Juan Felipe Herrera grew up in transit, the son of migrant workers who moved across the San Joaquin Valley and Salinas Valley following the crops.
Herrera endured punishment in the first grade because he couldn’t speak English, but kept on learning until he was accepted to UCLA in 1967 on the Educational Opportunity Program scholarship. On June 9, the Library of Congress named Juan Felipe Herrera the newest poet laureate of the United States.
That makes him the country’s official poet, and its first Latino to be so named.
“Everything is especially meaningful,” he writes by email. “Latinas and Latinos have long been speaking, writing and creating, and yet in many ways are still unheard. I hope my appointment shakes out a new set of keys – for all.”
Herrera uses poetry as a tool – like a hoe or a chisel or a whisk – to enlighten and lift up people, young people especially, from lives as meager as his own was.
In the 1970s, he worked as the director of the Centro Cultural de la Raza, a former water tank converted into a mural-ensconced community center in San Diego’s Balboa Park. In the ’80s he taught at Soledad Correctional Facility. Of late, he’s been working with community colleges and schools in poor communities, cultivating poetry where it is needed.
“People are expressing themselves at more levels than before,” he says.
He’s been teaching at CSU Summer Arts since the ’90s. This year he speaks July 21, at CSUMB’s World Theater, a date added so recently that it’s not on the flyers. He likes teaching at CSU Summer Arts: “[I like] the students and their families. Their openness. Their daring. Their art, music and multi-talents, their funny-bone and their amazing youth.”
He’s joined by comrades in poetry like Jimmy Santiago Baca, who does his own presentation 7pm July 6, and Marilyn Nelson, who goes on 7pm July 20.
When asked about the state of his home state of California as a beacon for the rest of the country, the bilingual man of letters, music, activism and teaching sends back this original poem:
The poem of California
is a poem of love and labor
it is a poem of borders and
borderlessness it is a wave –
you wear it everyday
it rises across the ocean
the new horizon
1 2 tres cuatro go
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