“At the Border, Your Life is Choice”: An Interview with Alberto Álvaro Ríos

On his arrival in Oklahoma City in April 2019, Alberto Ríos chose to meet us at the legendary Cattlemen’s Steakhouse in Stockyards City. In addition to the delicious food and vintage American West ambience, the four of us enjoyed a couple hours of delightful conversation. Ríos proved to be a man of great personal warmth and genuine curiosity about our city. We—a professor of English, a professor of Spanish, and a student poet majoring in both English and Spanish—were the first to welcome him.

The dinner venue was fitting for a poet who hails from the Southwest and for whom geographic location is a defining element of his work. He is, after all, the first Poet Laureate of Arizona (appointed in 2013). Like Arizona’s, Oklahoma’s identity is informed by a strong Indigenous presence and a Mexican American heritage that dates back prior to statehood in 1907. Ríos was joining us for the annual Thatcher Hoffman Smith Poetry series at Oklahoma City University, which for over twenty years has brought a major poet for several days of workshops and readings to the community.

During that first dinner, we were treated to a preview of what he would share in public and what he would share in the interview that follows. The congenial delight he took in all manner of topics was emblematic of the kind of poet he is: one who invites us to marvel at the world by looking at it in new ways and being surprised at its strangeness. Like the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, he is a master of taking commonplace things, the flora and fauna of his environment (in his case, the desert Southwest), and inviting us to look at them in amazement, as if for the first time. As we learned in conversation, he is also a natural storyteller and teacher.

Given his role as voice of the southwestern borderlands, we were not surprised to detect notes of outrage at a central government that has cut through his hometown of Nogales, Arizona, with Berlin-like walls. Our meeting with him was taking place amid the migrant crisis, family separations at the border, and the relocation of some of the children to Fort Sill in Oklahoma, with its troubling history of Native American detention and Japanese internment.

Most of the time, however, we heard him speak of Nogales with hope and pride. We heard him say on more than one occasion that the borderlands are the “quintessential” American place, not some remote corner. There is nothing more American than choice, and borderlands people face daily choices about significant matters—namely, through which language and through what cultural lens they are to frame their lives. For him, these are life-defining choices, which are a source both of anxiety and creative vitality.

Growing up in a modest, mixed-culture household in Nogales, his community might not have imagined the accolades he would come to earn, which include prestigious Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, six Pushcart Prize awards, and the Arizona Governor’s Arts Awards. He is the inaugural Poet Laureate of Arizona, Regents Professor of English at Arizona State University, Chancellor of the American Academy of Poets (appointed in 2014), and as of 2017, Director of the recently established Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at ASU. He has published over a dozen books, with several more in progress as we spoke. Known primarily as a poet, he also writes fiction and nonfiction, but poetry is at the root of all his writing, as our conversation revealed.

In the days we spent with him, we felt how Alberto Ríos spoke for us—not just to us—in Oklahoma. We are not so removed from the borderlands ourselves. We travel in and out of Native American jurisdictions frequently. Spanish was the first European language spoken in this area, and there are hybrid spaces all around us. Similar cultural dynamics inform identities across the United States...