The New Face of Arts Leadership in the West - westaf - The Western ...

Topic One: Language as it Relates to
Ethnicity, Leadership, and People Working
in the Arts
Flores Presentation
The presentation opened with a video of
Youth Speaks, featuring performance clips
and interviews of teenage poets from all over
the United States who participated in Brave
New Voices: The 7 th Annual International Youth
Poetry Slam Festival in Los Angeles, CA, 2004.
Paul Flores: This is called “Voice
of a Generation.” 1
If it hadn’t been for Governor Pete Wilson, I
might have never become a spoken word artist.
The year was 1994, and anti-immigrant hysteria
was running rampant through the California legislature
and on the AM radio waves. Speakers
were blaming the state’s dire economic situation
on costs related to servicing undocumented
workers. According to the Governor Wilson, “illegal
immigrants” didn’t pay income taxes. So not
only were they stealing money from California,
but they were costing the state whenever
an undocumented child was educated in a
public school or whenever a doctor delivered
a Mexican baby. I was a college student in San
Diego at the time (thanks to affirmative action).
Proposition 187 had been passed, denying
immigrants the right to public education and
health services (including the emergency room).
The measure also encouraged snitching on
suspected non-citizens. It was the first piece
of legal racism that directly crossed my path.
It would be followed by Propositions 227 and
209, which removed bilingual education and
affirmative action. In response to this personal
attack on my family, I began to write about
what my grandfather had done to exchange
his life of poverty in Mexico for that of an
American steelworker, now retired in California.
I wrote about how dark his skin was, how he
wore long-sleeved shirts and a sombrero, how
he went back to school at the age of 40 to get
an American high school diploma. I wrote of my
teenage cousin, Tommy, being sent to secondary
at the San Onofre immigration checkpoint
because he was moreno, a dark-skinned
Mexican. I wrote a poem that could be used as
a weapon to combat those who would deny my
family the rights of citizenship and the rewards
of their labor. It was the first poem I ever read at
a Chicano open mic. I was 22 years old, and I
had finally figured something out about myself.
I could see/Mexicans running/into
themselves/into their padres/into their
compadres/
into life they want returned/into their
tierra/desconocida/aislada/matada/running
to a home they
know/en sus corazones que/it’s theirs without
papers.
—“Vista,” 1994 2
It was amazing. And it was just the beginning.
By sharing my personal experience and connecting
it to a larger issue, I became part of a
much larger movement. I began performing
spoken word to have a voice and articulate
injustices. I wanted to speak for myself and
represent my community. Ten years later, I make
my living in San Francisco and perform in cities
all over the world, connecting my personal
narrative not only to a specific community but
also to an entire generation. Young people
and Latinos in particular are what Antonio
Gramsci defined as subaltern: “groups left out
of established structures of representation.”
3
I believe that the spoken word movement
is uniquely capable of reaching out to these
segments of the population that still stand on the
margins in order to dismantle the mainstream.
I realized a long time ago, through my own
work and through mentoring young writers, that
there is no speech without freedom. In other
words, the best way to defeat stereotypes and
empower the disenfranchised is to offer the
tools of language so that we can recreate our
existence in the most authentic way possible.
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