Hymn to Vatos Who Will Never be in a Poem

I realized that I didn't post any poems this year for National Poetry Month. So here is a beautiful piece by Luis Alberto Urrea that a friend just shared with me through email. Thanks, Melissa for the beautiful Sunday morning poem!  I read it to the sounds of mariachi trumpets blaring from the church across the street.

Hymn to Vatos Who Will Never be in a Poem
                                                   by Luis Urrea

All the vatos  sleeping on hillsides
All the vatos  say goodnight forever
All the vatos  loving their menudo

All the vatos  faith in la tortilla
All the vatos  fearing the alarm clock
All the vatos  Wino Jefe Peewee
All the vatos  even the cabrones
All the vatos  down por vida homeboys
All the vatos  using words like ranfla

All the vatos  who woke up abandoned
All the vatos  not afraid of their daughters
All the vatos  arms around their sisters
All the vatos  talking to their women
All the vatos  granting their foregiveness
All the vatos  plotting wicked paybacks

All the vatos  sleeping under mota
All the vatos  with tequilla visions
All the vatos  they call maricones
All the vatos  bleeding in the alley
All the vatos  chased by helicopters
All the vatos  dissed by pinches white boys

All the vatos  bent to pick tomatoes
All the vatos  smoked by Agent Orange
All the vatos  brave in deadly classrooms
All the vatos  pacing in the prisons
All the vatos  pierced by needle lightning
All the vatos  who were once our fathers

All the vatos  even veteranos
All the vatos  and their abuelitos
All the vatos  proud of tatuajes
All the vatos  carrying a lunch pail
All the vatos  graduating law school
All the vatos  grown up to be curas

All the vatos  Jimmy Spider Tito
All the vatos  lost their tongues in Spanish
All the vatos  can't say shit in English
All the vatos  looking at her photo
All the vatos  making love till morning
All the vatos  stroking their own hunger

All the vatos  faded clear as windows
All the vatos  needing something better
All the vatos  bold in strange horizons
All the vatos  waiting for tomorrow
All the vatos  sure that no one loves them
All the vatos  sure that no one hears them

All the vatos  never in a poem
All the vatos  told they don't belong here
All the vatos  beautiful young Aztecs
All the vatos  warrior Apaches
All the vatos  sons of Guadalupe
All the vatos  bad as a la chingada

All the vatos  call themselves Chicanos
All the vatos  praying for their children
All the vatos  even all you feos
All the vatos  filled with life eternal
All the vatos  sacred as the Sun God
All the vatos  Flaco Pepe Gordo

All the vatos  rising from their mothers

9 Days in the Desert: Day 8

Day 8: Byrd Baylor

Today is the final day of patrol in the desert. I volunteer to stay in camp and “hold it down” with Ricardo and Mike. The Silverado’s battery is dead this morning and the Suburban’s starter is shot, so without a car Elizabeth also has to stay back in camp. The cars are always an issue. Every morning one or another has to be jumped, every afternoon one or another has a flat tire. It is a never-ending puzzle to keep cars, people, and supplies properly moving through the desert. No one in camp knows about cars. Our patient from earlier in the week, Francisco was a chauffer in Guatemala, and for a couple of days he was able to tinker with the engines. With my limited Spanish I was able to act as go between with Francisco and other volunteers. That felt good, like I was useful for something. So many times in camp I feel like I’m along for a ride. I’m placed in the back seat of the suburban, jostled around, taken out of the suburban, pointed to a trail, and then I drop water, and repeat. Too many times I feel like a visitor, like a witness, like a writer, but that isn’t the reason I came. I cam to stop writing, to take my nose out of a book, take my fingers from the keyboard and be active, do something, help.

The Spanish helps with this feeling. For too many years I have allowed others to shame me out of speaking. As a Chicana, people (other Latinos and Spanish speakers) judge me for having limited Spanish. It is a critique I’ve heard my whole life, and unfortunately, instead of practicing and speaking, I have become quiet in the face of the jeers. But now, for the first time, I feel a real need to speak Spanish and little hang up seems inconsequential when held up to the realities of the desert and even the world. This is my opportunity to be a help to someone. I can be a comfort to someone. I can communicate. I can break down a wall, a wall I built around myself because of fear. I want to break down this wall, even if it is the only one I can.

Around lunch, Elizabeth asks if I want to walk with her to Byrd Baylor’s house to feed her horses. Byrd injured herself early in the summer and has been staying in Tucson. The volunteers have been caring for her horses and keeping an eye on her house. It is across the wash that runs around the back of the camp and up a hill, and is a beautiful hand-lay stone house with many Mexican and Native American influences and art. There is a succulent garden, hammocks, a windmill, barn, old rusted out bus, and a patio with a purple and pink mural on the floor of hand prints with two cots with blankets and pillows ready for any tired traveler (people are not the only travelers she welcomes. NMD volunteers have strict instructions to leave a plank of wood in every pond and water trough in order for bees to be able to drink without drowning). Elizabeth tells me a story that when she built the house the contractor laid the foundation and took off with her money, and that she and her friends built the home by hand, brick by brick, over years. Byrd has turned into legend around camp, perhaps made bigger by her absence. I feel her presence and the sacredness of the place and feel an ache that I do not have the opportunity to meet her. In some part of my brain where my fantasies run wild I imagine she is a kindred spirit and we are friends, or at least teacher and student, and we sit on her porch over-looking her garden writing magical tails of nature, want, life, death, and celebration, working together to create a more just world, a world where everyone is allowed beauty.

The Other Way to Listen is just one example of Byrd's beautiful children's books of Native American Folktales and the desert.

Education and Jaime Escalante

The other day I walked into my house and found my father and two of my brothers sitting around the kitchen table discussing some pressing matter. This is our favorite past-time. Other families may enjoy throwing the ball around, board games, or watching sports, but nothing gets us more excited than an argument over Obama's progress or lack there of, immigrant rights, big government, the state of public schools, allocation of state money, and so forth. We sit around the kitchen table blood boiling calling each other loyal "automotrons" and other such ridiculous insults.

On this particular day the argument had something to do with education and the state of Latino progress in comparison with the rest of the nation. My brother Julio, the oldest and arguable the smartest (he went to Stanford...whatever!) mentioned a quote he had heard that the Chicano movement of the sixties and seventies did the population a great injustice by focusing on education and not on business. My brother Gabriel agreed and thought we might be better off today if they stressed becoming part of the market instead of focusing on things such as cultural studies in colleges. Basically, they argued that the movement created a whole generation of teachers and thinkers, but no money makers or government players. My only retort: "But it's part of our makeup to encourage community, culture, and education." They didn't seem too convinced, and went on to discuss those people who have made it to the upper echelons like Villaragosa and Gloria Molina. I decided to retreat to my computer and let them solve the world's problems without me.

The next morning, while getting ready for work, my father had the news on in the living room, which had a live feed from Garfield High School and the memorial for educator Jaime Escalante.

And I thought, "See, this is what it's about."

Jaime Escalante changed people's lives. More than that he changed how his students' saw themselves. He gave them tools to succeed, and what more can we ask for? That's why education and art and community are important. It reminds of who we are, and by knowing who we are we are able to accomplish more.

He told his students, "I'll teach you math and that's your language. With that you're going to make it. You're going to college and sit in the first row, not the back, because you're going to know more than anybody." He gave them an even playing field. He gave them the language and the space to achieve, and that is essential.

For My Grandmother: An L.A. Story

From left to right: my father, grandmother, mother, and me

In my search and thirst for the past, for the faces of our history, I have forgotten the faces that brought me to the subject of immigration in the first place. I have forgotten that the story isn’t always something out there in the world, but something right here inside my own home, inside my own family.

This past Saturday my family decided to have a Catholic mass in my grandmother’s (my father’s mother) honor. In December my grandmother was in the hospital after she suffered an episode, which many of us feared was a stroke, and that our worst fear––the inevitable truth of her passing––was upon us. Watching her, my tiny grandmother, skin as delicate as tissue paper, struggling and crumpled in her hospital bed, I tried to hold back tears, as I suspect we all did, in what seemed like an attempt to keep this fragile creature from dissolving.

Thankfully, it wasn’t a stroke, and she was back in her Boyle Heights home by Christmas Eve. To celebrate, we had a mass said in her honor this past weekend in a small Catholic church, Mission San Conrado, up above Solano Avenue, in the shadow of Chavez Ravine and Dodger Stadium.

Yesterday, once again looking through Don Normark’s photos from the book, Chavez Ravine, 1949: A Los Angeles Story, I came across a black and white landscape shot of Solano Avenue and the north slope of La Loma. The homes of La Loma are gone now, but the church, the site of my grandmother’s mass, stands at the foot of that hill, and it is still green, still looking untouched. After the mass, my brother Andres took his son Armando and our nephew Gabrielito up the steps behind the church, past the ceramic alter to the Virgin Mary, to explore this greenery. I wasn’t up there with them, but I’m sure the boys played pirate, adventurer, conqueror, as I’m sure the boys of La Loma did 60-70 years earlier.

Inside the church, during the homily, the priest (speaking only in Spanish) addressed my grandmother, who with the help of her youngest daughter slowly rose to her feet. He asked her, are all your children here? She nodded. And are these young people your grandchildren and great-grandchildren? She smiled and nodded.

Some of the great-grandchildren attempting to sing for their great-grandmother

And señora, he asked, where are you from in Mexico? Teocaltiche (a small pueblo in Jalisco, Mexico), someone in the aisles assisted. Is anyone else here from Teocaltiche? My father raised his hand high up and let a proud grin spread wide over his face. And señora, how long have you been here? My grandmother laughed, shyly keeping her glance low in what seemed like an old school sign of respect for clergy, Cincuenta años. Fifty years, she told him.

And here I was trying to find an L.A. story, lamenting the loss of the culture and people of Chavez Ravine, not realizing that culture still lived in here. Normark’s photos illustrate a lost town, but the hills are still here, the Spanish is still here, and family is still here.

In 1949, Normark stumbled into Chavez Ravine. In 1949 my grandmother was raising three young children in a poor pueblo in Jalisco, Mexico (my father once told me how they didn’t have electricity in Teocaltiche, and that the children waited for full moons to play out in the streets at night). In 1949, the inhabitants of Ravine's La Loma, Bishop, and Palo Verde communities grew their own vegetables and milked their own goats that grazed along the green hills all around their homes. In 1949, my father scaled the hills surrounding his town with his grandmother to collect nopales (cactus) to accompany the simple meal of frijoles, chile, and tortillas that his mother was preparing back home for dinner.

My father, first on the left, with his siblings, cousins, and grandfather in Teocaltiche, Mexico

And now in 2010, sixty-one years later, the houses on the hill of La Loma are gone, but my family thrives. And my small, unassuming grandmother stands in a church beaming with pride to be surrounded by her still growing family of seven children, nineteen grandchildren, and twenty great-grandchildren. And in an hour two of those great-grandchildren, Armando and Gabrielito, will be conquering the hill just outside. And somehow, there is comfort in knowing nothing is ever completely gone.

Chavez Ravine: A Los Angeles Story

Before Lasorda and Valenzuela, before we bled blue, before Dodger Stadium Chavez Ravine was a collection of three sleepy communities–La Loma, Bishop, and Palo Verde–existing in the hills sandwiched between downtown and Elysian Park. There, poor, mostly Mexican-American families made their homes out of shacks and makeshift dwellings, but when a young photographer, Don Normark, stumbled upon the inhabitants of Chavez Ravine, he felt he "had found a poor man's Shangri-la." He had found three communities full of life, pride, and strength. Of course, most know that the homes that once scattered across the hillsides where vacated and bulldozed, at first for a public housing project, but later the public land was sold to private investor, Walter O'Malley for Dodger Stadium. So what was once a vibrant Mexican-American enclave hidden in the hills of Los Angeles became the site of the major Los Angeles professional sport institution known as The Dodgers.

What is especially astounding to me is that Normark accidentally stumbled on to La Loma, Bishop, and Palo Verde, when he was searching for a wide shot of downtown, but was so inspired by the place that he came back more than a dozen times with his camera in hand. Little did he know, nor the subjects of his photographs know, that the place he was capturing would soon no longer exist.

And now because of the work of a young, novice, but inspired photographer, we have a look back at a time and a way of life that has become obsolete in wide-spread industrialized Los Angeles.This is one of my favorite photos. He is demanding his own poem.

The book, Chavez Ravine, 1949: A Los Angeles Story, is full of Normark's black and white photos and is accompanied by interviews with the people who once lived there. It is an amazing source, and a reminder of a simpler time when neighbors knew one another, and L.A. was green and untouched.

Here is a portion of a poem inspired by Normack's photographs and one woman's memories of life in the ravine:

Quinceañera Serenata

“And what was really, really special was that on Saturday, five o’ clock in the morning when the sun was coming out, the boys used to play the guitar and serenade everybody, and it was so beautiful to hear the music in Spanish.” ––Carmen Torres Roldan

Mi quinceañera, en tela blanca,
como linda flor de la mañana,
blushes before an open window’s light.
A virgin veil sweeps black coquettish eyes,
and hands hold prayers like fiery drama.

Dawn calls me to sing my serenata
for this child-bride, this niña querida,
versus for young apricot cheeks. Ayay,
mi quinceañera.


Poem Notes:

The form of this poem is a rondeau. It is missing the final stanza for publication purposes.

A quinceañera is the celebration of a girl turning 15 years-old. It can also refer to a girl who is turning 15. This Mexican tradition is still very prevalent among Mexican-Americans.