Spilling the Beans in Chicanolandia: Conversations with Writers and Artists

Francisco X. Alarc

37 Francisco X. Alarcón n 1954 Francisco X. Alarcón was born in Wilmington, California. This small agricultural town would not be his final destination, however. As he grew up, he and his family moved back and forth across the U.S.– Mexico border, forever in search of that place they could call home. As a little boy in both places, Alarcón felt an outcast: in Mexico he was called apocho (“sell out” to the gringos) and in California a “wetback.” To shield himself against a prejudiced world on both sides of the border, Alarcón grew to embrace the power of storytelling—particularly his indigenous Tarascan grandfather’s stories of his people’s victories, such as taking up arms with Pancho Villa in the Mexican Revolution. From an early age, storytelling provided Alarcón with a sense of empowerment. Along with his grandfather’s syncopated and richly poetic stories, his grandmother’s Náhuatl dialect, with its distinctive cadence and rhythm, mesmerized him. His ambition: to grow up and become a master storyteller. This deep-seated sense of himself as a storyteller finally became realized when Alarcón began to write and publish poetry in the 1980s. Informed by preColumbian traditions, Alarcón’s poetic style and content paid homage to his ancestors. After finishing high school in California, Alarcón sought a venue where he could formally begin to learn the craft of poetry. He attended California State University, Long Beach, where he received a B.A. degree in English (1974). With a keen appetite to continue to hone his craft as a writer and thinker, Alarcón set out to pursue a Ph.D. at Stanford. Once at Stanford, Alarcón was taken under the wing of Chicano novelist, poet, and academic scholar Arturo Islas. However, in spite of Islas’s close mentoring, Stanford’s strong undercurrents of racism—and homophobia—began to undermine Alarcón’s progress as a writer. He pulled increasingly away from the campus, living and writing in San Francisco’s Latino Mission District. His vibrant life in Mission District culture contrasted more and more sharply with life at Stanford. To see if he could reconcile his scholarly with his poetic and intellectual ambitions, he traveled to Mexico on a Fulbright scholarship (1982– 1983). Here, he discovered that it was possible not only to be an intellectual and a poet without being attached to the university but also to be “out” as a gay Chicano. Upon his return from Mexico, Alarcón cut all ties to Stanford and dedicated himself full-time to writing poetry and to community activism in San Francisco’s Mission District. Alarcón’s enthusiasm to shape himself into a poet-intellectual working within the community, however, was soon dashed. This was not, as one might surmise, due to the trauma of his coming out to his friends and family (they readily embraced Alarcón’s sexuality) but because of certain events that led to his becoming the target of a judicial and media witch-hunt. In the summer of 1984, he was thrown in jail and accused of the rape and murder of a teenage boy. He was proved innocent of the crime, but the public defamation of his character and the traumatic experience generally of a racist and homophobic police and judiciary system meant that years would pass before his name would be cleared and before he would fully recover psychologically. After experiencing such a severe extreme of what the human mind and body can tolerate—and with the impulse to find a sense of balance— Alarcón’s hand took to his pen. In 1985, he published his first series of out, Chicano-informed verses in Ya vas, Carnal; that same year, he published his first collection of poems, Tattoos. In both publications, Alarcón had discovered a poetic rhythm and a penetrating, staccato voice that he aimed at a xenophobic and homophobic world. For Alarcón, the black marks on the page that formed into words were less an antidote to his pain than a violent lash against a racist world: “poems / fill up / pages // tattoos / puncture / flesh” (“Acoma: Léxico para desenterrar,” From the Other Side of Night, 3). Throughout the late 1980s, Alarcón dedicated his life to activist work and to his crafting of a queer Chicano poetics. His political activism aimed to transform the conditions of Latinos living in the United States, and his 38 Spilling the Beans in...