I'm glad I do not have to search for words to introduce Ricardo Sánchez' work because he for the 1st year or so I have been literally flooded with most, if not all, of his writings. While he was up east he kept mailing me, with demonic persistence, all he penned. I have introduced Ricardo to various groups as one of the most brilliant minds in the Chicano Movement (bar none). This can, at the same time be a well deserved tribute and a deferment, since at times I sense he as well as his writings are so far ahead of our times that he may not be understood.

He tells me, and I believe him, that he was talking Chicano power before the phrase was coined. He was talking chicano liberation to a bunch of chicano hop-heads to the tune of mariachi bands in Juárez and since no one would listen, he picked up a gun and did the next best thing to being involved in a non-defined and nonexistent chicano movement.

As to his writings, they are one of the best examples of MACHISMO, the strong pillar of our culture. They are manly enough and speak of the superhuman endurance of our raza. Yet, his writings too betray the childlike sentimentality inherited from the pureness of our Indian side.

What is most admirable is the excellent and high quality of expression he possesses, and, at times, and rightly so, he becomes the show-case of most of us who would like to fling him and his writings at the anglo world, which has snobbed and insulted us as "being good with our hands only..."

While his tone is naturally angry, there is no frustration nor defeat in his anger, but rather an inflating of the chest and the refusal of the customary blindfold as he faces the firing squad.

While he writes of the desmadre he fails not to highlight the virtues of the Barrio and the Campos.

All anybody can really say, if one can be considered a camarada de pluma, is that it is rather fortunate to be at least considered his contemporaneo.

One last observation of the man, rather than the writer, is that Sánchez is hard to categorize. A thinker he is, a philosopher, a mentor of the movement, a journalist, a novelist living a novel rather than writing one, a chicano--not just a chicano, but the cream of the chocolate and king of mestizaje.

But what makes him really acceptable is that he is also an old pachuco and a pinto ....

abelardo