font color="#000077">Q. Can you tell us how Cinco Puntos Press got started? A. We started Cinco Puntos Press in 1985, naively trying to figure out a way to work at home so we'd have more time to write, since we're both writers. Richard Grossinger of North Atlantic Press told us that he was making $25,000 a year as a publisher. That sounded great to us. Our friend Dagoberto Gilb had a collection of short stories he was sending around to different publishers. We said we'd like to try our hand at it. Winners on the Pass Line was Gilb's first book. Of course, Dagoberto Gilb went on to be really big, so we started out with a wonderful writer. In fact, we've had the privilege of publishing incredible writers. Our next book was Joe Hayes La Llorona, the well-known Hispanic legend about a woman who drowns her children when her husband leaves her for another woman. Repenting, she walks up and down the river wailing and weeping for her lost children. We knew what a marvelous storyteller Joe Hayes is because we'd been taking our kids to listen to his stories at the Border Folk Festival. His librito of the Wailing Woman, which still sells for only $5.95, has since sold close to 75,000 copies; it's been such an important part of our success that we call Cinco Puntos the house that La Llorona built. Without understanding it, these two books set us off in the directions we're still publishing today great literature for adults and great bilingual books for kids. When we first started Cinco Puntos, we didn't know anything about publishing books! Each book and each author has taught us more about publishing and more about this place where we live, the U.S./Mexico border. One of our early books, for instance, was Women and Other Aliens, Essays from the U.S./Mexico Border by Debbie Nathan, who was living in El Paso at that time. Debbie's work was instrumental in giving Cinco Puntos its focus on the border. Subsequently we published The Late Great Mexican Border, Reports from a Disappearing Line, a collection of essays about life and culture here on the border. And we're about to publish its sequel, Puro Border, later this year. We named our Press after the wonderful neighborhood where we ve lived in Central El Paso for the last 25 years. It's called Five Points, and is two miles north of the U.S. / Mexico border. People of every generation who ve come up from Mexico live here: first, second, third; and then, there's us, a pair of gringos. We named it Cinco Puntos Press to reflect the fact that we live in a place where people slid back and forth between two languages as easily as they once went back and forth across the border. For many years, we published our books right out of our home in Cinco Puntos. Our daughter Susie and her husband Eddie joined us in 1995, making this a true family business. Susie pulled a minor coup, running the El Paso mayoral campaign in 2001, then leaving Cinco Puntos to work for the new mayor. Eddie still works for us, and Susie has been replaced by two other dedicated employees, Jessica Powers (who works in the publicity and editorial department) and Mary Fountaine (who works in the shipping and billing department.) In addition to gaining new employees, we finally moved the business out of our house to a building in downtown El Paso, where we are work in the heart of El Paso s political and art scenes. Q. What is Cinco Puntos best-known book? A. Probably the book that garnered Cinco Puntos Press the most attention was Story of Colors/La Historia de los Colores by Subcomandante Marcos, the prolific spokesperson for the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico. We had won an NEA grant for the book, a wonderful folktale that reveals the down-to-earth wisdom of the indigenous peoples of Chiapas. The grant had long since been approved and we had already gone to press when the NEA called to pull the grant because they were about to go before Congress (then a Republican Congress) to get approval for their funding that year. At first, we were shocked and unnerved. That was a lot of money to be pulled at the last minute like that, money that we had already spent putting the book together. But when the news hit the New York Times front page, the Lannan Foundation stepped in and offered twice as much as we had expected from the NEA grant. Orders poured in like crazy; The Story of Colors is still selling well. Q. What is Cinco Puntos underlying philosophy or vision? A. Good writing is our first and most important criteria. that's what we always look for, something that excites us. We think we ve published some incredible writers. Cinco Puntos publishes both adult and children's books that reflect where we live, the U.S./Mexico border. Bilingual children's books just came naturally because everybody we know speaks two languages! Q. What sort of programs does Cinco Puntos have to involve the community? A. We continue to publish great bilingual books for kids, as well as literature for adults with a border or Southwest flavor. Over the last few years, we've begun to realize that there is a big gap in literature for Latino young adults and teenagers young adult books that reflect their culture and values. we've had very few young adult novels written by Latinos submitted for our consideration, so we finally started an active search for one by initiating a contest for a young adult novel or collection of short stories. It's very specific: we want a book about Latino(a) teenagers by a Latino(a) writer. If anybody out there is interested in submitting a manuscript for this contest, the guidelines are posted on our website (www.cincopuntos.com). We also do a publishing workshop for schools elementary, secondary, and college. We show students of all ages how a book goes from manuscript to publication, explaining the steps in between. We worked out of our house for the first 15 years we were in business and people were always asking us if we had a printing press in our bedroom. So that made us realize that kids and adults don t really understand what a publisher does or how much work and thought goes into producing a book. It's almost (but not quite) like having a baby! Q. What can you tell publishers and bookstores about the Spanish-language market today? A. Our daughter Susie, who worked at Cinco Puntos as our marketing director for many years, once tried to explain the Spanish-language market to our distributor by saying, Thirty million Latinos is NOT a niche market. When we first started publishing bilingual books, we didn't know we were on the cutting edge of publishing. We did bilingual books with Joe Hayes because that's the way he liked to tell the stories. But in recent years, more and more teachers and librarians have realized the need for stories told from the Latino perspective. But most Spanish language books published today are re-tellings of English-language classics, like Little Red Riding Hood or Winnie the Pooh. In contrast, Cinco Puntos tries to publish books that are culturally relevant to the Hispanic community, like our recent book, out this month, Festival of Bones/El Festival de las Calaveras: A Little-Bitty Book for the Day of the Dead. This book not only celebrates Mexico's favorite holiday, the Day of the Dead, but it also provides instructions for how kids can celebrate the holiday on their own or in school. Teachers need Latino-oriented books that include information about Hispanic culture and history. This information is too often lacking in textbooks. This is one reason why we frequently include posters on the back of our dust jackets for use in the classroom. Q. There are many different ideas regarding bilingual education and bilingual editions of books. What are your own views? A. This was a question that never occurred to us until we were deep in the process of publishing bilingual books. Many of our neighbors and friends speak two languages; it's an entirely natural fact of life here along the border. So for us, the idea of publishing books in two languages just seemed right. But we have been surprised occasionally at how much rancor there is over the issue. Recently, for example, an Arizona schoolteacher visited our publishing company and complained that though she loved our books, she didn't dare buy them for her classroom because she wasn't allowed to teach in Spanish. She wasn't even allowed to explain concepts or give instructions to children who couldn't understand English. We think this is wrong. Sure, kids need to learn English, but learning a foreign language is a process. It's sad when kids learn English only to lose their Spanish along the way. that's unnecessary. There should be room for both languages in today s culture. In the end, however, whether or not to do bilingual editions is less a philosophical decision and much more an economic one, both for ourselves and for our audience. We find that bilingual books sell better for us. And for the most part, that's how our buyers seem to view the books too. Maybe they can't afford two books but only one, so why not get two for the price of one!

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