It’s me and Chapulín. This kid calls
me maestro, and there is no more humbling an attribution. We’re at a neighborhood
bar working on our second or third beer after walking through the Mobile Mural
Lab which has been stationed strategically at the regular Friday afternoon
Boyle Heights Farmer’s Market. It’s getting cool, and until just moments before
taking a seat on these stools, our pockets were empty. For poets, this is not a
surprise. Penniless poet is a redundancy.
“No problem,” I had uttered an hour
or two earlier. We see a client and a Brooklyn & Boyle contributing writer,
a successful attorney who supports the arts and advertises here regularly. He
doesn’t have a problem with an advance payment on the next issue. Chapulín is a
poet, and, of course, poets never think about the weather or whether they’re
dressed appropriately. He’s in a t-shirt, shorts and the inevitable Chuck
Taylors. As the sun goes down, I can see he’s having a tough time with the drop
in temperature.
“We have to start your Eastside
poe-tour and cantina crawl with a stop at the Proyecto Pastoral segunda to get
you a long sleeve flannel, homie,” I tell the young vato sporting a goatee and
Buddy Holly horn-rimmed glasses. Bronze and maybe just a bit on the chonchito
side like me, he is covered in a grip of tattoos. Daniel Morales León, AKA El
Chapulín, is the resident poet at La Mina Collective, over in City Terrace.
Relocated from South Central to LA’s Eastside, he is part of a circle that also
includes the charmingly magnetic boys in a lively cumbia band called La Chamba,
young dudes who also happen to take political organizing with a zeal and a
seriousness that provokes and inspires. They are LA’s first and foremost
exponents of cumbia chicha, a Peruvian variation of working class cumbia where
the accordion has been supplanted by the electric guitar. Daniel’s jefitos are
from Oaxaca, and they don’t necessarily always understand, he says, that he is
a “poeta necio,” a handle I’ve managed to get friendlier with myself over the
years.
“They have a hard time understanding
just exactly what it is I do,” says Chapulín, who has also begun extending his
Eastside residency with regular gigs as the host of the Corazón del Pueblo
bi-monthly open mic series, Flowers of Fire.
“You know why we named it Flowers of
Fire, right? Flores de Fuego,” I say. “Not really, but I can pretty much
guess,” comes the reply from a sage and wise young bard who I’ve watched the
sun come up with more than once already.
“When we first came together as the
original Corazón del Pueblo collective board, we were thinking of the floricanto,
you know, ‘in xochitl in cuicatl,’ which is nahuatl for ‘flower-song,’” I explain.
We weave back and forth on a hundred subjects but mostly we get back to the
poetry and what it means and why we have to write. And then there are
references to Neruda and Roque Dalton. I’m trying to tell him about the
argentina Alejandra Pizarnik and her “ extracción de la piedra de la locura,”
that stone of madness we both have lodged in our brains.
“She committed suicide,” I say. “Say
what?” says Chapulín. “Yeah, she OD’d on seconal on purpose,” I say. Later, we
sit in my car and I extract a manuscript to share some more of that madness,
the kinds of craziness that keeps Chapulín awake at all hours when he has to
write, when he has to let the ink dribble in spades from his fingertips,
allowing it to pour forth onto a page before it hemorrhages in his veins.
These are the musings and sharp
reveries that have pulled him here, to a barrio not unlike the South Central
hood where he was raised, a community that drew me 12 years ago after a decade
of nomadic gypsy wanderings in Mexico City, Chiapas, Barcelona, New York,
Matamoros, El Paso and Houston after a childhood in Austin marked by movimiento
politics, Brown Beret marches against police brutality and the tutelage under
an ex-pinto poet named Raúl Salinas, or raúlrsalinas, as he himself signed his
named. “Tapón” (the placazo Raúl was given during his own childhood) had
authored the now renowned “Un Trip Through the Mind Jail Y Otras Excursions,”
and I’m trying to tell Chapulín that lineage and an appreciation for the
literary opportunities we have been handed from elders who made it a point to
step outside of their traditional homes to embrace brotherhood with distant
relatives from all of the tribes is important. I’m telling him that I wouldn’t
be publishing this paper in the barrio I recognize as ground zero for Chicano
culture worldwide if it weren’t for them.
Chapulin, like many of the young
brothers who share spoken word, did not grow up surrounded by nurturing poets
who arrived with an armload of books and told them, “you should read this and
come back later so we can talk about it.” No, Daniel and many of his peers
brought themselves up, literally. They did not have guides or XicanIndio
mentors who led them through sweat lodge ceremonies. They looked for and found
their poetic voices on the street and in the immigrant stories of their
indigena parents.
“I’ve been spittin’ for about a
minute,” says Chapulín. And I know he’s the one. He’s the one who can only sit
still long enough to let the poem live through him, pound itself out of him
until it sees the light of day. I see a grittier, angrier yet somehow still
less tortured version of myself in him.
So we chill, we make the rounds. We break bread and follow the moon,
howling into the wind and pretending we don’t care. That life is only loaned to
us and that we’re on borrowed time. Of course, I tell him that in an effort to
let my own street-wise profe know how much his influence and love had meant to
me, I coined a word. How I sat in a South Austin restaurant called Little
Mexico over a plate of tacos de carne guisada (steak picado to folks here in Califaztlan)
and a bottle of cold Corona with the legendary barrio bard, a traveler who had
been invited to Cuba and Nicaragua and Libya and Palestine to share
revolutionary poetry. How he was at the same time a die-hard radical AIM
(American Indian Movement) activist and a co-founder of the national Leonard
Peltier Support Committee. How I looked at him with reverence and said I would
forever be proud of having been inducted into the great hall of the
“literalocos y literatontos” he had adopted and raised.
I tell Chapulin how Raúl used to
humbly refer to himself as the cockroach poet because he never took it so
seriously that he had to act like a diva and demand green M & Ms backstage
at readings where he shared the stage with truly great writers such as Ernesto
Cardenal and Fernando Alegria and Mikey Piñero. When he heard me say
literaloco-literatonto, or literary krazy-klown-fool, he laughed and nodded his
approval. These days, veteranos like Jose Antonio Burciaga, Raúl Salinas, and
Trinidad Sánchez are gone. And it seems like so many of the young poets are
trying too hard to be rock stars who worry about pecking order or whether or
not they’re going to be on the radio instead of just trying to be the guys that
don’t mind taking out the trash and cleaning the refrigerator and loading sound
equipment even though they don’t have to. Chapulín is one of those dudes. He
gets down and dirty, he loads gear and slangs beers at fundraising events, but
he can also slang words and spit fire with the best of them. There is something
simultaneously charismatic and travieso about him. Much later, after I’ve
published his gut-wrenching poem about Mexico, I watch him dance around a room
holding the printed pages in his arms and waving them about with a contagious
glee. And again, I know he is the one. I can ask for no one better to help me
uphold the literaloco-literatonto banner. And more than any of the other
youngsters on the scene right now, he really is mexicano.
“Yes, I’m Chicano and all that, but I was born in Mexico,”
he says proudly. While still heir to a
powerful Chicano literary tradition, he is unique among all the other serious
young wordsmiths mixing it up on the Eastside right now with poetry rooted in
rap and hip-hop. He holds up his mexicanidad for all to see and still skips
easily back and forth between two languages like a wizard of wordplay,
straddling all kinds of borders… a lad after me own heart, neta.
“Literaloco-literatonto, huh?” says
Chapulín. “I like it.”
