This is a transcript of the talk that Felipe Duran, a poet and lecturer, who was a good friend of Dr. Sánchez, gave at the Dr. Ricardo Sánchez Celebration, September 7, 1996 in El Paso, Texas.

Great poets and human beings like Dr. Ricardo Sánchez do not abandon those for whom they struggled when they cross the final border without us. Their voices will continue to speak as long as we, the communities of memory, honor and celebrate their legacies.

Ricardo has been gone a year now, and I still remember him as a warrior who never abandoned the turf of battle, whether confronting the cancer that invaded his body or struggling for someone else's justice. This poet, activist, professor and lover of people was one of the greatest minds and voices the world has known, though many did not recognize it. He did not always need pen and paper to write poetry; he could create it on stage before a live audience.

Several tributes and accounts about his life have already been written, but his record would still be incomplete without some of the ironies and special moments I was able to capture from the last five years of his active life. It was during this period that he lived in the Pacific Northwest and I came to know him as a carnal, a compadre, and a fellow poet. He had no bachelor's degree, having gone directly from a G.E.D. certificate to a Ph.D. degree, finally earning the rank of full tenured professor at Washington State University. Since he converted every negative aspect of his earlier life as a pinto and a school drop-out into a success story, he deserves recognition.

No one expected Ricardo's creativity and celebration of life to end so soon. But everything changed on January 23, 1995. It seemed like a normal Monday morning until María Teresa called me at my campus office. "Cómo está mi compadre?" I asked, expecting the usual cheerful answer. "Pues, no muy bien," she answered, and the crisis behind a strong woman's voice became immediately obvious. Ricardo had spent the night in the hospital. A bleeding ulcer was soon ruled out and cancer became a possibility. The other transforming events of that week happened fast.

On Wednesday, the results of the biopsy came back from the lab: adenocarcenoma, diagnosed as terminal. Surgery was scheduled for Thursday and Ricardo asked to be awakened by the sounds of recorded Chicano music. The surgeon reported that the stomach cancer had already spread to vital organs and could not be removed.

On Friday morning, a strange feeling came over me, as if Ricardo's cancer were invading my own body. Maybe I was experiencing an aspect of carnalismo too mysterious to fully understand: identifying with another human being like myself. There is, after all, the Mayan concept of In Lak' Ech Yelir: "I am another yourself. I am you. We are the same."

After that first sign of cancer arrived unexpectedly and with a vengeance, Ricardo was no longer able to meet his classes. My mind then wandered back four years to a different reality when the Sánchez family joined Norma and me around our dinner table for a menudo supper, the first time in two decades that another Chicano family had been in our home and able to satisfy our cultura hunger. They ate comidas con chile picoso prepared our way and Ricardo, like me, was addicted to jalapeños which he often carried in his pocket. He knew the language of my youth. He was a down-to-earth vato with a brilliant mind and a Ph.D. who never considered himself higher than other Raza. He was an experienced intellectual with first-hand knowledge of El Movimiento, not just a book-learned academician. He spoke of El Paso as a unique place which he insisted "is not Texas." I think I understood him, because to me, Ysleta is a unique place where my ancestors on both sides of the family were born and buried since at least the 18th century. Ysleta was here first; Ysleta is not El Paso.

So that first evening our two families came together was meant to happen. It was a time of solemn beginnings and carnalismo bonding.

It was almost a ritual
as we blessed the first bowl in front of us 
ceremoniously adding 
chile piquín and diced onion 
to the purifying mixture 
of red hot chile colorado from Nuevo México, 
draining our sinuses and cooling our tongues 
with forced air that filled the room 
with lispy sounds and wonderfully painful sensations,
spiced with Ricardo's utterances about places en El Chuco 
which I still remembered from 21 years before, 
prompting my memory of Ysleta-childhood days
when I played dangerous games with my cousins
using homemade technology...
Oh, I wanted to return.

Ricardo told me he had come to WSU hoping for a more stable life style and reduced activism for his family's sake. Even so, it took him only one year to bring back the word "Chicano" to our campus. Chicano power had fallen victim to national attempts to dissolve Chicanos into a hispanic soup made mild the "American" way. Also that year, WSU Chicano students began to celebrate El Segundo de Febrero instead of letting it pass as Ground Hog Day. And Teresa's presence was no less important. She donated her time and skills to form the folkloric dance group Sabor de la Raza, which today is still going strong.

In the summer of 1992, Ricardo led our university in hosting the first Border Crossings Conference, which attracted enthusiastic Chicano artists and scholars to our isolated town. Most of them paid their own expenses because they chose to participate with Ricardo. Author Franca Bacchiega, who had been looking for such an opportunity, also came from Italy with her husband, paying their expenses. During an evening session in Bryan Auditorium, she read selected Chicano poems while the Chicano authors, including Lalo Delgado and Ricardo Sánchez, sat in the audience listening to their poems being read in Italian. This was a significant moment in the history of our University but, unfortunately, the attendance lacked institutional representation.

The following year's Border Crossings Conference was not the same, as politics kept Ricardo from exerting much leadership. Gone were the unity and spirit of celebration of the previous year. I became aware of behind- the-scenes movidas when Ricardo asked me to moderate the Noche de Cultura in his place so as not to appear he was exerting too much control. I assumed, like the previous year but this time erroneously, that my contribution qualified me for a complimentary registration to the Conference sessions. The organizers were so unlike Ricardo, so unlike Raza with corazón. I was not allowed into the room to hear the keynote speaker (whose book Ricardo required in his poetics class) unless I paid a fee, in stark contrast from the previous year when Ricardo honored every program personality and contributor with an individual poem mounted on a frame and presented with a public expression of gratitude at the end of the Conference. (Ricardo wrote 16 poems in a single one-hour sitting while we were at McDonald's.)

Ricardo called himself a catedrático, proud of his achievements and world renown, but he never stopped identifying with oppressed peoples in America or the world, including the Zapatistas for whom we sponsored special poetry readings. He traveled extensively to the Spanish-speaking communities in Washington State, representing the University, reading poetry, speaking to youth groups, making contacts with farm workers and planning with educators.

He lived and died a rainbow warrior, fighting not only for el pueblo but for everyone's justice and using his undeniable success to inspire others, young and old. Unfortunately, there were those who did not like him for the wrong reasons. They may not have known him and his passion well enough, or perhaps his candor and honesty were too uncomfortable. Ricardo was Ricardo, likable or not, and he did not let anyone to define him or keep him from stating what he had to say so eloquently. Long before his illness, he asked me twice: "Do you think I've done enough? Do you think I will leave an adequate legacy when I die?" To him, being a Chicano implied universal empathy. He was the enemy of whatever limits and excludes. He was proud of his Tewa indigenous heritage, which he traced to San Juan Pueblo and was perhaps a source of his spirituality that considers all humans as relatives and responsible for each other's welfare.

A liberated individual until the end, Ricardo died from cancer but was not defeated by it. His terminal condition was just another challenge, and he continued to make big plans, such as a writing institute at Washington State University or a school for children in his future home in El Paso. Celebrating life to the end, he refused to lie down and wait to die. He said he would leave when he was ready, and that day arrived on September 3. One evening, as we spoke on the phone when he was in obvious pain, he said "Qué buena es la vida, verdad?"

Ricardo Sánchez never missed an opportunity to express irony with invented language. By coincidence, he was at home watching El Profe, a Cantinflas video I had loaned him about an activist teacher in México, when he received a phone call from the WSU Provost informing him that he had been promoted to full-tenured professor. Ricardo humorously began to call himself "El Profe Cabal," the full(literally "complete") professor who now, ironically, was no longer able to meet his classes and live out his tenured professorship. In the new section of Canto y Grito Mi Liberación (re-published in 1995 by WSU Press), which contains some of his most passionate poetry, one finds the optimistic phrase "yes, I can-cer-vive" which, when read in Spanish, gives the opposite meaning "cancer lives."

During one of several Saturdays I spent with him when Teresa needed to go out of town, Ricardo opened his mail and received his first pay check after acquiring permanent disability status. He stared at it, despondent but not surprised, and insisted that I see it. The check was worth half the usual monthly amount. I stood there with a lump in my throat, groping for healing words but could think of nothing to dispel the reality of the moment. Before me was a great human being who had experienced pain most of his life and had finally found some stability and security for his family - until now. In one of his poems written during this time, he states: "...otra vez una vida de pocos recursos y muchas hambres culturales/sociales..." The obvious injustice crept deeply into my bones. While I was enjoying health and a full pay check, next to me was a carnal, perhaps more deserving than I, in great pain. I felt powerless, even guilty, in those moments. Had I given him everything I had, it would not have cured his illness.

Ricardo measured his success in terms of his benefactors, those he hoped to empower with words and deeds. Even as he lay in the hospital after learning of his terminal condition, he wrote poetic blessings to students who came to visit him. He spoke for the unfortunate whom society had cast aside and who needed a voice. It was for them, and especially for el pueblo, that he constantly struggled since leaving the prison cell. While he aspired to his own concept of greatness and eventually defied the hopeless predictions and shallow expectations of a sick society, his message to younger generations was that they were not born to limit themselves but to become great. In Ricardo's every breath were the words, "Sí se puede!" "Sí se puede!"

That Ricardo was an internationally recognized human rights activist can be ascertained by a letter he received in February of 1993 from an International Emergency Committee, which included a long-standing British member of Parliament, urging him to participate in a dangerous mission to Peru. The letter reads: "As an internationally recognized poet, known for defending the human rights of people throughout the U.S., Central America and Latin America, your participation is imperative. Your knowledge of the culture, your mastery of the language, and your personal courage and stand would be essential to the impact this delegation can have. We implore you to move heaven and earth to participate in this historic delegation." I was very disturbed at first about Ricardo's involvement in such a mission which seemed to protect someone who ismassacring indigenous people: El Sendero Luminoso and political prisoner Abimael Guzmán, whose life was being threatened by President Alberto Fujimori. But Ricardo explained that, if Fujimori carried out his threat, he would set a dangerous precedent for human rights activists.

Ricardo escaped the negativism and despair of the barrio and faced opposition to greatness since early childhood. A story he often told in keynote addresses to youth was about his second grade teacher at Zavala Elementary School in El Paso who asked the class what they wanted to do when they grew up. Ricardo had the audacity to say he wanted to become a writer and a poet, to which she responded, "Ricardo, you are just going to disappoint yourself. People like you, Mexican people, are not born to do those kinds of things. You should accept who you are... Mexicans don't become poets and writers." Such memories must have continually fueled his passion for others similarly put down.

His forthrightness annoyed many, but beneath the indignation, which along with a natural facial expression that was often misconstrued as self-centered anger, was a deeply compassionate, kind and generous human being. Famed Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who spent many years of exile in Chile and was a close friend of Che Guevara, also knew Ricardo and invited him to participate on stage during an invited poetry reading at WSU. After learning of the cancer, he wrote to Ricardo: "Decir que tú eres el poeta - es poco. Tú eres el poeta no solo de la poesía, sino el poeta de la vida..." Among Ricardo's legacies are the people living today who can attest to being empowered because he helped them accept their potential for greatness.

In October of 1992, Ricardo was invited to give testimony at the International Tribunal of Indigenous Peoples and Oppressed Nations in the USA, initiated by the American Indian Movement. In his transcribed testimony, he recounts an incident when he was invited to perform poetry all day long in the high school at Eagle Pass, Texas which was almost 100% Chicano (ca. 1987-88). At the end of the day, one of the school's teachers angrily accused him of lying to the students by telling them they all had greatness in them. Ricardo said: "How did I lie? What I told the children was that every human being, every creature born, has an inherent capacity for greatness, and that we must somehow explore ourselves and arrive at our personal greatness, so we can add to human society. A beautiful, meaningful measure of realization with our lives. I believe we are all born to enjoy life, and share the wonder of humanity."

Ricardo led students in his creative writing classes to publish an anthology of their work at the end of each semester. A group of students, eventually calling themselves The Palousian Poets, emerged and became a recognized campus organization. They held several public poetry readings in downtown Pullman and, when Ricardo became ill, supported him all the way, including a fund-raising poetry reading on his birthday on March 29 which Ricardo attended, though by then he was much thinner and weakly voiced. The Poets wanted to make the occasion especially meaningful for Ricardo by inviting another famous poet and friend, but repeated attempts to make contact were unsuccessful and discouraging. They held another reading to honor him after his passing. It is a mystery as well as one of Ricardo's greatest disappointments that so few, perhaps two or three, Chicano students chose to join him in making important statements through poetry. Perhaps the rest never knew the real Ricardo. There were no Chicanos among The Palousian Poets.

Ricardo has carved a permanent space in American literature and gained international respect for his activism and literary work. Stanford University purchased his papers, which were inaugurated on March 24, 1993. His close colleague at WSU, Dr. Daniel Estrada, began a project last year to permanently establish the Ricardo Sánchez Summer Institute in Chicano Studies. There are those who will assure him a rightful place in the literature, including Dr. Felipe de Ortego y Gasca, who stated in an e-mail note to me right after Ricardo's death: "When I reviewed Amsterdam Cantos for the MELUS Journal I cited Ricardo as one of the great universal poets, a truly gifted American poet in the tradition of Whitman. He deserves more than he has received in recognition"

When Norma and I saw Ricardo and Teresa off at the Spokane airport in May of 1995, he weighed no more than 140 pounds. Gone was the vibrant spirit he had brought to Pullman a few years before. The strong bond of marriage to Teresa remained. I would not see him again, and we could only speak the strong language of silence. So there were no words that morning, only a final hug as he sat in the wheelchair before he was assisted onto the plane. There would be no more menudo suppers. There were no good-byes, only a photograph to capture the sacred moment.

Well, Ricardo, 
a year later I still sit alone
in those familiar gathering places
musing over the important things
we once discussed
when we hoped for better times
for our families, our pueblo, our universe.

You are now spared the campus politics
but in my many moments of forgetfulness
I still await the return of a great poet.

I turn back the clock in my mind
and try to re-adjust the past
but it's no use,
so I look for another one like you
to appear on the horizon.

It's going to be a very long wait.