And now it's my very great pleasure
to introduce an old friend of mine
and probably an old friend of many of yours,
or at least it will seem like that.
As a journalist, Ernesto Portillo, Jr.,
writes compelling stories about the people and places
of his hometown, Tucson, Arizona,
a place we all love and know, and know
better because of Ernesto.
As host of KXCI's Onda Suave, he puts on Tucson's very best
Latino music radio program, one that I often find myself,
when driving around, having to do that usually NPR
thing of sitting in the car and waiting
to hear out the end of a story or the end of a song.
Ernesto.
[APPLAUSE]
Gracias, Jenny.
Among the many contributions and gifts and accomplishments
of the UA Poetry Center is the annual Bilingual High School
Corrido Contest.
It started in 1999 by Frances Sjoberg,
who was then at the Poetry Center
and now at the U of A Law School,
and continues today under the direction of Executive Director
Gail Browne, Renee Angle.
The contest brings together high school students
to write corridos.
Corridos is our borderlands form of ballads,
a way of telling stories about people,
about heroes, about horses, about events.
As Big Jim Griffith has often put it,
the corrido is the newspaper of our times,
of yesterday, and today.
Or as Celestino Fernández of the University of Arizona Sociology
Department has sometimes put it, the corrido
is the editorial pages.
I had the pleasure in 2008 to be a judge in the contest,
and I selected as a winner of that year
a corrido written by Gamaliel Rabago, a student of Desert
View High School in the Sunnyside Unified School
District.
And like many corridos, he wrote of an actual event
which had taken place just a few years earlier
here in Southern Arizona, in Arivaca,
when an undocumented immigrant from Magdalena, Sonora,
did something noble at the risk of being deported.
And he wrote, Gamaliel,
El Ángel Ilegal.
Voy a empezar a cantar y vale más que no se rían,
porque les voy a contar algo que ni yo creía.
En el desierto de Arizona, al norte de la línea fronteriza,
un pobre inmigrante encontró lo que nunca pensaría.
Manuel de Jesús, su nombre, de humilde casa venía,
pero no porque fuera pobre piensen que se rajaría.
Ya casi al anochecer de esa tan triste noche,
muy cansado y sin comer.
Y a nadie le hacía un reproche.
Su cuerpo entero temblaba por el frío de aquella noche,
pero en el fondo del barranco parecía haber un coche.
No se detuvo.
No se detuvo a pensarlo.
Para esto hay que ser valiente.
Él solo quería saber si había un sobreviviente.
Atrapada entre los fierros una madre se encontraba,
mientras desesperadamente su pobre niño lloraba.
Dios pone a todas las cosas, eso no hay por qué dudarlo,
Manuel de Jesús fue el ángel que al niño mandó cuidarlo.
Manuel de Jesús Córdoba venía a buscar trabajo,
pero esto fue más importante.
Debía cuidar a este niño aunque él fuera un inmigrante.
Hoy mucha gente que nos odia solo por buscar trabajo.
Yo no sé qué pensarían si ellos fueran los de abajo.
Yo respeto a todo el mundo.
No me importa la apariencia.
Lo que pasó aquella noche que le sirva de experiencia.
In the tradition of the Bilingual Corrido Contest,
the corridos are translated.
Some of them are written in Spanish,
and some are written originally in English.
And this one is translated by Wendy Burk of the UA Poetry
Center.
"The Illegal Alien."
"I am going to begin my song, and please
don't laugh about it.
It's such an incredible story, even I can barely believe it.
In the Arizona desert north of where the border lies,
a poor immigrant found a terrible surprise.
His name was Manuel de Jesús.
From a humble home, he came.
But just because he was poor, don't think he wasn't brave.
On this saddest of nights, as the dusk began to fall,
he was very tired and hungry, but he never complained at all.
Trembling from the cold, he knew he must travel far.
But at the bottom of a ravine, he seemed to see a car.
Without even stopping to think, he ran to look for the driver.
With all of his courage, he searched
to see if there was a survivor.
Trapped in the twisted metal, he found a mother lying wild
with desperation.
Her poor child was crying.
God puts all things in place, the sorrow and the joy.
Manuel De Jesus was the angel God sent to care for this boy.
Manuel de Jesús Córdoba came to look for work,
but this was more important.
He had to take care of this child
even though he was an immigrant.
Because we come here to work, many people hate us, I know.
I wonder what they would think if they were the ones below.
I have respect for everyone.
It's what's inside us that is true.
What happened on that night is a lesson to me and you."
[APPLAUSE]