SHADOW BOXING; NOVELIST'S CHARACTERS REACH FOR BRASS RING IN OWN WAYS.

Byline: Bernadette Murphy Special to the Daily News

Yxta Maya Murray is a woman of contradiction. The 31-year-old Studio City resident has just released her second novel, ``What It Takes to Get to Vegas'' (Grove/Atlantic Inc.), a gritty story set among the street fighters and gyms of East L.A.'s boxing hopefuls. At the same time, she also made tenure as a professor of law at Loyola Law School. This sense of enigma, of inhabiting two worlds at once, is part of her career.

Her first novel, ``Locas'' (Grove/Atlantic, 1997), told the story of Latina gang girls in Echo Park, and in doing so, highlighted the striking differences between the incisive, polished author and the harsh, trash-talking characters about whom she writes. The incongruities continue in her newest work. ``What It Takes to Get to Vegas'' profiles Rita, a tough, young woman from East L.A. who uses the one avenue to power she can see - sex and her feminine wiles - to win over boxers and wanna-be-fighters in her grasp for the American Dream. Rita's ultimate fantasy is to go to Las Vegas as the wife of an established fighter.

Murray herself is a first-generation American, half-Mexican and half-Canadian. Unlike her immigrant characters, however, she ``is the product of a rich society'' that provided a lot of leisure time and educational opportunities. ``I was not born into poverty,'' she explains. ``I did not have to barter my sexuality in order to survive.'' The voices in her work, she says, are taken from the women of her family. Though the stories are different, ``its the music in the voice, the desire to be included within the larger American culture, to find a place in this society'' that animates her narratives.

Murray notes that she's contrasted from her characters in many ways, most conspicuously in her speech. The women she writes about speak a barrio form of English and Spanish and do not have a wealth of dialects from which to draw. ``I speak differently,'' she says, listing the many types of discourse available to her. ``My standard default is Valley girl/kid-who-went-to-magnet-classes and maybe knows a little bit of Spanish.'' Through her education in English literature at UCLA and her graduate work at Stanford Law School, she learned to use ``polysyllabic phrases and work words like `postmodern' into a sentence.'' But these differences do not separate her on a core level from the people she writes about.

``A lot of my characters have an intense longing to connect with other folks. That is a part of me. I had a very difficult time as a young person making friends. I had some very painful incidences that have stayed with me. There's that sense of being an outsider, excluded. I was biracial in a largely white neighborhood.'' It was an experience that left her feeling ``out of place'' at times.

It's this sense of belonging and not belonging that enlivens her fiction. In ``Vegas,'' for example, the heroine, Rita, belongs to and is a product of her neighborhood. Though she is initially excluded from the neighborhood's female cliques by her overt sexuality, she gains inclusion when she lands the boxer of her dreams, only to find herself excluded in new ways, thanks to her elevated status. Ironically, the man she loves, Billy, is seen as the great hope of the community and yet is not from the community at all. Likewise, Rita's sister Dolores becomes ever more respected and connected to the neighborhood the more she migrates toward power and city politics.

Similar to the question of belonging, the role of sex and money as tools to power is another strong theme in Murray's work. In ``Vegas,'' Rita uses sex to gain power over circumstances, but as Murray notes, all sexual power is derivative. ``It's a power that men give women, so how much power can that be?''

She says that ``women are consistently altering themselves to be at an advantage sexually,'' which she attributes in part to a lack of power. ``It would be easy to see Rita as a freak or monster,'' but her situation is ``no different than being a Fifth Avenue matron and being really sexy to get a great prenuptial agreement.''

In this way, Murray's stories are both about the way things are now and a hope for a better tomorrow, especially in the area of women's rights and the rights of immigrants. Though each of her characters reflect a part of Murray's own psyche, Dolores - the one character who becomes politically active and finds her power through intelligence and persistence - seems closest to home.

Murray, in fact, teaches courses in Feminist Jurisprudence as well as Sexual Orientation and the Law, and sees Dolores as someone similar to herself. Dolores is ``a center of strength and stability ... someone I would like to have as a girlfriend or mother.'' And yet, according to Murray, Dolores is not meant to be taken as a role model for other women.

``When I write, I never think, `Who should you be?' I think, `Who are these people?' '' While her stories may offer a genuine glimpse of life in Los Angeles, Murray notes that she's writing fiction. ``It's a myth, a fairy tale. This book is as true as Br'er Rabbit. I would love it if some woman read this and got ideas to become politically active as a result. But I don't write to give people prescriptions.'' Instead, she writes stories that ``hopefully, transcend ethnic and gender questions.''

Her subject matter mirrors this sense of transcendence and incongruity. Boxing, like Murray herself, is ripe with contradiction, an aspect she doesn't shy away from but capitalizes upon. ``Boxing is beautiful,'' she says, and in the same breath acknowledges that it can be brutal and racist. Often it's ``people of color fighting each other in front of mostly white audiences, like gladiators.''

It is precisely in this type of clashing ideals, where beauty and brutality exist side by side, that Murray found her story. Particularly in her examination of the roles women play in the boxing subculture, she saw ``questions of Mexican-American identity, feminism, sexuality, Latino ethnic identity and how people pick dreams based on images of stardom.'' The first day she walked into the gyms in Pico Union and experienced the richness of contradiction, she knew she had hit on what she had been looking for. ``This is it,'' she thought at that moment. ``This is the book.''

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2 Photos

Photo: (1) ``A lot of my characters have an intense longing to connect with other folks. That is a part of me. I had a very difficult time as a young person making friends,'' says author Yxta Maya Murray.

(2) no caption (Book cover - What It Takes to Get to Vegas)