Interview on “Dientes For Dentures” (Preview)

The abuela in your story is called crazy in several different contexts. She is dubbed “vieja loca” by her narrating granddaughter and later said to have dementia. Could you talk a bit about the relationship between these different understandings and terminologies for this Abuela’s mental state? Is one more accurate than the other for this particular figure and story?

Abuela isn’t so much crazy as she is someone who feels too much about certain, integral aspects of each stage of her life. She supported the ideology that killed her brothers and robbed her mother, desperately hoping that it could save her country, and it’s possible that this illogical passion is also what enabled her to protect her granddaughter from a rabid dog. The dementia isn’t a version of Abuela’s locura but the undoing of it, as it erases the erraticism that pretty much defined who she was.