Unlike some of my Latine brethren, who spend time at writer’s conferences and in faculty lounges, pontificating on paper on struggles they long abandoned for suburbs and sinecures, I was found unfit for the academy.
So I forsook my Latinidad, saddled up, and saw the world. The Florida and California parts anyway. At Bookstar on Rosecrans Street in San Diego I read William Blake and Jimmy Santiago Baca. I felt like a Chicano. I went back to my barracks room and listened to the Minutemen and I felt like a gringo.
I read and wrote at night and in daylight, rode the shuttle to the hangar where I worked, passing seven miles of cotton fields, manned by immigrant workers. I felt like an immigrant in my own land and a clerical assistant for the red, white, and blue. I loved my country. My friends José and Miguel were slightly younger than me; we rented hotel rooms, drank beer underage, listened to The Cure and The Smiths and pined after girls, both white and brown. I wrote my poems alone and in silence, read Moby-Dick, waited to be ready for the world.
Years later when I met a famous poet, he refused to shake my hand, said with a smirk, “Where you from? Chino?” He meant the State Correctional Facility.
And then I wrote like hell, found myself a Latina girlfriend, listened to Shakira before she sang in English, watched the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on TV. Drank too much and broke my own heart incessantly and mined the pieces for my art. And I never forgot that once in the famous poet’s office, doors closed, he said “You can’t write. You’re just another white-identified spic,” thrusting a book by a Chicano poet in my face. I hated him then, but I never wanted to shoot anybody. I wasn’t making a political point. My conscience was clear. I didn’t shoot anybody. I never wanted any of that.
Anthony Robinson is a Chicano poet from rural Oregon. His poems have appeared widely in print and online in such places as The Iowa Review, Heavy Feather Review, The Brooklyn Rail, and the failing New York Times. His most recent chapbook is Broke Republic (Green Tower Press 2025). His favorite literary kerfuffle is The People vs. Ezra Pound, which technically never happened, which is just as well.
