Lorna Dee Cervantes Biography

Chicana poet. An internationally acclaimed Chicana poet, Lorna Dee Cervantes is the author of two award-winning volumes of poetry, Emplumada (1981) and From the Cables of Genocide (1991). Her work has appeared in more than 150 anthologies, including The Norton Anthology of American Literature and The Heath Anthology of American Literature. She is the winner of the Peterson Prize for Poetry, the Latino Literature Award, and the American Book Award, and she has received two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts as well as a Lila Wallace–Reader's Digest Award. Since 1974 Cervantes has presented at more than one thousand poetry readings, lectures, performances, and panel presentations in such places as the Library of Congress, the White House, the Walker Art Center, and major university campuses. Her work has been translated into German, Italian, French, Spanish, and Czechoslovakian. She directs the creative writing program at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Cervantes began her publishing career not only as a writer but also as a literary activist. She founded Mango Publications in 1974, a time when Chicano and Chicana writing was dominated by men. She published the famous Chicano Chapbook series and Mango, a cross-cultural literary and art magazine. Cervantes coedited and copublished a broadside series of women's art and literature, and during the early 1990s she founded and edited Red Dirt, a biannual, cross-cultural poetry journal. She also coordinates an annual writing retreat for women of color, providing space, time, and intensive writing workshops dedicated to developing emerging literary voices.

Cervantes's evolving poetics are significant in American letters because they form connections across a range of literary traditions and canons. Her work has the potential to revitalize models of political and social solidarity and action while offering important models for reading poetry and cultural texts. Most importantly Cervantes is a masterful poet, as aware of literary form and traditions as she is of history and the work poets have done and can do.

Cervantes's first collection, Emplumada (1981), was well received. Critics thought it marked the “threshold of a new phase for Chicano literature” (Madrigal, p. 137), while describing a “world simply built by feminine ancestors” (Saldívar, p. 87). Her work was groundbreaking because of its multiplicity and specificity of voice as female, Chicana, and working class. Cervantes's themes centers primarily on questions of ethnic and gender identity as well as her search for a poetic voice as a Chicana and as a woman. Her second collection, From the Cables of Genocide: Poems on Love and Hunger (1991), was not so widely reviewed. Perhaps one reason for the relative quiet surrounding the collection had to do with its departure in style from Emplumada. Where her first collection is introspective and overtly political, her second is, in contrast, slippery. Its range is broader and more self-consciously literary, showing greater emphasis on the positioning of poetic voice. Cervantes carefully develops deferral as a poetic strategy, most explicit in her manipulation of enjambed lines. In these poems, she reveals a prevalent deferral of meaning, desire, and certainty and creates productive tensions and multiplicities of meaning. Consequently the connections between the personal, mythic, and historical are deeply intertwined.

Throughout her work Cervantes develops an expanding frame of reference for Chicana poetry. She moves from a pride in the indigenous roots of Mexican and Chicana and Chicano culture that is characteristic of classic Chicano and Chicana literature to a broad engagement with global cultural and political influences. Cervantes's references—which range from the traditional Chicana and Chicano tropes of Nahuatl and Mesoamerican images to Hispanophone modernist poetry, from Celtic folklore to Greek myth—indicate a shifting of consciousness. Not only is it important, as Cervantes has stressed, to participate in a “cultural break” that disrupts monological versions of history and culture, but it is also important to extend the scope of struggle and the alliances that can be imagined in poetry and formed in the world.

From the Cables of Genocide consists of dense, lyrical poems that, rather than speak directly to the issue of genocide, assume it as an underlying fact. The term “genocide” is important because of its historical and political uses. The losses occasioned by genocide shapes this poetry in nuanced imagery, linking poems thematically and formally throughout the sections of the volume. The title significantly echoes Cables to Rage by African American poet Audre Lorde, shifting the reader's understanding of where Chicana poetry might locate itself. This affinity with African American feminism, embedded here in the allusion to one of its preeminent figures, is not overtly expressed in the poems, yet it shapes Cervantes's poetic sensibility as surely as the history of genocide. In this collection and in her subsequent work Cervantes extends a Chicana and Chicano poetic tradition across cultural lines to connect explicitly with third world feminist concerns.

Cervantes's poem “Coffee” stands as the culmination and expression of her poetics. It is a long poem of six sections. Evoking the military-ordered massacre in Acteal in December 1997, “Coffee” travels across space and time. From Guatemala it connects to the Jewish poet Hans Sahl fleeing Nazi persecution in Germany and to events in France and the United States. The poem moves back to Acteal to describe the massacre, then it shifts to a young woman protesting in Denver. It ends in the first-person voice of the poet, whose final words are “con safos,” a signature of protection and defiance ever present in urban placas, or Chicana and Chicano graffiti markings. “Coffee” is at once an epic and a personal poem in scope and tone, detailing the horrors of the massacre in the context of global capitalism and neocolonialism as well as the role of poetry in the world.

Questions of aesthetics and history and of literary and cultural tradition are deeply interlinked in Cervantes's work. She does not engage in consolation or in monumentalizing the dead; instead, she identifies with them. Cervantes creates a way of understanding devastating cultural and historic losses, specifically a way of understanding the ways women experience grief. Pushing those connections, she engages difficult questions about the meanings of historical loss and the possibilities of connection across cultural differences and oppositional worldviews.

Cervantes writes poems about Chicanas in gangs, connecting them to Chumash and Greek myths while describing the realities of their lives. She writes of poverty, combining dignity with righteous anger. She writes about families and their histories and how she is connected to families on the other side of the globe. The scope of her poetic vision is vast, intimately connective, and deeply democratic. Cervantes is part of a generation of Latina and Latino poets who, along with Martín Espada and Francisco Alarcón, write powerfully about love and beauty and its importance to struggles for social justice.

Bibliography and More Information about Lorna Dee Cervantes

• Arteaga, Alfred. Chicano Poetics: Heterotexts and Hybridities. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
• Cervantes, Lorna Dee. Emplumada. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981.
• Cervantes, Lorna Dee. From the Cables of Genocide: Poems on Love and Hunger. Houston, Tex.: Arte Público Press, 1991.
• Chávez Candelaria, Cordelia. “Rethinking the ‘Eyes’ of Chicano Poetry; or, Reading the Multiple Centers of Chicana Poetics.” In Women Poets of the Americas: Toward a Pan-American Gathering, edited by Jacqueline Vaught Brogan and Cordelia Chávez Candelaria. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999.
• Madrigal, Sylvia. “Book Review of Emplumada.” Imagine 1, no. 1 (Summer 1984): 137–140.
• Pérez-Torres, Rafael. Movements in Chicano Poetry: Against Myths, against Margins. New York and Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
• Saldívar, Jose David. “Book Review of Emplumada.” Revista Chicano-Riqueña 12, no. 2 (Summer 1984): 87–89.

See also Chicanos and Chicanas; Literature; Mexican-Origin People in the United States; and Poetry.

Eliza Rodriguez y Gibson