Author Bio
• Birth—June 19, 1957
• Where—Mexico City, Mexico
• Education—N/A
• Awards—Film awards for Santitos (see below)
• Currently—lives in Los Angeles, California, USA
Maria Amparo Escandon 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.
Short Stories
Maria Amparo Escandon 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 Cortazar, Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes, Juan Rulfo, Pablo Neruda, Mario Benedetti, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 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.
Novels
Living in California, Escandon 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.
Her first novel published in 1999, Esperanza's Box of Saints (Santitos—Spanish version), 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. Escandon's novel achieved the number one spot on the Los Angeles Times best sellers list. Both Newsweek (1999) and Los Angeles Times (2000) named her the writer to watch.
Gonzalez & Daughter Trucking Co., (Transportes Gonzalez e Hija—Spanish version) her second novel, was published in 2005. 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 Escandon 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.
Aside from teaching Creative Writing at UCLA Extension, Escandon has been an advisor at the Sundance Screenwriters Labs in Mexico and Brazil, as well as at the Fundacion Contenidos de Creacion 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.
Film career
Escandon 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 Cinemas de Toulouse, and Best Opera Prima by the Critique Francaise (Decouverte de la Critique Francaise).
Escandon has recently completed the screenplay based on her novel Gonzalez & Daughter Trucking Co. and the film is currently in active development at her own production company, The Other Truth Productions.
Wings for the Soul
In addition to her writing career, Escandon 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. (From Wikipedia.)