A Rascuache Prayer

The poet says,

                                                                                    come with me:

                                    I will be writing —

1.

I don’t know if Juan Felipe Herrera is a boxer. But I can tell from his poems that he must be a dancer. That footwork is devilish. I sit back and try to chart the juxtapositions that come like bracing kicks all the way down his pages:

[…] there are memories trailing us empty orange
and hot pink bottles of medicine left behind
buried next to a saguaro

I recently watched a Texas hurricane blow down part of Trump’s border wall. I was amazed, as ever, by the imagery of the border: a hurricane in the desert, waves of rain and land clouds writhing and speeding like ghosts out of the wasteland, and that allegedly unbreachable steel boondoggle itself become wobbly as rubber as it collapsed.

Like the seekers it was built to deny.

During a plague year.

That vision could have been a stanza in Every Day We Get More Illegal (City Lights, 2020), the slender, ferocious, tender new volume by Herrera, the first Xicano poet laureate of the United States.

Ostensibly, the notes that became the poems in this depth charge were inspired by his duties as America’s poeta, from 2015 to 2017, and by his travels around the country bearing witness to the many people he encountered. I can imagine the nights he spent in hotel rooms with the confessions of the day still echoing in his ears. Yeah, he was writing.

Herrera prophesied the wall’s death scene in his book. He doesn’t need violent winds to knock down the illusion of the border—he does this with the puffs of breath from all the people he conspires to give voice to in his songs. He’s a canny and political writer. He echoes A.R. Ammons in the colons he sometimes deploys and Emily Dickinson, perhaps, in his dashes. He’s a warrior troubadour; he knows the territory. He’s got the lyric down. But the homie also knows car horns and laughter and accordion music and weeping. He is not afraid to scream like James Brown, whisper like Ko Un, rage at the abuser and comfort the afflicted.

And he uses what voice he pulls from the wind:

Underneath the crust of The Wall things are always
in motion
 
            while we wait to cross

2.

Herrera and I come from the same barrio in San Diego. That simple fact has been endlessly mythic and mysterious to me. With his deadly playfulness, he might have coined a word for this feeling: mythterious. 

If you came from that sunburned place, with those ancient pachucos and wizardly grandmothers, you’d know the kind of trickster wit the smart kids constructed out of the polyglot threads of two crazy languages crashing like Chevy Trokas. Wordplay and thought-play dance all through Herrera’s books, and both are unapologetic, seldom explained: if you don’t (can’t) get it, you won’t. There is some precedent for this, which I will talk about in a minute. Code-switching? Yes. Culture-switching, though? Is that a term? It is now. And not just “Latina/o/x.” The dance is deep: street culture, Spanish, Spanglish, scholarly culture, poverty culture, Catholicism, shamanism, progressive politics, literacy, anger sharp enough to turn unexpectedly and slice. But in the end, I believe Herrera’s driving force, certainly expressed in this book, is witness. 

Just like those old-school vatos we grew up with who had seen it all and feared nothing they’d admit to.

I was a boy at the far end of National Avenue, the thoroughfare that ran from my hill to his flats. Logan Heights, our own East Berlin. Herrera was in Barrio Logan itself, to the west, epicenter of Chicano evolution in San Diego, mother of revolution, the future birthplace of Chicano Park. We have this word that should be in POETRY magazine: rascuache. It is as funky as you think it is, and most outsiders probably found all of Logan pretty rascuache. Wait—it actually was, now that I reflect on it.

At that time, in 1970, a controversial people’s uprising turned a freeway overpass and a demolition-threatened neighborhood into a people’s park. Folks simply occupied the land armed with paint and brushes and food and will and faced off against the cops. International tourists now flock to visit the murals: vibrant depictions of Che Guevara, Cesar Chavez, and Frida Kahlo and scenes from Chicano culture and mythology. The murals, once thought of as savage defacements by a bunch of commie wetbacks, are now cherished and studied around the world. The armed forces arrayed against the barrio in those days was not restrained, yet there was no secret police paramilitary in unmarked vans. There wasn’t an industrial complex of camps for children, addressed viscerally in Herrera’s new book.

It was an uprising that conservatives in this age would call Antifa rioting, and it attracted secret police from the bored ranks of Border Patrol agents with little to do. That was Herrera’s part of the barrio.

He came from the truly Mexican end of the street—good food (Las Cuatro Milpas) and the anchor church, Our Lady of Guadalupe (I was baptized there, as was my daughter). I was not across the tracks but across Wabash, the busy crossroad that formed a vast crucifix of our home. Our church was St. Jude’s (patron saint of lost causes, ahem).

[…] Are you listening. I had to
learn. I had to gain, pebble by pebble, seashell by seashell, the
courage to listen to my self.

3.

We didn’t have the density of culture of that west end. We had a multiplicity of cultures crammed into a block of apartments and alleys. Now it’s gentrified at both ends. My part of the barrio today has joggers in spandex. Our awful apartments now have Miami colors and handsome plantings. Herrera’s part has art galleries and sophisticated eateries. Up in the Heights, we never had a library—until now. And Starbucks too.

Eight years older than I, Herrera was in a different universe entirely. Generations move fast. And though I didn’t know him then, I seem to have followed him. We moved on. He went to San Diego High; I went to Clairemont High (where, interestingly enough, I was in the drama department with poet Tom Sleigh). 

Herrera got an EEOP grant to UCLA; I got an EEOP grant to UCSD. (Economic opportunity indeed.) We both hung around the foundational raza poet Alurista and his literary journal Maize, as well as San Diego’s Centro Cultural de la Raza. Yet I don’t know if we ever met. If we did, I was no doubt intimidated, as I was by all the older poets in that scene. We got to know each other only later, well into our careers, when we shared laughs and teasing at random literary festivals around the country.

Alurista was our Marxist shaman agitator, a poet with a bullfighter’s name. He was well-versed in Carlos Castaneda’s mysticism and in the dialectic; he was the king of code-switching. Unsatisfied with English/Spanish riffs, he added calo (Chicano slang), then Nahuatl words. Then, apparently feeling his work was still too accessible, he replaced the Nahuatl words with glyphs. A stanza might go from English to vato slang to a picture of a rabbit.

I am certain Herrera was playing close attention. I know I was. We all were in that small volcano of Southern California poets.

4.

Herrera’s people were farmworkers. He saw what would have been exotic to me: the San Joaquin Valley, Salinas. Man, all I knew was Tijuana. 

My dad was a cannery worker, then a bakery truck driver, then a bowling alley attendant.

Herrera’s family lived in tents as they struggled to feed America.

See this poem, “Touch the Earth (once again),” one of the searing set pieces in his new collection, with its litany of “This is what we do” kicking off the lines as if in a Catholic prayer during Mass:

This is what we do:
 
this is what the cotton truck driver does:
this is what the tobacco leaf roller does:
this is what the washer-woman & the laundry worker does:
this is what the grape & artichoke worker does

Until it reaches its amen moment:

how they touch the earth — for you

Lately, much has been made in literary circles about the failure of American publishing to see “minority” or “ethnic” writers as anything more than minstrels of their own suffering. Mexicans? Must be some wall-climbing at midnight, eh? Where’re the drug fiends and the gangbangers? Where’s the mournfully beautiful hot lover girlfriend? All questions I have been asked by publishers. I suspect one of Herrera’s weapons in this literary battle (along with our patented anger) is a clear drive toward witness. And within this witness, there is a vast reservoir of funk and humor and jokes and rock music. 

Friends, the barrio is funny. My apartment held exactly three of us: Mom, Dad, and me—if you don’t count the turtle and the guinea pig. Our mailbox must have been magical, though, because it received mail for at least ten other Urreas. It was always jammed with letters and government checks, so tight you couldn’t shut the door. These other Urreas listed our address as their permanent residence, though they all lived in Tijuana. Even the mailman accosted my mother to ask how the hell many people lived in our apartment. 

You can be raza and funny, raza and sad, raza and well-read, raza and spiritual, raza and trivial, raza and scholarly, raza and literate. You might have never had a pistola in your hand. You might have read a lot of books, even if it took a couple of buses to get from Logan to the library downtown. Herrera drops the names Elias Canetti and Octavio Paz in his book, Ko Un and Basho. He throws down in polyglot riffs, using Spanish and English, yes, but you’ll see a bit of Nahuatl float by as well.

5.

Were we unlikely writers to come from the barrio? Perhaps. But we weren’t the only ones. I am by far not the only one from Tijuana either. Nor is Herrera the only one to come from the fields. We are legion. And none of us wants to be any version of a stereotype, noble savage, or cartoon. Tell you what, though—if we feel cartoony, we’ll apply our own ink.

6.

Make no mistake: there are few cartoons in Herrera’s latest works.

I first became aware of him when his third book, Exiles of Desire, was published in 1983. I myself was in exile, teaching Expos at Harvard, feeling as far from my roots as possible, trying to find a new voice, helping the poet Tino Villanueva launch a Chicano literary journal, and having coffee with Martín Espada. And Herrera’s book dropped. It was like nothing I had read before; it was like everything I had read. It was my language and my milieu doing things I had not imagined doing. It was heavily influenced by the Bay Area; it had wafts of Beat energy while maintaining indigenous prayers and themes of diaspora and displacement. I was measuring my own lines against his. My own themes and fevers. You stalk the voice when you’re young; you parse the edges of the world the new poet walks. We were from Logan and Southern Califas—our names had the same syllabic count. Our last names were a weak slant rhyme. We were angry about the same things. But I was 10 years away from publishing my first book.

Now we see each other at literary events and sign books for each other.

“You’re so fancy, carnal,” he says. “You came from the Heights.”

Ha ha, rascuaches at work. His first book said

(Writing is richman’s work, therefore richman’s history. Lately, the unrich
are growing accustomed to the forbidden pleasures of writing.)

A call to arms for a new history.

7.

“border fever 105.7 degrees” is the killer in this new book. There is no answer. There is no argument. It is carrying water into the Devil’s Highway for a lost wanderer. It is tearing down the doors of a virulent detention center. It is a father’s cry for a stranger’s child. Its rage is beautiful. Its love is wounding. I think it is my favorite of his poems. I will try to be mature and not copy him now that we’re both graybeards. “Dedicated to Jakelin Amei Rosemary,” he writes, “7 years old from Guatemala, with a fever of 105.7, who died in captivity….” The poem begins

       why do you cry
those are not screams you hear across this cage
it is         a symphony  —  the border guard says

It is not long. It is not a screed. It is a memorial Mass. And it ends:

                                                                        on the custody floor
                                                                                    105.7 degrees
 
where do I go where did they go
where do I go to breathe no more

This is not the end of the book. This is the singer taking a breath so he can make it to the end.

And we must say Amen.