When I left Albuquerque, it was snowing, cold,
and I was up to my neck in problems
I couldn't resolve like how do we
make Bush pay for what he did?
No.
So I get here, and I cannot believe how lucky you people
are.
I got off the plane.
I got out of the airport, and I was like, god.
And the first thing I did, and I kid you not,
was I started praying.
Thank you, God, for my legs to be
able to walk in this sweater.
Thank you, God, for my face and my skin that feels the weather.
I prayed all the way to the hotel.
And then when I got to the hotel,
I ran out of prayers because the hotel was so cool.
I just said, where can I eat?
This is all really good.
I'm going to indulge myself.
By the way, my five-year-old boy, Esai,
he asked me the other day, which was really cool--
I'd like for all of you to try to answer that.
Well, there's probably a lot of biologists in here.
But anyway, we were talking about how
we can feel my shirt on my skin right now,
and how I can feel my hat on my head, and all that stuff.
And he says to me, Papi, how come
I can't feel my skin on me?
Isn't that cool?
He just says really amazing things that just absolutely
warm my heart.
In the next session--
I have a bunch of interns from all over the world that
work for me.
Some of them are OxyContin addicts.
Some of them are Fulbright scholars.
And we put them all together.
And what happened in Santa Fe, where
we have one of the offices, they were
supposed to send the movies this way, but the guy from Germany,
a kid from Germany didn't know that FedEx
didn't run on Sunday.
Don't you love those mistakes that
make life easier on this end?
Hey.
And Nick-- thank God for Nick.
What a great read.
Hey, I wanted to thank the sponsors
of these kids, Amy and--
Kurt.
Kurt, where are you?
I want to see you.
Thank you very much, Kurt.
Wow.
[APPLAUSE]
Wow, that's fantastic.
I've been in Arizona many, many times
to read, and have been given awards here.
And I can't thank you people enough.
You're amazing.
There comes a time in a poet's life
when the poet has to cut the bullshit,
and a poet has to literally go out and start living the poem.
With all the bullshit awards and all this other stuff
that goes on, and on, and on, it just comes time.
And without you, my 16 books--
I have it in 31 languages, and they're in 18 printings
now, every one of them.
And none of them would have been anything had it not
been for people like you.
They say, this poor guy, man.
He really has a passion for poetry.
And I do.
And somehow, some other way, you reached in your pocket,
pulled out your cash-- and I know how hard it
is to take it from you, Aleena.
You pulled it out, you paid for a book, you took it home.
And you know what was really beautiful about it?
Even though I'm a hardcore Chicano ex-convict who
believes in killing freaking oppression,
and blowing up the freaking prisons,
and putting in prison the people who would really hurt us,
which is about 1% of all the prisoners
that we have in this country, and of advocating
for true education to the poor, which we don't do.
It's just pure bullshit that we say we do,
and we don't, and then this on, and on,
and on, and on, thank you so much for having such grandorous
spirits to support me and the things that we do.
And we're not failing.
We're now in about 11, 12 countries in the world.
175,000 schools take our products now.
This year, this year alone, we gave out
something like 65,000 books.
You know what?
And we don't need the approval of all these--
This is eyesore crap, this corporate stuff.
Ask Barnes-- I'm sorry.
I've got to stop.
Ask Barnes & Noble how much money have they
put to helping the young women that are dying in the desert.
Ask them.
Ask the University of Arizona how much
they've tried to-- seven out of 10 Hispanics do not graduate.
Ask them.
Show me the money of your community engagement
and involvement.
Show me the money.
How much money have you put into this, and to the corrections
department here, and to stopping the killing and the madness
of the solos.
And Barnes & Noble, have you seen--
forget it.
I'm not going to got there.
I got to stop.
Otherwise, I'll go on, and on, and on.
I mean, Barnes & Noble's cool, but let me tell you what I did.
You know what they announced?
I won the writing award or something for Barnes & Noble.
I called them up, and I said, unless I
see a truckload of food and clothes
tomorrow at the homeless shelter,
I'm going to go on Good Morning America
and tell the people that you're nothing
but a bunch of scoundrels who keep your money
and invest it in South African prisons.
You know what?
I'll get right back to you.
And if people do not like what I'm saying, you can all leave.
It's OK.
Amiri Baraka and I ended up somewhere in South Africa.
They had 70,000 chairs laid out, and they only
had two old white ladies in front.
But they were the most amazing women in the world.
One of them lit up a joint and went to have coffee.
They split the cherry pie.
I'm like, yeah.
Amiri Baraka says, you know, if I'm
going to be killed on his plane going back to Jersey,
it's well worth the trip, Jimmy.
I'm like, yeah.
Amiri, what a spirit.
But anyway, I said to them, if you don't, you--
I'm not--
Way too long ago, I quit playing by the rules at the prison.
So you know what?
The next morning when I went out there, and I was serious--
the next morning I get there, there's a truck.
And they're hanging out beautiful food baskets.
They're hanging out little clothes to the little toddlers.
You see what happens?
The corporate executives are so terrified
of the world finding out who they really
are, that if you even hint at unveiling that terror,
they'll do whatever you want.
And you know what?
Yes, it's been hard, but you know what?
Today, we have more invitations at Cedar Tree Inc.
to go all over the world and spread the type of education
that we promote then we've ever had in our lives.
We're now at 175,000 schools in the world.
Isn't that amazing?
It all started in Florence, Arizona in a tiny cell.
Isn't that amazing?
[APPLAUSE]
I started in a cell, and then it was people like Rachel--
I don't even know if she's here.
She's a painter.
She's right there.
She's an incredible-- It started with Cami, Camillano.
I don't even know if he's here.
But I started with people like that.
Where are you at, Cami?
Right over there.
All right, [INAUDIBLE].
It started with people like that are unknowns in the world who
said Jimmy, come here.
Read over here.
Work with these people and stuff like that.
And you know what the beautiful-est part
of this whole thing is?
Then I'll read poetry and then we'll go to the other one.
But it's this.
I have some other projects that we're doing,
but I spent five years writing a novel.
I've never been in the fields and worked ever.
I went over that novel--
It took me five years.
I went over that novel five years 41 times.
And when I finally turned it in, I sent it to New York,
they are calling it a masterpiece.
I'm getting calls from the Bloomsbury in London saying,
what's a corrido?
A corrido?
I said, you know what?
The best explanation I can give you for a corrido is to go out
and buy Flaco Jiménez's records, his DVDs,
and take them back to your little loft in the--
And the guy was so cool.
He's doing a 15 page overview of the book,
and he says astonishingly beautiful.
It had me up.
I was just pacing in my tea room.
I was like--
Isn't that great?
And it's about two immigrants coming to America.
And I wanted to nail it so bad, that I
kept going over and over, and revising, revising, revising.
And now, it's gone from publisher to publisher,
and it's just so cool when you nail it.
And when you're really a cool guy like me and you nail it,
it's even better.
I'm just going to read a little excerpt.
When you go on in life, and you realize that God has given you
more blessings than you can handle,
and you manage to keep rebalancing the scales
so that you stay where you want to stay in your reality
and not get shifted off by the momentum of other powers
that are trying to move you along, it's like this.
I was in Minneapolis last week and Reno.
I was speaking to 5,000 high school
kids who were dropping out, and I insisted, and insisted,
and insisted, you can not drop out.
You don't have that right.
So we were-- It was so beautiful.
Anyway, somebody said to me--
I was talking, and I said, when we're
born out of mothers' wombs, we're
born with this extraordinary Earth.
When I was born from my mother, even though I was an orphan,
I had the entire Earth at my leisure.
I could have gone anywhere and done anything.
It's so sad that by the time that same child who
was born from her mother's womb is that in high school,
all they have left of that whole globe of Earth
are a few sand grains, or in this case,
desert grains that they can blow off as they're smoking crack.
Isn't that, like, wow.
And my question is, if they were born
with the world in their hands, why
do they reduce themselves to a few grains
in their teenage years?
Why isn't that Earth built upon to start
a universe of good things?
Because that's not working.
Us going to bookstores, it's just not working.
It's not that that's going to get us there
to give all the children a chance at really
having a great life.
It's us with contact with them so that we're there.
[APPLAUSE]
We have to be there.
And it's not like I want to go in detention centers
or at-risk, high schools, or prisons.
I don't want to go.
I hate it.
But I cannot stand people giving up.
I hate people giving up.
I cannot bear people who just say, the hell with it.
I'm going to be silent.
I said, look, when you say, I don't know,
you're given the right to the people
who hate you to define you.
And nobody is going to define Jimmy Santiago Baca ever.
Now, when I'm done speaking, you can say, what a total asshole.
Hey, you have the right to do that.
But I'm going to give you my two cents because my whole life
was, you don't understand.
When the judge sentenced me in Arizona in Phoenix,
he said, I'm giving you five to 15 years day for day.
I just turned 20 years old, and I thought,
something's wrong with this.
Something's wrong.
Something ain't right with this.
The judge said, do you got anything to say?
And in my head, it was rolling around,
and around, and around, and around, and in my head,
I was saying, but you don't understand.
Well, hey, isn't it time you express yourself, Jimmy?
For the last 18 years, you've gone every obstacle in the way
saying, you don't understand.
And that was the day that I opened up my heart,
and I apologized to my grandmother for all the work
that she had done to get me, the only Baca in a huge family,
first one to go to school.
And how do I pay her back?
By spitting in her face and saying, but grandma,
you don't understand.
And you know what?
My grandma did understand.
She knew that you are going to get nowhere in life unless you
go to school, and you gain the skill to express yourself.
And that's where education starts.
You have to learn to express yourself.
I don't care what they ask you.
You don't have the right to say, you
don't understand me because it's your job to express yourself.
So I'm about to express myself.
This is to a friend of mine, a poet.
We did a film in the prisons with sign language.
And it's not ESL.
It's the way prisoners talk to each other
around the entire world.
As a matter of fact, I'll read from this one here.
It's the way people speak in Korea, and Russia, and China,
all that stuff.
And this wonderful guy, James Drake, from West Texas--
what an extraordinarily, beautiful man he is.
He found out that there was a common language
among everybody.
All prisoners, African-American, South Africans, the Mexicans,
the Chicanos, the Peruvians, the Alaskans.
Wherever you go in the world, all people who are oppressed
and are taken the right away stripped from them to speak
have created a language behind bars that's
similar throughout the world.
So we went there with a film crew.
We actually went with Peter Jennings,
and he was battling cancer at the time.
And we went there, and we did this in the California prison.
We chose the worst prison in the United States
to film it in because it was worse because the Blacks hated
the Chicanos.
The Chicanos hated the Blacks.
The Mexicans hated the Blacks.
The whites hated the Blacks.
The Blacks hated the whites.
It was the worst situation we could go in.
And we wanted to work in there because we
wanted to see how this language played itself out
in a gang situation.
It was extraordinary.
Extraordinary.
So I wrote some poems for that guy.
Let me read you one here really quick to break the ice.
I think you all here have heard this before.
"Pórtate bien."
Yeah.
You want me to read that one first?
I spent so much time here talking,
I should probably read you something that's decent, huh?
The next session we have, we'll answer questions and stuff
like that, and we'll talk about something really incredible.
You know what?
I'm going to read some poems I've never read before aloud.
How's that?
OK.
Here goes.
I'm not even sure what this is going to say,
so if I run into a verse line that
has some serious, serious obscenities,
I may try to quickly start speaking
into [? Nahuatl ?] so the rest of you won't get it.
Number 12, "Fingers."
Yeah, I think I'll do it.
I'll go through one poem from the section.
This is a five section book.
"Fingers."
I won't go into all the work they've done.
More interested how they ignore manners
when scratching or picking, seeing women standing
below in the dark rain on an evening winter
night on the streets signaling to lovers in jail,
signing messages of love and the passages of grief,
fondling and caressing the air, patting their dog's
scruffed hearts, gripping the steering wheel of grief
or the prisoners above signing back to their beautiful women
codes that send the women off on missions to collect drugs
or send messages to friends to get killed.
A hand sign with crimped and bent fingers
studded with cheap rings has only one need in life,
to communicate.
Isn't that the essential reason we do what we do?
To communicate to another human being?
To communicate how much we love, how much
we desire to be touched, to be loved and love someone else?
The spinster's fingers grow thin like witnesses to a crime
and hold secrets to themselves.
And the poet's fingers singe the air like loose electrical wires
whipping around in a wild storm, but it
is the fingers of those women on the streets
that keep true to what fingers were meant to do,
communicating messages of loyalty.
The fingers say, we haven't forgotten you.
Yes, I will come again on Friday.
No, no, your mother has to work on Thursday.
She changes sheets at the hospital she got a job at.
Oh, your little brother was arrested last night?
Yes, I dream of you.
Of course, I think of you with every spoon of chili and butter
tortilla, my love.
I'll see you in the window, OK?
No, I mean, I see you in the window when
the wind is blowing.
I go there often and look this way.
I ask God to bless you.
And I'll wait.
I'll wait, my love.
I'll wait.
Nice part.