Current Reading: Very quick thoughts on Juan Felipe Herrera and Andres Montoya

(1) I finished Juan Felipe Herrera’s 187 Reasons Why Mexicanos Can’t Cross The Border: Undocuments 1971-2007, and I am thinking about what I wrote earlier about sprawl. First of all, this volume is a collection of a lifetime thus far of work. I was born in 1971, so that’s some perspective, in terms of range. I think what’s effective about this collection is its not being in chronological order. It starts with more recent times’ (early 1990’s) pressing issues. I hope California voters remember Proposition 187, which was on the ballot in 1994, because that’s what he’s referencing in his book’s title.

What Oscar and I were talking about this morning (again, how much do I love that my husband poet and I get to talk poetics during morning commute), was that Herrera’s taken what I believe has become truism and trope in Chicano poetry, “We didn’t cross the border. The border crossed us,” and he’s done something not just interesting with it. He’s gone deep into it, exposing the continuity of American and California history in drawing, enforcing, and policing borders. Herrera challenges these enforcements, depicting them in absurd ways. This reminds me so much of the sentiment and agenda of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera, in such fine examination of the US/Mexico border, of the concept of border, of the people defined by border.

Back to Herrera: In true litany form, he is performing something of a call and response, and he is praying, not privately, not quietly, but bombastically and communally. This is why it’s helpful that he introduces us to Floricanto at the onset of this collection. Public, collective, sacred, performative art.

From the litany, we move into dense prose, taking place mostly in indigenous communities deep in Mexico and Central America, where his speaker, also named “Juan,” is a visitor to these communities, to whom he properly brings offerings. His “Juan” does not delude himself into believing he is one with these indigenous communities and their resistance movements. He is of San Diego, of La Misión, of UCLA. His “Juan” goes home and engages in both abstract and concrete political and artistic discourse with his artist partner in their urban American artist home, much in the same way Oscar and I get to discuss poetics in morning commute.

But honestly, the work in this collection is uneven, and this is totally understandable given the 1971-2007 range of it. Some of this earlier work, which is presented to us towards the end of this 200+ page volume, and particularly the selections from Rebozos of Love (Tolteca Publications, 1974), show me a young, very hip and gung ho, and drugged out Chicano college student at the very DIY grassroots beginnings of a long literary career. This reminds me of being a young and hazy grassroots UC Berkeley Flip poet in the early 1990’s, pinballing from political protests to cultural events, absorbing as much anti-establishment, “indigenous” energy, vibe, and art as I could find, spitting my poetry at every place I could possibly do so. In his 1974 work, Herrera is just starting to commit to the page, it seems, these “undocuments,” these anti-Western canon poems. He is mixing up his language, using very spare lines, he is ignoring or flipping off traditional Western poetic form.

So it’s interesting that after we get through his more politically and formalistically “mature” or sophisticated work, we are then presented with these earliest poetic experiments.

(2) I have just started Andrés Montoya’s The Iceworker Sings and Other Poems, partly in preparation for this coming April’s In the Grove Homage to Montoya/Party in Fresno. I’ve only read the first three poems, so I can’t say too much yet. While I think most of what I have heard about Andres Montoya portrays him as a “working class” or “street” poet, let’s remember that he was a student of Juan Felipe Herrera, and also of Philip Levine and Garrett Hongo, that he was MFA’ed in Oregon, and so his work has had its time and deliberation in classroom discussion with white folks and not just with Vatos and homeboys on the street and in the factories.

What I am trying to say here is that wariness of romanticizing a Chicano working class anti-institution poet. Like Herrera, like many of us have done and will continue to do in our literary careers, knowing experientially that our respective communities are not primarily English speaking (my community, my family operates daily in Taglish Ilocano, and smatterings of Spanish since I married Oscar) and they are not (Western) literary minded, Montoya navigated and articulated a difficult, oftentimes tenuous and incompatible in-between.