La Perdida, by Jessica Abel

It is rare to see a snow storm in Seattle, yet when it happens, it changes how we look at our city and daily routines. We are forced to consider the new possibilities and limitations that surround activities as ordinary to us as the ride home.

Reading Jessica Abel’s latest work, La Perdida, is similar to the Seattle snow storm—the story compels you to shift your perspective, while the art within the panels holds tightly to your attention. La Perdida portrays the tale of Carla, a young woman searching to find herself in a world where she doesn’t belong.

I spent a snowy afternoon with Abel, discussing La Perdida, women in comics, and cultural views in Mexico and the U.S. A Chicago-area native and current Brooklyn resident, her experiences while living in Mexico helpeddefine a stirring perspective on Mexican life and the people who thrive and suffer within it.

With her compelling recent release, Abel is becoming a major influence for American graphic novels. She is an educator and an artist. Abel’s work mirrors reality—sometimes dark and brooding, sometimes optimistic—but always effective and thought-provoking.

KNOCK: What is the significance of setting La Perdida in Mexico? Was this choice based on culture or history and is that something you’ve been particularly inspired by?

Jessica Abel: Well, I certainly loved it when I lived there. The language—Mexican as opposed to Spanish— was so cool. It’s such a great language. This isn’t to say it’s really different from Spanish. Obviously it’s not. I loved slang. I loved learning the way people expressed themselves. It shows so much about how they feel about themselves.

Learning things like that was really wonderful for me. Part of the mission of the story has to do with talking about Mexico and getting Americans to have a picture—any kind of picture—of what Mexico City is and an understanding of the people. It’s a city that has a life. Before I went down there I knew it existed, but I had only the vaguest notion of anything about it.

K: A lot of people, a lot of young people especially, are fairly unaware of some of the struggles that are going on in Mexico and with Mexican workers. And you only see the perspective from this side of the border when it comes to NAFTA and other issues. There aren’t enough movies like A Day Without a Mexican.

JA: And we only see people who come here as immigrants. Certainly if you talk to immigrants, you realize they’re diverse. But Mexico is a country with a spectrum of types of people and things that people do. That wasn’t an eye-opening discovery to me because of course I expected to find something along those lines. But it’s not something most people think about. They think of Mexicans as peasants. They think of Mexicans as people who can’t speak English who are here to be illiterate and that’s not even close to a full picture. So, I felt that if nothing else, coming out of this book you’d feel like you’d heard the voices of some people who lived a different way. And maybe you wouldn’t like them. And you’d be right not to like some of them. But they have their own wholeness and personality and so on.

K: There are people who don’t realize that there are definitely different classes and groups in Mexico.

JA: Maybe even more so than here.

K: They see Vicente Fox. They see people who are coming across the border in the middle of the night and they don’t see anything in between. But you don’t hear about the wealthy class in Mexico as often. Not that the focus should be emphasized on the wealthy class, but an accurate representation of Mexico—the people—seems to be missing.

JA: Even the educated middle class. Although the educated middle class in Mexico is small it’s a very influential and powerful group. They’re the people who don’t have millions of dollars, but are the people who write the newspapers and literary magazines. They write the books and they have a lot of dialogue about what Mexico is and what it should be. Mexicans themselves carry on (their own dialogue) and we don’t need to do that for them but we should be aware of what they’re talking about and who they are.

K: When you were in Mexico, was your social circle mainly Mexican, or other foreigners, and were they in the arts or other writers?

JA: When we arrived, our friends were fairly evenly split between a group of Mexican intellectuals and writers and liberal artists on one side. And then the other half were these expat journalists and that’s where the whole group of journalists (featured in La Perdida) sort of comes from. As time went on the expats rotated out. Most of them were gone by the time we left. But the Mexicans weren’t and we continued to meet more people. So, by the end most of the people we knew were either long-term expats, people who weren’t going anywhere, or mostly Mexican writers, artists, dancers and people like that.

K: A lot of the dialogue in La Perdida seemed to be influenced by cultural gender roles Americans think of when they think of Mexico. How did the cultural influence direct the dialogue between the men and women in the story? Carla, the main character, seemed to take it in stride.

JA: She was a bit oblivious. There were certainly people I met who played off those roles more than others, but most the people who I knew, most of my friends there are like my friends here who reject those kinds of roles for the most part.

And so I gleaned stuff. I do know that gringa women are valuable to some kinds of men. They’re status symbols and that’s part of what I tried to get into. Carla doesn’t quite understand what’s going on. She thinks she’s in on the joke with everybody. But she’s this symbol who’s being paraded around. And even the fact that she’s not particularly glamorous or anything doesn’t matter. If she were blond and cuter it would be better. But as it is she’s clearly American and she’s pretty and she’s foreign. She’s a status symbol. I saw that around. Again, for the people that I really spent time with there, it wasn’t so much the case. But among the people that I encountered there, it was.

K: I got a sense of desperation from Carla—there were times when she seemed so desperate to make a place for herself.

JA: Well she doesn’t, to me, have much of a bass note in her personality. She doesn’t have anything to go back to. I’m not sure exactly why that is. I think that she’s a person who, back in the U.S. was a little bit of a dilettante and maybe she isn’t that smart—I don’t know. She’s someone who hasn’t really grabbed the baton, she hasn’t done anything. And so when she makes this decision to pick up and move to another country, which is actually a really difficult thing to do, it’s not like she’s without resources. She gets there and she has a vision for it. When that starts not working out she becomes a little bit desperate. She wants things to be the way she wants them to be.

K: It seems that through her experience Carla developed strength which she may not have had otherwise.

JA: That’s possible. She would rather not have developed that strength, perhaps. In the story she’s 23, 24, somewhere around there. Maybe by the time she’s 30, this will be a part of her life that is really meaningful to her because she will have incorporated it in some way that’s useful. But at the time she’s telling the story, Carla would probably dispute that with you. I think later on she’ll find that it’s a trial by fire. She survived when some people don’t.

K: Do you feel that multicultural relationships are left out of fiction and graphic novels in a way that is disproportionate to the realities of multicultural romantic relationships in urban communities?

JA: I think in general people who aren’t white are left out of fictional narratives way too often and that basically dictates that people who are in mixed race relationships are going to be left out also. I don’t think there’s any kind of conspiracy about it, but there’s a way in which, Black and white, all of us have an imagination that is formed by pop culture and pop culture is full of white people. So you find even black people are writing stories about white people.

What I try to do is walk the line. I go as far as I think I can possibly go as a truthful artist. I write about people of whatever color and ethnicity as far as I think that I’m capable of doing it. So, I don’t write very many Black characters because I don’t feel a sense of authority about what it could be like to be Black. Whereas I’ve though a lot about what it might be like to be Mexican through the course of this book.

I’m writing about that and I don’t feel definitive about it. You may notice the whole thing is written from the point of view of a white person, so I give myself an out. <Laughs.> I’m trying to represent it as fully as I can. I feel like it’s really important for artists to take responsibility to include men and women, people of other different ethnicities without regard, being honest, not putting them in places where it seems wrong, but getting them everywhere.

K: Some of the concepts in La Perdida reflected other stories that I’ve heard from friends who been in Mexico and fallen in love with Mexican men and women.

JA: My agent is a Black woman and she fell in love with this book because as she announced to me, I’d dissected this liberal white mind set. She was so excited because she felt like I’d hit on the assumptions people like Carla make. And one of the things I love about Memo, the character, and what I could do with him is that he’s such an ass and he’s so full of shit, but he’s so right about Carla. He knows exactly what she’s about. She doesn’t want to believe it, but he knows it and he lays it out on her and she has to deal with it. And I love that about him—that you can’t embrace him fully. You can’t just be like ‘oh Memo, you’re so wise’ or something. But at the same time you see the truth in it. She nails him, too, when she talks about Memo wanting to get with blonde girlfriends. So they both have this little thing on each other and neither of them can come clean themselves.

I love that about that relationship and those characters. It makes it a lot more fun.

K: It was interesting to see that perspective and to see Carla confronted with the same things many people avoid confronting in real life. Is it easy to be confronted with the negative aspects of your cultural identity when you are living outside of your own cultural community? Does this make it easier to be confronted with, for example, your “whiteness”?

JA: Well it certainly takes you out of context enough that that can happen. If somebody like Carla lives in her normal situation, or even if I’m in my normal situation, most the people I know are culturally liberal. Most of them are white and most of them are cartoonists and they all live in Brooklyn. That is a miniscule subsection of the world, but it’s really easy to feel like you go from one group to another, to a dinner party and then another...Then you’re teaching over here and over there...And basically everybody has the same point of view and does the same sort of stuff. It’s because we live in this little subculture. You think ‘this is the way people are and this is what is real.’ But the second you leave there and you’re somewhere else, whether it’s Seattle or Mexico City, you automatically call into question who you are and what kind of assumptions you make.

Whether or not you decide to address them and grapple with them depends on how hard the questions are and whether or not you’re ready to do that. You may have it brought up for you eight times before you’re ready to think about it.

Sometimes you think about it, and you’re like ‘well, I don’t care, everybody else is wrong and I’m right.’ And that’s certainly what I think about when I confront conservative Americans—that they’re wrong and I’m right. The end.

K: And there’s no in-between?

JA: There is something in between, and that’s the thing to understand. To understand how people have a different point of view and feel a different way even if you disagree with them. You have to understand that these people may be people with integrity and affable seriousness who have come to a different conclusion.

Understanding groups like conservative Christians or something, not all of them, but some of those people have gone through the thinking required
to come to a conclusion and they come to a conclusion that’s different from mine. And I respect that. There are people that I’ve met who hold diametrically opposite opinions, and the opinions themselves, I don’t respect at all, but I respect the people because they’re serious—everything fits into a logical system within their ethics. I just disagree with some of their precepts.

I think the same thing goes for other kinds of situations. The thing with Carla and Memo is that they are far apart when it comes to deciding what’s real and what’s authentic and what people should be like and what people should do. Carla keeps saying come over here and Memo keeps telling Carla ‘no, come over here.’ In fact the reality is that things aren’t that far apart and if they just got off their high horses, they’d be a lot closer to each other. You’d still be able to recognize their differences but they’d be able to respect each other and be who they are and feel strong.

K: For a writer, it is important to realize each character’s platform.

JA: Right, you have to be able to buy it or you can’t write it. You have to at least for a moment suspend your own personality and embody the beliefs of somebody else. The thing is that it often happens to you unconsciously. You know you’re doing a good job when you try to make a character do something and they don’t want to do it. You just realize it’s totally hopeless and that’s not going to work. That’s when you know that you’ve written a good character. The character who fights back.

K: What audience do you expect will gravitate to your work?

JA: Well I have a core audience which is sort of late teens to late 20’s. Urban types. What’s interesting and nice about this book is that it doesn’t necessitate that kind of audience. It’s certainly not for kids. Some of my other work has an urban hipster edge to it and a lot of people get turned off by that, which is too bad, but I understand. With La Perdida there’s no knee jerk reaction unless you just dislike comics.

K: How did you get interested in the art form?

JA: Well, I’m one of those people who like adventure and sci-fi stuff. So, comics appealed to me. The earliest stuff I saw was not sci-fi or adventure. It was Wonder Woman—the 1940s Wonder Woman—which is deeply bizarre and cool. That was very early. And basically anything that I saw that was drawn I would refer to anything that was photographed. It’s just a part of me that is attracted to drawings. I still find drawings way more appealing than photography.

So, when I saw comics I was right on them—whatever they were. Often they were really terrible. I remember reading stuff and thinking this is so stupid, not even enjoying it, but still reading it over and over again and getting really involved in it. When I became a teenager and finally had my own money I would buy comic books and I bought superhero comic books because that was what was there. It wasn’t entirely superhero comic books but that was mostly what was available and I would buy some of those things. And that’s what kind of kept me engaged long enough for comics to start coming back as an art form.

K: On women in graphic novels: I’ve seen the genre growing so rapidly. Last week I noticed a group of high school girls that had stopped by our International District to pick up some Manga. They were very focused on their reading. I think the popularity is growing particularly in Seattle. Why do you think comics have seen a sudden rise?

JA: There is complicated history to comics which involves certain crises. Certain codes of what could be in and out were imposed, which resulted in a monoculture of superheroes by the 70’s and 80’s. All the other comics that had been made in the past were gone. You basically had superheroes and Archie and not much else. They were made by and for boys. There was nothing inherently appealing about comics for women. If the stories so clearly do not engage in the fantasies of girls they engage in the fantasies of boys, then yes, you’ll have a few women who continue to read this stuff and get interested in it but for the most part, girls will find it to be boys’ stuff and not interesting.

Meanwhile, in Japan girls continued to have comics made for them throughout this entire period. They have an entirely different history of what happened in the art form. It goes back to history. There was no conspiracy. Things just went the wrong way until we ended up with a situation where comics are totally identified with boys in our culture. Not true in Japan.

It takes reading comics to want to make comics. For the most part you have to be infected with the comics bug early.

Now, you have girls reading comics and you have girls wanting to make comics. In my generation of cartoonists, there are very few women relative to men. But in my students’ generation, there are starting to be many more and I think in the next few years it will just continue to go up. It has to do with historical cultural factors, nothing inherent to the art form.

K: Where do you see graphic novels going next?

JA: There is so much that can still be done in comics. Comics are the same age as film, basically. But film got picked up and went commercial early and then had an avant garde and then levels of avant gardes followed by university support and foundation support. All kinds of stuff happened with film in the last hundred years.

Almost none of that has happened with comics. Comics have a huge amount in common with film. And certainly, they are just as valid an art form as film or prose literature or whatever. Just think about the vast area that’s never been touched in comics.

For me to predict what is going to happen is just silly. They are going to keep being popular because they’re an interesting and powerful way of communicating. They’re going to keep being sometimes disappointing because it’s one of the hardest art forms to work in. You have to master so many diverse skills sets in order to do it—that have nothing to do with each other in some cases. Organization of ideas, graphic design, drawing, writing, those are the big categories. You have to learn so many things in order to do this. But to predict exactly what is going to come? Why bother? I hope what happens is that it continues to grow in mainstream and academic credibility so that there will be more support for it as an art form.

People should be able to learn comics as an art form everywhere. It is a narrative art form that is as rich as any other. The saddest thing about comics is the history of comics—the way that people have dismissed them. It’s amazing to see educated adults dismiss comics as an art form just because they associate them with a certain kind of content. It’s shocking sometimes. It’s much better now. We’re coming back from a great deficit.

K: Yet, it sounds like there are a lot of young people with talent awaiting opportunities as comic artists like you gain even more exposure.

JA: There are, but part of it is not enough training and not enough support. People come in who are talented, but they don’t go far enough with it and it’s incredibly difficult. The same way sometimes people make a film and their first film is their best film, and they never reach that point again—that is almost never the case with comics. People reach their peak years as cartoonists when they are in their 40’s and 50’s. Not their 20’s and 30’s like you do as a novelist or a film maker. In comics, you have to learn your craft for way too long for that to happen.

For more details on La Perdida and author Jessica Abel, go to: www.jessicaabel.com