Chuy Renteria writes memoir on growing up in small town Iowa

Chuy Renteria wears many hats — figuratively and literally. He’s a key figure in the Iowa dance scene, a teacher, a father, husband, mentor, and leader in the field of diversity, equity and inclusion. But he never planned on being a memoirist.

While giving a reading of some of his previously published work, Renteria was approached by editors at the University of Iowa Press. They wanted to know if he’d be willing to write a book about growing up in West Liberty, the first Hispanic-majority town in Iowa.

Renteria’s memoir “We Heard It When We Were Young” moves from when Renteria was a shy, anxious kid checking out his father’s cherished lowrider to when he’s in his twenties working at Casey’s, trying to figure out life.

“The way that I wrote it was the way that I talk,” Renteria said. The book is “for real, for real.”

“If I’m writing this for the town, if I’m writing this for my friends, or people like me who grew up in towns like this, it needs to be accessible to them, right? Without me watering anything down.”

Telling the story

The memoir is divided into four sections, each centered on a different milestone moment in Renteria’s life. And while the memories were clear, Renteria wasn’t quite sure how he felt about them. There were lots of layers to life in West Liberty, Renteria said.

“It’s not straightforward,” Renteria said. “It’s more like: these things happened. And we did these things to each other. Here are these scenes that reinforce how complicated it is.”

For example: The book opens with a scene of his 10-year-old self walking home from school and being confronted on the sidewalk by a high school student who yells a series of racist remarks.

“The first story — I mean the very first line — is this very intense interaction where I am a victim.”

But Renteria didn’t want the memoir “to just be a simple us vs. them narrative. I think that’s why I added all the pieces about — yeah, we did some bad stuff, too,” including stories of Renteria and his friends destroying mailboxes and shooting out car windows.

This careful juxtaposition encourages readers to fully understand the diversity of experiences and perspectives that are present in every community.

Renteria said that a number of people talked to him about how uncomfortable the opening scene made them. “They said, ‘But I’m not racist. I don’t agree with that person. And you’re saying that by the nature of it, I’m associated with him.’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, and so am I.’”

“That’s the nature of living in a community that I think a lot of people — especially white liberal academic people in Iowa City — they like to separate themselves. This whole idea of Iowa City as a blue island and the rest of the state is red, so forget about them. West Liberty is in part of that red …. So what are you saying about towns like mine?”

True community, Renteria said, is not about separation. Through his storytelling and his day job as the assistant director for Diversity Resources at the University of Iowa, Renteria is at the “forefront” of the “fight for empathy.”

“How do we get these folks to empathize with each other, or even just understand what someone else has gone through?”

Dance

A huge part of what makes Renteria who they are is dance, and one entire section of the memoir is dedicated to their personal history with break dancing as well as the history of Iowa’s dance scene, where Renteria still is a leader and mentor.

Renteria said that dance “either saved my life or it saved me from my worst impulses. It definitely changed my life, that’s an easy statement to say.”

But Renteria admits his relationship to dance has changed over the years, as break dancing has left a toll on his body.

“Now what is it about? Is it about teaching? Fostering community? About trying to give others like myself an outlet that I think could really help them in the long run? I’m thinking of kids like myself who didn’t really connect with academics or their family and friends in a way that was positive, but dance could have this outlet.”

“I’m constantly thinking about that. Because there are lots of lost men in this craft,” he said.

Love

Reaching out to struggling young men and serving as a mentor is a driving force in all Renteria does — and that sense of tenderness and support comes through in his memoir, particularly the ending.

Renteria was “very intentional” in the way he structured the book: it opens with “this intense racist encounter with this high schooler” and closes with “this equally intense declaration of love for my friend.”

Both scenes, he said, were equally difficult to write.

Renteria explains that the idea of male tenderness and love, particularly Latino male tenderness and love, is something he “still struggles with.”

“There’s a line in the book where it’s like: my family, we don’t tell each other we love each other. And it’s still true. And my wife notices it. She’ll be like: there’s the moment where you should say ‘I love you’ and you don’t. And I can’t bring myself to still say it. And it’s one of those things — I wrote a whole book on this! I know why I should say it, I know how messed up it is that I don’t say it, but it’s not enough to know. I think that illuminates how there’s still work to do for me personally and also for Latino males.”

And while the memoir ends in a beautiful way, Renteria wished things could have wrapped up differently.

“It’s hard because you want to mold it into: ‘and we learned our lessons, and we learned how to say I love you.’ But we’re human, and I don’t know if we ever will.”