My Hair Turning Gray Among Strangers

This is my favorite Leroy V. Quintana book. Published in 1996 by Bilingual Press, it includes a flattering introduction by the late Robert Creeley, who says of Quintana: “This deeply gifted poet grasps the common terms of any life we either have or might think to have, shyly, proudly, painfully.”

Quintana was born in Albuquerque in 1944 and raised in Raton, New Mexico. He served in Vietnam in 1967-68. These two biographical facts—the small town, the big war—form the backbone of his art: portraits of a home disrupted by the larger politics, and then the bittersweet homecoming.
With My Hair Turning Gray Among Strangers, however, Quintana used a nostalgic lens to capture the quirky, pathos-filled existence of a working class community.
In the poem “Esteban”:
Esteban is sixty-five, on Social Security three years now,
he says. Two weeks ago he bought himself a motorcycle,
su caballo, a Suzuki GS 750L. “I don’t know
what all those numbers mean, but it’s got lots of soup.”
He wears tennis shoes, carries a slingshot in his back pocket.
“Pa’ los perros.”
Alberta complaining about her stressful office job:
p’arriba y p’abajo, p’arriba y p’abajo
all day long, como calzones de puta.
And the speaker of the poem “Etymologies,” while watching an episode of The Twilight Zone about a baseball team in New Jersey, muses over the odd name the team has: the Hobo Concephers (that is, the Hoboken Zephyrs). The word Hobo, he knew, but what in the world was a “concepher”?
The book takes me back to my own Mexican community in Zacapu, Michoacán, and to “el habla del pueblo”—the speech of the everyday citizen—a collision of puns, off-color jokes, dichos, double entendres, and other forms of wordplay, usually oral, thus the fun and humor in mishearing and miscommunication. The more sensitive types become uncomfortable around this kind of poetry because they feel it’s a class critique. Frankly, I’ve always interpreted that discomfort with distance and detachment—with the lack of knowledge of how things really go down in the barrio. It’s pinche funny, güey. Relax.
I once heard Quintana read his poetry at a reading in Arizona, and it was clear who got it and who didn’t by who laughed the loudest. One piece in particular (which is not part of this collection) was a poem in which a señora is asked if she likes ópera. She responds, “Ay, no, no me gusta pa’ nada esa Oprah. Es muy chismosa, ella.”
Quintana also wrote a series of prose pieces gathered into the collection La Promesa and Other Stories, which was published by the University of Oklahoma Press in 2002, the inaugural edition of the Chicana and Chicano Visions of the Américas Series. Interestingly enough, the story collection and the book of poetry overlap in a number of ways, primarily in the hilarious characterization of the townspeople of the fictional San Miguel, New Mexico. But this town must also contend with the dark reality of its Vietnam veterans, who are suffering the ill-effects of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Quintana’s work reminds us of the Chicano people’s bad blood with the Vietnam draft, and of the systematic plundering of the barrios in the Southwest, places that became suddenly visible with the pressing need for bodies to get shipped off to war. (And I’d like to pass a note to Mr. Ken Burns: There were also Chicano/Latino soldiers fighting in WWII. Look it up, homeboy.)
Another important role of Quintana’s was being one of the three editors in a groundbreaking anthology. As a gesture of Latino unity, the self-identified Chicano poet collaborated with Puerto Rican poet Víctor Hernández Cruz and Cuban American poet Virgil Suárez in compiling Paper Dance: 55 Latino Poets with Persea Books in 1995. This watershed project recognized the commonalities among the different U.S. Latino groups, while acknowledging important historical, cultural and linguistic differences that shaped each of those group’s poetics. Indeed, we are similar, but not the same people.