Chicano Art And Activism: A Conversation with Juan Felipe Herrera

Juan Felipe Herrera’s poetry, in the words of one critic, is “a manifesto you can dance to.” It’s little wonder. The son of migrant farm workers, Herrera was reared on both the hardships and the heart of California’s campesino community. Cesar Chavez loomed large. So did Allen Ginsberg, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Herrera’s mother, who taught him the power of storytelling, word play, and self-possession. His was a boyhood that kept time to Mexican ballads and San Francisco jazz - a rich brew for a kid given to solitary wanderings and prone to brooding over injustice.

By the 1970s, Juan Felipe Herrera was a pioneer of the Chicano spoken word movement, combining art and activism. Today, he holds the Tomas Rivera endowed chair in the Department of Creative Writing at the Univerisity of California-Riverside. He is the author of 25 books. One of them, One Hundred and Eighty-Seven Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Border (City Lights Books), was just named winner of the PEN/West and the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles poetry prizes. At the beginning of that collection, he writes, "I didn’t start out to be a poet. Because I had been silenced, I started out to be a speaker." Juan Felipe Herrera joins Word of Mouth to discuss art and activism from the studios of KUCI in Irvine, Calif.

Watch Juan Felipe Herrera read from One Hundred and Eighty-Seven Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Border:

Here's a poem from a recent issue of the poetry journal Luna:

iraq tree

all the broken boys
and the shredded elms cannot be sewn back
nine generations of weeping for every wound,
all dust howls nine lifetimes, ragged, upright orange flesh open
butterfly seed tomb

colorless, almost transparent standing in between cross-fire
and five hundred pound American bombs and Shiite clerics,
the face of Walt Whitman with a pipe, or Hirschman on Columbus Street
angular, frayed and the cherubic azure of their eyes
upon the dead with fists frozen, rising up, or with shoulders bleached
hunched to serve, they fire the body, love they say, treasure
its rose-stamped holdes, Euphrates across the broken pubis
the leaf branches curled to one side, a mosque remains,
in a bitten wood of syllables, poison and beards, I hear
a mortar broadcast across the globe, general-men in
camouflage, they say nothing has changed, we are en route
to triumph, listen to them

—Juan Felipe Herrera