By Dalia Hajir with Contributions by Demond Lowrey
For the past couple of months, I have compiled information on Abelardo Delgado and learned what he stood for, what he represented, what he taught, and the creed he lived by. He has opened my eyes to a myriad of topics, including the Chicano Movement, the culture of the Hispanic community, and his overall influence in border cities, such as El Paso, Texas. Delgado is a polarizing figure - you either love him or you do not - and the epitome of what comes to mind when you think about the literary aspects of El Paso and other communities like it.
Delgado, commonly referred to as Lalo, was born on November 27, 1931, in Boquilla de Conchos, Chihuahua, Mexico. He grew up in Parral, Chihuahua, and around all the area mineral towns, and then lived a 
couple of years in Juarez. Spending his formative years in Mexico, he experienced firsthand what it was like to be very poor. By age 12, he and his family moved to El Paso, Texas, in 1943, where he lived in a filthy tenement with 23 families, unable to afford anything better. He learned what it was like to live in a barrio, in El Segundo Barrio of El Paso, to be precise. Delgado considered El Segundo Barrio "a human laboratory of social interaction and is the steppingstone of many Mexicanos .... To many of us, El Segundo Barrio is but an extension of Mexico," he says. Spending time in a boy's club after school, he quickly learned to speak English. He attended Bowie High School, one of the oldest operating high schools in El Paso. While at Bowie, Delgado organized his first-ever protest by refusing to sing the National Anthem, even convincing several of his classmates to join him to sing in Spanish instead.
"I was very observant that something was very wrong in our barrios with the gangs and the Pachuco Movement, which flourished and faded in this span of time .... But having no depth, no contrast, no social sense, I could not pinpoint this wrong I sensed," he relates to the now-defunct El Paso Herald-Post. At an early age, Delgado demonstrated pride in his Chicano heritage and social justice, becoming aware of what was going on in and around his community. A bright student in high school, Delgado graduated in 1950 "among the top ten and as vice president of the National Honor Society," he says to the Post. Sadly, he placed his trust in his teachers, who prompted him to put writing aside and become a laborer instead. If this happened to Delgado, how many other students received the same troubling advice, to leave their hopes and aspirations behind for a life of heavy labor? Thus, his teachers' advice landed him jobs in construction and restaurants, once becoming a waiter in Pasadena, California.
Image caption: Abelardo Delgado. Courtesy of La Bloga
In his early life experiences, living and learning from his grandmother in Mexico and fully immersed in el barrio in El Paso, Delgado carved into his mind the very circumstances and experiences that would later take center stage in his literary work and his social activism. Of the barrio, Delgado once said, "Denver's West Side, El Paso's El Segundo, East Los l sic J have a very definite pulse and smell. Albuquerque, Laredo, Phoenix, Chicago, Oakland, San Antonio, and all of the Harlems of the World are small cunas of pride and the best of settings for the human tragedy and comedy of life."
From 1955 to 1964, with the help of Father Harold J. Rahm, Delgado found work as a director for Our Lady's Youth Center in El Paso, helping young people's dreams become reality. Unlike his high school teachers, Delgado helped motivate and inspire lower-income students to pursue jobs and take advantage of educational opportunities that he did not take full advantage of during his youth. Delgado soon decided to attend the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) eight years after graduating from high school while working in the Farmworkers' Movement led by Cesar Chavez. After graduating in 1962 with a degree in Spanish, he took graduate courses at UTEP and then made the move to the University of Utah from 1974 to 1977. Quite possibly, this helped forge his path to read and write poetry. In 1977, he was awarded the Tonatiuh Quinto Sol Award for literature, evidence of how resounding his works were to the Chicano community.
Throughout the 1970s, Delgado remained active with several teaching and human services positions, including jobs with the Colorado Migrant Council, where he earned the executive director position in 1985, and the Northwest Chicano Health Task Force in Seattle. He also held teaching posts at the University of Texas and the University of Utah. He and his family settled in Colorado in the 1980s, where he taught at Aims Community College, St. Thomas Seminary, the University of Colorado, and for 17 years at the Metropolitan State College in Denver.
During the 1990s, involved in education and civil rights, Delgado worked as a client specialist at the Justice Information Center in Denver. However, despite his educational and civil rights efforts, Delgado is best known for his poetry. He wrote voraciously in English, Spanish, and a mix of the two, known as Cal, on behalf of Chicanos and Latinos. As Delgado describes it, in El Segundo Barrio in El Paso, "I immediately began to learn a third language, which is known as Caló, which is a derivative of colloquialisms ... the pachucos were coining words right and left, beautiful expressions that I fell in love with, so a lot of my work reflects a little bit of that Caló." He then adds, "I am suspecting that even the very word 'Chicano' is a fabrication."
Delgado, highly regarded as a forerunner of and inspiration to Hispanic American poets everywhere, a pioneer of sorts, was one of the major poets during the Chicano Movement literature era that began in the 1960s and lasted through the 1970s. He selfpublished 14 books of poetry under Bario Books with the intent to make his work economically accessible to readers from lower incomes. If anything, this exhibits his genuine care for his community, making his writings easily acceptable to all.
Delgado published his first collection in 1969, named Chicano: 25 Pieces of a Chicano Mind. He intended to "depict the Chicano heart, the movement and the spirit that encircles the United States and is brightly painting the whole nation brown." His work promptly gained popularity in the Chicano Movement, his vivid, straightforward style becoming the base for many Chicano writers. In the introduction, Delgado writes, "lf my poems help the Chicanos to view themselves more clearly or for the Anglo or the Black man to also understand them, I have helped. If they don't, mine has been a sincere crime ... " Of this, La Bloga literary blog says "you will find that the only crime is not having read the poems assembled in Chicano."
Delgado soon gained the reputation as "the poet laureate de Aztlan." The article "Aztlan and the Chicano Movement" teaches that Aztlan, according to the legend of Nahuatl-speaking peoples, is "the land from which they, sometime in the 11th century CE, began the migration which eventually took them to the Valley of Mexico. There were seven different tribes that migrated, of which the Mexica was one. Seemingly, Aztlan was located somewhere to the north, but exactly where is less certain. Guesses point to northwestern Mexico or somewhere in the southwestern parts of the United States." To Delgado, Aztlan holds a more spiritual significance than geographical; for Chicanos, he says, it is "any place where they stand up for their rights. If they are in Michigan, that would be their Aztlan; if they are in Alaska, that would be their Aztlan. And for many of our brothers and sisters who are abroad serving through the armed forces, I think they carry Aztlan in their hearts. In that sense, it is not a geographic site, it is a state of mind." Aztlan housed and inspired the souls of significant members of the Chicano Movement, with such Chicano writers as Alurista, Tomas Rivera, and Ricardo Sanchez, dedicating poetry and other literature to the Movement. To many, Delgado is often considered one of the grandfathers of the Chicano literature renaissance of the 1960s and 1970s.
Image caption: Book cover of Here Lies Lalo. Courtesy of Amazon
Considered Delgado's most well-known poem, "Stupid America" resonates in the minds of Chicanos who have ever fought and are still fighting to this day for equality and self-respect . Delgado speaks of the lack of opportunities, the educational system, and the lack of a platform to express their creativity. Jesus Rosales, in "Abelardo Delgado, Here Lies Lalo: The Collected Poems of Abelardo Delgado," writes that "the poem has retained its freshness, for it still preserves its strength and pertinence in describing Chicanos' longing to maintain what gains were made in the past against the negative backlashes of the present." La Bloga strongly asserts that "en cultura, costumbre, y sentimiento viven estas poemas (in culture, customs, and sentiments live these poems); [the] poem dances to the beat of a Chicano heart. It is in the simplicity of Delgado's words readers realize the harsh reality survived by the Chicanito he writes of in by far the book's finest poem, 'Stupid America."' Many times, it is best to read the poem for yourself:
stupid america
stupid america, see that
chicano
with a big knife
on his steady hand
he doesn't want to knife you
he wants to sit on a bench
and carve christfigures [sicj
but you won't let him.
stupid america, hear that
chicano
shouting curses on the street
he is a poet
without paper and pencil
and since he cannot write
he will explode.
stupid america, remember
that chicano
flunking math and english
he is the picasso
of your western states
but he will die
with one thousand
masterpieces
hanging only from his mind.
In the poem "Why Am I Here?" the title does not invite a question but provides a statement affirming the object of his craft. Delgado writes, "I pledge before all my raza not to rest / until the Chicano way of life is proven best." In another poem, "The Kansas Carnales," Delgado read live at Kansas State University in front of a college crowd in May 1976, displaying his love and passion for the Chicano culture and deeply moving his target audience. His poem, later published in the school's forum "Minorities Resource and Research Center: Newsletter," speaks volumes on just how effective and passionate his poetry is, as Delgado reaches and expands his message to young minds even in such places as Manhattan, Kansas.
While most of his work speaks to protesting mistreatment and discrimination, many others focus on the love of family, land, and traditions or culture. Delgado published many other pieces that reverberate throughout the community with collective consciousness and social protest, as in his poems "Raza," "EI Barrio," "La Huelga," and "La Causa," all worth reading with a critical eye.
There's no doubt that Delgado's heart belonged to writing. He often expressed his ideas on the spot, scribbling poems on cocktail napkins and loose scraps of paper, unafraid to share them as soon as they were out of the oven. However, he also taught Spanish in Denver, where he lived for the latter half of his life and became recognized for his efforts to educate Latino immigrants on obtaining citizenship in the United States. Helping them navigate through the complex system of their new country, Delgado instilled in his community a sense of hope, purpose, empowerment and pride.
A professor in the Metropolitan State University of Denver's Chicano Studies Department for 17 years, Delgado sadly passed away in Denver at the age of 73, on July 23, 2004, after struggling with liver cancer. He was honored for his lifelong poetry, education, and social justice efforts. In 2004 and 2005, the city of Denver posthumously named him their first poet laureate and honored him with the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Lifetime Achievement Award, respectively. Despite earning many awards, his true satisfaction was always helping people.
Image caption: Abelardo Delgado, Chicano: 25 Pieces of a Chicano Mind. Courtesy of La Bloga
Delgado's spirit and legacy continue to illuminate brightly with the new upcoming generations. He addresses three areas important for young Chicano writers to consider: one, "There should be continuation .... It is up to young writers to develop the rest of the body, the mind, everything, so that the territory in that sense is still virgin"; two, "Most artists, regardless of what the medium is, have a social obligation ... to reflect what is going on in our communities, in our barrios. It is not enough to write about flowers and bees and trees, but about jails and welfare and the homeless and victims of AJDS and their families. The obligation should be social, as well as artistic"; three, he tells young Chicano writers that "writing has a sort of personal reward .... By writing you create the outlets necessary to discard what I would call a very healthy insanity we should have because those who claim to be sane in our world are the real locos." Although he is gone, his work undoubtedly resonates among the youth of any culture.
La Bloga affirms that "while Delgado's work can almost never be found in chain bookstores, fans old and new are sure to liberate single volumes of his many published chapbooks from the leaning stacks of dusty used bookshops. Yes, his titles are rarities and cause para un pisto when found on those lucky days as there is no denying Lalo's masterpieces endure and no longer hang only from his mind, they hang from ours as we! I." It so happens that one of my favorite places is dusty used bookshops, and it is my aim to swipe off the dust from a Delgado rarity and indulge in the sentiments of justice and liberation.
Abelardo Delgado's work embodies precisely what the borderland embodies. His poetry is very raw, harsh, and filled with emotion as his tone is that of the Mexican people in his community screaming to be heard by their oppressors. His love for his culture and pride is easy for anyone to get behind. Based on everything stated above, Abelardo Delgado can open the eyes of many, as it did for me, about his work and lifetime achievements, especially about the conditions many Chicanos endure. After reading his work and reading about him, I wholeheartedly appreciate what he accomplished through the power and significance of his words. Thank you, Lalo!!
Here Lies Lalo by 