Spilling the Beans in Chicanolandia: Conversations with Writers and Artists

Juan Felipe Herrera

129 Juan Felipe Herrera uan Felipe Herrera was born in 1948 in a small farming town in California. Raised by parents who migrated from Chihuahua , Mexico, Herrera defied his farmworker destiny when, as an adolescent, he discovered a passion for music and a love of poetry. His long hours reading and writing at the library as a teenager gained him entrance to the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1968. At college, Herrera found himself drawn to the writings of such Latin American authors as Miguel de Asturias, Mario Vargas Llosa, Alejo Carpentier , Gabriel García Márquez, Elena Garro, Rosario Castellanos, and Juan Rulfo. He also discovered a deep affinity with the activist poetry of Abelardo Delgado, Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzalez, and the poet known as Alurista; these poets expressed more directly his sociopolitical concerns regarding his own experiences growing up Chicano in California. Once Herrera finished his degree, he moved to San Diego, where he continued to work on his craft as a poet and dramatist. After several years of trying his hand at drama and working for Teatro Tolteca and Teatro Zapata, Herrera turned completely to poetry. In 1974 Herrera published his first collection , Rebozos of Love, which experimented with form (a lack of pagination , for example) to more fluidly contain a series of poems that gravitated around themes of deracination. Throughout the 1970s, Herrera continued to write poetry that combined the experimental play he had learned from Latin American writers with the sociopolitical edge he’d picked up from raza poets like Alurista. Herrera’s interest in resuscitating a pre-Columbian voice in his poetry led him back to the university, where he studied anthropology. After receiving his M.A. from Stanford in 1980, he returned to publishing poetry full-time. In 1983, he published a collection of dark, surrealistic poems,Exiles of Desire, which textured the violent experiences of urban Chicano life. By the end of the 1980s, Herrera’s poetry had earned him a place at the prestigious University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. During his stint at Iowa, Herrera found a balance between a hard-hitting sociopolitical voice and one that celebrated play and hope. Soon after receiving his M.F.A. from Iowa, he published a collection of bittersweet poems, Memoirs of an Exile’s Notebook of the Future (1993), which was soon followed by The Roots of a Thousand Embraces (1994) and Night Train to Tuxtla (1994). During the rest of the decade, Herrera published many collections of poetry that experimented with form but always focused on the Chicano experience. For example, he used a hiphop style of verse in Border-Crosser with a Lamborghini Dream (1999): Lissen to the whistle of night bats— oye como va, in the engines, in the Chevys & armed Impalas, the Toyota gangsta’ monsters, surf of new world colony definitions & quasar & culture prostars going blam. (“Punk half panther,” 2) During this period Herrera also became an award-winning author of bilingual children’s books. In CrashBoomLove (1999) he employed the free verse form he uses in some of his poetry to breathe life into the autobiographically inspired character César García, a Chicano teen who struggles to survive everyday encounters with racism in Fowlerville. Juan Felipe Herrera is a Chicano poet and author of bilingual young adult fiction who employs a variety of poetic styles and techniques to richly texture the Chicano/a experience. Frederick Luis Aldama: Why don’t we start with your latest work, Notebooks of a Chile Verde Smuggler. Why do you mix poetry with prose and photographs with sketches in this book? 130 Spilling the Beans in Chicanolandia Juan Felipe Herrera 131 Juan Felipe Herrera: My mother always used to carry this old album around wherever we moved. It was a big, red, plastic-covered album with soft, black, felt-like mounting paper that she kept adding pictures to. Along with showing me the photos, she’d tell me stories. And then sometimes a photo would be missing, and I didn’t know where it was anymore. It’d get lost. I conceived of Notebooks of a Chile Verde Smuggler as an album of sorts, but one where the photographs—that record of time—wouldn’t get lost. Like the album, I conceived the book as a composite of story and image. The photos I decided to use have deep meaning for me—many came from my mother’s...