Thanks.
[CHUCKLES] I'm not quite sure where to begin
or what to talk about.
I don't feel like I need to introduce myself much in Tucson
because I read here so much, and I lived here.
But just briefly for those of us who don't know each other here.
I was born in Tijuana, and I was raised
in Barrio Logan, and San Diego.
And Juan Felipe Herrera is coming later this week,
isn't it?
And Juan Felipe and I--
I was telling a class earlier, we're homeboys.
He was from the lowlands of the same Barrio I was from.
I was up in the hills in Shelltown.
And he was down in Barrio Logan.
And we never knew each other until years later
we crossed in the literary sense,
and that was really neat.
So if you get a chance to meet him or hear him speak,
you should.
He's a wonderful writer.
I've been working on a couple of projects.
Most of you know, because many of you
suffered through a lot of my research
and scrambling to do this book.
I've been working on this book.
But I came to Tucson to finish researching
about my great aunt, the Saint of Cabora, Teresita.
And I'm finally in final draft of that book,
and I'm on page 300, which is pretty awesome,
except that it's going to be an 800 or 900 page book.
So I'm not even halfway there and I feel
like I should quit already.
But I've also been working on a book of poetry that's
turning into a book length poem called The Tijuana
Book Of The Dead, and I'm really not sure.
I think it's tenderly insane if--
I was telling people earlier that reading so much stuff,
and experiencing so much stuff with medicine,
and faith, and the ancestors, and the spirits.
I started thinking about the Mexican soul,
and the sort of Latino soul, and then ultimately the human soul.
And at the time I was reading The Tibetan Book Of The Dead
and The Popol Vuh together and something happened.
I don't know what.
It was a really peculiar experience for me
and this book started coming out of it.
And I wanted to read you two sections of it
and then a chapter from Nobody's Son.
And that seems like a fairly compact reading
and you won't get too weary.
And if you'd like to chat afterwards
we can talk about it.
The Taiwan a Book of the Dead is structured
along the lines of the Aztec calendar,
the four houses of the years, and the last five days that
ended the count of the year, where the world could
have ended at any time.
And these are a poem from the first section
and then a poem from the last section.
And I need to back this poem up a little bit though think
you'll understand it.
I read this piece in Boulder, Colorado,
and people afterwards were like that's really cool,
but what was it about?
We don't get it.
So I just want to say briefly that this
is a prose poem about an experience I
had as a little boy when we left the Barrio
and we went to a white suburb.
I was the first Urrea and the last to be a boy scout.
[LAUGHTER]
And the Urrea family was down on this, man.
They thought this was just not macho at all, me running around
in my little shorts and bat patrol.
[LAUGHTER]
And my eldest brother Juan married
a woman who had a whole lot of sisters and the family business
was to smuggle the sisters one by one
illegally across the border into Los Angeles where
they became maids.
And I didn't get into this thing until one day I came home
from a boy scout camping trip and I
was all in my little uniform.
And Juan and his wife were there talking to my mom and dad,
and I went in my bedroom and there
was a woman asleep in my bed.
And I dare say that was the first time I ever
had a woman sleeping in my bed.
[LAUGHTER]
And I just-- you know how it is when you're a kid.
I just fell in love with this woman.
She was only probably 14, 15, and I was maybe 10.
And I just went crazy.
And I'm watching her sleep, and I was watching her hair.
And late she woke up and caught me watching her,
and we were all both very embarrassed.
And afterwards they visited and then they went off.
And then they told me that she was
on her way to be a Maid in a motel in Los Angeles.
And they were going to smuggle her up there.
And years later I got to know her better.
But what happened was going back to my room,
her smell was in my bed.
And it was like this really weird strange
almost ritualistic thing.
Her perfume on my pillow, and I thought about her,
and I dreamed about her.
So I ended up writing this poem about her.
The book is separated into codices
along the Aztec line of codexes, and this
is called "Codex Luna."
And the other thing that inspired this poem thinking
about her, I was reviewing a book
by Sebastian Rotella about the border.
And he had this incredible story in it.
Not even a story, an anecdote.
That the border patrol's favorite nickname for Mexicans
is tonk.
You know that?
Because tonk is the sound of the flashlight
makes breaking over your head and that made me think of her.
So this is it "Codex Luna."
"My moon pulled a different darkness across the sky.
My unknown sisters tucked in the barbed wire
embrace of the border fence saw a different face in the moon.
Theirs was Luna Tochtli, rabbit moon,
moon of running, fear and hiding.
My bed was soft.
Their beds were stone.
My moon was tissue floating in a water cup.
A Japanese rice paper sheet cut into an oyster full of pearls.
Their moon peeled a panicked eye to goggled blind as they ran.
Headlights froze their moon and ran it down.
Tufts of dream caught shaking in border tumbleweeds.
Migra moonbeams burned to the dust.
Silver terror and black arroyos, Ram Charger, moon rise,
dogs, bull horn English, 4 by 4 midnight.
My sisters brought uninvited scents to sweeten the valleys.
Their perfume settled on the roadsides,
misted over bloodstain, snake, footprint, guard dog,
flashlight, illegal exhalations.
Breath of cinnamon and coffee filling
cries like sugar and honeysuckle.
Underarm sweat, belly sweat, back of the neck sweat,
small of the back sweat, shoulder blades sweat,
brow sweat, thigh sweat.
Tang of panic in the mustard blossoms in the caves.
Burning stink of running.
Death smells of squatting where they
hope no one could see them.
Fertilizer, lemons, black soap hair smell furled in the wire.
Sun smell of panties once hung in wind.
Heavy hopeless breast smell.
Old milk, sour in heat.
Smell of Morelos in the blouses.
Sweet skirt lavender smell.
Sex's heavy incense.
The secret smell of the bloom painted beside the eyes,
between the breasts, behind the ears.
Burning stink of running.
I didn't run.
My moon was a colonia moon.
I knew where I was, where I was supposed to go.
Colonia moon, and Barrio moon, and suburb moon.
We enjoyed the outhouse moon.
The dirt alley moon.
The tortilla moon.
The channel 12 bullfight moon.
And my moon was a boy scout moon.
A campout moon.
A drive in movie moon.
My moon remained poor as a coin in a frozen pond
but documented.
The tanned men in green trucks could read our papers
by its light.
They gave us permission to walk and to work
on the ground our ancestors had crawled out of.
Let us don bat patrol troop 260 uniforms
and camp in the seven caves of Aztlan,
where the Mexica took Huitzilopochtli in their arms
and began their 100 year walk.
My moon rose over houses but she ran.
She ran.
She had run all her life.
She ran to stay ahead of nightfall.
Hunger ran West to El Poniente, turned North
in the direction of the dead.
Worked the light of the moon in her small hands.
She molded beams of moon glow into trinkets.
Traded for coins the color of sun.
Wove moon into bracelets she traded for perfume.
Worked in the chambers of motel rooms,
swept the floors of the moneyed, folded bloody sheets.
Knelt at toilet scrubbing smears of the mighty
from plastic seats.
She was 13.
Mactlacti ihuan yei.
I was 10.
Mactlactli.
Somehow she came to rest in my house
where trucks could not find her.
Where sniffing dogs could not find her.
She was being run to Los Angeles, enemy
city of the great Tijuanatlán.
I was in the Cuyamaca mountains walking
in the ghost footprints of vanished hunters,
and she slept in my bed.
Too tired to eat or join the gathering in my living room,
she lay in my sheets smelling the odor of laughter
as those in the living room drank Thunderbird
and played records.
And her eyes pulled themselves closed
to protect her dreams of home.
I came in and found her.
Is there any other story to tell.
Any other tale.
I came home.
I found her.
Her head on my pillow.
The first woman who ever slept in my bed.
Her hair black across my pillow, falling down the blanket,
falling toward the Earth, falling
toward the heart of Ce Anahuác.
Her eyebrows shallow as the small streams
fringed in cress and licorice.
In the Cuyamaca shadows, her brow brown, unlined, one hand,
fingers curled, nails pale against her Chichimecha skin.
Her breath.
The music of her breath and me holding my breath.
The thrum and sigh.
Thrum and sigh.
Thrum and sigh of her sleep.
Then they woke her.
She didn't want to wake.
Did she ever want to wake.
I didn't want them to wake her.
I wanted to sleep beside her.
I didn't imagine what else might happen between us.
I did not yet know the language of beds.
I wanted to pass through the door of her color.
I wanted to kneel at the temple of her hair.
She blushed, discovered, sleeping in my bed.
I blushed, discovered, watching her sleep.
We touched hands.
Then she was tucked in the back of a car, smuggled
through the trucks on the freeway looking
for runners, taking her North on the road to [INAUDIBLE]..
North where she'd bask in the lights of their toilets,
sweep more bedrooms, carry more blankets
stained with old dreams off more beds where she would not sleep.
North where she could hide from helicopters.
Where she could wash off the smell of her homeland,
the running, and my room.
Where she could speak to no one and no one
spoke to her except to say, "Girlie,
get your lazy ass over here."
Except to say, "Come over here.
I'll teach you a little something.
How about it bitch."
That night I lay in her outline in my sheets.
She was hot as sunburn in the cave of night.
When my face sank into the imprint of hers,
her perfume came shyly from the pillow.
I lay all night in the smell of her cheap Tijuana perfume.
The smell of her memories.
I smelled her mother in a kitchen
with clay pots smelling like mud and soup.
It was all there.
The smell of hibiscus.
The smell of a river.
The smell of shampoo.
A memory of first grade.
The national flag.
Chalk, wooden seats.
A bottle of paste.
Memory of the village church, old men praying,
Santos in their niches.
Incense, the choke of dust on unopened bibles.
Laundry day, and boiling water, and bleach.
Tamal day, and the voices of aunties, and the meat,
and the corn dough, and the raisins, and the olives.
If you see her, protect her, revere her, my little sister,
light candles in her honor.
She's the mother of my race."
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you all.