"What do you mean?" she said. "Opera to me felt so European and also with characters that existed many decades before."
Talamante's life has been very much shaped by the immigrant experience.
Her family moved from Mexicali, Mexico to Gilroy when she was a child.
She went to school and worked picking fruit and garlic in the summers. That experience opened her eyes to the living conditions of farmworker families.
"Seeing the inequities and the deplorable living and working conditions, and the farmworkers had to right to unionize, that was part of my consciousness," Tamante said.
While in high school, Talamante missed college application deadlines because her parents were unaware of the process. San Jose State students eventually guided her and got her into UC Santa Cruz, where she blossomed as an activist.
It was the 1960s, and the campus was a hotbed of protests against the Vietnam War and demonstrations for civil rights, feminist, farmworker and Chicano movements.
After doing independent studies in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas with indigenous communities, she met a group of Argentinians who invited her to South America.
Talamante was smitten by one of the woman activists. She was still trying to understand her sexual orientation and decided to follow her to Argentina and join the Juventud Peronista, a progressive part of the Peronist movement.
The group worked to uplift a marginalized community in the outskirts of Buenos Aires, but their work became increasingly scrutinized as Argentina's government began to crack down on political organizing.
"In November of 1974, the Isabel Peron government declared a state of siege, and then everything that we had been doing became illegal, just forbidden," Talamante said.
She was detained, along with fellow activists, as they left a gathering.
"The first few days it was just interrogations and beatings and torture with electric shocks, and then finally being formally taken to prison, and that's where I spent 16 months," Talamante said.
During her imprisonment, her family and friends in the Bay Area formed the Olga Defense Committee. Her parents held fundraisers, started petitions and flew to Washington, D.C. to meet with the Argentinian ambassador and members of Congress to advocate for her release.
Their pleas often fell on deaf ears as the U.S. government backed the military dictatorship that had taken control of the country and was responsible for the disappearance of 30,000 people over a seven-year period, known as the Dirty War.
She was eventually released and moved back to the Bay Area to continue her advocacy work.
Talamante eventually became executive director of the Chicana-Latina Foundation, which gives scholarships and offers leadership courses for Hispanic young women.
"We saw really good reasons to concentrate on Latinas. They make a lot of decisions around education and around the health of the family. We know that by educating a Latina, we really are educating the whole family," Talamante said.
Working on educational attainment was a full circle moment for Talamante, who needed guidance outside her family and school to get into college.
As she got older, Talamante became comfortable with her sexual orientation and got involved in the National Center for Lesbian Rights.
"I was identified as a political activist and as a community organizer, and I wanted to be very clear that this is also part of my identity," she said. "It's not just being tolerated. That's not what we want. We want to be fully accepted and fully celebrated."
Talamante's life journey always intrigued Carla Lucero, a composer and librettist of several operas.
Her first was "Wuornos" about Aileen Wuornos, who was known as the first female serial killer.
"It's mainly about childhood trauma and how it can manifest in an unhealed life," Lucero said.
She met Talamante while developing a Spanish-language opera about Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, a nun who became Mexico's most celebrated writer in the 17th century.
So, when she was commissioned by Quinteto Latino to write an opera, she knew she wanted it to be about Talamante.
"The opera is kind of a cycle. It goes from somebody convincing her that she should get an education, and she does so much good in the world, and then at the end, she is trying to ignite the fire in young Latinas like she was," Lucero said.
The opera doesn't just focus on Talamante's accomplishments. It also touches on the trauma of being tortured.
"I was hurt physically. I was violated physically. And so, it just kind of got trapped inside, so that I could go on with life because sometimes you can't deal with the trauma."
The opera includes a poem Talamante wrote about her healing. It's featured in the opera as a duet with Vola, her partner.
"There's so many metaphors in her poem that are about how she releases herself from captivity mentally and emotionally," Lucero said.
The play is called "¡Chicanisima!," which is a play on the word Chicano.
"Chicanisima is a word I made up. I wanted something really strong that actually spoke about the Chicano movement and the fact that she's a woman and she's lesbian. I can't think of anything stronger than this," Lucero said.
¡Chicanisima! will be performed Saturday, June 27 at MACLA in San Jose.
Olga Talamante and Carla Lucero will hold a question-and-answer session after the evening performance.