Well, thank you very much.
It's a great pleasure to be here again today,
and to hear Sherwin, and to see my nephew that I haven't seen
in many years, Jesus Robles, and many of my good friends
that are here today.
And to be back in Tucson.
A big hand for all of you.
Uno mano.
A big hand.
It's one of those places that calls me back all the time
and that I love now.
And my father used to travel through here quite a bit.
And my father actually came from Chihuahua in the late 1800s
to Denver.
But he was always traveling through here, and El Paso,
Chihuahua, New Mexico, Arizona, and then Wyoming, Denver,
and back and forth in California.
So it's good to be back in many ways.
And I'm so thankful to Patty Hartman, who
opened the way for me with my books,
and to Chris [? Sutter, ?] who also was part of this award
that I received, and everyone at the University of Arizona
Press.
You know how it is.
It feels like it's one person that did it all but
it's everyone that does it, and creates the poetry,
and makes the award happen.
And it's part of everything.
The water that Sherwin was talking about,
the fruit flies buried in onion skin.
That's so beautiful to hear, Sherwin.
And to my mother and father, you know how we think of ourselves
sometimes.
That we don't have language, or we
don't feel that we have language,
or we're told that we don't have language,
or we're not allowed to have a language.
And the language that I received from my mother
was in the form of songs and stories.
Woman stories.
And she told me all the stories of the women in her family.
And she told me all the stories of the men in her family.
And they're kind of similar stories,
and they're very different stories.
And they all were, at first, I thought, about suffering.
And then I thought they were about survival,
and I just discovered a couple of days ago,
just maybe I think it was here, that they really
were about transcendence.
Sometimes we think of all the pain our families have
gone through, and then we really look at what
our families have gone through.
It's about pioneers.
Stories of pioneers, songs of pioneers, poems of pioneers,
ballads of pioneers in transcendence.
Here's a photo of my uncle, Vicente Quintana,
looking like a really bad dude in El Paso
and wearing a bathrobe.
Let's wear bathrobes, OK?
Let's hang out wearing bathrobes.
Bathrobes-- serapes and bathrobes.
Since the economy issue is happening,
let's help the economy by wearing serapes and bathrobes.
And he's hanging out with his buddies,
and they're wearing a World War I helmet,
so this must have been around 1920 and 1921 in El Paso.
This photograph.
And again, "Notebooks of a Chile Verde Smuggler"
with photographs.
"Watering cebolla when my father burns leña.
Escondido and Vista days, 1955.
Stepped down from the trailer early morning, 6:00 AM.
My dad burned some leña.
Hear it sighing, then it whistles with a sharp ache.
The wavy smoke rises from the yard.
It tells me the day tastes good.
My jefito leans back on the box trailer
made with plaster, wood slab and two axles
from an abandoned Ford.
Drinks una taza de café, looks out to the tiny lot where
the corn we planted is up six feet.
The quiet air is sweet.
I take it with me as I walk down to the cebollas.
They're coming up good.
Shower them carefully.
Cut the hose water with my fingers, high above the plants.
The water mixes with the tomatoes
and creates another universe.
A deeper green blends into the earth when it's wet.
Look back to the trailer.
The milpa sways.
Small offerings come to me.
Gentle winds."
For quite a long time, I didn't look back.
Well, maybe I just didn't look at myself
and see the beauty of my family, and that's what my father did.
He burned wood.
He grew crops and traveled.
He kept it to three things.
I mean, that's pretty good.
Now I realize that's great.
That we can keep our lives to three things?
That's beautiful.
Mine is like in three billion.
It's kind of tough.
And my mother took care of me, told me stories,
and took care of the young ones.
So three things.
I just figured it out.