Notebooks of a Chile Verde Smuggler

by Juan Felipe Herrera

Overview

Raucous adobe hearts and urban violet mascara. Televised immigration games and ethnic sit-coms. Chile con karma served on a bed of race. In a startling melange of poetry, prose, journal entries, and even a screenplay, Zen Chicano desperado Juan Felipe Herrera fixes his gaze on his own life and times to craft his most personal work to date.

Notebooks of a Chile Verde Smuggler is a river of faces and phrases, jottings and reflections—a personal pilgrimage and collective parade of love, mock-prophecy, and chiste. Tuning in voices from numerous time zones, languages, and minds, Herrera recalls his childhood and coming of age, his participation in the Chicano Movement, and the surreal aspects of postmodern America. He uses broad strokes to paint a historical, social, and familial portrait that moves from the twilight of the nineteenth century to the dawn of the twenty-first, then takes up a finer brush to etch the eternal tension between desire and frustration, hope and disillusionment, violence and tenderness.

Here are transamerican sutras spanning metrocenters from Mexico City to San Francisco, or slinking across the border from Juárez to El Paso. Outrageous, rhythmic lists—"Foodstuffs They Never Told Us About," "Things Religion Makes Me Do"—that fire the imagination. Celebrations of his Plutomobile that "runs on ham hawks & bird grease," and of Chicano inventions such as cilantro aftershave and "the art of eating Vicks VapoRub with your dedos."

Pushing forms to the edge of possibility while forcing readers to rethink reality as well as language, Herrera invokes childhoods and neighborhoods, stand-up clowns and Movimiento gypsies, grandmothers of the buñuelo kitchen and tragicomic soliloquies of dizzy-headed outcasts of paradise. Notebooks of a Chile Verde Smuggler is a crucible of flavorful language meant to be rolled lazily on the mind's tongue—and then swallowed whole to let its hot and savory sweetness fill your soul.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780816533084
Publisher:	University of Arizona Press
Publication date:	11/01/2015
Series:	Camino del Sol
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	191
File size:	8 MB

About the Author

Poet and performance artist Juan Felipe Herrera is the author of many books of poetry and prose, as well as two bilingual books for children. He is the twenty-first Poet Laureate of the United States.

Read an Excerpt

Notebooks of a Chile Verde Smuggler

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By Juan Felipe Herrera

The University of Arizona Press

Copyright © 2002 Juan Felipe Herrera.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0-8165-2215-4

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Hard Curas on "C" Street

1436 "C" Street, late fifties,
San Diego, California


Show Mamá my right big toe infected and swollen. Ven aquí, she says.
OK, Mom. Just put your foot in this pan of hot water. Hold the toe up, Juan,
come on. OK, now, give me that razor. What razor?
Your papi's brand new Gillette. It's not brand new, Mamá.
'S OK, the hot water and the salt will burn the germs.


You ready, Juan?


Limpia for Walking into Clear Campos

Winter, Carbondale, Illinois,
late February, 1993


Step ahead, be careful—the ice,
you can slip.


Unloosen, breathe. Remember to breathe deep.
Unloosen. Swing to an easy beat.
Let your jacket become light, the sweet light
from the floating leaves of winter.
Sing to yourself. Follow the naked trees.
Sing


I drop my burdens
from my feet that guide them
I drop my burdens
from my ankles that turn them
I drop my burdens
from my calves that cup them
I drop my burdens
from my knees that rock them
I drop my burdens
from my thighs that run them
I drop my burdens
from my hips that churn them
I drop my burdens
from my sexthat heats them
I drop my burdens
from my belly that smoothes them
I drop my burdens
from my ombligo that ties them


I drop my burdens
from the small of my back that cradles them
I drop my burdens
from my cintura that dances them
I drop my burdens
from my ribs that cage them
I drop my burdens
from my breasts that nourish them
I drop my burdens
from my mid-back that protects them
I drop my burdens
from my shoulder blades that build them
I drop my burdens
from my shoulders that salute them
I drop my burdens
from my upper arms that wrap them
I drop my burdens
from my elbows that swing them
I drop my burdens
from my forearms that caress them
I drop my burdens
from my wrists that pull them
I drop my burdens
from my hands that grasp them
I drop my burdens
from my fists that defend them
I drop my burdens
from my fingers that find them
I drop my burdens
from my neck that balances them
I drop my burdens
from my head that circles them
I drop my burdens
from my forehead that honors them
I drop my burdens
from my eyes that picture them


I drop my burdens
from my nose that breathes them
I drop my burdens
from my face that covers them
I drop my burdens
from my lips that invite them
I drop my burdens
from my mouth that savors them
I drop my burdens
from my voice that soothes them
I drop my burdens
from my throat that swallows them
I drop my burdens
from my heart that lives them
I drop my burdens
from my lungs that fill them
I drop my burdens
from my stomach that knots them
I drop my burdens
from this body that holds them.
I drop my burdens.
I drop my burdens.
As I walk, I drop my burdens.
As I walk, I melt with the snow.


Immigrant Fortune Teller Machine


Lissen,
Bobo Chango—yeah,


you, rope-a-dope blues lover,
writer with a jinx on your ass, time is up
on your side of the block, betta' be adding up
your karma tortillas ]us about now, 'cuz,
all the chips you've been collecting be gone
to the wind, man, so
lemme set you straight
in a nice way, got it? So,


whaddya gotta do,
Chango, is—begin again,
toss out your old coins,
your mamá ashes, your papá whips,
yo' bad boy lover pill-poppin' games
an' mos of all your fast talkin' total whack
communicating genius girl self out the door!


Ahright, Sugar, yeah,
thass what I say,

step on
out now, naked,
everything showing, yo'
true self,


not that slime bug collection you've been
showing at the parlour, no no, noooo
you know whadday mean,
yeah, Chango, now,
iz up to you, you gotta trow out all that razz
matazz affabet', all them piles & stacks
of crosswords, those tiny pronunciation
dictionaries, the ol' memory power
tapes and that self-enlargement machine,
you know whad am sayon, OK?


Out wid it
out with all them hoodlum paintings of yoself,
out out, I said,


this is the lass stop before you
hit Phoenix, you know that next place you say
you are bound for, I see your ol' truck outside,


hissin', gettin' all shook under the sun,
outside, with that fine weasel sitting
on the red leather cushion next
to the wheel,


still rappin' about Desert Storm
comix & the great stash of bodies in the trunk
all the way from Tegucigalpa, yeah, yeah


I know, I heard it true
the grave vine, talking about the Virus in
air, grinning at you, adding up your DNA
like Fritos and bean dip, I can hear it from
here, yo' radio blastin' out,


yeah, about the Chain People,
the Chain Colonies, the hunger artists in search
of chicken sandwiches, the new bands of rape dogs,
it's my language anyway, sucker
so


whadelseiz new,
you going to ask me a new new
question today?


You come up with somethin'
new new? So tell me then, wha?
Did you say new, did you say Shakyamuni?
Did you say Shotinyotoey? In the hall,
the fast destiny velvet ball, is that what I hear


I heard you say
something? Or maybe you were jus laughing
in that fast high mariachi voice you got
from whoknowswhere, San Francisco? Yeah,


you jus bopped
in on the sneak,


but I'm tellin' you, don't
you come heah homo
thinking I'm going to put up wid you &
your razz about yo'self and all those yellow
papers you carry in your fish bag,


yeah thass
what it smell like, fish, good o1' mackerel,
wrapped in newspaper, yeah, yeah, you call it
something else, you always call it something
else, you come out with all those fancy hooks,
those scratchy little phrases, those words, yeah
those hooks,


thass what you call them, wordyhooks,
and you spin around me like an Italian
Puerto Rican boxer with all the moves an'
handsome serious faces you make


saying
you look good in any hat south of Broadway,
but, I'm telling straight up sugar, time is up, see
that door to yo' left,
no that one, muchacho,
the one
to your left I said, yeah


the one cracked
dopen, the one with all those tiny smoky
black bluish candles popping inside, gold
smoke and shadows, red vases blurrin'
wavin' into watery insects on the wall there,
some kind of holiday, like,


come on now,
I told you all about that door
long time ago, remembrrr, yeah, you remembrrr,
that first almost infinite day
when you came
up to me by yo'self,


yo' mamá and papi
still alive then, I think they were havin'
coffee and apple pie a la mode over there
by the newsstand, and your father was talkin'
big 'bout buyin' some kinda land in Kingman, Arizona
paying thuddy dollars a month from the Welfare check
sayin' he was goin' to leave it you,
but he was jus
a li'l too old for those things, his light was
'bout gone by then, then, well you know the res.
Now sugar, one lass time,


you go now, get on
out now, leave those old cardboard boxes here,
ain't nothin' in them anyway, jus leave them
right heah, & go on out there, time is right,


I can tell by the way people are shuffling
their feet & the shadows 'cross the fences,
time is time, jus smell the wet night rollin' in,
you know how my green blue blouse
always gets a li'l tight jus about now,
rain comin' in, maybe,


my customers drop a coin,
ask me 'bout the yellow sparks of sirens, wild crows
flyin' up to the saints carved outside the cathedrals
askin' same ol' questions, perched on the glass
against this glass, jus like you


they shiver and whisper like in an ol'
movie house, 'bout to begin, I tell 'em
the nun & St. Peter jokes 'bout to spin out
to the asphalt one more time, yeah, yeah


I think the weasel is waiting for you,
leave me the rope, doncha worry
'bout a thing, jus smooth your way out
by yo'self, whistle up


with yo' tiny crooked musical faces
thass your existence, Bobo Chango boy,
thass it.

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Excerpted from Notebooks of a Chile Verde Smuggler by Juan Felipe Herrera. Copyright © 2002 by Juan Felipe Herrera. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Table of Contents

Mercado Acknowledgments Book One: Hard Curas on "C" Street Book Two: Chile Con Karma Book Three: On the Other Side of Puccini's Book Four: Hispanopoly: The Upwardly Mobile Identity Game Show Book Five: How to Make a Chile Verde Smuggler Notebook Fragments

Editorial Reviews

Splicing names, dates and places with a talismanic array of bilingual references, Herrera uses the rough, unfinished notebook form more or less invented by Aim C saire in Notebook for a Return to the Native Land to turn his speaker's search for the truth into a force for unsettling existing political and poetic paradigms: "I stand alone on my boulevard, with my small audience of category makers, not word tuners or word flutterers or word hissers or word twisters, I said category makers. I am the idea, I am the concept, I am the liquid syrup that messes with the machine's objectives." By detailing his literary, familial (illustrated with a selection of family photographs) and activist histories, Herrera skillfully confounds preconceptions and prejudices, laying nonviolent dynamite under the tracks of those who would box him in: "We invented Chicano Studies, con manas limpias en las ma$anas, demanding our rights (this sounds old now but we did demand our rights). With our language, our home-poems, our long walks and fasts for justice Delano, Sacra, Coachella. I can say this." Composed of equal parts generational requiem, personal reckoning and political manifesto, these notebooks are deliberately process-oriented and lack the polish of "finished" work, since they are built to deliver a hot green flavor, "let's call it a flavor; it set out on its own." Readers should dig in. (Aug. 24) Forecast: Herrera is professor of Chicano and Latin American studies at Cal State Fresno, and most recently the author of Thunderweavers/Tejedoras de rayos and Giraffe on Fire. The former book contained perhaps too high a Spanish-to-English ratio for some readers, while the latter seemed to disappear despite being awarded a Latino Hall of Fame Book Award at BookExpo this year. This book, too good to ignore, should be Herrera's breakthrough: look for strong reviews in literary magazines and major award nominations. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Distinguished poet and performance artist Herrera (literature, California State Univ., Fresno) here invites us to peek into his poetic diary. Starting with his youth in San Diego, Herrera guides us on a spiritual search for personal and racial identity that is carried out with an arresting display of diversity and virtuosity standard verse mixed up with prose poems, journal entries, letters, and even a sardonically satirical teleplay. This collection lacks the unity and emotion of Herrera's Love After the Riots and delivers a lot of the messages we've heard before and perhaps better expressed. But it stands out for its triumphant, almost self-deprecating sense of humor (in "Juantoomany," for example, Herrera transforms as many words as he can using his first name). Often, this humor is tinged by the juxtaposition of surrealist images, as reflected in numerous stinging one-liners ("I worry about carbohydrate lobotomies" is one of over 100 causes of concern voiced in "Don't Worry Baby"). The poems "Foodstuffs They Never Told Us About" and "Millennium Omens" are similar irreverent lists. As a veritable smorgasbord of originality, this work shows us a writer at the height of his creative powers. Recommended. Lawrence Olszewski, OCLC Lib., Dublin, OH Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

"Herrera skillfully confounds preconceptions and prejudices, laying nonviolent dynamite under the tracks of those who would box him in. . . . This book, too good to ignore, should be Herrrera's breakthrough."—Publishers Weekly

"Herrera guides us on a spiritual search for personal and racial identity that is carried out with an arresting display of diversity and virtuosity. . . . As a veritable smorgasbord of originality, this work shows us a writer at the height of creative powers."—Library Journal

"Throughout its exuberant, flash-card allocation of poetry, letter-excerpts (that are themselves prose poems), snapshot recollections, antique photos and even a brief screenplay, such organizing principles as chronology, theme and form crumble before Herrera's endearingly personable voice. . . . Notebooks of a Chile Verde Smuggler is a convincing testament to the emergence of Juan Felipe Herrera's voice as the ultimate and enduring triumph of his literary deeds."—San Francisco Chronicle

"The inimitable and prolific Juan Felipe Herrera continues to defy and redefine the boundaries of poetics. . . . Herrera's energetic display of language is as close to acrobatics as poetry will ever achieve. . . . Piquant and poignant, the uncovered notebooks are now the public's treasures."—El Paso Times

From the Publisher