In as our barrio turns...who the yoke b on?, alurista poet-filetero filosofo snaps shots of his singular history in wickedly funny, blasphemous travelogues through his youth and activist days. He twists our tongues in the vernacular that we as Chicano Mexicanos find snugly familiar and exhilarating.
Phosphorescent political punches punctuate anecdotes of school trips, mischief making with his military school carnales - the ocelotes - budding carnal knowledge with nubile femmes in the Mexican countryside, charcoaled elotes nipping the nostrils. These are familiar to us -whether we grew up in San Jo, Tijuas, Sacra, El Paso or D.F.
alurista summons nostalgia like those brown or black and white faded photos which our jefitas and tias dust off for the holiday family get-togethers. His scrapbook leapfrogs from military academy in México to militant politics in '60's San Diego, boyhood challenges of Catholic dogma, adult challenges in building a Chicano cultural movement and on. But its not nostalgia that alurista traffics in - its the re-visiting of the past that may hold clues to the map of the movimiento's millennium movidas.
"Pick up your Neo-Aztec
battle armour and get ready to rumble in a vortex of language
corridos and time-space slippage. Here are the lost codices of
Xicano Being reclaimed in Alurista's unchained automythographical
codes and confessions. Brown Beret Minister of Movimientoformation,
California Toltec inner soul graffito and macrobiotic vegetarian
urban barrio vision-quests thrust this wild-eyed breed of declarations,
reports and loves -- a holograph of our psychic bellybutton with
a cosmic bato itch."
- Juan Felipe Herrera, author of Giraffe on Fire,
Member of Cilantro Seals International
"A novel from the
mercurial pen of the poet laureate of Aztlán alurista?
. . . YES! Here's a verbal spectacle that "kaleidoscopes"
alurista's personal-turn-barrio history for all to decipher."
- Juan Rodriguez, Texas Lutheran University
alurista, one of the Chicano movement's renown poets, was born in México City and raised in Morelos before moving to San Diego, Califas as a teenager. Dedicated to the Chicano movement, he helped co-found the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA), the Brown Berets, Chicano Park, the Centro Cultural de la Raza, the Chicano Free Clinic and the Chicano Studies Department at San Diego State University. He received his B.A. at SDSU and eventually earned his M.A. and Ph.D at UC San Diego. As a published poet since the late 1960's, he has published nine collections of poetry, including Floricanto en Aztlán, Nationchild Plumaroja, Spik in Glyph?, Return: Poems Collected and New, z eros and et tú...raza?, which was awarded the National Book Award for Poetry by the Before Columbus Foundation in 1995.