From STANDARDS: The International
Journal for Multicultural Studies on the World Wide Web
Welcome to Calaca, 'manitos,
where everything is served fresh and hot, and each item is muy
sabroso. This fledgling independent press is a Chicano family-owned
small press/multimedia company, operating in San Diego, Califas
and, according to the publishers' homepage:
dedicated to publishing,
producing and promoting Raza writers and artists. Authors and
writings that are relevant to our communities whether it's in
East Los, el chuco or in 'burque, in the fields or on the res,
or the concrete jungles of Chicago or Nuevo York. A Chicano press
that will stand up for the interests of nuestro barrios and help
nurture the writers that lay therein.
A hefty task perhaps, but
one to which Calaca is uniquely suited. Brent Beltrán
and Consuelo Manríquez de Beltrán are cultural
and political activists in California (or, as those of us native
to Aztlán like to call it, Califas). The husband and wife
team bring with them to the field of publishing a strident commitment
to producing the word of la gente, la raza, and making the offerings
from their press available at affordable prices. An egalitarian
notion that's doomed to failure? Absolutely not. One of the mechanisms
by which the Beltráns keep their work in touch with the
communities they represent and to which they speak is by running
an email list addressed to Chicano/Latino groups across the nation,
announcing not only the release of the new titles from Calaca,
but political salvos on the issues of workers' rights, police
actions, community education projects, art gatherings, language
and literacy - along with, yes, announcements for upcoming poetry
and prose readings. Just run a search engine check on the 'net
for the many reviews of the earliest works available from this
strongly independent little press. On the national scene, it's
clear that, by popular vote, Calaca is very much here to stay.
The first project undertaken
by the publishers was a collaboration with poet Manuel J. Vélez,
in releasing the collection Bus Stops and Other Poems, with illustrations
by long-time San Diego muralista and artist Victor Orozco Ochoa.
After finishing his MFA in the Creative Writing Program at the
University of Texas, El Paso, Vélez joined forces with
the Beltráns, in the birth of Calaca Press.
Bus Stops and Other Poems
The collection begins with
an essay introduction by the author, in which Vélez describes
the experience of moving from Salinas, California, to El Paso,
Texas, at the age of sixteen. "The contrast between the
rich, rolling greens of Central California and the somber browns
of El Paso are so great," Vélez writes, "that
experiencing them from one day to the next can be a shock for
anyone." The author's initial resistance to finding solace
and a sense of home in the move is later replaced, when Vélez
discovers that, "there is something else about the desert;
something I could not see at first." This realization prompts
Vélez to find more than just a vision of the land, but
of its peoples:
My first year would be spent
exploring this city, coming into contact with the people who
interacted daily within it. It was something I had never seen
in Salinas. The language here was different. Growing up in Central
California, the son of Mexican parents, I knew Spanish but spoke
it rarely, primarily only with my parents. Even then, it went
only as far as "sí, papá" or "no,
mamá." In El Paso, however, everyone spoke Spanish;
this language that for me seemed so personal. I was forced to
learn it; forced to say "buenos dís" to those
I passed, even when I didn't know them. Forced to learn the difference
between "tú" and "usted." It was difficult
at first. I remember being lectured sternly by the mother of
a friend after responding to her question with a "Bien,
y tú?" The look on her face as if I had just told
her to go to hell was all I needed to tell me that "tú"
was not a sign of respect. It was not only that I hadn't mastered
the art of speaking casually in Spanish, but also that I found
myself confronted by it every day. Here, strangers did not pass
each other without even a nod. That was rude. Here, everyone
acknowledged everyone else's presence somehow. This is part of
the life that shines in El Paso. This is what the desert feeds.
The people here are the plants that sprout forth from the dry
earth and brim with life. It fills them so much that they must
recognize each other as friends; compadres y comadres, each sharing
the desert as home.
This nascent immersion into
cultural richness - from which the poet was once isolated, and
now learning to embrace - informs many of the titles in this
collection, including (perhaps most significantly) the six works,
each titled "Bus Stop," simple vignettes throughout
the book describing chance encounters; the wind against a woman's
grocery bag; a mother's advice; the meeting of expectation at
the corner of time; education for Latino youth in the advent
of teen pregnancy. Here, like the sign-posts for bus stops themselves,
are the concise notations of that which truly matters among a
people, within communities.
The "Bus Stop"
poems, like other titles in the collection, are more than "bilingual":
English and Spanish become part of the poet's lines, but so,
too, comes the argot of caló, or what is often called
"Spanglish" and "kitchen table Spanish" -
that linguist's delightful mezcla of nouns and verbs with syllables
rhythmically truncated in both Spanish and English. There is,
for example, Vélez's "Vato Loco de la Maravilla,"
which begins:
Ayer watché al frankie
cruising the varrio in his
firme sixty-four, chingón
como los vatos locos de
tiempos pasados, listening
to the oldies a madre como
si todo 'stuviera de aquellas
with the world.
The filament of language
in Bus Stops and Other Poems is, by turns, luminous and frayed.
What begins as a Chicano poetic twin to Gwendolyn Brook's "We
So Cool" takes a similar ravaged turn, as Vélez illuminates
what follows for so many of those vatos locos:
Frankie didn't land in the
pinta
til he was twenty-one, el
vato
no era como el Flaco o Chino
crazy motherfuckers that
started
with batteries then took
whole cars,
Frankie played it cool saying
the pinta wasn't for him,
but he got caught in some
jale that went wrong one
night
at the Circle K when a chola
caught
him and Beto on a beer run
and
cuetes blasted and the vato
at the counter came out
dead.
The chola said it was Frankie
that killed him and everyone
believed him, the judge
the news
and us, y lo mandaron a
la pinta
where Frankie said he didn't
belong
to spend twenty-five no
chance
of parole.
We didn't know about chotas
and raza and about the varrio,
ese.
We didn't see how the cop
saw his life as more important
and Frankie just another
punk
that would end up in jail
anyway
and who really gives a fuck
about another mexican that
kills.
The lesson in the language
here, in the common schooling (that schooling that should be
common but never seems to hit us, until it's too late) - that
lesson is succinctly expressed in an epigraph to this book, by
Sekou Sundiata, who says, "I didn't know you could say that
in a poem. I mean, we said it all the time in the neighborhood,
but he was saying that in a poem." This is the essence of
poetry, the work of a Chicano poet at its finest: rendering experience;
detailing that lost and gained sense of place and worth; telling
it like it is. And this is how students of literature come to
find works that have both relevance and resonance in their lives,
how we teach that poetry matters.
Vélez moves the Mechicano
body politic beyond the varrio, too, in his contemplations of
la migra, such as in the ambitious poem, "Flaco's First
Day at Work," where a Spanish-speaking Mexican immigrant
is taken away in that van all too familiar to those of us who
were raised or have lived along the frontlines of the frontera
- in this Vélez poem, the single "offense" is
that the man on his way to work, when confronted by la migra,
can only say cocina in response to the demand, "papeles?"
Other ambitious works in
this collection include "Conversations with Lupe,"
a portrait of a widow who nightly offers her prayers to La Virgen
in the hopes of being released from the dark visage of her abusive
husband; "Onions Fields," an ode to respect and familial
pride which first appeared in Many Mountains Moving; and the
prose poem "Saturday in Juarez" - a fine work that
traverses the complexities of the borderlands through the perceptions
of a child.
We highly recommend this
collection for classroom use, as well as for those readers ever-hungry
for a taste of Chicanismo.
the taco shop poets anthology:
Chorizo Tonguefire
"The white bread and
peanut butter conspiracy is spreading," George Lipsitz quips,
in his introduction to this anthology, "but Taco Shop Poets
answer back con salsa, con sabor, y con fuerza." Y que.
Along with frontliners like
Guillermo Gomez-Peña and Lorna Dee Cervantes, who have
been exciting the worlds of Latino performance art and publishing,
respectively, the Taco Shop Poets have taken up residence in
the forefront of our national consciousness by making Latino
experiences loom large and unapologetic, effectively combining
poetry, performance, sound, rhythm, and politics. And, like similar
movements such as the formidable Nuyorican Poets Cafe, however,
the Taco Shop Poets begin and end with the sustenance of the
people: comunidad. So, since 1994, they've been staging their
works at local taquerias, first in San Diego, and later around
the nation, bringing the pulse of Latino life y lucha to those
tiny community centers not supported by a national endowment,
but by la gente directly. There's no getting around this mezcla
- and who would want to.
Meet Adrián Arancibia,
the Chilean poet whose works open this first anthology by the
group. In his "it's the heat," Arancibia plays on the
stultifying atmospheric pressures of both the weather and of
existing as a brown-skinned man in the borderlands:
static - be on the look
out for a
male hispanic in a black
shirt, static
heat makes
revolution vacate shelves
empties hearts feeling rage
spit upon trying to open
...
no one feels same ways
resonance in sirens
steps steps steps
pounding feet
to be free?
to be innocent but proved
guilty again?
this time a white jury
this time technology
this time some gene
chromosome particle
in my dna strand
why can't they see
what this heat's like
livin day by day
steps steps steps
runnin runnin runnin
day by day
runnin runnin runnin
Men of color all too often
"fit the description"; that's a fact. As do, in so
many other poems here, our children, our parents, our land. The
indelible sorrow of loss smears a miasma of striking colors throughout
a majority of the works in this collection. But what the Taco
Shop Poets accomplish goes beyond that certainty of loss and
indictment, in the move toward self-representation, self-determination,
and tremendous communal orgullo, all through the relentless truths
of poetry.
There is, for example, the
poem from which the collection takes its title, Mexicano poet
Aldolfo Gúzman López's "A Taco Shop Canto
for War-Town San Diego," in which the poet declares: "War-town
San Diego/ Now Cultural Mecca in Aztlan/ Has become a crossroads
for mestizo tonguefire/ Has become a crossroads for taco shop
culture/ Has become a crossroads for chorizo tonguefire".
A similar call-to-arms persists
in Miguel Angel-Soria's "Inglés for the children":
it takes a dormant village
to raise a stillborn child
all in english
stop
solve everything
all in english
english only
only divides
for the children - for the
children
for the children
people will say don't lie
for the children the undignified
need to be unsilenced
for the children
the seconds are approaching
for the children
the belltowers need watchmen
and women
to look out for hungry snipers
for the children now, now,
now
christopher columbus can't
come back
for the children rise
rise, rise
Part of this self-representation
and self-determination is the willingness and humility (not to
be confused with humiliation) with which we stop identifying
only those bruisings we sustain from outside sources, and begin
looking at the effects of our own internalized oppressions. Tomás
Riley brings this point home, in his "Grey Grease,"
especially in the riff:
we demeaned by quarantine
the en masse gente de masa
tired because restlessness
is next to joblessness
and talking
the fruition of dead president
cutbacks
tired because double barrels
aim down
Broadway emblatic of
I say so blue clad predators
tired because
life does not flash before
the eyes
of hard rock vatos
dancing green back mambos
celebrating every day
as dia de los muertos
The Taco Shop Poets can
be credited with much more than simply sponsoring a revival of
Latino performance art - they are political arsonists of misrepresentation;
they sneak into the enclosures of diminishment and ridicule;
and they are on a mission to burn that house to the ground, while
working as architects of better living conditions for our communities
around the world. The revolution is on.
And listen: the "chorizo
tonguefire"
and "raza spoken here"
audio cds
Now this is hip. New-wave
techno, light industrial stanzas, avant noir free verse, cutting
edge spoken word - whatever you want to call it, poetry on cd
is more than just music to the ears; it's the rhythm of the night,
the morning, and all the moments in between. And, contrary to
the faint at heart who have been touting spoken word on cd as
a fad that's not going to last, we beg to differ: get a shock
to the system with these works, and you'll be coming back for
more.
Everything juicy and trip-hop
about the Taco Shop Poets Anthology: Chorizo Tonguefire is made
even more visceral, more gregarious, infinitely más que
in on the audio cd, where live performances of the poems, with
musical back-up, make the milieu of the taqueria floricantos
come alive. Especially valuable for teachers who want the voices
of the actual authors to inflame the eager student, as well as
for those who just want to dress to impress by driving alongside
those polished vehicles on the freeways and highways - or pulling
up at stop signs, in grocery store parking lots - blaring not
Top 40, not the latest indie cd from Europe, but REAL LIVE SPOKEN
POETRY. How's that for cool?
And check out the pieces
on "Raza Spoken Here" that you won't find on the Taco
Shop cd - especially the voices of the women poets. Imagine yourself
sitting in the crowded parking lot of Mission Bay, near the Pepper
Grove in Balboa Park; holding your ghetto blaster in LAX, SFO,
or DIA, blaring Sandra C. Muñoz's "Free Metal Woman":
I'm serious
I can't take it no more
The next time
the next time I see a metal
woman -
you know who I'm talking
about,
that too-perfect, too-steel
female silhouette
stuck to cars that make
me sick-
the next time I see her
captured on the bumper of
some asshole's Camaro,
monster truck or forehead,
I'm gonna rip her right
off
and I'm not gonna care or
nothing
I'm not gonna care if I
get caught
or arrested, I'm not gonna
even care
if I get socked in the face
by some
white greasy man showing
his hairy ass
cuz his pants are too damned
low
I don't care what happens
I'm gonna rip her right
off
and free Metal Woman
liberate her.
Y eso es. Think about it:
what better way to strike up a conversation about the things
we love, miss, yearn for, doubt, and believe will come to pass?
Poetry is the answer, 'manitos, and Calaca Press has the offerings
to make the foray into a Latino explosion well worth the trip.
