Our Warrior: A Celebration of Rigoberto González

Rigoberto González @ Poet's House

December 6, 2016

Among the NYC poetry orgs Letras Latinas has had the pleasure of collaborating with, Poet’s House holds a place of honor: in the Fall of 2009, they hosted the fourth final stop of, “The Wind Shifts Tour,” which consisted of a reading featuring four contributors of The Wind Shifts anthology, as well as a pre-reading panel discussion on Latino/a poetics, featuring NYC-based Latino/a poets. So when Poet’s House, this time around, approached Letras Latinas about co-presenting an event to celebrate Rigoberto González’s contributions to our field, it was easy to say Yes. What follows is an account of that special evening. Special thanks to Nathan Xavier Osorio for contributing this piece. FA

Our Warrior: A Celebration of Rigoberto González

On Tuesday, December 6th, Natalie Diaz and Ada Limón co-hosted a celebration of Rigoberto González in Downtown Manhattan’s Poet’s House. Despite the early winter rain, the venue felt true to its name – homelike.  It vibrated with old friends reuniting and shuffling along the packed room in search of a place to sit or stand. La raza cósmica had shown up to honor a poet who, throughout his career –which includes four books of poetry, ten books of prose, and the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement– had never forgotten about us. In their opening speech, Limón and Diaz called him, “Our Warrior … a man who had written for us, of us.” Limón praised the beauty of his language saying, “his poems are lessons on bowing down to sound and confronting the abyss.” Rigoberto González sat in the first row, wearing a suit and a dark blue sarape that hung down his right shoulder like the fashionable champion he had come to be known as. Diaz described how the after-cocktail ritual of remembering friends and heroes would often end with González’s name and his message that poetry is service and the light by which we navigate the borderlands of our identity.  

Ada Limón, Natalie Diaz, Rigoberto González

The evenings readers shared their own stories of González and selections of his work. They came from local barrios like Brooklyn’s Bushwick, and further out west from Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Bell Gardens, California, demonstrating the vitality of the community González has influenced.  Saeed Jones, the author of Prelude to a Bruise, a finalist for the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award and former student of González at Rutgers University – Newark, read first. Jones reflected on how Rigoberto was his first non-straight, non-white literature teacher and how he guided him to understand that in our writing, “sentimentality is not humanizing, clarity is.” Jones’ reading of González’s persona poem “Gila,” with its line, “I make a throne of the body/ until it begins to decay.” reminds us of how devotion to clarity can animate the spirit embedded in language.

 Saeed Jones

 Elisabet Velásquez

Elisabet Velásquez, a spoken-word poet who has performed at the Brooklyn Museum, Lincoln Center Out of Doors and the Nuyorican Poets Café, shared a story of how González had always looked out for young and emerging writers. She cited a Harriet post from April 9^th, 2011 written by González after attending Latino Literary Imagination Conference at Rutgers that year. He writes, “Baca and I were the only non-stage poets, which made for an interesting pause among the parade of young, energetic spoken-word poets that took to the mic. Special shout out to Elisabet Velásquez, who impressed the fuck out of me …” González’s sense of humor and hope for a poetry community that isn't stifled by cruel self-preservation has become his living legacy. 

Erika L. Sánchez

Hannah Ensor

Erika L. Sánchez, whose debut poetry collection, Lessons on Expulsion, is forthcoming from Graywolf, called González the “padrino of latinx poetry,” and praised his complex portrayals of women in his writing. Hannah Ensor, poet and president of the board of directors of Casa Libre en la Solana, highlighted the importance of how González connects with the echoes of what immigrants have abandoned.  From his poem, “Gone the Body, Its Accessories,” she read, “The moon,/ she bows to you-she’s seen fugitives/ evade recapture when the mouth doesn’t seal like stone, suspend/ the letters of a name like fireflies in amber.”

 Eduardo C. Corral

Eduardo C. Corral, the first Latino recipient of the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize, called González, “threshold and exit,” a means to entering and gathering within community but also a way out to practice talent and growth. Corral, who has extended his support and guidance to many young latinx poets, including myself, lovingly called González his mentor and brother. 

Vickie Vértiz

Vickie Vértiz, author of the poetry collection Swallows, read an excerpt of González’s memoir Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa: “I look back at her defiantly, but then my aunt turns away and keeps collecting clothes as if she hasn’t seen two young men scrubbing heat out of their flesh ... “I think we should go in, you,” he says, placing his arm over his face for protection. He has broken the illusion. He has expressed weakness. I roll over on my back, shut my eyes, and spread my arms out. The rain continues to pin me to the roof.”  Vértiz explains that this “looking back defiantly” captures Rigoberto’s temperament. His commitment to queer communities and narratives is bold and unapologetic.

Juan Felipe Herrera

The evenings final reader was United States Poet Laureate, Juan Felipe Herrera. He read González’s poem the “The Solider of Mictlán,” and wooed the audience into a call and response song he accompanied with his harmonica.  Its refrain, “more books, more books” came from when Herrera asked González what he had in store for the future. Despite the distress of the recent election, Herrera urged us to continue to seek out magic, in González’s poetry and in his message of fortifying friendships and making love possible. “We all have things to do,” Herrera admitted, “but we chose this path.”

Rigoberto González takes the stage

When Rigoberto González stepped up to the lectern he was welcomed by a standing ovation.  If González had been overwhelmed by the affection, he showed no sign of it as he spoke with the clarity he had been celebrated for all evening. He talked of how although writing was a solitary act it did not have be lonely, how all our communities, including those supported by organizations like the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Cave Canem, Kundiman and Canto Mundo, are and have always been intimately interconnected. Any gains or setbacks were all of ours to share. He explained how protesting with the United Farm Workers taught him at a young age that there was no waiting for anyone else to lift the weight of progress. González addressed the literary community at large, reminding us that it still held many of its doors shut to writers who didn’t fit the white heterosexual male description and how there was still much work to be done. Yet he expressed, in his defiant optimism, that change was coming, “this isn’t a threat, this is a certainty.” 

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Nathan Xavier Osorio is the son of Mexican and Nicaraguan immigrants. He is from Sylmar, California and teaches translation studies at Barnard College. His chapbook The Last Town Before the Mojave was a finalist for the 2016 Atlas Review Chapbook Contest. His poetry and translations have been featured in Mexico City Lit, diSONARE and The Offing.  

Latin@ Featured Poets: 3 Interviews

Linda Rodriguez interviews Lucha Corpi

Lucha Corpi is the author of two collections of poetry and six novels, four of which feature Chicana detective Gloria Damasco: Eulogy for a Brown Angel, Cactus Blood, Black Widow’s Wardrobe, and Death at Solstice. In addition to writing poetry and mystery novels, Corpi is also the author of two bilingual children’s books and has been distinguished with a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in poetry, an Oakland Cultural Arts fellowship in fiction, the PEN-Oakland Josephine Miles Award and the Multicultural Publishers Exchange Literary Award for fiction.

She is currently featured in an interview with novelist Linda Rodriguez in her blog “Linda Rodriguez Writes,” in which the character of Gloria Damasco is foregrounded as a central and defining figure in Lucha Corpi’s work: Both for her role as being considered, among scholars and critics, as the “first Chicana private detective in American literature… [and as]the first fictional woman detective to be deeply rooted in Chicana-o/Mexican culture in the U.S.” but also for the special place this character holds in the imagination of the author:                  

“That same year, my father underwent a cornea transplant and had trouble reading the newspaper. He asked me to read to him from any page in the newspaper except La página roja—the crime page. I was seven years old, so my father went to great lengths to remove the red page and hide it from me. But he didn’t destroy it right away, so I usually found it and read it. La página described knifings, fights in the sugar cane fields, other brawls and bloody accidents, in all their gory details. I soon tired of reading those repetitive news reports. But my curiosity grew the first time I read about and followed the case of a woman who had unsuccessfully tried to poison her husband. I fell in love with the kind of story, in which it was evident that there was someone’s “intelligence” behind the crime, and someone else’s matching “wits” to bring the criminal to justice—aka the detective story. But it wasn’t until 1989 that I undertook the research for my first mystery novel, months before I met Gloria Damasco, the detective who would need access to all that knowledge at a moment’s notice to do her job.”

                  [Continue reading.]

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Rigoberto González interviews Natalie Diaz

Natalie Diaz is the author of When My Brother Was an Aztec (Copper Canyon Press, 2012) and is currently featured over at “Critical Mass” in an interview by Latino/a Poetry Now featured poet, Rigoberto González and which profiles Diaz’s debut collection of poems.

Grounded in the experiences of growing up in the Fort Mojave Indian Reservation in Needles, California, 

Natalie Diaz’s debut collection burrows from native folklore, Greek mythology, Mexican pop culture, and the speaker’s brother and his troubled addiction to methamphetamine to build a series of poems that is both narrative and surreal but always engaged with reveling what Natalie Diaz calls the “truest truth:” Testimonies that are to be found not in “history” but in the “myths” found in tribal stories:

“I was raised to hold many truths in my hand, all at the same time, and to never have to drop one in order to have faith the other. This is the beauty of growing up in a multicultural family. Our capacity for identity is large. I am many. Even though most people use the word “myth” to speak of our tribal stories, we see them as truth. So, for me, myth has always been the truest truth. The word “history” on the other hand, we question. Since I first began reading, I was drawn to any stories that were labeled myth—Viking, Roman, Greek, etc.—because I had learned those were the real stories. My grandparents are from the north of Spain, Asturias and Oviedo. We grew up hearing them speak Spanish, and I ended up playing basketball and living in Spain, where I learned to appreciate the language more. Though my grandparents are Spanish, we have many Mexican relatives. My mother is native, from two tribes, but our language was a dying language, and so not spoken at home. It wasn’t until I began to work with my Elders that I began to learn the Mojave language. There are only a few poems in the book that use Mojave, and this is very intentional. The English language silenced Mojave for a very long time, worked hard to crush it completely. I don’t ever want to force my Mojave language to speak in English—what I mean by this is that in my writing, I use Mojave to say Mojave things, things that the English language is too young or not strong enough or deep enough to hold. Truly Mojave things. If I have something to say in English, well, there is plenty of the English language to say it with.”

                  [Continue reading.]

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 Emma Trelles @ Boxcar Poetry Review

Emma Trelles is the author of Tropicalia (University of Notre Dame Press, 2011) and the winner of the 2010 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize and is currently featured in a conversation with Justin Petropoulos, author of Eminent Domain (Marsh Hawk Press, 2011), over at “Boxcar Poetry Review.”

In this conversation both poets express the convergence, in their two texts (Tropicalia and Eminent Domain), of poetry as an agent of preservation where language serves both to document and record the voice(s) of communities previously displaced; where language acts as the agent that cures and preserves these voices like the “canning of fruit for the coming winter:”

“I find it interesting that although our books are utterly disparate in tone, there is still a fundamental unity present that involves the document—a thing that serves to record, preserve, or, in some cases, give voice to communities which, as you put so precisely, are "relegated to silence" by the very language that is used to mask their existence. This idea of language as a form of preservation is also of great interest to me, although my own book's approach is rooted more in the truths and artifices of the image, how it is subject to manipulation through a desire to document.”

[Continue reading.]

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Maria Melendez @ Letras Latina’s Oral History Project

One of Letras Latinas’ most little known initiative is the Oral History Project. A series of taped interviews, this initiative is intended to provide a resource on the web for students, scholars, and the general reader alike. To date this collection includes over twenty interviews, including those with poets Valerie Martinez and Brenda Cárdenas and prose writers Daniel Alarcón and John Phillip Santos, to name a few.

Latino/a Poetry Now featured poet, Maria Melendez is the author of How Long She'll Last in This World (University of Arizona Press, 2006), for which she received Honorable Mention at the 2007 International Latino Book Awards and was named a finalist for the 2007 PEN Center USA Literary Awards.  University of Arizona Press published Flexible Bones, her most recent collection of poetry, in 2010. 

In this Oral History Project interview, Maria Melendez speaks of her own poetics and its relationship to the environment; where poetry has the power to mourn the loss of biodiversity, the loss of whole communities of plants and other living beings—as well as the ability to remember places that are lost and which where once inhabited by human and non-human life alike. And of her fascinating and artistic childhood and household where she was first encouraged to write poetry in exchange for ice cream: “poetry does pay” Maria jokes laughingly.

[Watch here.]