Introduction by Roberto Barcena

Ricardo Sánchez was most widely known for his social activism and for poems that reflected anger against the actions of American society toward Chicanos and other underrepresented groups. His early works, such as Canto y grito mi liberación (1971) and Hechizospells (176), though multifaceted, reverberate wrath. Thus, a book entitled The Loves of Ricardo might seem like a contradiction. But Sánchez's public persona was misunderstood. In our contemporary "talk show" world, where the word "love" is thrown about so profusely, few really understand what it implies. For Sánchez, love was a celebration of life in its fundamental aspects. Love is what his life revolved around.

During his life, Sánchez was involved in many cultural and political causes and clashed with many people. His keen intellect and his love of and ability to use words effectively reinforced his impulse to lash out the instant he sensed falsity. He did not shy away from expressing his thoughts in his poems, notes, or newspaper columns written for San Antonio and El Paso dailies, and he disregarded the effect that these words might have on other people or on his career as a writer.

Sánchez's abilities as a public orator were unique and frequently in demand. He was robust and tough, and had a stern and piercing gaze. His voice was a low, melodic, hypnotizing thunder that showered words of rage and bliss simultaneously. The passion, power, and eloquence of his speeches and performances made him a person to be respected. Though Sánchez was serious in his beliefs, he was playful with words. Words were his toys, and he enjoyed creating playful images and parodies of people. This playfulness, known as cábula, often confused the uninitiated and made some people feel that they were being attacked or ridiculed. Consequently, some saw him as too uncouth and too tempered by barrio and prison harshness. They believed he was too difficult, too explosive, and too dangerous to deal with. For some, then, it may be difficult to associate Sánchez with love.

Nevertheless, to the many people who got to know Sánchez on a personal level, the contradictions soon vanished. One could see the tenderness and gentleness with which he treated his wife, his children, his friends, and even strangers. Many were shocked that this could be the same man who wrote his early works of rage.

I knew Sánchez for more than twenty years. Though he moved and lived in many areas of the United States and I remained in El Paso, we kept in contact. Every time he came into town we would pick up our discussion where we had left off months before. When, for family reasons, he moved back to El Paso in 1988, I got to know Sánchez much better. For three years prior to his leaving to teach at Washington State University, we engaged almost daily in marathons of dialogues and arguments.

From this vantage point, I was able to witness the many private and public sides of Sánchez: the husband, the father, the friend, the poet, the spokesman, the performer. All of these aspects revolved around one theme-love. Not love in the sense of trying to fill an emptiness by creating and using dependence on another, but love as a celebration of one's strength as a human being.

Paradoxically, he was continuously misinterpreted by opposite perspectives. Though he had achieved tenure at Washington State University while teaching in both the English Department and the Department of Comparative Cultures, he had been rejected by the academic world of the Southwest. Perhaps associating him with his pinto (convict) background, his fellow professors felt that he was too harsh and unrefined. Yet, he commented, when he read his love poetry at Chicano community activist gatherings, he would sometimes be labeled as "wishy-washy" and too refined.

This paradox has much to do with the essence of this book-a misunderstanding of what love is and a struggle to understand it. Social philosopher and psychoanalyst Erich Fromm states that when humans evolved from a communal to a marketplace orientation, material progress occurred at the cost of deteriorating authentic human relationships. In the competitive universe, according to Fromm, we tend to sell our personalities as commodities or services. Therefore, to be successful requires adopting a pleasing personality and any other attributes necessary for a particular position. The market will decide if these qualities are useful. Thus, one's self-worth depends on what others think. This frame of mind leads to a misuse of love; that is, it eventually leads to a kind of false love that is based on manipulation and power.

Domination and discrimination in contemporary society, Fromm said, is a result of the lack of genuine love. Though humans have a basic need to transcend themselves and relate to others, this relating has been subtlety and effectively disfigured by society's marketplace orientation, in which people can only relate to each other as objects.

Sánchez grew to understand that a society that lacked an understanding of love would base its human relationships on power and domination. Meaning and progress meant having power and dominion over nature and other beings. He cried out against such false normalcy because these conditions could not allow human beings to actualize themselves to their full potential. The reflection of his experiences as a Chicano lead him to abhor this pattern of power and domination.

Sánchez stated that he was not searching for power, because he didn't need or want to have power over anyone else. What he demanded, though, was strength. Strength gave the individual the capacity to defend himself or herself against subjugation and victimization. With this virtue, individuals could express themselves on equal terms as self-actualizing human beings. In a poem to his newly born daughter, Sánchez writes:

Who'll be free, with inner peace 
that you'll never bow nor cringe, 
that you'll share in liberty, 
ever knowing who you are, 
ever proud of where you've come, 
That you'll never feel inferior
          nor superior, Libertad

Similarly, in his Les Suerostraats notes ("There is only the open door . . 1988) he states:

no, I do not want to own you nor can I, my power is
too fragile and too evanescent to pretend that you
are less or that you can fit in my pocket besides
my cigarette pack: you too are a giant, an
amorphous being of many silhouettes and nuances,
and I cannot possibly fit in your pocketbook.

Sánchez's love and celebration of differences is echoed throughout the great majority of his love poems. His appreciation and love of differences can be traced back to his upbringing in El Paso, Texas, a city on the border with Mexico where two different histories and consciousnesses are juxtaposed-near yet far apart. Before Hispanicization, the Chicano, for the most part-not the Mexican or the American-had been the group that had been able to internalize both world views. Ignored by both worlds, the Chicano reacted against the dominating tendencies of both worlds, for their juxtaposition allowed them to have contact with both on a daily basis.

Eventually gang-like groups of young people called pachucos developed. They expressed an existential reaction to the fact that they could not identify with and felt forgotten by both American and Mexican culture. Theirs was a natural phenomenon, not an intellectualized one. They took up ganglike activities, a unique style of dress, and a dialect known as caló that combined idiomatic phrases of English and Spanish. Thus, Sánchez's poetry is rife with neologisms, metonymy, and metaphors, just as caló is.

The Chicano was a decentered being, not adhering to any culture that emanated from a center such as Mexico City or Washington, D.C. American sociologists could only describe the Chicano as an unacculturated ethnic group still clinging to Mexican culture and language. From the Mexican perspective, intellectuals such as poet Octavio Paz could only describe the Chicano as a fractured Mexican.

Sánchez rejoiced in this difference, in this differing. He felt the term Hispanic de-emphasized the Indian roots of the Chicano and took away the mestizaje or blending aspect. Furthermore, the synthesis of the Chicano essence went beyond the mixture of Spanish and Indian. It also included the Moorish, Sephardic, Germanic, and Roman background of Spain as well as cultural-and at times blood-mixtures of the North American dynamic: Northern European, Jewish, African, and Asian.

Though Sánchez was essentially a universalist, he believed that the best way he could express his cosmic consciousness was from a Chicano perspective. He loved his Chicanoness, and he believed that this self-love needed to be expressed and shared. He believed that his people (raza) needed to understand their roots, and that this search had to be authentic, not one of self-aggrandizement. A genuine search would require that the individual learn to have a productive love based on thought, feeling, and action-not a love based on power or that sought recompense. Simply, a love where sharing, empathy, and the celebration of the individual uniqueness and potentiality of each person is expressed. As the search for roots proceeds and merges with the search for love, a person doesn't lock himself or herself into his or her own culture; rather, the opposite occurs. As barriers are broken, the Chicano-just as any other group member in the world-will understand that we are all one.

The Loves of Ricardo is an attempt to put some of Sánchez's poems dealing with love into chronological order. Many of these were written in notebooks and dated, almost like journal entries, and are published in this volume for the first time. Throughout the book, the reader will see different dimensions of love-marital love, paternal love, familial love, fraternal love, communal love (raza), aesthetic love, and universal love. Dividing these poems into separate thematic sections would have been one way, perhaps more reader-friendly, of organizing this book. But as one reads the poems including those that may be addressed to his beloved wife, María Teresa or to his children, Rikárd-Sergei, Libertad-Yvonne, or Jacinto-Temilotzín-one begins to see that any one poem can contain other elements of Sánchez's search for, and sharing of, love.

Roberto Barcena
El Paso, Texas
March, 1997