I don't know how many of you are familiar with the name Tomás
Rivera.
He was the first Chicano to become the president
of a major University.
And it was a great tragedy that about three or four years ago
he died at a very young age from a heart
attack, a tremendous loss to the Chicano community.
And I'd had the pleasure of knowing him
and so like many people I decided
to try to write something about him.
They knew so much his hands spoke
of the journey from Crystal City to Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota.
Year after year, dirt dusted in fields and orchards.
His hands a pillow at night, in bare cold buildings
family laughter his favorite blanket.
On slow days, his hands gathered books
at city dumps, saved like the memories of smiling hard
at that first grade teacher and her noises
in the other language that didn't laugh like Spanish.
Those hands clenched in the dark at vivoras,
vivoras us hissing we don't want you, you people have lice.
As the school door slammed, but Tomás learned and his hands
began to hold books gently with affection.
He searched for stories about his people
and finally gave their words sound,
wrote the books he didn't have, we didn't have.
And he graduated over and over until one day
he was Chancellor Rivera, famous Chicano
too needed, his hands too full of us to sit alone and write
green stories alive with voices, fiesta of the living, pressing.
The present pressing like the hands reaching out to him.
And he'd hugged the small brown hands, his hands whispering
his secret learn, learn.
His face a wink, teasing out their smiles,
a face all could rest in.
Like the cherries he picked dark, sweet, round a pit,
tooth breaker for the unwary, the lazy, the cruel.
His hands knew about the harvest, tasted the laborers
sweat in the sweet cantaloupes he sliced,
knew how to use laughter to remove
stubborn roots of bitter weeds, prejudice, indifference.
The boy from Crystal City Texas not a legend
to be shelved but a man whose Abruzzo still warm
us yet say now you.