“Sunsets are beautiful here”— I am told by someone as we are driving one evening on Fresno’s State Route 99 Highway, before a majestic orange sun overlooking the scenic hills of San Joaquín Valley. In sarcastic jest, they add: “they say it is because of the pesticides.”
The comment encapsulates the historical circumstances, cultural character and resilient spirit of the city of Fresno, California. Fresno County is the top agricultural producing county in the United States, and as such the breadbasket for the nation. The phrase “will it play in Peoria?” seems apt for Fresno, as the city has a history of being a testing ground. It was the place where, in 1958, the first credit card in history was launched, where the first franchised McDonalds opened in 1955, and where the first community college in California (and second in the nation) was established. It was the first city to have, in 1926, a fully air-conditioned multi-story office building—a detail that was salient to me during my visit, where summer temperatures hovered around 105 Fahrenheit. A city where more than half of the population is Latinx (primarily Mexican American), some descend from families that were in California already during the Mexican period, while others are descendants of immigrant farmworkers. Partially because wages in the (often cash-based) service economy are dependent of local conditions, there is a great deal of unpredictability, making Fresno a region with historically high economic disparity in California. The widespread use of pesticides in crops is also indeed a problem and has raised alarm in the local communities for the many illnesses that chemicals can cause.
I was in Fresno last week to open the latest iteration of my nomadic Spanish language second-hand bookstore, Librería Donceles. The host is Arte Américas, a 37-year-old arts organization that serves as the key Latinx cultural center of California’s Central Valley. Its executive director, Arianna Chávez, comes from a family of arts leaders (Arianna’s mother, Lilia González Chávez, was the co-founder of Arte Américas along with Nancy Márquez and F. John Sierra). Arianna, along with the director of programs Lorena Marrón (a photographer from Acapulco/Mexico City) conform a unique Chicano/Chilango team ( Lorena later shared with me that her great-grandmother lived on Donceles Street in downtown Mexico City).
Fresno is a particularly fitting place for a Spanish language bookstore, first because the city has around 350,000 Spanish speakers, but also because it has a longstanding and remarkable literary tradition: many Fresno poets have been nationally recognized, ranging from Phillip Levine, Mai Der Vang, Lee Herrick, Juan Felipe Herrera, and many more. Unrelatedly, but coincidentally, Douglas Walla, who was my dealer in New York when we first launched the bookstore in his gallery Kent Fine Art in 2013, was born and raised in Fresno.
The Fresno public embraced the bookstore with great enthusiasm; it made me realize for the first time how much Librería Donceles is, in some ways, a Chicano-engaged project: one that mainly makes sense to present in the United States for its Latinx communities.
The relationship between the Mexican-American community and the Spanish language is complex. At the entrance of this version of Donceles, Arianna and Lorena had the idea to invite a group of local Fresno Latinx poets to write about their relationship to Spanish and display their responses. One that caught my attention was by the current poet laureate of Fresno, Joseph Rios. His book Shadowboxing: Poems and Impersonations (2017) won a 2018 National Book Award (one of Joe’s powerful poems can be read here).
He wrote:
I mostly don’t write in Spanish. If I do, it’s peppered about here and there. I have a fraught relationship with the language, to say the least. I didn’t grow up speaking it in my household because my grandparents insisted we learn English without an accent. That opinion was formed with the help [of] teachers in segregated elementary schools and by priests and nuns in Clovis during the 1930s where they were hit, slapped, and paddled if they dared to speak any language other than English. I imagine, if they had been born in Mexico at the same time, those teachers and priests would have hit them for speaking indigenous languages in favor of Spanish. So, you’ll excuse me if I don’t hold either of my colonizer languages in high regard.
Though, as a poet, I recognize that Spanish is a shortcut to the hearts of those for whom I write; farm workers, working people, Brown people, Chicanx people — like me.
I am a proud Pocho, a proud Chicano and my mouth is full of marbles when I try to speak.
Later that night, I met Joe at a small gathering organized by Arianna at her home, which included members of the publishing collective Arroz is Arroz, (drawing from José Montoya’s Chicano twist on the Gertude Stein line, “a rose is a rose is a rose”). The artistic life of Fresno was the subject of conversation. At some point, Joe told an anecdote that seems illustrative of the Fresno poetry scene. A Fresno fellow poet, Anthony Cody, had recently put out a book, Borderland Apochrypha, which Joe read in one sitting right after getting it in the mail. I asked him to describe again the anecdote for me:
I plowed through the pages, getting angrier and angrier. A fellow poet’s best response to another poet’s book is anger. If it’s good enough, you’ll want to throw it across the room; you’ll curse them with so much joy with every turn of the page.
I called him to berate him over the phone for his achievement. He told me, thanks, but I am on such and such street (in Fresno) and I have to change the tire on my car. I’ll call you back.
I imagined Anthony moving a mess of things in his trunk to pull out the spare tire and a jack. I imagined the heat, the gravel underfoot, the sweat, the urgency, the frustration. There is something quintessentially Fresno about a poet of this caliber having to change his tire on an old Honda while I’m 200 miles away experiencing his brilliance. All of that, the gravel, the heat, the sweat, and the labor can be found in the lines of most, if not all, of Fresno poetry.
As indicative by the title of his book, Rios has a craft that revolves around pugilism. “I have literary abandonment issues”, he told an interviewer once; but instead of rejecting the Western canon he engages with it in a critical way; he does so by impersonating the various languages in his life, which involves a great deal of cussing. I asked him about that:
I’ve worked manual labor jobs since I was a kid: jardinero, fruit packinghouse, general construction, janitor, handyman, etc. When I studied literature at, say, Berkeley or any of the other workshops I’ve attended elsewhere, I was confronted with the stiff language of the prescribed literary canon. I felt outside of it, not a part of it.[…] I feel attached, as a writer, to Fresno and the voices I hear all around me now and from when I grew up. They come from work vans, breakrooms, kitchen tables, backyard kickbacks, et al. Profanity, for me, is something policed on broadcast television and radio. These words are commonplace everywhere else and often don’t have the sting we expect them to have. They are every day and markers of place and broaden the understanding of a character and carry their own music, there’s own special rhythm and sonic quality that cannot be overlooked.
Joe in a certain way reminds me to the poets in my family: my uncle Eduardo Lizalde, whose poetic language often drew from the heart of darkness of the human experience; but primarily I thought of my late older brother, the poet Luis Ignacio Helguera. Even though Nacho was not so interested in naturalistic representation through language in his poetry (more so in some of his short stories), his criticism and his personality was in itself pugilistic. He always ridiculed my more conciliatory and diplomatic nature, sometimes saying that I had a gringo attitude (whatever that means), mainly insinuating cowardice. In his defense, affection and conflict to him were inextricable from one another: his friend, the late poet Antonio Deltoro, liked to remark that for Nacho friendship was about quarreling, mainly because he loved the process of reconciliation.
I think it is fair to say that the generation of Mexican writers to which my brother belonged (mentored by Octavio Paz) had a general indifference, if not contempt, toward Chicano literature. One of them once told me that he found the juxtapositions of Spanish and English ridiculous and the Spanish references superficial. What this generation did not appreciate was the interwoven, deep register of bicultural, high-and-low references (both colloquial and literary) that one can’t possibly capture if one has not lived in that specific context. I, for one, as a sheltered young artist was totally ignorant from key aspects of urban and popular culture both in Mexico and the United States. I remember when I, at 22, was still a recent transplant in Chicago and helped organize a performance by the Chicano comedy troupe Culture Clash; at some point they discovered that I had never been to, nor even heard of, Hooters. From then on this was a running joke for them. I became “The Hooters guy”.
Thankfully, Mexican misperceptions about Chicano literature are changing. I asked Joe to share his thoughts about it:
In 2019, I was invited by David Ruano, noted translator of Jose Olivarez’s most recent poetry book Promises of Gold, to take part in a reading of poetry in CDMX. David has made it his mission to translate Chicanx poets into Mexico City Spanish. He and other colleagues translated some of mine and Jose’s poetry and we had a wonderful showing of it out there. The event was standing room only and was heavily attended by local translators, many of whom were in or had graduated from UNAM. It was one of my first experiences hearing my work in Spanish. I appreciated what David had to say about his methods. He gravitated to Chicanx poetry because of the colloquial speech, the hood-ness of it and felt that he could bring the uniqueness barrio Mexico City Spanish to the texts. He’s quite brilliant. The poems felt like mine, but somehow fresh and new. I could hear his poetic choices in the reading; his fingerprints all over it. I was in tears hearing it for the first time, the emotions were new, like I was re-experiencing the writing process, the inspiration, and the grief, as was the case with an elegy he translated. The conversations between Chicanx and Mexican writers are happening more and more.
I have also been reflecting on where I am positioned in this Chicano/Mexico relationship. I do not really feel, like my admired friend the artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña says, “post-Mexican”. However, I am a generation 1.5— one of those individuals for whom the fate of immigrating while adolescent allows one to be perfectly fluid between the two countries, but never quite fitting entirely into either one. I will live forever in a stateless identity limbo, of which the silver lining is that one is exempt from exclusively belonging to any tribe while also able to code-switch to temporarily join one or the other. As one of my favorite phrases by Guy de Maupassant goes, just as we remain alone despite all our efforts, we remain free despite all ties.
On this city of firsts, I also decided to do a first for myself, something I confess I had never done and which is the most American thing in the world to do: I went to a baseball game. You could say that the Hooters guy went to Chukchansi Park to see the home team, The Grizzlies, play the Stockton Ports. Arianna Chávez took me, and we sat in the back amidst 105 F weather but in front of the water misters in order to cool down. Behind the field we could see downtown Fresno. Arianna pointed out the building of the old department store Luftenburg's, where her mother got her wedding dress. Now instead of the iconic sign it once had, there’s one that reads “Growlifornia”, a nod to the Grizzlies.
Looking at the Grizzlies mascot entertaining the fans, I thought to myself: in the sport of human existence we shadowbox, we go to bat, we play the hand we are dealt with.
It was in Fresno, however, where I realized just how important the (serious) play of words — either in Spanish, English, or Spanglish— can be in the that critical endeavor of the reframing of the landscape of our lives.