Border Lines

by Sam Romero

Fall 2004

On the way from Guadalajara to the United States, his family rode through desert, jungle and towns, traveling for two or three days by bus and train so that his father could look for work. The family came often. They would stay for a year, two years, three years and then, for reasons not always clear to Juan, return to Mexico. By the early 1970s the frequent trips to the U.S. turned into relatively frequent moves from homes around Southern California. They moved from Chinatown to El Monte to Colton to Rialto in just a few years, and Juan, only 5 when he saw America for the first time, would come to regard these early trips as central in the laying of his landscape — the people, places and experiences that shaped him. In his life, the familiar territory of “crossing borders,” as he now tells it, has been a traveling companion throughout.

Five years ago, on its surface, it just didn’t sit right for Juan Delgado, a poet, to accept a post as an assistant to the provost for academic affairs at Cal State San Bernardino. The high-powered, cool and configured halls of administration seem the opposite of art. But Juan, a CSUSB English professor who’s crossed borders his whole life, slipped into the role without so much as a scrape. Energized by the challenge, he could be seen walking the campus in his black horn-rimmed glasses, dress shirt and rolled-up sleeves, tie and slacks or maybe jeans as he worked on special projects, such as the university’s accreditation report and matters related to the university’s national classification as a Hispanic-Serving Institution.

After taking some professional leave earlier this year to teach as a poet-in-residence at the University of Miami, he returned this past summer and hadn’t been back long when CSUSB asked him to serve in another administrative position, this time as interim chair for the communication studies department. Making the move wasn’t foreign to him. Over time he’d grown comfortable with transition, with learning new things and facing the mystery of rediscovering who he was. For instance, in 1989, around the time he became a naturalized U.S. citizen and crossed that boundary into a new allegiance, his feelings floated between his identity as a Mexican national and his standing as an American citizen.

“One of the more important things about writing when you’re creating art is not the end result of creating a poem,” he says, “but going through the process of discovery — what I want to say … the issues and the questions and the doubts. That’s much more meaningful.” The process of learning administration, he says, was just like that.

In a land where borders can be impenetrable barriers to some and an invitation to explore for others, it was less extraordinary for Juan to step into an Ontario, Calif., furniture store one day and read his poetry. He sat on couches with families and read and talked about poetry as they listened and asked questions. While he’s never considered himself much of a performer of poetry, he does consider a furniture store, a retirement home, a home for runaway children, a factory, a veterans’ meeting, a community center for transvestites and gays, a small general store on Olvera Street in L.A. or continuation schools — all places he’s read — as fine a choice of venues for dispensing literature as any quaint bookstore or grand hall on a college campus.

Not one for keeping strictly to the prescribed art zones, Juan believes these are the very spots art belongs. He likes to say, “Poetry is an act of sharing,” and not only with the elite, erudite or certifiably artistic. “Could you imagine somewhere in the mall, in the corner, we were going to have five poets read? ‘Come bring your family, share, listen.’ Why does that only have to happen at the university?” he asks. “Galleries, bookstores, libraries sometimes frame and create cultural places where art can exist … where people can read. I think that’s wonderful. I guess my philosophy is that we have to find other places to keep doing that. In other words, we go to the furniture store and by reading there people realize, ‘Wait, this can be a cultural place.’”

In art and education, Juan is a lot about the working-class and the disenfranchised, anyone whose impediments to the cultural avenues are intimidating or unyielding. He shares that view of the landscape with novelist Helena Viramontes, a Cornell University professor and author of the acclaimed book, “Moths and Other Stories.” She and Juan were among the first Latinos ever accepted into the University of California, Irvine’s M.F.A. program, Helena being the first Latina ever accepted to the school’s fiction writing program. By the time Juan came to hear Helena read in Los Angeles years ago, she’d already learned of him and admired his work, recognizing the voice she heard in his poetry, because it was as much hers as his. When they arrived at UCI, the two writers had brought with them the mind of the working class Latino, compressing into lines of rhythm or tone or meter the message of citizens and immigrants, laying open life and work around the fields, suburbs and city.

“Because of the language, because of the density,” Helena says, a poem of Juan’s “speaks with different layers of meaning. When you first read it you think of a poem about the disenfranchised, or you think of the meter, you think of the rhyme.”

UCI had then and still has one of the top writing programs in the country. But it took gains and losses to get Juan there. In the early 1980s, with just a year’s work left in his accounting degree from Cal State San Bernardino, Juan wanted to shore up his English skills before graduating and heading for the job market. He met with Larry Kramer, a Cal State English professor, who suggested that Juan take a creative writing course. Creative writing? He barely knew what that meant, and asked, “Will I be writing?”

He had just finished one or two writing courses at the college when his father died, forcing Juan to drop out of school with just one class left to complete his accounting degree (a fact that remains true to this day). Now a family of five — two sisters, two brothers and their mother — each of the Delgados pitched in to make ends meet. Juan took work as a cook and busboy, and on weekends shuffled out the door at 4 a.m. to scrub the large yellow Stater Bros. Markets delivery trucks — 85 of them — with three other workers. While he worked, the shortness and unpredictability of life came hurtling into view, blowing apart along the way all of his ideas about the meaning of a degree and career. It wasn’t about prestige or good pay anymore. He thought that if he was going to get a degree, he wanted to get one in a field he liked. He was 21, and the more practical, financial appeal of a traditional career was morphing into something else, something he could only define as “a calling.”

In the fall Juan returned to Cal State San Bernardino as an English major. Those first creative writing classes, unlike accounting, didn’t feel like work, and he never saw it coming. From the converted chicken coop, where his family lived in El Monte, he never saw the developing landscape. Being the only boy who didn’t speak English in an elementary school class, the teacher gave him a couple of books and then left him to draw for two or three hours. And at Eisenhower High School in Rialto he was never the “literary or academic student type.”

He began to live by words, reading poetry, writing it, writing about life as a boy in Mexico, about growing up in Southern California, writing about loss. Eventually, he came to believe that poetry, once a stranger, had rescued him.

While at CSUSB, Juan got out one day to play racquetball. His partner invited an extra player, Jean Douglas, a French major who, Juan would learn in time, was not a writer by nature and by her own admission. (Jean says now, “Some people say, ‘I’ve always wanted to write the great American novel.’ I’ve always wanted to read the great American novel.”) Two years later they married, and shortly afterward UCI chose Juan as a Regents Fellow, a heady achievement because only three of about 300 students who applied to the M.F.A. program that year made it in.

Two years after graduating from UCI Juan returned to the area where he’d done much of his growing up, taking a teaching post at Crafton Hills College in Yucaipa, near the very fields — in Mentone and Redlands — where his father and grandfather had once picked oranges and grapefruit. In 1988, he landed in the English department at Cal State San Bernardino. A year after their third child was born, Jean, who today speaks three languages besides English, began teaching linguistics part-time for the department. Juan published his first book of poetry in 1994 and one every four years after that, “A Rush of Hands” being his most recent. His first book had taken 10 years to write. But recognition was not far behind once it was released. It received a Contemporary Poetry Series prize from the University of Georgia in 1994. That accomplishment was followed five years later by a two- or three-week stay at the home of writer Rudolfo Anaya, who invited writers of note into his home every summer to spend focused time with their craft, and then, under a Whittenberger Fellowship, an invitation to teach promising high school poets at Albertson College in Idaho.

It was nice being noticed, but Juan would write even if notice never came, even if he were never published. He says this knowing full well that recognition eludes most writers, particularly poets, who should not be in it for the money or the fame. “There are probably more poets than there are readers of poetry.” So be it. He’s unconcerned. When he thinks of recognition of his work the first scene that enters his mind is that of his nine-year-old fraternal twins after a Long Beach reading several years ago. From their seats and for an hour or so they had watched their father read in an auditorium full of people. This was different than what they were used to at home. At home, they didn’t see him write, and he didn’t read his poems aloud. As they listened in the auditorium, they realized for the first time that writing could be public, and that, as he had said, it was meant to be shared. In the car on the way home, it seemed to Juan that the twins were unusually quiet. Then one of them, in some amazement and as if they had finally scared up the guts to speak, said something like, “Dad, people were really listening.”

Of the borders Juan has seen, that was one he was proud to see his children cross. They had witnessed the power the spoken word could wield in public. The audience's pleasure, however, could not outdo the difference the act of writing and the written word had made in private years ago, and that continued now when dad would become kind of quiet around the house, and head up to his office in the attic, where he could be silent and think about the next line.