It’s a sunny Saturday morning in El Monte, California, and in a rare turn of events, I am running early. I’ve traveled here to meet with Carribean Fragoza, a professor in the CalArts MFA Creative Writing program and Whiting Award winning author of the short story collection Eat the Mouth That Feeds You (City Lights, 2021).
CalArts professor Carribean Fragoza.
I’m here because in addition to her work as a writer, a professor and a mother of two, Carribean is also one of the co-founders of the South El Monte Arts Posse. Today I’ll be attending the Posse’s gardening workshop. My earliness turns out to be its own reward as now I get to watch the idyllic scene unfolding around me in Zamora Park. Young children shriek in joy from the playground as elders walk in pairs or small groups around the surrounding track. On a nearby basketball court, a group of local firefighters play a few quick pickup games.
Under the park’s central gazebo, picnic tables are set up with paint kits, gardening supplies, and snacks. The people preparing for the event introduce themselves to me as Valeria and Pedro, who serve (respectively) as the resident gardener and resident librarian at C.A.S.A. Zamora, the house leased by SEMAP which sits at the park’s edge. They’re both quick to tell me how grateful they are for SEMAP and the community Carribean has helped foster therein, and as neighbors start trickling into the workshop, I quickly see what they mean firsthand. Pedro greets everyone, old and young, with the warmth of old friends; Valeria seems to know the name of every child present. Soon the workshop is underway. Some folks take the time to paint and decorate their planters, while Valeria instructs others on the best way to transplant seedlings. Things have been humming along for nearly an hour when Carribean arrives. Instantly, the warm energy of the scene shifts towards her — everyone wants a moment of her time, wants to tell her hello. Watching the intention with which she greets each individual makes it clear that Fragoza has not simply shown up at this idyllic scene of community care: she has enabled it.
Fragoza’s involvement in the community arts is nothing new. As a high schooler, she attended the California State Summer School for the Arts on the CalArts campus, a program designed to provide young artists with a supportive environment. “I knew that one day, perhaps for an MFA I would go to CalArts,” she recalls, “I was just really enamored with it from a very young age.” For her undergrad she attended UCLA, where she majored in Chicano/Chicana Studies and Comparative Literature and worked as an editor for La Gente de Aztlan, a student magazine that came out of the Civil Rights and Chicano movements. After graduating from UCLA and completing her MFA in CalArts’ Creative Writing program, Carribean stayed at CalArts for work, finding employment as the director of their Community Arts Partnership, a program committed to offering free arts education to youth in the greater LA area.
It’s no surprise, then, that Fragoza would go on to foster an artists’ collective of her own. SEMAP, co-founded with Fragoza’s husband, historian Romeo Guzmán, aims “to shift the relationship between the bodies of South El Monte/El Monte residents and transients and the physical spaces they inhabit by using art to foster agency, ownership, and grassroots democracy.” In September of 2023, SEMAP was able to move into C.A.S.A. Zamora, a space made available through an agreement between the city and Guzmán’s campus, Claremont Graduate University, which facilitates the leasing of space to arts programs for a single dollar a year. C.A.S.A. (Cultura, Archivo, Solidaridad, Acción) Zamora functions not only as an archive for the stories of the SEM/EM area, but as a meeting place for activists, a lending library, and a community center. In addition to the beautiful space at C.A.S.A. Zamora, SEMAP is also responsible for East of East, an edited collection of essays from 2020 which details the history of the El Monte neighborhood over the span of generations. “As a young person growing up in this neighborhood, all I wanted was to leave,” Fragoza admits, “but now all I want is to keep coming back.”
I think as writers, many of us go through some point or another when we’re just wondering, ‘Is this gonna work? Am I gonna be able to sustain this longer?’ I mean, there’s some pretty funky places we can go to as writers.
This sentiment is a prominent one in Carribean’s work, particularly her fiction. Eat the Mouth That Feeds You is a short story collection weaving together tales of surreality in Latinx communities on both sides of the U.S./Mexico border. The stories grapple with historical violence, Chicanx womanhood, and familial traumas. In addition to being a Pen America Literary Award Finalist, Fragoza’s collection turned the public’s attention back towards her fiction. Carribean recalls, “I’d been known primarily as a journalist, an art critic, and a cultural critic, but people had forgotten that I was a fiction writer. So after I published my book, it sort of set me back on fiction and being recognized as a fiction writer.” To say she was recognized is an understatement; shortly thereafter, Fragoza won the Whiting Award, a prestigious literary accolade that comes with a fifty thousand dollar grant. The news came at a time before Fragoza knew she would be returning to CalArts as a professor, and she describes the validation it offered: “I think as writers, many of us go through some point or another when we’re just wondering, ‘Is this gonna work? Am I gonna be able to sustain this longer?’ I mean, there’s some pretty funky places we can go to as writers. So it gave me a big confidence boost to know that this really prestigious entity respected the work I was doing and decided to recognize me for what I had been doing all those years.”
In discussing what drew her to CalArts, Carribean praises the Creative Writing program’s non-genre-tracking nature. “We’re proud of students who are multidisciplinary and multi-genre, that are fluid in all the ways that they want to be. I think that speaks to me and how fluid I wanted to be my entire life. It’s something I think about often: how is it that this strange multifaceted life that I live came to be? And how do I bring those pieces together?” Fragoza calmly but consistently punctuates her speech with gestures from just one hand as she continues, “I think that’s something people are interested in. How do I bring being a mother, a member of this community, my writing practice, and my commitment to community arts together?” In answer to this, she mentions that she is continuing to find meaningful ways that CalArts and SEMAP can mutually benefit each other. She notes a growing interest in SEMAP’s work among CalArts graduate students, who she sees as being interested in “how to have a writing life that is not separate from the world.” It’s certainly demanding work to find avenues for bringing together so many resources, but Fragoza is grateful for the opportunity: “I feel lucky that I get to live this life and that CalArts is part of it.”
