Mother country
By John Habich

Sandra Benitez realized from the start that the little boy's mother would die.

Four of Benitez's friends had been killed during the revolution in El Salvador. Her brother-in-law had been kidnapped, then forced to flee the country. Even from Edina, where she has lived for about 20 years, she felt their suffering. When she decided to open her third novel at a historical event -- the funeral of Archbishop Oscar Romero in 1980 -- she knew from the outset that Lety Veras would number among those killed in the ensuing pandemonium.

Lety's only son, Nicolas, is the hero of that new novel, "The Weight of All Things," like its predecessors woven from the culture and turbulent history of El Salvador, where she grew up. A story of the boy's search for his mother, spurred by love for his grandfather and faith in the Virgin Mary, it is the new selection of the Talking Volumes regional book club.

Benitez has endured her own hard search, likewise fortified by faith. She struggled to become a published author despite harsh criticism or indifference, and despite her inexperience when she decided to become a writer at age 39. She did it by claiming the Latina half of her heritage.

Benitez, born Sandra Ables, spent her childhood in Mexico and El Salvador as the privileged daughter of a U.S. diplomat and his Puerto Rican wife. Her first writing was at the behest of the illiterate women household servants in El Salvador. "They wanted to write letters home and they asked me to do it: 'La niÞa Sandra, por favor, escribame una carta,' you know? And I would sit there and listen to their stories and write."

When she was 14, her father sent her to live with his relatives on a Missouri dairy farm so she could become "Americanized." Her parents stayed in El Salvador long after her father retired. Her only sister married a Salvadoran. But Sandy Ables settled into a thoroughly gringa life.

It took the failure of her Americanized fiction for her to take ownership of the Latin American childhood that had largely shaped her. Her career took off only after she symbolically took her mother's maiden name and began writing about what she calls "the other America."

Fortitude and attitude

Benitez, who turns 60 on Monday, credits her success to sheer endurance. "Talent is important," she said, "but perseverance and tenacity will get you all the way."

She had been an English and Spanish teacher before moving here with her first husband and their two sons in the mid-1970s. Amid a temporary glut of teachers, she went to work as a translator of business programs into Spanish at Wilson Learning Corp. in Hopkins. Her marriage was foundering. One summer day at a back-yard party, a deck railing she was leaning against gave way and she fell 15 feet and broke her back. She was sandwiched into a Striker frame for three months and wore a body cast for six more.

Jim Kondrick, the man who'd hired her, visited her frequently at the hospital. "We had lots of conversations about life, marriage and all the rest of that. We became very, very close," he said. They moved in together and married in 1980.

She started paying attention to mailings from the Loft Literary Center, signed up for a weekly writing class at the Hopkins Community Center and decided to write a murder mystery set in Missouri. She told Kondrick she wanted to quit her job to write full-time, and he promised to support her until she was published.

"We didn't know it would take 13 years," she said, her voice suddenly loud with incredulity.

Benitez is the first to admit that some of her early writing was flat-out awful. Then as now, ex-journalist Kondrick would edit her. "I used to give her back her pages and every page had 20 or 30 marks on it," he said.

"Initially, she had so little control over point of view that she could violate it even when writing in the first person," said children's author Marion Dane Bauer of Eden Prairie, who taught Benitez in the Hopkins writing class. "But one day she got it and was just there. Sometimes they learn by inches and sometimes they take great leaps."

She also indulged in flowery verbiage that her classmates called "H.D." for "heightened diction." Benitez explained that her writing, even today, "comes to me in a Spanishness that manifests itself in much longer sentences, complex sentences and florid language." Through her years of study with Bauer and workshops at the Loft, she learned to rein it in.

She took the mystery novel to the respected Breadloaf writing colony in Vermont, where an instructor spent two hours berating it. "I came home and just was crushed," she said, exaggerating a frown. She buried the manuscript under her bed, where it remains to this day. "I said I was going to quit. Jim said he wouldn't let me quit. My writing class wouldn't let me quit."

Although her writing was uneven, it showed promise. "There were two or three chapters that were really pretty sparkling," Kondrick said. "The thing was, the more you write, the better you get, and that certainly proved true in her case."

Personal revolution

Her major turning point came with a complete change of subject matter, inspired in part by a three-month trip to Mexico with Kondrick, suffusing her in la vida latina.

"I started to think, 'OK, Sandy, maybe you ought to rethink what you're writing. Maybe a murder mystery set in Missouri is not the right thing for you. Start thinking about the stories the nanas told you as they were writing those letters home.' I finally said, 'OK, I'm going to write about Latino subjects.' This is what is really important to me; this is very precious material."

It was not so important to the U.S. book industry, she soon discovered. "In the '80s people weren't that interested in Latina stories," she said.

She had begun to win prizes through the Loft, earning the chance to study intensively with such established writers as Tim O'Brien, Toni Cade Bambara and Etheridge Knight. After 12 tries, she won a Bush Fellowship. But 20 New York publishers turned down her second attempt at a novel, set in El Salvador.

"Even 10 years ago, Latin fiction was viewed as 'What do we do with this? Who's going to buy it?'" said Leslie Wells, the executive editor at Hyperion who has worked on Benitez's past two books. "There wasn't even much thought about marketing to non-Hispanic readers."

Her ostensible career hit a near-fatal pothole on a bleak winter night in Fargo, N.D., where she and Kondrick had driven so she could deliver a lecture on Latino literature. Only one person showed up. One. On the way home, she told her husband it was time to give up, and for the first time, he agreed.

They returned to Edina, only to find a phone message from Coffee House Press offering her a book contract. Remembering it today causes her to erupt in high-pitched giggles. "It changed my life!" she gasps.

The 1993 novel, "A Place Where the Sea Remembers," went on to win a Minnesota Book Award and a Discover Award from Barnes & Noble. "All those guys had said no, no, no! So you need to persevere if you're a writer. Because you never know when success could be," she said, escalating into a joyful scream, "right around the corner!"

Keen-o Latinos

Publishers recognized a Hispanic growth market at the same time that mainstream U.S. reading appetites grew for the stories of that vast and varied "other America" to the south.

Benitez signed a two-book contract with Hyperion of New York City. Her second book, "Bitter Grounds," won an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. She started visiting book clubs on request; to date, she has been to more than 100.

As she was embraced by the Minnesota writing community, she also became a member of a burgeoning Latino literary circle, including Isabel Allende ("House of the Spirits"), Oscar Hijuelos ("The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love"), Denise Chavez ("Face of an Angel"), Cristina Garcia ("Dreaming in Cuban") and Sandra Cisneros ("My Wicked Wicked Ways.") "There's a bunch of us out there trying to do this thing," she said.

She and Chavez call each other comadre -- "the one who's like your sister without being your sister, like your little mother." It is Chavez whom she calls at all hours to talk about writing or to cry during a crisis of confidence. She held her hands toward the heavens and wailed an example: "'Oh, my God, why did I decide to do this? I'd rather work at Wendy's; all I'd have to worry about is the smell of grease on my arms. Fine!'"

She also relies on her Roman Catholic faith. The Virgin Mary plays a crucial role in "The Weight of All Things" as a "second mother" to Nicolas as she was to the teenage Sandy Ables, also separated from her parents. "I've asked her for very many things, and I believe through her intercession they've been granted me. She's helped me through some very rough times in my life." She added enthusiastically, "I'm unabashedly devoted to both the Virgin Mary and to her son."

Benitez talks daily in Spanish to her sister, Anita Ables de Alvarez, who lives in Coral Gables, Fla.

"My English is like her Spanish," said Ables de Alvarez. "The U.S. is like a melting pot: They melted her but they could not melt me."

Yet her sister attests to the exactitude with which Benitez depicts El Salvador and its people. "It's exactly the same," she said. "It's very amazing because my sister has written a book as if she's never left."

From the other side of the narrowing cultural divide, her editor, Wells, said Benitez "so writes from the heart that she attaches you to the characters immediately, and you forget it's a country other than your own."

Benitez is 15 pages into her next book, titled "The Night of the Radishes" after a feast celebrated in Oaxaca, Mexico, each Dec. 23. Its protagonist is a woman from Hopkins, Minn., who goes there to get her life back together. "I have a lot of energy for taking the whole, rounded voice of who I really am, not just a Latina, but also a Minnesotan," she said, beaming. "A gringa latina."

Star Tribune Sunday, March 25, 2001