One does not know the depths and riches of Texas writing until he or she has examined the works of Ricardo Sánchez; only then will the stubborn root of local culture reveal its tenacious strength, its powers, and its mysterious vitality. Much Texas writing has faded to pierce through to the spiritual struggles of the races here, white, brown and black; the white writer has tended to make the past his subject; the black writer has only recently braved the silence to speak of his resentments and outrage against a history of brutal repression; and the Chicano, hybrid of two nations, has found the past and present so ambiguous and frightening, only a new culture of his own contriving will do as a theme. But Ricardo is that gnarled mesquite, some thorny twisted thing, on the landscape, who has endured the worst of El Barrio del Diablo, in El Paso, the Texas prisons (those democratic dungeons), and the white world's bureaucracies of education and government work, from which he has emerged with a vision encompassing the split worlds of his time. He is the contemporary shaman of racial synthesis, and a keen and educated judge of the inequities and failings of American social philosophy, especially as it has evolved in the Southwest.

Texas is a region of mixed racial heritages, a culture of volatile fragments set against one another. The European emigres to the region warred against an indigenous Indian population, then against Spanish colonialists; and finally, not only against Texas Blacks freed by the Civil War, but also those who had drifted West after the Civil War to eke out marginal livelihoods in tenant farming. At the center of rage and torment are the White settlers, a warrior race that dug in tenaciously and carried on the old European cultural order as best they could; against them was not only other races and cultures but the environment itself, a cursed land of droughts, winds, raging storms, scarce water, insects, infidels and outlaws among their own kind. Their victims never allied against them, but their revenge was to refuse White culture, to cling to whatever identity of otherness remained to them. Hence the great fractured and suspended pieces of Texas life, to which few writers have gained insight or the sense of what could possibly unite them. it was easier to celebrate the natural order of Texas than it was to explain the human; it was more feasible to sympathize with one's opposite extreme, the black prisoners recorded and celebrated in the 1920's, than it was to bring races together. Hence the phenomenon of Amado Muro, an Anglo writer who dissolved his identity as Charles Seltzer to become the eyes of the barrio of la Chihuahuita, in El Paso, or the witness to life in Chihuahua, Mexico; it was John Howard Griffin's necessity to darken his face and hands and experience the Deep South in order to write Black Like Me, another dissolved identity in Texas. it remained for someone to be born mixed, raised in the bottom realm of Texas and to struggle to the lightabove, and then write from that merged center of opposing forces in order to envision the creative synthesis of humanity here.

It is a mistake to assume that Sánchez represents only the cause of the Chicano; Chicano culture is that mysterious interface between two races, the Latin American and the Anglo-American, and the Chicano lives in the ambiguous merger of the two as tenuously as the present exists between past and future. Sánchez makes his Chicano identity the basis for celebrating the merger of other humanity around him; he is the enemy of the distilled, the pure, the rarefied single thing that excludes all else from its make-up. "Do not fear me," he tells his reader in the closing page of Milhuas Blues and Gritos Norteños (1980), his verse journal of a teaching stint in Milwaukee, and then elaborates his fundamental stance:

do not fear me
as I fear you not,
let us understand
that not one of us
can reign supreme,
we're all
but frail/fragile
creatures
... who ... declare
they'll not oppress
nor mother earth exploit ...

That theme of alliance, fellowship, willing merger among racial opposites runs throughout his canon, an impressive outpouring of work that included Canto Y Grito Mi Liberación, originally published in 1971; Los cuatro (1971); Hechizospells (1975); his doctoral dissertation, a long verse and prose commentary, contains the rudiments of his vision of La Raza; Milhuas Blues, and the present text. The scale of his writing is large; all of his texts are ambitious, overlapping versions of a new Leaves of Grass that may one day be regarded as the rightful heir to Whitman's original. Indeed, both texts gapple with the fundamentals of an American democracy and both urge upon us an epic of sexual rejoicing among the world's gathered races; both are the visions of deeply spiritual seers who have invented verse forms of great fluidity and sensuousness in which to proclaim their gospels of reunification. In Hechizospells, Ricardo tells us "this letter to you," his text, "is also a letter to myself and other raza- in fact', to all humanity. All of us stand indicted for allowing this people-chewing system to oppress all humankind." (p. 47) Whitman also diagnosed a deep disease in America, the money cult of the White race, which had overtaken his countrymen in 1871, when he wrote Democratic Vistas. indeed, by 1975, a little over a century later, Sánchez finds the disease has reached into the American marrowbone and requires potent medicine, the shaman's song of revolution to bring about the new consciousness of brotherhood.

And like Whitman, there is something casual and barbaric about Ricardo, the mixed man of this age, a bearded, dark-skinned, heavy framed figure banoed in rings, bracelets, necklaces of huge turquoise stones, a sort of crossroads species of the Indian, Mexican, Negro and Anglo White of the American isthmus- a Queequeg mongrel in the computer age of specialists, engineers, pure products of American technology, the epoch of service industries, of programmed humanity. He is gravelly voiced, his speech accented and sensuous, his eyes protruding like a frog's to which women respond shamelessly, sensing the utter frankness and magnetism of his spirit as he draws them out. He is the stark counterpoint to us all, as though he were a kind of river god dredged up out of the mud of the Mississippi, a sedimentary man in whom the earth's spawn has been stirred and congealed into a self-reflecting genius. We underestimate Ricardo's art if we do not see it as the jubilant flowing of all those pent up racial energies so long sorted and refined by the regime of EuroAmerican culture. Ricardo's poems are rivers of language in which English and Spanish flow as tributaries into one huge river of thought; into it he seems to gather up whatever he considers vital on either side of his monologs. And one feels he has mixed his languages with cunning; his English is the latinate cold diction of science, the technical terminology of government, a linguistic pool of words coined or recirculated since the Enlightenment, to say to us he is master of the tongue of White authority, even if it is a starved speech cleansed of spiritual words and sensuous phrases; his Spanish is the peasant tongue of Mexican mestizos, a street talk that is warm, langorous, moody, a language of passion and anger, rage and resentment, the jargon earned of centuries of political insecurity, the argot of dispossessed indigenes, in whom one almost overhears the dead souls of American Indians, on both sides of the American borders. "WE ARE UNIVERSAL MAN, / a spectral rivulet," he tells us in an uncharacteristically brief poem published in the Amsterdam journal, P78; the rivulet or stream is spectral because afloat with ghosts of the deep past. One advantage to being of no country but simultaneously of all is that one's roots and family is man everywhere. The Chicano has no one ground to call his own, therefore the earth is home, and the mythos of universal man is his memory and consciousness. Ricardo fills out Whitman's vision and informs it with races the old Bard did not understand; the American dream is here fleshed and enriched with the news of the other continent; for Ricardo is really the concatenation of the whole of Spanish América opposing the northern continent.

The text that follows, Amsterdam Cantos y poemas pistos, is a verse journal recording Ricardo's trip to Amsterdam to participate in an international poetry festival in 1978, hence the festival title P78. Soyo Benn, the organizer, wanted to follow it with a World Tribal Meeting, in 1980, which has yet to come off. The festival invited poets from Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas, and presumably the poets represented in their work and attitudes the tendency toward a whole earth mythos, not the nationalism of more orthodox writers. Perhaps true; but then, much of the festival seems to have been a struggle of egos, a contest among artists too long used to the neglect of their own countries who found this festival almost suspect as an event; Ricardo must struggle with the patent artificiality of some of the writers, the excessive swaggering, the posturings of those who have warred against indifference and now find themselves suddenly honored and important. Ricardo is wise to it, and yet excited; he too feels the newness of the attitude; like American Blacks who find Europe liberating and invigorating, Ricardo tells us how it feels to walk about city streets a free man, unaccused, untainted by prejudice. The great American melting pot is a stew of sorrows which many American minority artists struggle wilfully in, but find their peace, their heaven away from home - the only relief from the angst and bitterness of the fight. But watch them return hungrily to it all - the crime, violence, hatred of the streets, the whole amazing bloody process of merger, as Ricardo does in the closing pages! Ricardo's journal shows us the difficulty of letting go one's own identity too quickly; there is the paradox of clinging to one's self even as dissolution is one's most devoutly held ideal. The whole of this poem is many-faceted and of the warring elements of the reality he describes -. it is a prayer to marry the races as much as it is the dog-fighting of artists among the scraps of public praise. These avant garde figures are all rough-hewed, salty-minded spiritual democrats, and a hard crew to control, but through it all, and the trip home, Ricardo is a guide in this purgatorio of geniuses, fakers, dreamers, idlers, dopers, visionaries, saints, and demons.

I do not know of any other participating poet's journal to be published from P78; but I would bet Ricardo's text is the most cunning version of it - the Chicano's eye is simply more suspicious of gifts and ideals than would be other poets. Ricardo questions everything; but his chief resource, curiously enough, is his uncanny re-creation of American political oratory, a lost art in public life these days, which he can draw upon at will; as the festival proceeds, the readings and parties wear a little thin and the poet seizes upon the weaknesses of his brothers almost as though he were running for an office, the office of dreamer, shaman, collective conscience of the tribe, in oratorical tirades, directed at once at his own kind and against us, the people, the readers, against the nation's history as well as against its habits, venalities, hidden crimes, smug double-dealing. From his outpost in Amsterdam, he is an itinerant mystic directirig his letters to the world, especially to his own roost, America. Ricardo captures the minims of the festival from the lofty vantage of a political metaphysic of racial democracy, and nothing is lost upon his wary, allconsuming eye. Ricardo thrives upon relativity, especially the cultural relativity and ambiguity of travel, as in Milhuas Blues and this book, Amsterdam Cantos, which I take to be one of his best, most reliable examinations of his spirit.

Paul Christensen
Texas A&M University