From Field Labor to Laureate—The Journey of Juan Felipe Herrera

Juan Felipe Herrera performing his work.

My bitching about being overlooked for selection of Poet Laureate by the Library of Congress has become a stale joke repeated here once too often.  As much as I may hate to admit it, as a versifier I am so far down the totem pole of able and creative voices that I am obscured by new mown grass at the base.  I can’t even quibble that the selection goes primarily to practitioners confined to an academic elite.  For some years now a wide range of voices from varied backgrounds, ethnicities, races, regions, and gender have demonstrated the Library’s commitment to recognition of the broad excitement of American poetry.

The announcement this week of the selection of California Chicano Juan Felipe Herrera is proof positive of it.  The 66 year old Herrera—my exact contemporary, by the way—is a vibrant, unique, and even exuberant poet who has drawn of his life experiences and his culture to create wholly original work that seamlessly blends English and Spanish without embarrassment or explanation.  As an actor and performer, his work is meant to leap from the page—it demands an audience and the active interaction between speaker and listener.  Herrera has also worked in theatrical pieces and prose for adults, youth, and children. 

As the immediate past Poet Laureate of California he traveled that state and visited every corner promoting poetry to young people who have responded with enthusiasm.  Along the way he created a massive, multi-contributor unity poem share at a number of popular live readings.  It was likely that energetic dedication that caught the attention of the national selection committee.

Herrera was born on Christmas Eve 1948 in Fowler, California.  He could hardly call the San Joaquin Valley town near Fresno in a vineyard and agricultural district his home town.  His parents María de la Luz Quintana and Felipe Emilio Herrera were Mexican born migrant farm workers who had been following the crops since their own childhoods.  His belly button had hardly time to heal before his parents moved on to the next fields.

As compesinos the young family was constantly on the move living in migrant camps, trailers, and even tents.  His mother took him with her to the fields as a baby and when he was old enough he worked alongside his parents.  He attended more than a dozen schools in dusty agricultural towns from near the Bay Area south to San Diego.  He spoke Spanish at home and early on was punished for speaking it in school.  By his middle school years he was fluent in English.  He would be comfortable in both languages, often mixing them.

Herrera was unusual in that he was an only child in a culture that valued and produced large families.  Inevitably that meant he was lavished with more attention and encouragement than many migrant children might receive.  He was bright and artistic.  In middle school he began drawing cartoons and by high School had picked up the guitar but he was playing and singing the songs of Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan.

Graduating from High School in San Diego in 1967, Herrera was bright and accomplished enough to win one of the first Educational Opportunity Program Scholarships for disadvantaged students to attend one of the state’s flagship schools—the University of California at Los Angles (UCLA).  There he was drawn into the whirl of counter culture, radicalism, and a burgeoning Chicano identity movement of which he was soon an important part.

As a young performer/poet.

Chicano identity recognized and drew pride from Indio and Mexican roots, but recognized a distinct cultural identity of those born or largely raised in El Norte.  And at UCLA he was not only absorbing and reflecting the militant Chicano movement, but being moved by the Beat poetry of Alan Ginsberg, jazz, and experimental theater.  Much later he reflected on this mixture of identity and experience in this poem:

Half-Mexican

Odd to be a half-Mexican, let me put it this way

I am Mexican + Mexican, then there’s the question of the half

To say Mexican without the half, well it means another thing

One could say only Mexican

Then think of pyramids – obsidian flaw, flame etchings, goddesses with

Flayed visages claw feet & skulls as belts – these are not Mexican

They are existences, that is to say

Slavery, sinew, hearts shredded sacrifices for the continuum

Quarks & galaxies, the cosmic milk that flows into trees

Then darkness

What is the other – yes

It is Mexican too, yet it is formless, it is speckled with particles

European pieces? To say colony or power is incorrect

Better to think of Kant in his tiny room

Shuffling in his black socks seeking out the notion of time

Or Einstein re-working the erroneous equation

Concerning the way light bends – all this has to do with

The half, the half-thing when you are a half-being

 

Time

 

Light

 

How they stalk you & how you beseech them

All this becomes your life-long project, that is

You are Mexican. One half Mexican the other half

Mexican, then the half against itself

 

—Juan Felipe Herrera

Herrera graduated from UCLA in 1971 with a degree in anthropology but with an itch to write poetry and to blend it with performance art breaking down barriers between genres, between artist and audience.  “I used to stand on the corner in San Diego with poems sticking out of my hip pocket, asking people if there was a place where I could read poems,” he told an intervier, “The audience is half of the poem.”

Herrera became involved with the Centro Cultural de la Raza in San Diego which encouraged and developed Chicano arts out of a converted water tank in Balboa Park.

Later Herrera moved to San Francisco where a Beat poetry scene still thrived.  He fell in with the informal group of poets and artists in the Mission District with whom he often shared readings in coffee houses, bars, and impromptu street corners.  He was honing his craft.  In 1974 his first poetry collection, Rebozos of Love was published by the Chicano movement press Tolteca Publications.  It would be more than ten years before another would be printed.

In the meantime Herrera finished a Masters in Social Anthropology at Stanford in 1980.  His interest in Mexican cultural roots caused him to organize and lead Chicano trek to Mexican Indian villages, from the rain forest of Chiapas to the mountains of Nayarit. The experience profoundly changed him and influenced his subsequent work. 

But he wanted to concentrate on developing his craft as a writer.  He enrolled in the famed University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop earning in Master of Fine Arts in 1990 and subsequently staying on as a Distinguished Teaching Fellow.  His collections Exile of Desire (1985), Facegames (1987), and Akrílica (1989) were products of this period. 

Chicano activist and poet.

Returning to California Herrera established a solid academic career as Chair of the Chicano and Latin American Studies Department at California State University, Fresno and for the last ten years until retiring earlier this year as the Tomás Rivera Endowed Chair of the Creative Writing Department at the University of California, Riverside.  During the same years he founded several performing arts and experimental theater groups, taught poetry, art, and performance in community art galleries and correctional facilities.  He became a Director of the Art and Barbara Culver Center for the Arts in Riverside.  He was named a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2011.  And ultimately Governor Jerry Brown appointed him California Poet Laureate.

Herrera really hit his creative stride in full maturity despite decades of activity under his belt beginning with Border-Crosser with a Lamborghini Dream in 1999 and CrashBoomLove: A Novel in Verse the same year.   Since then he has penned nearly twenty books including his award winning young adult and children’s books, The Upside Down Boy/El Nino de Cabeza, Grandma & Me at the Flea/Los Meros Meros Remateros, Super Cilantro Girl/La Superniña del Cilantro, and Downtown Boy.

Meanwhile his adult collections have earned widespread praise and honors including Notebooks of a Chile Verde Smuggler, 187 Reasons Mexicans Can’t Cross the Border: Undocucments 1971-2007 (a unique collection of nearly three decades of work intended for oral performance), and his latest master work Senegal Taxi which brings to light the tragedy and genocide in Darfur through multiple voices—child victims, perpetrators, even inanimate objects.

Together this body of work has earned armloads of prizes and honors while Herrera has been showered with fellowships.  Through it all he remains personally modest and a little awestruck at the fuss and recognition.  Becoming the first Latino to be named Poet Laureate has only magnified the attention.  William Carlos Williams, whose mother was Puerto Rican, and who was one of half a dozen towering figures of 20th Century American poetry, was on a path to be named to the post, but was blocked by Red Scare Era politics.  Surely the selection of Herrera, the old Chicano militant, will be just as objectionable to the xenophobic American right wing.  But it seems to be unanimously popular with working poets and has been greeted with huge celebrations in Hispanic communities and press.

Herrera, who still lives in Fresno with his long time companion Margarita Robles, a performance artist and poet in her own right, is not yet sure what he will do as Poet Laureate.  But with his expansive, exuberant personality and ability to not only be an ambassador for poetry but to inspire young people and the marginalized to find their voices, you can bet that Herrera will be out and about, not lurking among the stacks of the Library and giving staid readings for polite audiences. 

Everyday We Get More Illegal

Yet the peach tree

still rises

& falls with fruit & without

birds eat it the sparrows fight

our desert

burns with trash & drug

it also breathes & sprouts

vines & maguey

laws pass laws with scientific walls

detention cells husband

with the son

the wife &

the daughter who

married a citizen

they stay behind broken slashed

un-powdered in the apartment to

deal out the day

& the puzzles

another law then another

Mexican

Indian

spirit exile

migration sky

the grass is mowed then blown

by a machine sidewalks are empty

clean & the Red Shouldered Hawk

peers

down — from

an abandoned wooden dome

an empty field

it is all in-between the light

every day this changes a little

yesterday homeless &

w/o papers Alberto

left for Denver a Greyhound bus he said

where they don’t check you

walking working

under the silver darkness

walking working

with our mind

our life

—Juan Felipe Herrera

The Zoot Suit Riots—An Ugly Homegrown Side Bar to the Good War

Tex Avery's Woolf--the classic image of a Zoot Suiter.

The mention of Zoot Suits these days conjures up fuzzy, even nostalgic memories—the ogling, lecherous Big Bad Wolf in Tex Avery’s classic Red Riding Hood cartoons; clips from old black and white Big Band movies with Lindy Hop and Jitterbug dancers; even teenage Dodie Steven’s already anachronistic 1959 hit Tan Shoes and Pink Shoelaces.  But in the midst of World War II the flamboyant outfits had become popular youth culture symbols especially popular in minority communities from coast to coast and were widely viewed as flagrant defiance of war time austerity and patriotic rationing.  In 1943 they became the flashpoint of days of rioting as Marines and Sailors roamed the streets of Los Angeles assaulting Zoot Suiters—mostly Mexican youth with the open encouragement of the city’s Newspapers and the abetting of the LAPD’s notorious vigilante Vengeance Squad.

The Zoot Suit arose out of the Big Band Jazz scene and among vipers—marijuana users (think Cab Calloway)—in the late 1930’s as a mark of defiance to the Squares.  Like many trends on the cutting edge of culture it probably started in Eastern Black communities, but quickly spread.  By 1940 the outfits had become especially popular with California’s Mexican Pachucos, youth who flaunted their flashy, expensive outfits and enjoyed a wild night life of partying and clubbing.  The term originated in El Paso, Texas and was brought to the Los Angeles area with the huge migration of Mexican-Americans—Chicanos—and Mexican immigrants to the area during the Depression which accelerated with the availability of war production jobs.  Pachucos and their female equivalent, Pachucas, who sometimes cross dressed in Zoot Suits, formed street gangs and became linked in the public mind with street crime.

Zoot Suits featured a long coat tailored at the waist and billowing pleated pants pegged at the ankles.  Accessories included broad brimmed, low crowned hats with wide, bands, brightly colored ties, pointed toe shoes with stacked heels and thick soles, and long watch chains.  No question about it, they were eye catching.

Cab Calloway, Viper and Zoot Suiter.

In 1942 in order to conserve wool for uniforms, the War Production Board issued strict regulations on how much material could be used in men’s suits.  The regulations meant to reduce wool use in suits by 26% and encouraged “new streamlined suits by Uncle Sam.” They affected the voluminous pants and suit coats favored as pre-war business attire, but also effectively outlawed Zoot Suits.  Major manufacturers quickly complied and ended their production of the style.

But in California small tailor shops continued to supply the demand in apparent defiance of the regulations.  Young Latinos with money to spend from war jobs continued to buy the expensive suits.  And, of course, many had Zoot Suits produced before the restrictions.  The press railed against the unpatriotic defiance and spared no racial insults in singling out the Mexican community adding allegations of being slackers despite the fact that a much higher than average percent of young men in the community were in the armed services and their workers were essential to war production.

Tensions were further heightened by sensational press reports of Pachuco gang activity and street crime.  In one sensational case nine young gang members were accused of a murder in which the victim’s body was found in a dump.  Off-duty police acting as the Vengeance Squad began sweeps of the East LA barrio and popular night spots all over the city targeting Zoot Suit wearing suspected gang members for assault and summary punishment.

All over California tensions also rose between service men and Zoot Suiters because of the alleged lack of patriotism for defying rationing.  But typical conflicts between soldiers, sailors, and Marines and locals over women added fuel to the fire.  Attractive young Pachucas in sexy dresses, gowns, and their own versions of Zoot Suits were out on the streets frequenting night clubs, dance halls, and theaters.  They were often approached and harassed by groups of servicemen on leave.  Many fights resulted.

On May 30 a large group of sailors began hassling a group of young women and were attacked by Zoot Suit wearing men.  In the melee that resulted one sailor suffered serious injuries and several others were badly roughed up.

On the evening of June 3, 1943 11 sailors in Downtown Los Angeles got into a confrontation with a band of Pachucos and were beaten.  Once again the police Vengeance Squad swung into action in the word of the Los Angeles Times breathless reporting, “seeking to clean up Main Street from what they viewed as the loathsome influence of pachuco gangs.”

Sailors and Army Air Corps. members (not usually mentioned in accounts of the riots) roam the streets of Los Angeles armed with bats and looking for victims.

The next day, with the apparent winking approval of base authorities, more than 200 sailors piled into taxis to invade East LA.  Their first victims were a group of 13 and 14 year olds, some of them wearing Zoot Suits who they attacked and beat.  Those in Zoot Suits were stripped and their clothes burned on the streets.  Adults of both sexes in the neighborhood who tried to come to the boys’ defense were likewise attacked.  The sailor moved on to other targets, invading movie theaters, forcing the management to turn up the house lights, and dragging Zoot Suiters and other young men to the stage where they were stripped, beaten, and their clothes and bodies urinated on.  Night clubs were invaded.  Men were pulled off of busses.  And not just Mexicans—Filipinos, Blacks, and anyone with a dark complexion.

As word spread hundreds more Sailors and large numbers of even more aggressive Marines converged on the city and on Barrios from San Diego to San Jose.  Mobs marched down streets accompanied and escorted by Police who not only did not interfere but often participated.  No young Latin with or without a Zoot Suit was safe from attack.  Pachucas were especially targeted and many were sexually assaulted.  When one young woman was arrested in possession of brass knuckles the press reacted hysterically.

Rioting continued for days and spread across Southern California.  The press, especially the Times applauded the rampaging sailors and Marines, spared no racial animus toward Mexicans, and generally threw gasoline on a roaring fire.

Navy brass was slow to react.  They continued to issue passes in large numbers during the first days of the disturbances and maintained that their personnel were merely defending themselves.  The Shore Patrol was conspicuous for its absence on the streets in the heart of the riot zones.  Finally late on June 7, after the reeling Pachuco gangs rallied to organize resistance to the attacks and injuries to sailors and Marines began to climb, the Brass acted.  The cancelled all shore leave and confined men to their bases and ships.  The Shore Patrol was finally dispatched in numbers with orders to retrieve service members on the scene.  None were ever charged by the service for any offences committed during the riot.  In fact rumors later swirled that the Marines quickly promoted men who were reported to have shown “leadership ability under stress” during the fighting.

 

Injured young men after being stripped and beaten as a mostly Mexican crowd gathers, perhaps cowed by the LAPD officer with his back to the camera from offering any aid.

The Los Angeles City Council passed a resolution condemning “pleated pants” as gang apparel in much the same way later municipal bodies would try to ban gang colors or, more recently, drooping pants.  Despite the ballyhoo no actual ordinance banning Zoot Suits was adopted.

By mid-June rioting and fighting died down in L.A. Official reports indicate that more than 150 were injured badly enough to seek treatment and police had arrested more than 500 Latinos on charges ranging from rioting to vagrancy in the city alone.  Although the figures for the injured are probably grossly under reported, there were no known deaths during the disturbances due largely to the fact that neither the service men nor Pachuco gangs had fire arms. 

As things died down in California, copycat anti-Zoot Suit rioting spread across the country to cities in Texas and Arizona where Chicanos were targeted northern cities such as Detroit, New York City, and Philadelphia, where Blacks were often singled out.  But even white hipsters were not immune.  Two members of Gene Krupa’s big band were beaten up for wearing the band’s stage costumes.  In Harlem a young Zoot Suit street hustler named Malcolm Little—the future Malcolm X—was caught up in fighting.

The Federal Government, which was trying to shore up relations with Latin America to counter Nazi activity there, became alarmed when the Mexican government vigorously protested the abuse of its nationals and warned of possible severe diplomatic consequences. The government was particularly concerned that Mexico might cut off the supply of bracero migrant farm workers who had become absolutely essential in bringing in the nation’s crops as traditional native migrants joined the military or flocked to cities for big paying defense jobs. 

Under Federal pressure California Governor Earl Warren ordered the creation of the McGucken Committee to investigate and determine the cause of the riots. Its 1943 report, found racism to be a central cause of the riots, and blamed the press for aggravating the situation by emphasizing Zoot Suits in any report of Latino crime.  In response appointed the Peace Officers Committee on Civil Disturbances, chaired by Robert W. Kenny, President of the National Lawyers Guild to make recommendations to the police.  In a tradition of post-riot soul searching familiar to us today, human relations commissions were establish and Police Departments were instructed to institute training on treating all residents equally.  You can draw your own conclusions about how effective that was.

Rounded up Pachucos and Zoot Suiter in police custody.

 

But not everyone was on the same page.  L.A. Mayor Fletcher Bowron angrily dismissed the McGucken Committee conclusion of racism.  The fault for the riots, he maintained laid with the criminal culture of the Pachucos and Zoot Suiters on one hand sailors and Marines led by white Southerners, who came out of a region in with both overt legal and socially sanctioned racial discrimination.  It was just a clash of cultures, he maintained, with the good [White] citizens of the city, including the police, caught in the middle.

Anecdotal evidence does show that Southerners may have played leading roles in the violence, but it is clear that white sailors and Marines from all parts of the country were involved.

Also arriving in Los Angeles to cash in on the situation was California Un-American Activities Committee under State Senator Jack Tenney which declared that it had evidence that Nazi saboteurs were behind the riots.  That evidence was never produced and the Committee did not even hold hearings.  Yet wide spread publicity around the claim made sure that many Californians were convinced it was true.

Eleanor Roosevelt in one of her My Day newspaper columns wrote “The question goes deeper than just suits. It is a racial protest. I have been worried for a long time about the Mexican racial situation. It is a problem with roots going a long way back, and we do not always face these problems as we should.”

The Times, owned by the rabidly anti-Roosevelt Chandler family, erupted with predictable furry.  It repeated the accusations of Nazi sabotage by the Zoot Suiters and it accused Mrs. Roosevelt of having Communist leanings and stirring race discord.”

Although the Zoot Suit Riots have been nearly obliterated from history for White Americans, for Chicanos and other Latinos they represent a critical cultural moment and in enshrined in their collective memory.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

National Poetry Month—Gary Soto, Poet of the Fields and Barrios

Gary Soto reading at the California Poets Festival in 2006.

The sunbaked valleys of Central California produce a lot—or did until the current epic and extended western drought—of the nation’s fruits, vegetables, and even cotton.  But it has not known to be hospitable to poets.  To thrive there a poet must be a hearty weed with deep roots, luck in evading the hoe, and a resistance to the poisons meant to enforce a productive uniformity.  Gary Soto must be that weed.  He flourished against all odds to tell the story of his people and their time and place.

Born in Fresno on April 12, 1952 to Mexican-American migrant farm workers Manuel and Angie Soto, his father died when he was only four leaving his mother to raise him alone.  He worked beside her in the fields from a young age and following the crops changed schools frequently.  Although bi-lingual circumstances made him an indifferent student, certainly one who showed scant promise or much encouragement.

Soto in childhood with his mother and siblings from his web page.

Yet somehow while he was in high school he encountered writers like Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Jules Verne, Robert Frost,  and Thornton Wilder.  He fell madly in love with language and particularly poetry.

It was a struggle, but he completed studies at Fresno City College then transferred to California State University, Fresno.  By the happiest of circumstances, Soto fell under the tutelage of Philip Levine, a professor of English and writing who was a noted poet of his native Detroit, the auto industry, and its workers.  Transplanted to agricultural California, Levine passed on chances to move to more prestigious university hoping to encourage working class poets with brown skin to find their own voices.  Later Levine would become Poet Laureate of the United States.  In Soto he found just the kind of young talent he was dedicated to nurturing.

Soto graduated from Fresno State in 1974, the first member of his family to complete college.  With Levine’s encouragement he went on to graduate studies in writing poetry at  the University of California, Irvine, where he was the first Mexican-American to earn a M.F.A. in 1976.  He cited as his inspirations the novelist of magical realism Gabriel García Márquez and contemporary poets Edward Field, W. S. Merwin.

Soto and wife Carolyn Oda.

In 1975 Soto married Japanese American Carolyn Oda and together they have raised one daughter, Mariko Heidi Soto.

Soto’s first poetry collection, The Elements of San Joaquin, won the United States Award of the International Poetry Forum in 1976 prior to its publication in the Pitt Poetry Series in 1977.  His second collection, The Tale of Sunlight  in 1978, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.  His work reflected the daily experiences of Chicanos which he presented without varnish, judgement, or preaching.  “As a writer,” he said, “my duty is not to make people perfect, particularly Mexican Americans. I’m not a cheerleader. I’m one who provides portraits of people in the rush of life.”

Meanwhile Soto went on to an accomplished academic career of his own teaching at the  University of California, Berkeley and a University of California, Riverside, where he was a named Distinguished Professor.  In addition to his poetry Soto branched out in several directions.  Beginning with Baseball in April he has written 21 books for older children and youth including Too Many Tamales, The Pool Party, and Marisol  in the popular American Girl series.  He also has produced a bi-lingual series of Chato books for young children about a “real, cool cat (gato), a low rider from the barrio of East Los Angeles.

Soto's acclaimed collection for young readers.

His work in children’s lit helped him branch out into film producing The Pool Party and The No Guitar Blues which was adapted from a story in Baseball in April.  Soto received the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Film Excellence from the Association for Library Service to Children for his production work on The Pool Party.  He also became Young People’s Ambassador for the United Farm Workers of America, introducing young people to the union’s work and goals.

He has also written several volumes of adult memoir stories.  In 1985 Living Up the Street received the Before Columbus Foundation’s American Book Award.  He turned playwright with Novio Boy in 2006.

But Soto remains best known and most honored for his 14 collections of poetry.  Among his awards for poetry are the Hispanic Heritage Award for Literature, the Author-Illustrator Civil Rights Award from the National Education Association, the PEN Center West Book Award for Petty Crimes, Discovery/The Nation Prize, the Bess Hokin Prize,  and the Levinson Award from Poetry magazine, The California Library Association’s John and Patricia Beatty Award (twice), a Recognition of Merit from the Claremont Graduate School for Baseball in April, the Silver Medal from the Commonwealth Club of California, and the Tomás Rivera Prize.

Soto has retired from teaching to dedicate himself to writing.  He lives in Northern California but still spends much time in both Fresno and Berkley. His web site can be found at http://www.garysoto.com .

If the following representative poems seem a bit obsessed with money counted out in coins and crumpled dollar bills I assure you that all of his work is not.  But in lives lived always on the very edge, those pitiful small sums seem so important.

A Red Palm

You’re in this dream of cotton plants.

You raise a hoe, swing, and the first weeds

Fall with a sigh. You take another step,

Chop, and the sigh comes again,

Until you yourself are breathing that way

With each step, a sigh that will follow you into town.

That’s hours later. The sun is a red blister

Coming up in your palm. Your back is strong,

Young, not yet the broken chair

In an abandoned school of dry spiders.

Dust settles on your forehead, dirt

Smiles under each fingernail.

You chop, step, and by the end of the first row,

You can buy one splendid fish for wife

And three sons. Another row, another fish,

Until you have enough and move on to milk,

Bread, meat. Ten hours and the cupboards creak.

You can rest in the back yard under a tree.

Your hands twitch on your lap,

Not unlike the fish on a pier or the bottom

Of a boat. You drink iced tea. The minutes jerk

Like flies.

It's dusk, now night,

And the lights in your home are on.

That costs money, yellow light

In the kitchen. That’s thirty steps,

You say to your hands,

Now shaped into binoculars.

You could raise them to your eyes:

You were a fool in school, now look at you.

You’re a giant among cotton plants.

Now you see your oldest boy, also running.

Papa, he says, it’s time to come in.

You pull him into your lap

And ask, What’s forty times nine?

He knows as well as you, and you smile.

The wind makes peace with the trees,

The stars strike themselves in the dark.

You get up and walk with the sigh of cotton plants.

You go to sleep with a red sun on your palm,

The sore light you see when you first stir in bed;

—Gary Soto

The Mission Tire Factory, 1969

All through lunch Peter pinched at his crotch,

And Jesús talked about his tattoos,

And I let the flies crawl my arm, undisturbed,

Thinking it was wrong, a buck sixty five,

The wash of rubber in our lungs,

The oven we would enter, squinting

---because earlier in the day Manny fell

From his machine, and when we carried him

To the workshed (blood from

Under his shirt, in his pants)

All he could manage, in an ignorance

Outdone only by pain, was to take three dollars

From his wallet, and say:

“Buy some sandwiches. You guys saved my life.”

—Gary Soto

Oranges

The first time I walked

With a girl, I was twelve,

Cold, and weighted down

With two oranges in my jacket.

December. Frost cracking

Beneath my steps, my breath

Before me, then gone,

As I walked toward

Her house, the one whose

Porch light burned yellow

Night and day, in any weather.

A dog barked at me, until

She came out pulling

At her gloves, face bright

With rouge. I smiled,

Touched her shoulder, and led

Her down the street, across

A used car lot and a line

Of newly planted trees,

Until we were breathing

Before a drugstore. We

Entered, the tiny bell

Bringing a saleslady

Down a narrow aisle of goods.

I turned to the candies

Tiered like bleachers,

And asked what she wanted -

Light in her eyes, a smile

Starting at the corners

Of her mouth. I fingered

A nickel in my pocket,

And when she lifted a chocolate

That cost a dime,

I didn't say anything.

I took the nickel from

My pocket, then an orange,

And set them quietly on

The counter. When I looked up,

The lady's eyes met mine,

And held them, knowing

Very well what it was all

About.

     Outside,

A few cars hissing past,

Fog hanging like old

Coats between the trees.

I took my girl's hand

in mine for two blocks,

Then released it to let

Her unwrap the chocolate.

I peeled my orange

That was so bright against

The gray of December

That, from some distance,

Someone might have thought

I was making a fire in my hands.

—Gary Soto

How Things Work

Today it’s going to cost us twenty dollars

To live. Five for a softball. Four for a book,

A handful of ones for coffee and two sweet rolls,

Bus fare, rosin for your mother’s violin.

We’re completing our task. The tip I left

For the waitress filters down

Like rain, wetting the new roots of a child

Perhaps, a belligerent cat that won’t let go

Of a balled sock until there’s chicken to eat.

As far as I can tell, daughter, it works like this:

You buy bread from a grocery, a bag of apples

From a fruit stand, and what coins

Are passed on helps others buy pencils, glue,

Tickets to a movie in which laughter

Is thrown into their faces.

If we buy a goldfish, someone tries on a hat.

If we buy crayons, someone walks home with a broom.

A tip, a small purchase here and there,

And things just keep going. I guess.

            —Gary Soto