Latino art as activism

Juan Felipe Herrera was America’s first Latino Poet Laureate (2015-17), and is the author of 21 books including 14 collections of poetry, prose, short stories, young adult novels and childrens’ picture books. He earned a B.A. in Social Anthropology from the University of California, an M.A. in social anthropology from Stanford, and an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Iowa.

It’s a record of accomplishment that belies the humblest of beginnings.

Born in 1948 to Mexican immigrant farm workers, Herrera and his family lived from crop to crop in tents and trailers in the San Joaquín and Salinas Valleys.  Upon his graduation from high school, Herrera received an Educational Opportunity Program scholarship that allowed him to attend college during the ‘70’s Chicano Movement.

In the years immediately following, he channeled his artistic endeavors into community activism:

He served as Director of San Diego’s Centro Cultural de la Raza (much later, he would also serve as director of Riverside, California’s Art and Barbara Culver Center for the Arts).’

He also taught poetry, art and performance in settings ranging from community art galleries to the Soledad Correctional Facility.

He is the celebrated author of books for children and young people, for which his recognition includes:

• New York Public Library Outstanding Book for High School Students Award
• Smithsonian Children’s Book of the Year Award
• Cooperative Children’s Book Center Choice
• IRA Teacher’s Choice

In 2012, Herrera created an anti-bullying poetry project in for schoolchildren in response to the killing of a bullied elementary school girl in an afterschool fight.

Herrera’s experiences as the child of migrant farmers have strongly shaped his work, as has time spent in San Diego’s Logan Heights, and San Francisco’s Mission District.

His 2007 volume 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Border: Undocumented 1971-2007 examines questions of identity” on the U.S.-Mexico border.

New York Times critic Stephen Burt praised Herrera as one of the first poets to successfully create:

“a new hybrid art, part oral, part written, part English, part something else:

An art grounded in ethnic identity, fueled by collective pride, yet irreducibly individual.”

Awards.  He is the recipient of so many literary and humanitarian awards that this is only a partial list: 

• National Endowment for the Arts Writers’ Fellowship Awards (twice awarded)
• 1990 Distinguished teaching fellow, University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
• 1997 Ezra Jack Keats Book Award.
• 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award
• 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry
• 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship
• 2011 Chancellor, Academy of American Poets.
• 2012 California Poet Laureate
• 2021 Los Angeles Review of Books/UC Riverside Creative Writing Lifetime Achievement Award
• Latino Hall of Fame Poetry Awards (twice awarded)
• Stanford Chicano Fellows Fellowship