Herrera's chapters open with free-form prose diaries he dubs the "Aztlan Chronicles," quick autobiographical impressions set in such places as a train stop in Riverside (where he now teaches at UC Riverside) and San Francisco's Mission District (where he wrote poems on an electric typewriter bought with a National Endowment for the Arts grant). He muses on the impact of remittances. "It all dawns on me," he confesses. "The migrante is the new double-headed warrior like the Sacred Eagle Girl maiz deity of the Huichol-Tatei Werika Wimari -- a double-headed eagle, she refashions borders." These are new maps we're living, and Herrera is our poetic cartographer. And he positions his poems not as conventional texts, but as illicit missives, "undocuments" that breeze by checkpoints as fast as wired currency.
A line in the sand
Herrera's take on the hyperborder has a different chronology; it goes back to the Spanish conquest of Mexico, the U.S.-Mexico war of 1846-48 and the Chicano movement of the 1960s (when Herrera tossed a Molotov cocktail into a "no Zapatas allowed" UCLA frat house -- it didn't go off). His poems cast the border as a story with ancient echoes, overflowing with spilled blood ("blood in the border web, the penal colony shed, in the bilingual yard") and erased memory (a haunting chorus of "seed-voices").
He writes with a Beat-like torrent of sling-shots and trippy hallucination, equally at home watching Chicanos in "Toyota gangsta monsters" with "oye como va in the engines" as he is imagining himself as a punk half-panther. More than once in "187 Reasons," his poems read like border-blasted takes on Allen Ginsberg's epic American spew, "Howl." Except Herrera's America is "a grid of inverted serapes" where the best minds of his generation -- angel-headed hipsters in Indian drum circles high on Thelonious Monk and flush with "a Califas glow" -- have been driven mad by the Minutemen, Proposition 187 and miles of new border fencing.
Because Herrera has worked so long in the trenches of border art and politics, it's easy to imagine that his strategy for an interdependent future would be a lot like his 1968 vision: "a healing net across borders churned with brown clay, rain clouds, open arms, yerbas, a single leaf from the eucalyptus for each one of us. This is all you need. Breathe in, breathe out, this green wind makes you strong." We all need to take a deep breath. It may not heal the hyperborder, but our mingled breath will pass through it to the other side. *
