SOUL
FOOD: Abelardo Delgado and the Word
By
Felipe de Ortego y Gasca
Scholar
in Residence/Founding Member, Past Chair, and Member of the Executive
Committee (2008-2011), Department of Chicana/Chicano and Hemispheric
Studies, Western New Mexico University, Silver City, New Mexico 88062
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Words
are the poet’s stock-in-trade; no one knows the power of words like
poets and writers. I believe in the power of the word. Lalo Delgado
had an abiding faith in the power of the word. Proof of that faith is
manifest in the thousands of words Lalo Delgado wrote and left for us
in his poetry and prose, much of it still unpublished. I’m reminded
here of the 19th
century American poet Emily Dickenson who in her lifetimes only had
one poem published and left a trove of unpublished works.
There
is indeed no power greater than the power of language, the medium
that binds speakers of distinct languages together. So powerful and,
perhaps, so fearful was the power of the word that when God said “Let
there be light,” the word created “light.” Does anyone suppose
that when God said “Let there be light” there would be no light?
Of course ordinary mortals today would hardly expect light to be
[appear] just by saying the words “let there be light.”
It
appears that God so understood the power of the word that He
scattered humankind over the face of the earth and separated them by
a diversity of languages so they could not longer work together as
one people. Did humankind speaking one language threaten the eminence
of God? Is that why He diversified humankind by separate languages?
Or was it that God saw in the one language that humans spoke a
narcissistic threat to the human race in their zeal to become like
God?
It
doesn’t matter — we have since then come to understand the power of
language. Palabras are indeed food for the soul.
Abelardo
Delgado was the first poet to whom I applied the sobriquet “Poet
Laureate of Aztlan.” Later I used that sobriquet with Ricardo
Sanchez, not to diminish Abelardo Delgado’s standing as a poet of
Aztlan but to point out that at regular intervals Chicanos ought to
recognize different individuals as Poets Laureate of Aztlan just as
the Poet Laureate of the United States changes regularly.
Nevertheless, Abelardo Delgado holds the distinction of being the
first Poet Laureate of Aztlan.
There’s
a popular expression that one doesn’t get a second chance to make a
first impression. I was impressed with Abelardo Delgado from the
moment I first met him in the early 60’s. However, my most
memorable moment of him was when he was doing a reading in South El
Paso during the Cabinet Committee Hearings held there in in October
of 1967 — that was 45 years ago. I was covering the hearings for The
Nation Magazine
in New York (December 11, 1967). By this time, Abelardo was already
committed to the movimiento.
There was something about his poetry que
pegaba
urgently but not roughshod. To me, that perhaps best characterizes
Abelardo Delgado’s poetry and persona.
At
first glance, he appeared larger than he really was, not because of
his girth but because of how he stood and projected himself. I don’t
recall ever seeing Lalo without a smile, a smile that was at once
disarming mientras
que paloteaba.
His poetry is at once both a challenge and an assurance. In Stupid
America he
is chiding America while at the same time reaching out to embrace it
in the spirit of confraternity.
This
is what is most enduring about Abelardo’s poetry. It invites one to
participate in its unfolding. For example. In Stupid
America
the persona of the poem (we may assume it’s Abelardo) starts the
introit to the poem like the Duke in Robert Browning’s My
Last Duchess:
Stupid
America, see that Chicano
With
a big knife
On
his steady hand
He
doesn’t want to knife you
He
wants to sit on a bench
And
carve christfigures
But
you won’t let him.
Enganchado,
the reader is drawn deeper into the poem with another recitation:
Stupid
America, hear that Chicano
Shouting
curses on the street
He
is a poet
Without
paper and pencil
And
since he cannot write
He
will explode.
The
unfolding here starts out like the first recitation but takes an
unexpected tack in its comparison that leaves the reader poised to
draw the inevitable conclusion of the last strophe.
Stupid America,
Remember that Chicanito
Flunking math and English
He is the Picasso
Of your western states
But he will die
With one thousand
masterpieces
Hanging only from his mind.
The
structure of the poem reminds me of the 19th
century English poet Robert Browning’s Rabbi
Ben Ezra
who takes his pupils on a mental journey, saying “Come, grow old
along with me, the best is yet to be; the first for which the last
was made . . .” Except that in Abelardo’s poem “the first”
cannot actuate “the last” because the Chicanito
“will die” and we can only imagine his potential as a “Picasso
of your western states.”
This
is hardly the work of “archaic” poets as Gary Soto has
characterized Delgado, Sanchez, Alurista, and Gonzalez. That’s like
saying Shakespeare is an archaic poet. He may be of a distant
generation, but he still speaks to the ages as Ben Jonson knew. About
the works of these poets, Soto adds, “they were not very well
written(Partial
Autobiographic Interview with Twenty Chicano Poets,
Wolfgang Binder, ed., Germany: Palm & Erlangen, 1985; 198).
Stupid America strikes me as an extraordinarily well-written poem
with structural integrity in the best tradition of poetics as I have
indicated in my comparison of Delgado and Browning.
The
tendency in American poetry has been toward introspective
angst-ridden autobiographic pieces. Chicano Movement poetry of the
60’s, starting with Corky Gonzalez’ epic I
am Joaquin,
deconstructed that tradition while serving as countertexts to dispel
the images of Chicanos in mainstream privileged texts. Chicano
writers, particularly Chicano poets, construed their responsibility:
to identify the enemy, promote the revolution, and praise the people.
Early on, these were the threads Abelardo Delgado established in his
poetry. He was a people’s poet. He carried the fire of their
aspirations in his heart.
It
was a big heart: Abelardo’s. At the end of the 60’s and the early
70’s, Abelardo’s view of Chicanos and mine were identical though
I expressed my view principally in prose. After World War II, during
my studies at the University of Pittsburgh, I had aspirations to be a
poet. I wrote much poetry during the 50’a and in the early to mid
60’s read my works with many El Paso poets including Abelardo
Delgado and Jesus Rafael Gonzalez. And though I joined Cesar Chavez’s
efforts early in the 60’s, I was not a Chicano poet -- I was a Chicano
writing poetry.
In 1964, Paso del Norte Press brought out a chapbook
edition of my poetry entitled Sangre
y Cenizas
in Spanish. In 1952, my early work The
Wide Well of Hours
(Pittsburgh: New World Society) was in English. Neither of those
works are movement poetry though the latter deals with the angst of a
larger humanity while the former entails a highly stylized anguish of
recollection.
The
first movement poem I essayed was Hijos
de la Chingada
published in Nosotros
Magazine
in El Paso in 1970. The poem brought upon me the wrath of many
Chicano formidables in the community who, like Plato in his Republic,
thought my poem was a corrupting influence on Chicano students at the
University of Texas at El Paso, especially since I was then Director
of the Chicano Studies Program and expected to set the standards of
decorum for the students.
Abelardo
Delgado and Ricardo Sanchez came to my rescue. They defended me
publicly as a Chicano and defended my First Amendment right to
express myself as I had. Of course there was nothing subversive or
salacious about the poem. I was simply expressing the case already
proffered by the Mexican poet Octavio Paz that mejicanos (los
mestizos) were the offspring of an indigenous mother and a Spanish
father eiconicized by the historical figure of Malintzin (later
called Doña Marina), the Tlaxcalan woman who became Cortez’s
consort and whose child with him has been historically considered
the “first” Mexican mestizo.
Thus, the word malinche (with the semantic weight of “traitor).
Octavio
Paz posited that ever since, mejicanos have thought of her as la
Chingada — the
violated one (but that she deserved it because of her treason). I
don’t side with Octavio Paz’s rendition of that historical event.
Nevertheless the symbolism of Malintzin and mestizaje is powerful and
closer to the reality of Chicano origins as Malintzin’s children
than Coronado’s children. I made that point in my piece on
“Montezuma’s Children” in 1970 (The
Center Magazine,
November/December), a scathing piece on the shameful condition of
Chicanos in American education and recommended for a Pulitzer that
year by Senator Ralph Yarbrough of Texas who read the piece into the
Congressional
Record.
In
1971, Abelardo Delgado and Ricardo Sanchez both came to work at
Chicano Studies at UTEP where I was Director of the Program. Even
then, Abelardo had interests in Denver where he was closely allied
with Corky Gonzalez and the Crusade for Justice. Though ostensibly
different from each other poetically, Delgado and Sanchez are really
two sides of the same coin. Their poetic focus is on the people and
their plight. Sanchez is the old-testament voice in the whirlwind;
Delgado is the ole-testament shepherd waiting for the comforting
voice of God.
Just
before he died I sent Lalo a brief note in which I said:
“Im sorry you’re ailing,
old friend. At 78 God is not yet through with me and God still has
many things for you to do. Todavia
queda mucha lucha.
During a Summer Session at UT Brownsville I used Stupid America in
one of the Sabal Palms Lectures I delivered there. The audience
responded to the poem just as we all did when you first wrote it
almost 40 years ago. Your work in Chicano poetry will stand as a
testament to struggles we’ve endured as Chicanos in proclaiming our
presence in this country; and your poetry will stand as the legacy
you’ve bestowed on our progeny.”
In
1971, when I was putting together We
Are Chicanos,
the first critical anthology of Mexican American Literature published
by Washington Square Press, I included four poems by Abelardo —one
of which was Stupid
America.
And in my study of Backgrounds of Mexican American Literature,
Abelardo Delgado was featured prominently.
Abelardo
Delgado is gone now.
So is
Ricardo Sanchez. Voices of yesterday, sonorous, compelling. Lalo’s
passing brings to mind Milton’s poem about Lycidas — gone
but not forgotten. Que viva, Lalo Delgado!
Copyright
© 2012 by the author. All rights reserved.
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