Your daily dose of Chicano poetry
"I write poems on walls that crumble and fall
I talk to shadows that sleep and go away crying.”
Luis Omar Salinas (1937–2008)
La tarde era triste
Tequila, mestizas y mariachis
vienen a llamarme con las quietas
noches glaciales:
mestizas, mariachis
y el sol de Brownsville.
–Okazaki
1945
Américo Paredes
This poem was taken from Between Two Worlds, published by Arte Publico Press.
“…in 1944 Paredes entered the U.S. Army as an infantryman. At the end of the war he was assigned to the army journal, Stars and Stripes and was sent to Tokyo to cover the war crimes trials…
He is recognized as one of the seminal Mexican American scholars of the 20th century. From mid-century onward his studies of corridos, folkloric ballads, machismo, and border stereotypes of Mexicanos formed the basis of a whole school of southwestern folklore…“
Paredes’ books include George Washington Gomez: A Mexicotexan Novel, With His Pistol In His Hand: A Border Ballad and Its Hero, and A Texas-Mexican Cancionero: Folksongs of the Lower Border.
I am commonly perceived as a foreigner…
“I am commonly perceived as a foreigner everywhere I go, including in the United States and in Mexico. This international perception is based on my color and features. I am neither black nor white. I am not light skinned and cannot be mistaken for “white”; because my hair is so straight I cannot be mistaken for “black.” And by U.S. standards and according to some North American Native Americans, I cannot make official claims to be india.
Socioeconomic status, genetic makeup and ongoing debates on mestisaje aside, if in search of refuge from the United States I took up residence on any other continent, the core of my being would long for a return to the lands of my ancestors. My ethereal spirit and my collective memory with other indigenas and mestizo/as yearn to claim these territories as homeland.”
Ana Castillo
from “A Countryless Woman: The Early Feminista,” Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma
Tafolla the story keeper
“Tafolla the story keeper” by Steve Bennett
The Holy Tortilla and a Pot of Beans
By Carmen Tafolla
Wings Press, $16
Carmen Tafolla stands on the shoulders of several centuries of storytellers.
About 15 years ago, the San Antonio poet, essayist, children’s author and fiction writer was down in the Río Grande Valley, searching for inspiration. During an interview with a woman in her 90s, the writer
asked why la vieja had stayed so long with her husband, who liked to drink and then scream and then beat up people who got in his way. “ En esos dias,” the old woman replied, “ Nos casamos pa better o pa worse.”
“And then she said, ‘And I got stuck with worse,’” Tafolla recalls. “Wow! ‘In those days, we got married for better or for worse. And I got stuck with worse.’
“What a powerful line. She perfectly expressed the tone of her time period. You get what you get. This is fate. If I can capture some of that strength, some of that beauty, some of the eloquence in that very simple language then I am honored to be the scribe that writes it down.”
Read an excerpt here
Ambition
Danny Lopez was so dark that some thought he was black.
His eyes were wide and wild.
When he ran, his short frame’s stride heated the streets.
Sweat trickled down his bony face, and his throat
lumped with desire, the race, the win.
We used to sit on the hood of my parents’ car,
gaze at the stars. He would win state,
dash through the flagged shoot in Austin,
get a scholarship to Auburn, escape the tumbleweeds,
the dirt floors of his pink adobe home, his father’s rage.
We were runners.
Our thin bodies warmed with sweat, and the moon round
with dreams of release. We lived a mile from the border;
the Tigua Indian drums could be heard in the cool evenings.
Our rhythmic hopes pounded dusty roads, and cholos
with slicked hair, low-riders, were only a mirage.
We drove across the border, heavy voices, drunk
with dreams, tequila, and hollow fears. We ran
trans-mountain road, shadows cast cold shivers
down our backs in the hundred-degree sun.
Danny ran twenty miles, finished, arms raised
with manic exultation.
The grassy course felt different beneath his spikes,
and the gun’s smoke forgotten in the rampage of runners,
his gold cross pounding his chest to triumph, his legs
heedless to pain, his guts burning.
Neither of us return to the cement underpasses,
graffiti, and dry grass, though I know
the drums still beat when we look at the stars,
and our eyes flicker with ambition.
Brown children in tattered shorts still beg for pesos,
steal pomegranates and melons.
Young men with sweaty chests and muddy pants
ask my mother for work, food,
passage to that distant win
somewhere on the other side of Texas.
Today the green trees are wet with rain,
and I am too lazy to run. The desire to run my fingers
down an abdomen tight with ambition, is shaky, starved.
It’s been too long since I’ve crossed that border,
drunk tequila, screamed victorious
at the mountain. The stars seem small tonight,
they don’t burst over the sky like they did back then.
These poems, these books don’t ravish me
the way Danny could, the way the race could.
His accented English, broken on the wind, and his run,
his lean darkness, drove exhaustion to consummation.
The wind seems too humid in this preferred place,
and when I hear throaty Spanish spoken in the lushness,
I long for the grimy heat,
the Rio Grande’s shallow passage,
the blue desert, and the slick legs of runners
along the smoggy highway.
Sheryl Luna
Sheryl Luna was born and raised in El Paso, Texas. Her collection of poetry Pity the Drowned Horses won the first Andres Montoya Poetry Prize. It was also profiled in “18 Debut Poets who Made their Mark in 2005” by Poets and Writers Magazine. Her work has appeared in Feminist Studies, Notre Dame Review, Georgia Review, American Literary Review, and many other nationally acclaimed journals. Her second manuscript of poems, titled 7, was recently runner-up for the Ernest Sandeen Poetry Prize sponsored by University of Notre Dame. She currently teaches at the University of Colorado in Boulder, Colorado.
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