María Amparo Escandón

María Amparo Escandón
Born	June 19, 1957 (1957-06-19) (age 54)
Occupation	Novelist, Short Story Writer, Screenwriter, Film Producer

María Amparo Escandón (June 19, 1957) is a Mexican born, US resident, best-selling bilingual novelist, short story writer, screenwriter, and film producer. Her award-winning work is known for addressing bicultural themes that deal with the immigration experience of Mexicans crossing over to the United States. Her stories concentrate on family relationships, loss, forgiveness, faith, and self-discovery. A linguist with a sharp ear for dialogue, she explores the dynamics of language in border sub-cultures and the evolution of Spanglish. Her innovative style of multiple voice narrations and her cleverly humorous, quirky, and compassionate stories with a feminine angle capture the magical reality of everyday life and place her among the top Latin American female writers. Her work has been translated into over 21 languages and is currently read in more than 85 countries.

Literary career

María Amparo Escandón developed her career in the early 1970s during the Latin American Boom. Her first published short story appeared in the Mexican literary journal Plural in 1973 when she was sixteen. The works of masters Julio Cortázar, Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes, Juan Rulfo, Pablo Neruda, Mario Benedetti, Gabriel García Márquez, Alejo Carpentier, and others influenced her work. Convinced that men had better opportunities to succeed as writers than women, she wrote her first short stories from the male perspective. It was until she moved to Los Angeles in 1983 when she discovered women writers like Toni Morrison and Sandra Cisneros that she shifted her perspective and focused on women's issues and the Mexican American experience in the US.

Living in California, Escandón began to view her culture of origin from an expatriate distance that provided her a deeper analysis of ingrained traditions, like the Mexicans' unique practice of Catholicism influenced by Pre-Columbian beliefs, women's position in society, female identity, illegal immigration, US-Mexico relations, and government corruption, all topics that she later drew on to write her novels and non-fiction work. In 1999, she wrote her first novel, Esperanza's Box of Saints published by Simon & Schuster, and its Spanish version, Santitos, published by Plaza & Janés, now Random House. Esperanza's Box of Saints deals with the universal fear of losing a child, with a woman's search for identity and a journey—both geographical and spiritual—that take Esperanza, the lead character, through sordid brothels throughout Mexico and into Los Angeles. Escandón's novel has been the number one best seller in the Los Angeles Times Best Sellers List. She has been named the writer to watch for 1999 by Newsweek magazine and the writer to watch for 2000 by the Los Angeles Times. Her second novel, González & Daughter Trucking Co., was published in English by Three Rivers Press in 2005 and in Spanish by Vintage Español under the title Transportes González e Hija. It is set in a Mexican prison and the roads of America. It deals with women's relationships, guilt, crime, passion, corruption and forgiveness in a context of a hybrid border culture. In this novel Escandón approaches her personal relationship with her own father who died of a heart attack three days after she finished writing her manuscript. She addresses paternal possessiveness and gender double standards in the Mexican society. The novel also reflects a linguistic reality in bicultural California exploring the vernacular merge of Spanish and English (Spanglish), as well as different sub-culture lingoes.^[1]

Aside from teaching Creative Writing at UCLA Extension, Escandón has been an advisor at the Sundance Screenwriters Labs in Mexico and Brazil, as well as at the Fundación Contenidos de Creación Fiction Workshops in Barcelona, and participates as a mentor for young upcoming minority writers at the PEN Center's Emerging Voices Program. Additionally, she is one of the original members of Frijolywood, the official Mexican Filmmakers' association in Hollywood.^[2]

Film career

Escandón wrote the screenplay Santitos, based on her novel Esperanza’s Box of Saints at the Sundance Screenwriters Lab. The film was produced by John Sayles and directed in Mexico by Alejandro Springall. The film was the third largest grossing Mexican film in Mexico in 1999 and was successfully released in Spain and Latin America in January 2000. To date, the film has received awards in 14 film festivals around the world, such as the Latin Cinema Award at the Sundance Film Festival, Best Film at the Guadalajara Film Festival, Best Actress at the Latin American Film Festival in Lima, Peru, Best Film at the Los Angeles Latino Film Festival, Best Actress at the Festival International du Film d'Amiens, Best Film at the Santa Fe International Film Festival, Grand Jury Award at the Cartagena International Film Festival, Best Opera Prima at the Heraldos Awards in Mexico, Special Jury Award at the Rencontres Cinémas de Toulouse, and Best Opera Prima by the Critique Française (Découverte de la Critique Française).

Escandón has recently completed the screenplay based on her novel González & Daughter Trucking Co. and the film is currently in active development at her own production company, The Other Truth Productions.^[3]

Wings for the Soul

In addition to her writing career, Escandón launched the first-ever prison book club and author series in 2005, Wings for the Soul, at the California Institution for Women in Corona, CA, made possible by the Women and Criminal Justice Network. Wings for the Soul gave inmates the opportunity to meet four times a year to read and discuss a particular book with the author. The books were primarily written by and about women.^[1]

Published work

• Esperanza’s Box of Saints (Santitos, in Spanish) (Simon & Schuster) (1998)
• González & Daughter Trucking Co. (Three Rivers Press) (2005)
• Las Mamis, Favorite Latino Authors Remember their Mothers, Edited by Esmeralda Santiago and Joie Davidow (Knopf) (2000)

Filmography

• Santitos (1997) (Screenwriter, Actress)

External links

• http://www.mariaescandon.com/
• http://acento.com/

References

1. ^ ^{a b} http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5054995
2. ^ http://www.frijolywood.org
3. ^ http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0260203/

Persondata
Name	Amparo Escandon, Maria
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Date of birth	June 19, 1957
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