fun match. I’m half-Black, half-Salvadoran, and, at the time, [that area] was literally all Latino. Me and my sister, we could walk next door at any point — we were young, too; I was, like, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 — and we could just roam the streets and nobody would bother us … When I came back to The Mission after years and years, it just like, ‘Oh my goodness, this place has taken a complete turn. There’s still those pockets of what I loved about it — the beauty, the culture, and the people — but it’s so different from what it was when I was a kid. And I was like, ‘God, it feels like the death of something. It feels like a death.’ And so I thought of that idea — of personifying The Mission as a person — and, like, what would that look like? And sidewalk funerals are just so iconic of The Mission, right? Like, you walk places, and when I was younger, it’d be like, there’s all the candles of Guadalupe, where maybe someone got hit or got shot or something, so that image of some coming and paying their respects to whatever the person was — I just wanted to toy with the idea of, ‘Let’s pay respect to the place that is still here but not here in a way that a lot of us remember.’
EF: Place is so complicated, isn’t it? It’s not just the economic determinism attached to a certain zip code. It’s not in saying, ‘Oh, that was my favorite restaurant’ or ‘That was my favorite bar.’ And this is something you get at in your story — there is a strange kind of fullness in place that is relatively easy to articulate from a humanist point of view but really hard to articulate in terms of power analysis. It is but isn’t just how a place changes over time, for instance. It’s — well, given all that — given how change over time makes itself present in your story — what do you think it means to ‘make a place?’
OP: A lot of what I do in writing is very, very rooted in place. But, man, it is, like, 1010% the people, right? Like the people are what give the color to the place. As I was thinking about The Mission, all I could think about was every individual I’ve encountered and how can I make it in a way in such a small space, right? It was a very, very short story, and it wasn’t even meant to be that — it’s meant to be a forward for a collection I’m working on right now about The Mission.
Having these little nuggets of people who show up who I’ve encountered — you know, there are the cholos with their tall T’s; there are the immigrants; having all these people come together like a puzzle piece builds the place for me. It’s so hard to explain — have you ever been there? I just wanna — I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced or —
EF: I haven’t been there, but my Dad lived on Telegraph in Oakland in the 60’s and he and my Mom lived in Berkeley in the late 60’s, early 70’s, so I have that narrative piece in my head, but I’ve never experienced the thing for myself.
OP: That sounds amazing. I would’ve loved to be in Berkeley in the 60’s. Yeah — there’s this hum to The Mission. A lot has changed in The Mission, but even just going back to 24th Street, which is literally down the road from where I live, there’s still a little bit of that hum left, which is interesting, because it’s like, in the stories, I was thinking of it as a death, right? And there are so many things that are gone. But there are also people in so many places that have survived. So that’s why I mean like a ‘hum’ — it doesn’t feel like a song like it used to, where it was — you walk out the door and you felt like, ‘Ah! You know, there’s Dan. There’s Chago over there.’ But now it feels like a dull hum that kind of runs through it.
EF: How disruptive do you think newcomers are, and is there any chance for them in terms of integrating them into the flow of the storyline of a place?
OP: So here’s the thing: I know a lot of folks who’ve come to The Mission or San Francisco and they’re maybe not from here but have really — I don’t know — ‘adopted?’ I don’t know how to describe it — I have a lot of friends in the writing community who come from the Central Valley, Fresno, Los Angeles, and what I find is that they share is … respect. They have this shared love for the arts and the culture [of this place.] There are so many things embedded in The Mission that are surrounded around art — and that’s another thing that makes it so special: it was historically a place where the Muralistas — they started out there; a lot of writing grew out of there; so I feel like if people come here, just respect what it is and don’t try and change the things we still have left. We still have so many things that are still nuggets of places that still exist.
It’s heartbreaking to see some people come to The Mission and say things like, ‘I don’t know about the homelessness’ and just complain and it’s like, ‘That’s funny, ‘cause the homeless were actually here before any of you were.’ They know what it’s like to lose in more ways than just one. I don’t know — that attitude to me has always been a little triggering, ‘cause I’m like, “You know???”
EF: This raises a semi-obvious question: have you seen The Last Black Man in San Francisco?
OP: I have. I actually saw it — it’s so funny — I saw it in the perfect location. I don’t live in The Mission proper anymore — I live about 15 minutes away — but there’s a tiny little theater called The 4-Star Theater. It’s, like, ten seats per theater. It’s family run. I saw it there with a few of my friends and it just felt so San Francisco, right? Like, so intimate. Everyone who was there was just really into everything about it. So, yeah — I love that movie.
EF: What do you think of the differences between that movie and your story?
OP: That’s a good question. That story is so interesting to me, especially as someone who’s half-black with roots. I mean — there’s something interesting about that idea of ‘the last,’ right? And I feel similarly, in a way, as being the kind of last person in a sense. In my day job, I work with a lot of technology companies, because that was a natural fit after higher ed, and just the amount of sheer surprise people would have when they’re like, ‘Oh my god — so where’re you from? Did you come from the East Coast? Did you come from the Midwest?’ And it’s like, ‘ … No. I’m actually from here.’
EF: I probably won’t include this in the final transcript, but the novel I’m writing is [DELETED BY A MYSTERIOUS UNSEEN HAND.] Development isn’t quite the right word to describe it, though, because development suggests improvement and one of the weird things about developers is that they are perfectly capable of picking a location at random and saying, ‘All right, we’re going to make money there.’ And the question as to what’s currently there is utterly irrelevant — everything could be going swimmingly — but it doesn’t matter, because a group of people have decided that this is going to happen.
I’ve been really intrigued by this multi-dimensional puzzle piece for a while, not only in terms of how it makes itself apparent, but also in how it’s similar and different across the country, like in Detroit. In Detroit, people are evicted because folks will value the land of black families at a higher rate than white families, so when the property tax comes around, they can’t pay it, and that’s how black families are evicted. That’s happening in about seven states but perhaps most notably in Detroit, whereas in a place like Boston, it’s almost a death by committee approach to development. You can protest something for years, get all the environmental reports right, sign all the right papers, and the city will still give the go-ahead to a certain project.
But let’s start to pivot back, ‘cause the way you’re characterizing The Mission also makes me think of other locations that have received a certain kind of heat over the years and still feel like themselves to a degree — I’m thinking of Austin and Portland, Oregon in particular — and I don’t quite know what to make of that particular dynamic — the way they’re the same but also different.
OP: Yeah, I was getting so many thoughts as you were talking. The displacement of people is such an interesting topic. I know it’s different for every case, but in terms of my family, they all came here from El Salvador. It was the kind of situation where they were like, ‘Let’s all come together!’ So I had five of my Tio’s, my Dad, my grandma, some cousins, and it was all in one house in The Mission, and it — they lost it, you know? It’s such a tragedy that even people who have gotten pushed out don't even have the option to go back when the mission was literally a place that a lot of immigrants came to, particularly from Latin America. Now it’s a place they can’t even have access to. I mean — San Francisco as a whole, but especially The Mission. It’s so expensive. I don’t know if you know anything about the prices over here, but, like, a studio here would be over two grand a month. And that’s if you’re looking in the worst neighborhood in San Francisco. So there’s not even an option to go back if we wanted to. You know what I mean? Like, I don’t even live there. (Laughs.) And I have a pretty good paying day job! And there’s where I’m from, where I consider my roots as being, and so many people have been displaced because of that. And it’s a tragedy. It really is.
EF: I’m tempted to steal a question from a show called AirGo at this point and ask — how is the world treating you, and how are you treating the world?
OP: Oh, gosh. So how is the world treating me and how am I treating the world? The world is so broad, I guess I would start with — so for me, I don’t think change at any level can be made until each of us finds the things in ourselves that we personally want to change. That’s how real change happens, right? So for me, what I focus on just in my personal life is all just about like how to rally the community and particularly how to promote arts and writing for people like me.
As you know, I’m mixed-race, and growing up as a writer, I came from a long line of really strong storytellers from both sides — like, the actual oral histories and how they would tell it. But as I started to dive into more mainstream literature, as I finally started writing stories, I realized that all of my characters had either no race mentioned or were white. And I had to unpack that. Like, why is that? And it’s really because I had no basis in seeing anything else and what was given to me. So that really was a shift for me. I kept thinking, “How can I be a part of the conversation?” How can I make sure that my writing — like, what matters to me most is not to get published, but it is for my writing to be a part of the community, for the community, and for the people, so that somebody who’s in my shoes can say, ‘Wow, I’ve never seen an Afro-Latina character! I’ve never seen a collection centered around those voices!’ And … I have the power to do that.
So when I think of how I’m working in the world and how I want to contribute to it — that’s something that’s really important to me and that’s something I have control over. I could go out and protest, but this is something that feels super personal and attainable. And, to go alongside that — I feel like I could ramble about this forever; I’ll keep it short and sweet —
EF: Do what you need to do!
OP: But there’s another thing I did that I just love telling people about in the hope someone — particularly other writers — could do in their own communities is, during my MFA, I took a class on teaching creative writing and we’re going to go over pedagogy and all that, but, also, you guys are going to teach a practicum. And I looked through the list of possibilities that were offered, but none of them I could do. So I had this idea of — ‘What if I just created a Meetup and said, ‘Hey, San Francisco, this is what I am — I’m a second-year fiction writer, and I want to teach an eight-week practicum which is going to be a workshop in fiction. If you’re interested, submit me a two page sample and why you want to do this.’ I’m thinking I’m going to get, like, 10 people — I have 100 applicants. And I had to sift through. And I was able. I had the creative agency. And I hand-picked each of them and I made it so that each person came from a wildly different background. I had every ethnicity you could think of, every age group, the oldest being 70 and the youngest being 21, and I got a group of 12 folks and I taught this practicum at the University of San Francisco.
And the stories that came out of it were absolutely mind-blowing. These people were so present, so grateful, they’re like, ‘We’ve never had the experience of having a workshop, having anybody care about our work enough to listen to it — to have 12 other people reading it for you — and it was one of the most humbling, gratifying experiences, because there was no institutional structure, right? It was for the community with the community. It was free. And I don’t have time for such things now because my work is crazy, but I think that if everybody who’s a teacher could do that at least once, give people access to writing and to the right forms of storytelling, it would be so beneficial.
So that’s something I’ve done that I hope to keep doing for the world, because, again, it’s something I can control and it’s so small. But, man, the impact — I just — I could go on and on about it, because it was so amazing. After class, I was almost in tears because folks were saying things to me like, ‘Wow, nobody ever told me that my story mattered.’ Literally. At the baseline. ‘Nobody’s ever said that to me. Nobody’s ever said that my point of view matters.’ It was so humbling and so gratifying. I hope to someday do it again.