SOURCE: “Toward a Chicano Poetics: Alurista,” in Chicano Poetry: A Critical Introduction, Greenwood Press, 1986, pp.78-108.

In the following essay, Candelaria explicates a number of Alurista's poems in order to demonstrate the nature of his cultural, spiritrual, and political concerns, and explore how his poetics has developed.

Alurista

More and more one finds references calling Alurista “the poet laureate” of la raza,¹ a tribute meant to honor him by bestowal of the highest accolade available to him: the title of the preeminent poet of his entire people. Although this praise and the motivations behind it are understandable and, even, perhaps, laudable, they are nonetheless somewhat inappropriate, for the label itself, poet laureate, comes out of the Western European heritage and tradition that Alurista has been rebelling against throughout his professional life.² Moreover, in recent times poet laureates have not often been the most creative, most exciting poets of...