Linda Chavez, a Reagan-era official and Library of Congress Living Legend, traces her family’s roots to Spanish Inquisition survivors and New Mexico’s founding. Her debut novel, The Silver Candlesticks, took a decade to write, blending history with themes of assimilation, while her next book—about bootlegger-turned-grandfather Armijo—aims for faster publication. A staunch critic of public unions and affirmative action, she argues policies like the Supreme Court’s 2023 admissions ruling improved minority success by redirecting underqualified students. Now retired from policy work, Chavez shifts focus to fiction, warning against AI shortcuts in writing while championing rigorous research as her legacy. [Automatically generated summary]
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From the nation's iconic libraries and institutions, America's Book Club takes you on a powerful journey of ideas, exploring the lives and inspiration of writers who have defined the country in conversation with civic leader and author David Rubinstein.
We're doing this interview today about some of your books, Linda Chavez.
But Linda is more than an author.
She's also been a government official.
We'll talk about that as well.
But we're coming to you from Decatur House.
Decatur House was the first house actually built around Lafayette Park or Jackson Square.
It almost was torn down during the Kennedy administration, but Jackie Kennedy eventually got it preserved with the help of President Kennedy, President Johnson.
And we are now in, I hate to say it, but we're in where the horse stables used to be.
But it's been cleaned up and it's in very good shape.
So Linda, thank you very much for coming here today.
My mother had two sons who she gave up when she moved to New Mexico to be with my father.
I then also had a sister who was my father's daughter from his marriage to a war bride, an Australian, and then a younger sister who was my full sister.
But all of them either died or were given up for adoption.
The man almost knocked me over coming out of the ladies' room and didn't think really too much about it until I saw his picture in the newspaper after they were arrested.
So after you did that, you left the DNC to do something else?
unidentified
Went to work for the House Judiciary Committee, and there I worked on the professional staff of the Civil and Constitutional Rights Subcommittee in the House Judiciary Committee under Emmanuel Seller.
He comes into the Oval Office in January 20th, 1981.
And were you invited into the White House then?
unidentified
I actually did some consulting for one of the agencies in 1981, but it was not until 1983 when I was brought in and interviewed for a job at the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
Well, I ended up getting more than 70% of the vote, primarily because a local television station decided to do a pop quiz with all of the candidates, Democrats and Republicans.
And they came in and asked a series of questions, and apparently nobody else could answer them correctly.
And so I became front-page news, not just in the United States, but around the world.
Well, let's talk about that in the context of your own background because, you know, your name is Chavez.
You are from Albuquerque.
I would assume that you're Hispanic in background, Latino.
But it turns out that if you go back far enough, your background is a little different than people might have thought.
What is your real background?
unidentified
Well, so my family came here in 1601.
The Chavez side of the family, Captain Pedro Durani Chavez, was part of the expedition that actually founded New Mexico, founded that territory.
The other side of my family, my grandparents, Armijo side, and they are the subject, by the way, of my book, The Silver Candlesticks.
They didn't get to New Mexico until 1701, but they left Spain in 1597.
And they left, lo and behold, not just to seek adventure and riches in the New World, but it turns out they were being investigated by the Inquisition because they were Converso Jews.
So for those not familiar with the term, conversos was a word used to describe people that had converted from Judaism to Catholicism or other type of Christianity, but Catholicism principally.
And that's because in Spain, there were efforts to get rid of anybody who was Jewish.
And in fact, on 1492, all the Jews and all the Muslims were kicked out of Spain.
And so many people to prevent themselves from getting kicked out would convert, conversos, as they were called.
And your ancestors were among those, is that right?
unidentified
That's right.
Well, a lot of people don't understand this, but they were kicked out, but they were not allowed to take any of their wealth with them.
So if you were a peasant, didn't have great riches, you know, you left.
If you were, as my family, were a merchant, it was probably in your interest to stay and convert.
So some people think that the greatest minority in terms of size in the United States is African Americans, but actually Latino or Latino Americans or Hispanic Americans are actually a larger percentage of the population, right?
unidentified
That's exactly right.
But it's a little more complicated than that because many people are like myself.
They're of mixed origin.
My mother's last name was McKenna.
She was blue-eyed and blonde-haired.
Her heritage was English and Irish.
And that was less common, but it's much more common today.
The subtitle was Toward a New Politics of Hispanic Assimilation.
It was published in 1991.
And I wrote it primarily because there was a lot of misunderstanding about the Hispanic population.
If you looked at the statistics in the 1980s, you would have believed that Hispanics were mostly uneducated, did not have high school diplomas, many of them did not speak English, et cetera.
Well, it turns out it was confused because there was a huge influx during the 1980s of newcomers from Mexico, primarily, as well as people like myself who trace their origins back many hundred years or people who came after the Mexican Revolution in 1910.
So the general perception that you were trying to address in the book is that people, let's say white Americans, would say people who are Latino, Hispanic, they are not from well-educated backgrounds, they don't have a lot of money, but we need to figure out how to assimilate them and to make them like us.
unidentified
Well, actually, they were assimilating quite nicely, thank you.
So of the Latino or Hispanic population in the United States today, I assume the largest number trace their ancestry back to Mexico.
What would be second?
unidentified
Well, there's a very large population now of Central Americans.
There are also Puerto Ricans who are Americans by birth, because Puerto Rico is a territory of the U.S.
But you have Salvadorans, Nicaraguans, and in the last 10 years or so, we've had a large number of people coming from South America, particularly from Venezuela.
Now, in your book, you talk about the importance of learning English.
Now, when I was working in the White House before you in the Carter administration, in those days, bilingual education was something that the Democrats very much supported, was if you're Hispanic, let's say, you're supposed to learn Spanish as well as English.
Don't learn only English.
Today, the conventional wisdom is that maybe that's not as good a thing.
Is that fair or not?
unidentified
Well, I think the problem was in order to be bilingual, you have to, if Spanish is your first language, you have to learn English.
And the problem during the Carter years, and they actually had a policy to promote Spanish language instruction, so that a lot of kids who were coming in as young immigrants or the children of immigrants were not learning English when they went into school.
And ironically, some of these kids from Mexico weren't Spanish speakers.
They spoke indigenous language, and it was really the LA school system that forced them to learn Spanish.
So if you came, let's say, from Mexico, let's say in the 1970s, you're a young child, and you speak Spanish very fluently, were you able to go to school and get through school only by speaking Spanish, or were they being forced to learn English as well?
unidentified
You actually, in some school districts in the U.S., could spend almost your entire school life being instructed in Spanish, and that's what I had a problem with.
Your second book was on a different subject, and why don't you go through what that was?
unidentified
My second book was An Unlikely Conservative, The Transformation of an Ex-Liberal or How I Became the Most Hated Hispanic in America.
The subtitle was not my choice.
My publishers picked that.
And it really, it stemmed from my having failed to become Secretary of Labor.
I was nominated by George W. Bush, and my nomination lasted all of about a week, I think, before it was discovered that 10 years earlier I had taken into my home a woman who was an illegal immigrant.
And I knew she was an illegal immigrant.
I was asked by a friend if I could give her a place to live, a friend who knew that I had taken in Vietnamese and other people who I helped try to give a helping hand to.
And unfortunately, back in that period, that was enough to derail my nomination.
Okay, so your second book comes out, and it's, let's say, a lot of people criticize it because they think you're saying we should only learn English if you're Hispanic and not learn both languages.
Is that right?
unidentified
That's right.
And, you know, I think there were a lot of people who didn't think that I celebrated my Hispanic heritage, which is not accurate.
I was very aware of my Hispanic heritage my entire life and very proud of it.
Okay, so after you wrote that book, you wrote another book more recently, is that right?
Now, the first three you wrote were non-fiction books, and most non-fiction authors kind of stick with it because they know how to do it.
But then you wrote a fiction book, and was that harder to do?
And did you take a lot more time working on that than the non-fiction books?
unidentified
Well, it took a long time to get published because I was doing a lot of other things at the same time.
In my mid-60s, I decided to go back to graduate school.
I had decided I wanted to write fiction.
And I started writing short stories.
I got some of them published.
And I decided to go back and get an MFA from George Mason University.
And it was during that period that I discovered my Jewish roots because I was featured on the television program Finding Your Roots.
And that story very much inspired the book.
And my thesis advisor, Alan Shoes, who was at George Mason, he said, don't, you know, I was going to be writing stories about North Korean prison camps, which did not have a wide audience.
And he said, no, no, no, you have to turn your family story.
So when you come up with fiction as an idea, you have to come up with something creative nobody ever thought of before, and you got to sell it to a publisher and all that.
What was your idea for the book?
unidentified
Well, I thought telling the story of this family and leaving Spain.
First of all, there's not a lot written about the secret Jews of Spain, the people who were conversos, like my family, who didn't leave in 1492, who stuck around, practiced Catholicism.
Some of them became devout Catholics and never went back, but many of them didn't.
Many of them tried to hold on and preserve their heritage.
So I wanted to turn that into a novel.
And that meant doing a lot of research.
I had to spend a lot of time researching the Spanish Inquisition.
I had to spend time learning about the Conversos.
I had to visit Spain.
I visited Spain a half dozen times.
I was in Seville.
I was able to go to the street where my family lived, to the church where they had been baptized, married, and buried.
So for those who don't remember the history, people may not remember it, just saying that in 1492, I think it was October, you had to leave if you were Muslim or Jewish.
Those people that didn't leave, the conversos, they converted.
But the Spanish Inquisition was saying, well, wait a second, you really are Jewish and you shouldn't be still here.
So the Inquisition, to some extent, was to go after those people and root them out.
Is that right?
unidentified
Actually, that's exactly right.
It wasn't per se aimed at Jews.
It was aimed at what they called Judaizers, people who were ethnically Jewish and who had converted to Catholicism but were practicing their Judaism secretly.
So if you were part of the Spanish Inquisition, they have a trial or something like a trial, and then they found you guilty, the punishment was burning at the stake?
unidentified
That's exactly right.
You were given the chance to basically renounce.
And if you did that, if you renounced your Judaism, you wouldn't be burned.
You would be choked to death, garrotted to death.
So that was the nice treatment.
And it wasn't the church.
The church could not execute anybody.
They were released to the state, and it was the state that actually burned them.
Well, without giving away the entire plot, what's the kind of theme of it then?
What happens?
unidentified
So the theme of the book is it's a love story, really.
It's about a young woman.
She's madly in love with this Nair Dewell.
She finds out she's Jewish.
Her mother tells her she's Jewish, and she's told you can't marry this guy you're interested in.
You have to marry this other person, and you have to marry him so that he will protect you, because he's from an old Catholic family.
And at that time, what the church would do is if two people were getting married, they'd look and see, are these two old Catholics?
Are they two new Catholics?
If you were a new Catholic, that meant you were both from Jewish origins, and that made you suspect.
So she's told she has to marry another man, and it's the story of that relationship.
It's the story of the Inquisitor, the Grand Inquisitor of Sevilla, who tries to entrap this woman, and how she ultimately learns to love the man that she's forced to marry, and they end up fleeing to the United States.
So when you tell your husband and your three sons that you're going to Spain to do research for a novel, they say, you've never written a novel before.
You know what you're doing?
Is that what they said?
unidentified
No, my husband is a big fan of my fiction.
He loved my short stories.
And I was very fortunate.
I got all of the stories that I submitted for publication.
Now, one time when we started this series, I interviewed John Grisham, and he said that he was told by, I think, his agent that if you're going to be a great novelist, you've got to write one book a year, every year, a new book.
So are you in that school yet?
Are you going to write another one?
unidentified
Well, at my age, I don't know if I'm going to write another book every year.
I would like to write a sequel, and I have it planned.
When I originally started writing the novel, it was going to be a trilogy, but I'm not sure that I will finish all three, so I may combine the second and third into one.
It will take place after the Armijo family ends up in New Mexico.
They were part of the reconquest of New Mexico in 1701, and it will come into the 20th century.
During my grandfather's era, he was the biggest bootlegger in the Southwest and spent 11 and a half years in Fort Leavenworth.
Now, for somebody that's watching and wants to be you, a writer who's started writing maybe later in your life than earlier, but let's suppose somebody wants to be mid-career, starting how to write a novel or a nonfiction book.
What is your best advice about how to become a book writer?
unidentified
The best way to become a good book writer is to be a good book reader.
Reading is the key to good writing.
You have to be well-read.
You have to read a lot and you have to read good books.
So today, would you attribute your interest in literature and writing to the fact that you read when you were a young girl and your parents read to you and you went to the library a lot?
Is that an important factor?
unidentified
Absolutely.
I don't remember my parents reading to me.
My father taught me how to read, but I remember reading on my own.
It was my escape.
It was the way I went into a world that was much better and more interesting than my own.
Let's go back to the issue of affirmative action, which you know a lot about.
Today, the Supreme Court has more or less said that affirmative action, at least certainly in education, is not permissible.
Do you think that's changed universities for the good or the bad?
Or what's your assessment of that?
unidentified
I very much believe it's changed universities for the good.
And it's not just that it has taken out impermissible discrimination.
I think it's been really good for Latino and black students.
My organization has done studies over the years taking a look at the admission of students into university who did not meet the normal qualifications.
Admissions Disparities00:05:55
unidentified
And what we found over 80 different universities was that admitting a student whose grades and test scores were not similar to those of his white and Asian peers meant the student was more likely to fail.
And so now you've got students, they may not be going to the top-tier school in as great as a number, but they're going to schools where their preparation allows them to succeed.
Now, there have been some people in the United States who want to have a constitutional amendment making English our official language.
Do you think that's a good idea or not necessary?
unidentified
I don't think it would do much harm to make it an official language.
Many countries have official languages, but the practical matter is that English has been our de facto official language almost from the beginning, and that no matter where people came from, what country they spoke when they got here, they eventually learned English.
And are you surprised at how many people think you are a person who was born in, let's say, Mexico and came up to the United States and when you were young and so forth?
And you tell them that actually my ancestors were here for three or four hundred years.
What do they say?
unidentified
Yeah, people are always surprised at that.
It used to be very common.
People would say, when did your family come here, Ms. Chavez?
And when I said 1601, that was usually a conversation stopper.
So when you go to Spain and say, I'm researching a novel, do people say, look, I'm busy, I got a job, I don't have time to help somebody research a novel, or do they say, oh, here, I have nothing better to do, I'll help you.
unidentified
Well, I wasn't going to Spain so much to research the novel.
I was going to Spain to get the sights and sounds and smells and tastes, you know, right.
I wanted to have the right atmosphere.
Much of the book is written, I hope, to try to give you a sense of Spain in the 16th century.
And so I'm going to places that are old places.
As I say, I went to the church where my family were baptized, where my grandmother, who opens the book, is actually buried in the crypt in Santa Ana in Triana, the neighborhood of Triana in Sevilla.
So today, so the story of your second novel is going to be how New Mexico was more or less settled?
unidentified
Yes, it's going to be about New Mexico, Santa Fe, the families, and what happened to those families.
Because it's not unusual for great families with lots of wealth to basically end up losing all of that.
So it's going to be about the downward trajectory of my family ending up with my grandfather in prison and my father struggling through the Depression.
Some people, Jim Baker used to say, he used to tell some of the same stories over and over again.
unidentified
Yes, he would sometimes tell the same story.
I can remember being on Air Force One and he came back and I was seated with the press corps and he came back and he said, now, Linda, cover your ears.
I don't think you want to hear this story.
And I don't know what the story was because I think it was probably a little off color.
But he was just a wonderful man.
Once I was getting beat up a lot in the press when I was at the Civil Rights Commission.
It was a Saturday morning.
I was in bed.
The telephone rings.
It's the White House Signal Office.
They had President Reagan on the phone for me.
He was on the treadmill, but he was watching me on C-SPAN, and he wanted to tell me what a good job I was doing.
So when Reagan was getting ready to be sworn in, he and Jimmy Carter rode up, as most presidents do, together.
Sometimes they don't talk to each other.
I think Truman and Eisenhower didn't talk.
FDR and Hoover didn't talk.
But they were having a conversation, Reagan being jovial, and Carter was listening.
And after it was over, somebody went to Carter and said, well, what was he talking about?
And he said, I don't know.
He kept talking about this guy, Jack Warner.
Who is Jack Warner?
Jack Warner being the head of a studio that Reagan had worked for, but Carter didn't know anything about studio heads and he couldn't understand who Jack Warner was.
But Reagan liked to talk about the movie days, right?
unidentified
He did like to talk about the movie days.
I rode in the limousine when I was running for Senate with President Reagan.
My husband and I rode with him.
And it was in Baltimore, and there were people lining the streets.
And the president looked out and he said, Now, take a look.
So when Reagan was president early on, there was something that the Hollywood studios wanted to get, something related to the Finn Sin rule.
And the Hollywood studios weren't getting what they wanted out of the FCC.
So eventually, I think Jack Valenti, who was then the head of the Motion Picture Association lobby, got all the studio heads, all of them, to come to Washington.
And they come to the Oval Office.
Reagan is outside somewhere else.
He comes back and he sees all the studio heads there and he says, My God, if I could have gotten a meeting with any of you when I was an actor, I wouldn't be in public policy.
I never could get a meeting with any of you guys.
But he had a good sense of humor, I guess.
unidentified
He did.
He had a great sense of humor.
He was really genuinely a good person.
I just was always impressed with how he would not just tell stories, he liked to listen to stories.
And he took care of people and he cared about America.
These are my books and some of the work I've done with my Center for Equal Opportunity.
So that was my first book out of the barrio, which is about Hispanic assimilation.
An Unlikely Conservative was my memoir after President George W. Bush tried to make me Secretary of Labor.
That didn't work out.
And then there's a book about the labor unions and their political.
And that is- And then you have your new book.
And I have my new book.
Yes, my new book, which is the silver candlesticks.
New Books Discussed00:01:53
unidentified
I see it here, but yes, I have that.
And those are, I was very involved in trying to reform bilingual education so that kids who didn't speak English learned English.
And so that's some of that as well.
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