Los Cuatro - Introduction                  

                                JUST AFTER A REPAST 
                                IN A WOULD-BE CHICANO RESTAURANT...

             LOS CUATRO IS

a travesty perpetrated in madness and wishful thinking by four ape-like poets in the heat of their own loneliness and need for an articulate explosion that would rock the boat and make amerika take nooootice.

ape #1 is Lalo Delgado, a paunchy carnal with the fire of an Aztec hero and the soft lilting phrases of Cervantes;

ape #2 is Reymundo "Tigre" Pérez, a finely featured chicano with a razor sharp mind trying to dissect amerika;

ape #3 is a fiction called Juan Valdez, but the real man behind that name is Magdaleno Avila--a brute of a man in frame, but a sensitive soul writing his hurts and hopes hoping that the tide will turn and Uncle Sam might be resuscitated, for sam is very much a dead machine chewing up people just for the sake of it; and

ape #4 is an ex-con, Ricardo Sánchez ... with all the attendent hopes, wishes, needs, and hasty plots that never work for an escape from the mendacious frenetic desmadrazgo that society is ... his plans never work, he still continues being very much a social being.

this book then is the culmination of needs meeting up with resource orchestration building up to that cataclysmic crescendo when the world go ker-plunk and presto there shall blossom forth a new social order-- so some think ... still there will be madness, for it is in the human way of perceiving life that madness must ever be part and parcel of man's way ...

these selections might move you--at least some of you. those of you unmoved might need dynamite to move you, if so, you are already too lost, and we have neither time nor resources to bother with you. to those who welcome the angers, loves, joys, and madnesses in these pages, we merely shrug our shoulders in a very customary fashion and mutter: read on, read on.

let us then see, amerika, if you can stomach the desperation in our voices, if you can read us ojos-abiertos style and objectively take in our words and ideas; if after you have read you still do not make the effort to understand what we say, then perhaps it will be time for amerika to disappear once and for all ... if amerika still persists in demanding that chicanos burn down their barrios and campos before they listen to us, then amerika must be informed that La Raza will never have a watts so that los gringos can have their cheap thrills at our expense ... la verdad es que we shall not burn down our own--for if we burn, it is simply: LOOK OUT, GRINGO, LA RAZA SHALL BURN YOU DOWN-and don't think for a moment that your conscience money is going to assuage us or stop us ... your token positions mean nothing to us ... not a damn thing!

que viva la raza de bronce, 
que viva Aztlán ... 
libertad, justicia, tierra y dignidad ...

                              --R.S.--