Lucha Corpi

Lucha Corpi’s bilingual artistry has manifested itself differently from most of the other writers, such as Rolando Hinojosa, who either use English-Spanish code-switching or create two separate-language versions of their works. Throughout the body of her highly symbolic, intimate poetry and in her short fiction for children, Corpi has used the language of her early upbringing and education in Mexico: Spanish. Her prose fiction, on the other hand, is written in the language of her professional life and education in California: English. She was born in Jáltipan, Veracruz, Mexico, in 1945, where she was raised in a household that resounded with music. Corpi received all of her early education in Mexico, and when she came to the United States in 1964 with her husband, who was a student at the University of California-Berkeley, she knew not a word of English. But through classes for foreign students at the University of California, her experiences while raising a child in the United States after a divorce in 1970, and her college education at the same university, she became proficient enough to become a teacher and a writer in her adopted language. Corpi holds both a B.A. and a M.A. in Comparative Literature.

Throughout her college education, Corpi wrote poetry, and in 1976 she published her first short collection of poems in a bilingual anthology, Fire-flight: Three Latin American Poets. With this collection her relationship with her poetry translator, Catherine Rodríguez-Nieto, began. The relationship has endured through Corpi’s two highly applauded books of poetry: Palabras de mediodía/Noon Words (1980) and Variaciones sobre una tempestad/Variations on a Storm (1990). In 1979, Corpi received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts to produce the latter book.

While Lucha Corpi had experimented with short-story writing earlier, her first full-length novel, Delia’s Song, was published in English in 1984. Based on her political activism at the university in the early 1970’s, Delia’s Song is one of the very few novelistic representations of an historical period that was so important in the making of the modern Chicano.

Of her novelistic writing, Corpi has said, “I write in English because my dreams are—literally—expressed in that language. Also, I write about the political struggle I have witnessed and have shared with so many Chicanos during my life in California.”

Her second novel, Eulogy for a Brown Angel (1992), also takes as its background the Chicano civil rights movement. Described as a feminist detective novel, Eulogy is fast-paced, suspenseful and packed with an assortment of interesting characters. Her feminist protagonist, Gloria Damasco, is somewhat of a clairvoyant who is able to use more than reason and logic in solving a very puzzling crime.

Following is the first exciting chapter of Eulogy for a Brown Angel.