A smooth bass guitar and
a jazzy drum pulse out a rhythm that lulls listeners into a groove
before all hell breaks loose.
Then sas! The room explodes
into a riot of chants as four young men burst in slinging a chaos
of Spanglish.
You catch a phrase or two:
"We are chicano essense." "Somos todo y somos
nada."
These are San Diego's Taco
Shop Poets, "cultural guerillas" bearing witness to
the modulating Latino world with high-octane poetry they call
"chorizo tonguefire".
Declaring "long-live
salsa and the spoken word," the six-man group is serving
up powerful performances in taquerias from the West Coast to
East, feeding people's minds as they fill their stomachs.
Street wise and book smart,
the poets are at once hip, literate and percolating with Latino
chispa.
Adolfo Guzman Lopez, Adrian
Arancibia, Tómas Riley and Miguel Angel Soria draw on
la raza's everyday reality -- of "99-cent stores and 99-cent
lives" -- of workaday heroes and homeboys to bring the bus
stop, the street corner, the swap meet to life in their performances.
"We believe regardless
of who you are, everyone should have a voice,'' Arancibia says.
"We are the community. The community has different voices
-- recent immigrants, people who've been here for generations
-- all these people are coming through."
It was 1994 when Arancibia,
Guzman and Soria decided their ethnic voices were out of sync
with the university/cappuccino crowd where they'd been reading
their material.
"Our message wasn't
being received at coffee shops,'' said Soria. "We knew we
wanted to connect more with the audience; we didn't always want
to rationalize our choice of code-switching or our subject matter.''
Opting to take their brand
of poetry to the streets, Guzman organized a series of taco shop
readings with an extended group of poets and musicians who performed
in Tijuana and San Diego. When the series ended, a core group
kept going.
Eventually, the Taco Shop
Poets distilled themselves down to the four writers and two crack
musicians. Michael Figgins on bass and Kevin Green on drums supply
the jazz, salsa and rap sounds that complete the crew.
In the past three years,
they've pushed beyond their border roots to tour San Francisco,
Denver, Boston and New York. Their performance was even captured
on film in Edwards James Olmos' recent HBO special "Americanos".
The poets love to clash
and clang. To mix styles, language and sounds. They defy categorization.
Three of the poets -- Arancibia,
Soria and Riley -- are grade-school teachers. Guzman is a public
radio show producer. At performances, they get their pedagogical
juices going by involving the audience.
"We ask people to stand
up in the crowd, they have to participate,'' says Arancibia.
"It's really important because the crowd becomes active
members in change.''
Recently, the poets stepped
out of the taco shop for a night to accept an invitation to perform
for an upscale crowd at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art.
Moments after Green and
Figgins laid down a beat, the poets' contagious energy put the
crowd on its feet, setting blue-hairs and society matrons clapping
out a beat as the poets dished out their stuff.
It was the kind of reaction
the guys thrive on.
"I think they understood
that we were there to challenge them and they were open to that,''
says Arancibia. "There's a certain amount of excitement
there, a certain amount of tension."
For those who don't have
the suerte to be serenaded by the poets while they munch on carnitas,
the poets produced a CD, "Chorizo Tonguefire," in 1999.
It's a spicy pozole of music
styles and politically conscious messages starting with the Taco
Shop Poets manifesto: "We are the 30-year-olds talking Chicano
liberation and 401K's.''
The ebb and flow of Latino
daily life pulses through the cuts as the poets follow in the
Mexican corrido tradition.
"We're not doing anything
that the corrido wasn't doing before,'' says Soria. "We
are reaffirming and finding beauty in places that are ours."
One controversial spot the
poets decided to reclaim was the Alamo during a tour of San Antonio
three years ago.
Aware of the Alamo's place
as a shrine to the Texas fighters who defended the fortress against
Mexican forces, the poets also wanted to underscore the Alamo's
place as a symbol of the Mexican-American struggle.
Accompanied by a lone drum,
they marched in and staged an impromptu reading captivating the
tourists and alarming the rangers who ordered them off the property.
Before leaving without incident,
the poets made their stand. "Instead of shooting guns, we
shot off our poetry,'' says Guzman.
But their venue of choice
is always the taco shop.
They call these natural
culture centers, community meeting places where people from all
walks of life come together to enjoy the same good food.
"The taco shop is one
of the most democratic of places,'' says Guzman.
"When you step up to
a taco shop and order your food, it doesn't matter to the taquero
if you're a junior or an albanil (laborer) or a teacher or a
businessman,'' says Guzman. "He's going to make you the
same taco and all those people co-exist standing up at a taco
shop.''
Go to http://www.tacoshoppoets.org
for more about the poets.
