I never intended to be a writer. As far as I knew, my passion was for acting and for many years that was the career I pursued. Writing seemed not only incompatible with a life in the theater, but inconceivable to someone who considered the English language his worst handicap.

It’s not like that ever prevented me from putting pencil to paper. From the earliest age, I can recall locking myself in my room to scribble out all sorts of nonsense. I kept a diary, I scratched out poems and stories. My mother still keeps in her old file cabinet the first two poems I penned when I was six or so: “For My Mother” and “Ode to a Prairie Dog.” I wrote so much crap when I was young, and what I wrote I fancied good enough to keep, but not good enough to share with anyone else.

That’s because I grew up with a lot of insecurities, due in large part to my cultural origins. I was a Mexican-American kid, born of poor immigrant parents from Coahuila, Mexico, and, for the first few years in El Paso, my brothers, sister, and I spoke a very rough and informal Spanish at home and in the streets. All the English we knew was learned from TV shows and radio. Once we got in school, we realized how woefully inadequate that was.

I gotta hand it to my teachers, though. Without ever once denying me the right to use my native tongue, they infused in me a love and respect for English which continues today. They introduced me early to real literature, to poetry with a capital P, to the fantastical worlds I thought only the movies could evoke. With a zealot’s appetite, I read Poe, Verne, Twain, A. Conan Doyle, H.G. Wells, the Brontës. I wrote papers on them and later, poems and little fictions which emulated their style. It was my fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Harris, who told me that the best revenge against those who mocked my English was to become better at it than they were. And I thought I had.

But something dramatic happened to me in high school. Recruited for the fall production of The Diary of Anne Frank, I discovered that I seemed to have a knack for acting. I took some speech classes, joined the Drama Club, and got cast in the next school play. In a matter of days, I was stagebit. Acting became the thing I did all through high school, and by graduation time I had resolved to make it my life’s work.

Theater was a cheap and immediate alternative to the movies. The poor man’s cinema, so to speak. I had long been smitten with the movies, ever since I saw from my crib the grimy black-and-white images of King Kong and Frankenstein. There was something in those old gothic horror and suspense flicks that seemed so large, so otherworldly, they were almost operatic. The theatricality of their expressions, the manner in which the world was reduced to a sound stage with stark uses of light and epic angles, and the easy insistence on the fantastic (something I later found out was called the willing suspension of disbelief), all these facets made it logical for me to drift toward the stage. Here was the same world with the same monsters, only their names were now Iago, Macbeth, and Bottom. The same beautiful, powerful sirens were there, too: Nora, Ondine, and Rosalind. Even the Mexican horror films of my youth manifested themselves in the work I saw onstage; the burlesque conflicts of El Santo and Mil Máscaras (famous wrestling idols of the fifties and sixties) battling Dracula and La Momia (The Mummy) and zombies of every ilk seemed to find their translations in the lazzis of commedia dell’arte and high camp. But, finally, it was the power of language in drama that drew me toward it. If I could master the English spoken by these heroes and monsters, if I could warble Shakespeare as comfortably as anyone else, then I could shed a little more of that irrational boyhood shame.

All this time, of course, I was writing and reading intensely. Working with and producing verse for the school literary magazine, I pored over the works of William Carlos Williams, Vachel Lindsay, Marianne Moore, T.S. Eliot, and Sylvia Plath. But at no time did I ever entertain the notion of pursuing this kind of work seriously. I was an actor.

Entry into college at Trinity University in San Antonio delivered a shock to my system. Once again, I seemed to be disastrously unprepared for the level of education and sophistication that the university environment provided. Everyone spoke so intelligently, everyone seemed so worldly-wise. I could barely open my mouth to speak. I was so self-conscious of my inability with the language, and with the accent of my parent’s tongue present in my speech, I really did have to frame each sentence in my mind beforehand. Actually, this acute awareness of language turned out to be an asset for me as a writer: I pay attention to the cadence of words, to the texture and coloring of each syllable, and strive to use the lexicon as a kind of music.

Of course, I was no more or less intelligent and articulate than anyone else; I was simply reacting like an insecure ESL kid from the border town. In retrospect, I think that my love for literature, which was growing more and more ardent every year, was being compromised by this strange relationship to a language I felt I had no affinity for. It was as if English was the birthright of others, not mine. Silly of me to think so, even culturally crippling, but there you have it. Whereas my mother was proud of all the English she was learning at her soda-fountain job, even poking fun at herself for the hilarious flubs she made (“Would you like a snake with that, sir?” “Are you ready for your desert?”), I was obsessing over proper usage and pronunciation and feeling alternately threatened and seduced by great works in English. This warring over the language, over its sense and meaning, continues today, albeit in a healthier mode.

If I had been exposed to the writings of people of my background, if I had at least known of Mexican-American writers like Jimmy Santiago Baca and Jose Montoya and Luis Valdez, if I had even been schooled in the rich literary tradition already established in Latin America by Gabriel García Márquez, Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes, and Mario Vargas Llosa, who knows how much sooner I might have turned into a writer. I hold my college partly responsible for that lapse; in the end, I should have sought them out. But I was too busy trying to become something I wasn’t, hiding behind a perfectly wrought mask of erudite English. Not so ironic, then, that I should want to become an actor.

Throughout undergraduate and graduate schools, I pursued my studies in theater, focussing primarily on acting and immersing myself in as many acting styles and periods as I could. But the terms of my study required that I also take playwriting courses. Under the tutelage of such fine writing instructors as Eugene McKinney and Glenn Allen Smith, I studied scene construction, learned about dialogue, and wrote small scenes and half-baked plays. I did all this more out of a sense of obligation to my teachers than out of any desire to express myself in dramatic form. I saved that for the long self-indulgent poems I wrote in utter privacy. And, naturally, for the roles I played onstage.

It was a little weird for someone like me, a young Latino feeling diminished by his own vocabulary, to feel so comfortable speaking onstage in front of a lot of people. Only it wasn’t me who was speaking; it was the people I was portraying. There was tremendous gratification in feeling the words come so naturally from my lips, fulminant and ripe and precise. I could execute any of Shakespeare’s monologues; I could throw myself into Pinter and Mamet with complete command. I couldn’t count on myself to be like that in real life, but in someone else’s clothes, English was my ally.

Yet I never once forswore my literary bent. I took intense courses on the epic, reading and studying in two consecutive summers some of the greatest works in western literature. Among them were Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, Beowulf, The Divine Comedy, Moby-Dick, and several of Faulkner’s novels. These great works made an impression on me that, to my profit, I haven’t been able to shake.

After seven years of acting courses (and as many semesters taking playwriting), I launched into my career. Audition after audition, resumes, headshots, voice-overs, readings, workshops...this was the routine I plunged into. Sometimes I got cast in an industrial film or a local TV commercial, and I even bagged a small speaking part in a made-for-TV movie, but generally I took part in the drudgery of dead-end auditions. It was depressing. Moreover, I began to resent being treated like meat at these cattle-calls, and I bucked at the loss of control my peers and I underwent in the process. What really rankled me, however, was the frequency with which I was sent out for roles I found demeaning: background cultural stereotypes like gardeners, waiters, butlers, and janitors. Either I was considered for these incidental parts or got cast in wretched works I couldn’t recommend to my friends. These latter works often paid zero.

The single play I was proud to have been cast in was Native Speech, a new work by a hot young playwright named Eric Overmyer. I played a thuggish transvestite with a feral snarl and great legs. It was fun (a fucking blast, in truth) to live inside this crazy nut, but what really turned my head was the writing. Native Speech was full of gorgeous profane disorganized poetry, rich with metaphor and literary allusions I actually recognized; here for the first time was a play which fearlessly experimented with language and defined the universe of the characters in poetic terms; here was a work which pinned English to the mat and forced it to say shit it didn’t know it could. I was aroused.

It was then that I realized: This was something I had always been dreaming about. Finally, I acknowledged this desire to write plays, plays which stretched the envelope of believability like Native Speech. I felt I already knew how, in some strange way. It was simply a matter of someone else showing me that it was O.K. to do so. That’s when I came up with a plan to showcase myself.

I wrote a short play of about 20 minutes in length, completely in verse, employing music, song, movement, and spoken text, and I solicited the 500 Café, this Dallas nightclub where I tended bar, to let me put it on before the first music act. Once I got the O.K., I cast it, rehearsed it, directed myself and three other actors, and put it on for one night at the club. I invited directors, producers, casting directors, and local actors so they could finally see my chops in action. None of them came, but the audience that did show remarked not on my acting skill, but on the originality of the script, the word-play, the songs, the story, and even the other actors. The one question they all asked: When is the next episode going on?

So I wrote the next episode, and in the ensuing months wrote the remaining eight, presenting them every month and a half for about a period of a year. Dubbed “The Geometricia Saga,” they developed a cult audience of young people, poets, dancers, journalists, and musicians (oddly, very few theatre denizens), and they confirmed me as a playwright of some local stature. I acted in every one of them, but because I did double-duty as director, my roles became more peripheral. It didn’t matter. I was now getting my charge from writing these phantasmagoric playlets. All the intimidation, all the alienation I had suffered from this monolith called Language was suddenly dispelled. American English was my sandbox now, and everyone wanted to play.

The most unexpected development came about when Teatro Dallas called. Their artistic director, Cora Cardona, commissioned me to write a play for her company, the only two restrictions being: 1) the work had to be set during the Mexican “Day of the Dead” and 2) its main character had to be the indefatigable Don Juan. In the first place, I was stunned that there was a company made up of Latino actors like myself, performing in pieces written by other Latino playwrights from across the country and beyond. Secondly, I was shocked that they wanted a play which reflected my own background, my culture, my own roots.

I couldn’t believe my ignorance. How could I have possibly gone through seven years of collegiate study and three of professional endeavors and never once come across the works of my Raza? Never once had the notions of Latino theater and literature been introduced to me, never once had anyone suggested that perhaps I might benefit from writing closer to those bones. Now, this company was asking me to contribute to a theatrical tradition I had no inkling of.

For them I wrote Man of the Flesh, my first play to deal with Latino themes and characters, thus marking a new milestone in my transformation into a full-on writer. In this play, and in every work I have subsequently penned, the English I had so respected and feared was given new force and wider scope through an infusion of my original tongue, my father’s Spanish. Through the further guidance of my mentor Maria Irene Fornes, a powerful playwright adept in both languages herself, I have learned to listen to the voices of the people in my plays with complete faith that whatever tongue they use will be their truest one. And they, in turn, will keep me honest in whatever language I exercise.

In attempting to mark the turning points which have made me the writer I claim to be today, I find that there was no one thing or occasion which determined my life’s choice. There was always reading, always good books. I can track a graduation from one level of difficulty to another (Poe to Eliot to Joyce), and the emergence of Latin American literature as an abiding influence. Today, I am touched and inspired by contemporaries like Isabel Allende, Junot Diaz, Arturo Islas, and my favorites, Fuentes and Márquez. I still spend hours with volumes of poetry, ancient and modern, and I return to my epics as often as I can. My books were superb teachers and true accomplices in the development and execution of my craft.

But I also see that my passion for the theater helped to focus my writing. Having been an actor, I knew what an actor required; having been a directeor, I knew how my plays should evolve. The words I write are not meant to be read, but to be spoken aloud before an audience, under the canopy of willed suspension of disbelief. Text is simply a blueprint for something greater which lives and dies within a matter of hours each night. This ongoing sense of impermanence is what, for me, being a playwright is all about.

I see that my tutors and mentors made a difference. Even as I dallied my way through all those playwriting courses I took in college, something was being absorbed, something less about the mechanics of writing and more about the truth required to commit it. I see that Fornes pushed me to a level of trust in my own creativity, something no one had done before. She, more than anyone else, made me feel that what I was engaged in was real art. Then again, my mother made me feel that way, when I wrote that poem for her. It scanned, and it rhymed, and it danced on that sheet of paper so deftly, my mom has kept it close ever since. Her own encouragement made me a writer, too.

In the end, however, I wonder if perhaps I had always been a writer to begin with. Whatever possessed me at six years of age to lock myself in my room to scribble out poems imprisons me today behind my laptop, the door to my office firmly shut against the world. The impulse to represent myself in this manner over other forms of self-expression must have been neural at the very least. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew this is what I would do. No question. What is often called into question is whether I am any good at it for any length of time, but that almost doesn’t matter. I write, whatever the consequences, and when I stop writing, I’ll stop doing everything else, too.

Then there is this ongoing struggle with the English language. Perhaps this is what truly keeps this ESL kid from El Paso writing. It would be ironic, and, indeed, the best revenge, if the thing I considered my worst handicap should become what I’m known for. The question is, whose revenge and for what?