In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Cristina Herrera Mezgravis

Where did your inspiration for your fiction piece, “Ninina,” come from?

I drew inspiration for “Ninina” from my own relationship with different women in my life—my mother, tías, and abuelas. Like Nina, I was also once a female teenager growing up in a sexist society dealing with rising crime and economic hardship. These external factors put a lot of pressure on an already fraught mother-daughter relationship. In this story, I investigate how we fail and succeed to communicate and how we keep loving each other despite these difficulties.

The central relationship is a tense one between Ninina and her mother, punctuated by the line, “She liked to think the good things [about her] came from [her father], and the bad came from Ma.” Can you talk about this line? What made you develop their relationship in that manner?

That line represents Nina’s tendency to idealize her father and place her frustrations on her mother. Nina’s father died when she was 7 years old; additionally, since her parents took on very divided gender roles—dad as main breadwinner, mother as main caretaker—her dad wasn’t as present as Nina’s mother when he was alive. In his absence, it’s much easier for Nina to blame and criticize the present parent: Ma is around more and this leads to more friction and clashes between them. I wanted to be so deeply entrenched in Nina’s adolescent brain that statements such as these, even with their flawed logic, make sense to her.  The line says Nina liked to think this way: for Nina, it’s a choice. It’s easier and rather childlike of her to think in dichotomies—dad, good, mom, bad—instead of sitting with, disentangling, and understanding her complex feelings for her mother. As an adolescent, she’s caught between being a child who thinks in simple terms and an adult who is better able to understand complexity. 

The way you’ve crafted the setting, with the specific descriptions of the streets and the detritus and the feel of it seems like a character in itself. How did you craft the setting to have maximum effect in your story?

Thank you for this question. As an immigrant away from my birthplace, it makes me happy that Venezuela comes across as a character in itself. I didn’t set out to do it consciously—at least not in the first few drafts. It was all about being really present in the character’s mind and body. Since I grew up in Venezuela, I thought back to the objects and fauna that made up my experience: like Nina, I didn’t like the taste of nonfat long-life milk, but it was often what we had at home—with the food and product shortages, many times there wasn’t much of a choice. If Nina was going to walk out the front door, I knew she had to open a multi-lock gate, as crime was rampant back then. For the same reason, there would be a guard downstairs. In walking, Nina would have to step over or around fallen mangoes—a staple of the parks around my parents’ home. Muggings and kidnappings were on the mind’s of everyone I knew back in 2012. By being fully present in Nina’s experience, I was able to capture the details that shape her life organically—a lot of this, of course, happened through revision. With every new draft, I added details or scaled back. 

I feel like Rafael plays a really interesting part between these two women, a sort of balm for Ma and a watchful figure for Ninina. Can you talk about his role in their relationship?

It’s an interesting relationship: on the one hand, he’s an employee of the building where Ma and Nina live; on the other, he’s been there for so long he knows many intimacies about their lives. Rafael has seen Ma go from pregnant to young mother to widow, and he’s seen Nina grow. He has insight into their lives that Nina and Ma don’t have into his—like Nina thinks, they stick to the same, superficial topics of conversation in part because of the employer-employee relationship and because of social norms. I wanted to represent this grey area on the page: Rafael is a witness, in a sense, to both Nina and Ma’s lives while their participation in his life is limited. 

Ninina and her mother are caught in this circle of pushing against each other. At the end, Ninina’s mother is able to begin to break that cycle by reaching out to her daughter. What made you end the story in this way? Were there other versions that you worked on where they didn’t come back together?

Looking back at drafts from 2018, when I started writing this story, I found two or three other versions, but they all have Nina and Ma coming back together: in one version, Nina steps into the elevator, certain that her mother knows she’s on her way up; in another, Nina and Ma end up cracking up, laughing so hard they have to shush each other to keep from waking up the neighbors (it’s nighttime in this version). I think my instinct to have them come back together stems from a desire to communicate that Nina will always be Ma’s daughter, and Ma will always be Nina’s mother. Nothing can change that, no matter how much they hurt each other, no matter what happens. I believe family is family, meaning, we have to do our best to work out our differences rather than holding grudges or resentments because estrangement, although in some cases necessary, can ultimately end up hurting more. I believe in the power of love to move people past their fears and differences, so I guess the move to end the story with Nina and her mother starting to reconcile is a reflection of that belief. 

Do you find that you return to certain themes in your writing?

Oh, for sure! I write about mother-daughter relationships, about migration and alienation; employer-employee relationships, often in the domestic sphere, female sexuality and desire. And, certainly, the big ones, the ones we can’t escape: love, not only in the romantic sense, and human resilience—how we’re able to keep going, laughing, dancing, loving, despite the trials we face. 

What books and authors inspire you? What are some of your favorite works? 

“Ninina” forms part of a novel first inspired by Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio—I love how he writes about a place through the experiences of different characters within the same fictional town. Ever since I read Gabriel García Márquez in highschool, I’ve loved how he captures the idiosyncrasies of a place with wit and without losing sight of tension, especially in his short stories. I greatly admire how James Baldwin writes about interpersonal relationships, more specifically about our ability to love and how it’s trumped by societal and gender norms. Tobias Wolff is a master of the short story, always writing with humility and humor. Junot Diaz mixes the rhythms of the Spanish and English language artfully, as does mi compatriota and fellow Michener grad Alejandro Puyana in writing about Venezuela in Freedom Is a Feast. In Dominicana, Angie Cruz tactfully writes about a woman’s immigrant experience, domestic violence and female sexuality. Ana Menendez’s short story “In Cuba, I Was a German Shepherd” made me cry and I still remember it with fondness. And there are many, many more authors and books that I could gush about. 

What are you currently working on?

I’m currently working on a coming-of-age novel about Venezuelan migrants (of which “Ninina” is a part). 

Cristina Herrera Mezgravis is a writer and eductor from Valencia, Venezuela. She earned awards in both fiction and nonfiction at Stanford University. She has worked in tech and in college prep in the Bay Area and in Lima, Peru. She currently lives in Austin, Texas, with her husband and their tabby cat, Lima. As a second-year Fiction Fellow at the Michener Center for Writers, Mezgravis is working on a coming-of-age novel about Venezuelan migrants. “Ninina” is her first publication.