Award-winning Ricardo Ruiz uses his poetry to tell the stories of those who chose to immigrate

When Ricardo Ruiz first started work on the project that would become an award-winning poetry collection, he said, it was often written alone at his desk, late at night when the rest of his family had long since gone to bed.

Ruiz recalled a looming sense of imposter syndrome, and tears shed not knowing if he would be able to do justice for the stories he was telling.

“All I felt I was capable of, even now still, it’s just like — I just want to go back home and drive a combine,” he said.

The poetry collection, titled, “We Had Our Reasons” tells stories shared by friends and family members of the poet about their decisions to leave their home in Mexico for a remote community in the United States.

Ruiz, a first-generation Mexican-American who grew up in Othello, Wash., is the son of potato factory workers. He didn’t learn English until elementary school, he said, and like his parents, many of the storytellers in “We Had Our Reasons,” are laborers who primarily speak Spanish.

“There’s this storyteller named Abigail in the collection,” Ruiz said. “She’s a member of a church I went to, and I was connected (to) her through a former pastor of mine. Her story is valuable and worthy to be read and told.”

Ruiz’s work as a classically trained poet, he said, was to elevate those voices.

If accolades are any indication, it would seem he succeeded. “We Had Our Reasons” won a 2023 Washington State Book Award, and has been praised as “powerful” and “evocative” by readers. It’s a major accomplishment. But Ruiz said he doesn’t consider the poems, or their success to be his alone.

Each poem’s byline includes the name of the storyteller along with Ruiz’s. “Lorena and Ricardo.” “Centavo and Ricardo.” “Francisco and Ricardo.” There would be no poems, Ruiz said, without the people who shared their stories.

Ruiz said the trust built over years of relationships allowed for a deeper truth to come out of the interviews he conducted. One storyteller, Patty, he had known for close to 20 years by the time he interviewed her for the collection.

“The interviews, though formal, were really just conversations with friends,” he said. “I was able to record because (those) years of trust (were) already there.”

The entire collection is published in both English and Spanish, Ruiz said, a step he felt was crucial in the collaborative process with his co-authors.

Ruiz said he knew if he was going to ask the people he interviewed to share their stories, the final work needed to be accessible to them.

“Having the whole collection translated was 100% a must,” he said. “The collection can now live first and foremost in the community that gave it birth.”

Ruiz said it was his own curiosity about his family that first led him to do the project. Until he started, he had thought it was unusual that his parents never talked about why they came to the U.S., or what they experienced.

“I started to learn that this isn’t unique to my family,” he said. “So many families there don’t speak about these really traumatic events and issues.”

Part of his hope for the collection, he said, was preserving the stories he recorded for the next generation to learn about where their family came from, and the sacrifices their grandparents made.

Ruiz said his children, now high schoolers, are preoccupied with the day-to-day pursuits of being a teenager. Things like football, and track, and video games.

“Rightfully so,” he said. “They should be children and have that freedom to live in their world and in their youth, but I really wanted to hold space for these conversations, so when they’re ready … there’s first-person accountings from the storytellers themselves.”

The Lewis-Clark State College Center for Arts and History will host Ruiz for a reading of excerpts from “We Had Our Reasons” at 7 p.m. Friday at the center, 415 Main St. in Lewiston. The event is free and open to the public.

Sun may be contacted at rsun@lmtribune.com or on Twitter at @Rachel_M_Sun. This report is made in partnership with Northwest Public Broadcasting, the Lewiston Tribune and the Moscow-Pullman Daily News.