CERVANTES, Lorna Dee

Born 6 August 1954, San Francisco, California

Lorna Dee Cervantes was born in the Mission District of San Francisco. She traces her ancestry to the Chumash tribe of the Santa Barbara coast on her mother's side, and to the Tarascans of Michoacán, Mexico, on her father's. After her parents separated when she was five years old, her mother resettled with Cervantes' grandmother in San Jose, California. Cervantes has written poetry since she was eight, her love of language fed by the books she found in the houses her mother cleaned. In 1974 she founded Mango Publications, editing Mango, a literary review, and also publishing poetry chapbooks in order to broaden not only horizons but also the definitions of Chicana literature. A feminist "since I knew what that was" and activist in the Chicano cultural movement, Cervantes sees herself as a "cultural worker." In 1978 she received a National Endowment for the Arts grant and subsequently spent nine months at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. After completing her B.A. at California State University, San Jose, Cervantes studied in the Ph.D. program in the history of consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She joined the creative writing department of the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1989; she has also coedited the crosscultural poetry magazine Red Dirt. In 1998 Cervantes received a Lila Wallace/Readers Digest Foundation Award.

The title of Cervantes' first book of poetry, Emplumada (1981), combines connotations of "feathered" (emplumado/a) and "flourish with the pen" (plumada); bird imagery abounds, resonant in both Mexican and U.S. cultures. The poems of this collection explore what it means to be connected to nature and to the urban wasteland, to be female and brown, in a voice remarkable for its clarity, depth of passion, and striking imagery. In "Visions of Mexico While at a Writing Symposium in Port Townsend, Washington," the poetic voice expresses the urgent need to speak for those who have been silenced, to rewrite history from the point of view of the oppressed, and to challenge racist stereotypes of Mexican and Chicano people: "I come from a long line of eloquent illiterates /whose history reveals what words don't say. /Our anger is our way of speaking, /the gesture is an utterance more pure than word." Other poems explore the multiple facets of Chicana identity, for example the clash between her mirror image ("bronzed skin, black hair") and the loss of the mother tongue ("My name hangs about me like a loose tooth"). In the process of self-naming, the poetic voice juxtaposes her experience with that of other Chicanas. In "To Virginia Chavez" class differences are momentarily balanced by gender solidarity: "ignoring what /the years had brought between us: /my diploma and the bare bulb /that always lit your bookless room." In "Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway" the granddaughter prefers her grandmother's ways to her mother's hard pragmatism: "I tie up my hair into loose braids, /and trust only what I have built /with my own hands."

After a prolonged period of introspection following a family tragedy in 1982, Cervantes began producing the poems that form her second collection, From the Cables of Genocide (1991). The subtitle cues the book 's thematic concerns: Poems of Love and Hunger. In some ways very like her first collection thematically, Cables is at the same time more personal and less readily accessible. "Pleiades from the Cables of Genocide" exemplifies the poems' layered fusion of the personal and the political, referring simultaneously to the heritage of the Chumash, who believed they descended from the Pleiades, and to the "Seven Sisters" constituted by the seven major oil companies: "The power /peace /Of worthless sky that unfolds me—now—in its greedy /Reading: Weeder of Wreckage, Historian of the Native /Who says: It happened. That's all. It just happened. /And runs on."

Her childhood passion for poetry has been collected in an as yet unpublished book of poetry for middle school and high school children. This collection of poetry written as a child between eight and fifteen includes work from a manuscript Cervantes first put together in her mid-teens. During this time, both poetry and her manuscript were a "fanatical obsession" for Cervantes; her youthful creative intensity led her to write prolifically, often at least five poems a day. This collection seeks to preserve the integrity of the child's poetic voice and to connect with other young creative voices.