Q&A with Yvonne Martinez

 

Photo by Matt Wong

 

 

Yvonne Martinez is the author of the new novel Scabmuggers. She also has written the memoir Someday Mija, You'll Learn the Difference Between a Whore and a Working Woman. A retired labor negotiator/organizer, she lives in Berkeley, California.

 

Q: What inspired you to write Scabmuggers, and how was the book’s title chosen?  

 

A: The book is based on my experience at Harvard University where we fought a Trumpian bully and won. Scabmuggers were turn of the century ethnic women who hid cudgels in corsets at picket lines to protect themselves from police at the Mill Strikes.

 

Q: As you mentioned, the book is based on a true story--what did you see as the right balance between fiction and history?

 

A: It was first a screenplay with all 30 of us in it. Then a stage play with fewer. Then it made the transition to a book. In each iteration the scenes were basically intact, pivoting where needed to the demands of a first-person narrator.

 

Q: The Kirkus Review of the book called it an “engrossing fictional examination of challenges women face in reform movements and in the world at large.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: It aptly captures the underbelly social movement work; what women and women of color go through even in "movement" work.

 

Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?

 

A: I hope that any activist who is going through what we went through at Harvard and reads this book learns that she/he is not crazy and not alone. That only by coming together, telling the truth to one another and finding allies, can we creatively fight back and win. 

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I'm haunted by the murder of my great-grandfather, the so-called Utah Millard Bandit. He was shot by a posse of 90 deputized men in Delta, Utah over a hundred years ago.

 

A mob went in search of the families in the Mexican camp who harbored him. The families, including my great-grandmother, barely survived. His body has never been found, but his story is still very much alive. 

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: Each book I've written sets out to answer a question. By the end of the book journey, I hardly recognize the question. 

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb