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187 Reasons Mexicanos Can't Cross the Border: Undocuments, 1971-2007
A hybrid collection of texts written and performed on the road, from Mexico City to San Francisco, from Central America to central California, illustrated throughout with photos and artwork. Rants, manifestos, newspaper cutups, street theater, anti-lectures, love poems, and riffs tell the story of what it's like to live outlaw and brown in the United States.
Juan Felipe Herrera is a professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside. The author of twenty-one books, he is also a community arts leader and a dynamic performer and actor. He is the son of Mexican immigrants and grew up in the migrant fields of California.
Juan Felipe Herrera is a professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside. The author of twenty-one books, he is also a community arts leader and a dynamic performer and actor. He is the son of Mexican immigrants and grew up in the migrant fields of California.
278 pages, Paperback
Published November 1, 2007
About the author
Juan Felipe Herrera
82 books138 followersJuan Felipe Herrera is the only son of Lucha Quintana and Felipe Emilio Herrera; the three were campesinos living from crop to crop on the roads of the San Joaquín Valley, Southern California and the Salinas Valley. Herrera's experiences as the child of migrant farmers have strongly shaped his work, such as the children's book Calling the Doves, which won the Ezra Jack Keats award in 1997. He is a poet, performer, writer, cartoonist, teacher, and activist who draws from real life experiences as well as years of education to inform his work. Community and art has always been part of what has driven Herrera, beginning in the mid-seventies, when he was director of the Centro Cultural de la Raza, an occupied water tank in Balboa Park converted into an arts space for the community.
Herrera’s publications include fourteen collections of poetry, prose, short stories, young adult novels and picture books for children in the last decade with twenty-one books in total.
Herrera’s publications include fourteen collections of poetry, prose, short stories, young adult novels and picture books for children in the last decade with twenty-one books in total.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
August 8, 2016
City Lights Author Juan Felipe Herrera Receives PEN West Poetry Award!
For his collection of verse spanning over three decades, 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can't Cross the Border, Juan Felipe Herrera has been awarded this year's PEN West award for outstanding poetry. City Lights congratulates the "wildly inventive" (New York Times) Juan Felipe!
Read the praise for 187 Reasonsin the New York Times Book Review!
"Herrera is . . . a sometimes hermetic, wildly inventive, always unpredictable poet, whose work commands attention for its style alone. . . Many poets since the 1960s have dreamed of a new hybrid art, part oral, part written, part English, part something else: an art grounded in ethnic identity, fueled by collective pride, yet irreducibly individual too. Many poets have tried to create such an art: Herrera is one of the first to succeed."
--New York Times Book Review
Check out 187Express.com for Juan Felipe's blog, bio, tour updates, and more!
Juan Felipe Herrera’s writings are charged with theatrical and athletic energies. A hybrid collection of texts written and performed on the road, gathered from more than thirty-five years of work in various genres, these “undocuments” are the record of an epic journey across many different borders: boundaries of nations, state lines, city limits, edges of farmland, crossings and mixtures of languages and literary forms.
From Mexico City to San Francisco, from Central America to central California, Herrera remembers everything and gives back to his native places and to the family, friends and compañeros of his Mexican/American/Chicano odyssey a scrapbook, a logbook, a journal, a multiform confession of proud hybridity and indigenous optimism. A sustained manifesto of resistance and affirmation, these rants, manifestos, newspaper cut-ups, bits of street theatre, anti-lectures, love poems and riffs tell the story of what it’s like to live outlaw and brown in the United States.
Illustrated throughout with photos and artwork.
“Papers? Permits? Documents? Identification? Open this book anywhere and find the authorization to keep on, permission to be who you are in your own skin, license to cultivate your inner guerrilla, angelic visas of transcendent transit. This book is the passport to a country under construction.” — from the Introduction by Stephen Kessler
Juan Felipe Herrera is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside. Author of 21 books, he is also a community arts leader and a dynamic performer and actor. He is the son of Mexican immigrants and grew up in the migrant fields of California.
Praise for 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can't Cross The Border:
"¡Por fin! A manifesto you can dance to. Juan Felipe Herrera's searing laments and soulful riffs don't just electrify. They Mexify."—Stephanie Elizondo Griest, author of Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana
"I’ve been reading Juan Felipe Herrera since he was little baby poet in the 1970s, and this volume, which collects published and unpublished community pieces from the last three decades, gives me an almost painful pleasure. He is the eternal teen poet, the timeless Beat, the premodern postmodern. He is Walt Whitman, Ezekiel, Pablo Neruda, Langston Hughes, Scheherazade, Carlos Fuentes, Allen Ginsberg, Frida Kahlo, Groucho and Karl Marx, Emily Dickinson, Santana, Lao Tzu, and Octavio Paz rolled up and squeezed through dreams of Aztlan and justice and jazz. He is Floricanto. And 187 Reasons, more than anything he has written, is his autobiography."—Tom Lutz, author of Doing Nothing, Crying, and Cosmopolitan Vistas
"Juan Felipe Herrera has written a giant verbal mural bursting with the inventiveness, rhythmic colorings, social engagement and humor — in forms of poetry, litany, and autobiography — that reveal not only the greatness but the absolute necessity of Chicano culture. This is a major generational work by a brilliant practitioner of the art of living the word."—Jack Hirschman, poet laureate of the City of San Francisco
"There are at least 187 reasons why you should read Herrera’s 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Border. A very abbreviated list would include: Because it is some of the strongest poetry, memoir, satire, and theater that you will find in one book- Because within it are over forty years of artfully recorded passion, anger, engagement, humor and love- Because it will carry you across, over and through languages, borders, and cultures revealing truths, asking hard questions, and insisting we see the power not only on of writer as witness, and the power of writer as memory, but the power of writer as conscious revolutionary striving towards a more just and humane world- Because it is a pleasure that will awaken and engage all of your senses as it touches and does not let go of your heart."– devorah major author of Brown Glass Windows, Open Weave, street smarts and Where River Meets Ocean.
"Aware, phosphorescent and immediate, this is language brilliantly engaged. Juan Felipe Herrera is simultaneous lighthouse and lightning, the flash that carries the warning and the live wire. For three decades now Herrera’s hot-colored Surrealism has transmitted one of the strongest border radio signals of alt-poetics from the Mission District to St. Mark’s Poetry Project, from the Taos Poetry Circus to Bisbee, from the first Floricantos of the Bay Area or cross-border exchanges in Tijuana and D.F., Chiapas and Yucatan to San Diego, L. A., Austin and beyond. This poetics makes a practice of making a difference. Here available together for the first time are wide-ranging selections from dozens of Herrera’s outstanding ‘experimental’ mixed-genre books, many of which had eccentric or limited original distribution. Contextualized with photos, historical notes and chronology, 187 Reasons serves up both continental panorama and meta-document in the practice of a poetics that comes alive with startling vitality---across borders of political silence and censorship of the Other, semiotic deserts and actual killing fields."– Sesshu Foster author of Atomik Aztex and American Loneliness: Selected Poems
For his collection of verse spanning over three decades, 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can't Cross the Border, Juan Felipe Herrera has been awarded this year's PEN West award for outstanding poetry. City Lights congratulates the "wildly inventive" (New York Times) Juan Felipe!
Read the praise for 187 Reasonsin the New York Times Book Review!
"Herrera is . . . a sometimes hermetic, wildly inventive, always unpredictable poet, whose work commands attention for its style alone. . . Many poets since the 1960s have dreamed of a new hybrid art, part oral, part written, part English, part something else: an art grounded in ethnic identity, fueled by collective pride, yet irreducibly individual too. Many poets have tried to create such an art: Herrera is one of the first to succeed."
--New York Times Book Review
Check out 187Express.com for Juan Felipe's blog, bio, tour updates, and more!
Juan Felipe Herrera’s writings are charged with theatrical and athletic energies. A hybrid collection of texts written and performed on the road, gathered from more than thirty-five years of work in various genres, these “undocuments” are the record of an epic journey across many different borders: boundaries of nations, state lines, city limits, edges of farmland, crossings and mixtures of languages and literary forms.
From Mexico City to San Francisco, from Central America to central California, Herrera remembers everything and gives back to his native places and to the family, friends and compañeros of his Mexican/American/Chicano odyssey a scrapbook, a logbook, a journal, a multiform confession of proud hybridity and indigenous optimism. A sustained manifesto of resistance and affirmation, these rants, manifestos, newspaper cut-ups, bits of street theatre, anti-lectures, love poems and riffs tell the story of what it’s like to live outlaw and brown in the United States.
Illustrated throughout with photos and artwork.
“Papers? Permits? Documents? Identification? Open this book anywhere and find the authorization to keep on, permission to be who you are in your own skin, license to cultivate your inner guerrilla, angelic visas of transcendent transit. This book is the passport to a country under construction.” — from the Introduction by Stephen Kessler
Juan Felipe Herrera is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside. Author of 21 books, he is also a community arts leader and a dynamic performer and actor. He is the son of Mexican immigrants and grew up in the migrant fields of California.
Praise for 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can't Cross The Border:
"¡Por fin! A manifesto you can dance to. Juan Felipe Herrera's searing laments and soulful riffs don't just electrify. They Mexify."—Stephanie Elizondo Griest, author of Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana
"I’ve been reading Juan Felipe Herrera since he was little baby poet in the 1970s, and this volume, which collects published and unpublished community pieces from the last three decades, gives me an almost painful pleasure. He is the eternal teen poet, the timeless Beat, the premodern postmodern. He is Walt Whitman, Ezekiel, Pablo Neruda, Langston Hughes, Scheherazade, Carlos Fuentes, Allen Ginsberg, Frida Kahlo, Groucho and Karl Marx, Emily Dickinson, Santana, Lao Tzu, and Octavio Paz rolled up and squeezed through dreams of Aztlan and justice and jazz. He is Floricanto. And 187 Reasons, more than anything he has written, is his autobiography."—Tom Lutz, author of Doing Nothing, Crying, and Cosmopolitan Vistas
"Juan Felipe Herrera has written a giant verbal mural bursting with the inventiveness, rhythmic colorings, social engagement and humor — in forms of poetry, litany, and autobiography — that reveal not only the greatness but the absolute necessity of Chicano culture. This is a major generational work by a brilliant practitioner of the art of living the word."—Jack Hirschman, poet laureate of the City of San Francisco
"There are at least 187 reasons why you should read Herrera’s 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Border. A very abbreviated list would include: Because it is some of the strongest poetry, memoir, satire, and theater that you will find in one book- Because within it are over forty years of artfully recorded passion, anger, engagement, humor and love- Because it will carry you across, over and through languages, borders, and cultures revealing truths, asking hard questions, and insisting we see the power not only on of writer as witness, and the power of writer as memory, but the power of writer as conscious revolutionary striving towards a more just and humane world- Because it is a pleasure that will awaken and engage all of your senses as it touches and does not let go of your heart."– devorah major author of Brown Glass Windows, Open Weave, street smarts and Where River Meets Ocean.
"Aware, phosphorescent and immediate, this is language brilliantly engaged. Juan Felipe Herrera is simultaneous lighthouse and lightning, the flash that carries the warning and the live wire. For three decades now Herrera’s hot-colored Surrealism has transmitted one of the strongest border radio signals of alt-poetics from the Mission District to St. Mark’s Poetry Project, from the Taos Poetry Circus to Bisbee, from the first Floricantos of the Bay Area or cross-border exchanges in Tijuana and D.F., Chiapas and Yucatan to San Diego, L. A., Austin and beyond. This poetics makes a practice of making a difference. Here available together for the first time are wide-ranging selections from dozens of Herrera’s outstanding ‘experimental’ mixed-genre books, many of which had eccentric or limited original distribution. Contextualized with photos, historical notes and chronology, 187 Reasons serves up both continental panorama and meta-document in the practice of a poetics that comes alive with startling vitality---across borders of political silence and censorship of the Other, semiotic deserts and actual killing fields."– Sesshu Foster author of Atomik Aztex and American Loneliness: Selected Poems
July 20, 2008
Despite the fact that the Mexican population is growing greater in the U.S. every day, many people choose to remain ignorant of the history of our neighbors and friends from South of the border. After reading Herrera’s new book I felt like I had gained a great deal of insight about the experience of living in the U.S. as a Mexican. I also realized that I knew much less about Mexican culture than I would like to admit.
Herrera compiled over thirty years of “undocumets” consisting of poetry, journal entries, and essays in which he discusses everything from food to freedom marches. Some of his writings are longwinded and repetitious, while others snap to the point with powerful thoughts and imagery. To better benefit from this book I would recommend grabbing a Spanish-English dictionary to better learn from something you might not understand.
Herrera compiled over thirty years of “undocumets” consisting of poetry, journal entries, and essays in which he discusses everything from food to freedom marches. Some of his writings are longwinded and repetitious, while others snap to the point with powerful thoughts and imagery. To better benefit from this book I would recommend grabbing a Spanish-English dictionary to better learn from something you might not understand.
January 27, 2022
The third eye of poetry is out on the streets translating. "The Soul is a Bone" is a good mantra. I love how as the book progresses his different languages, our different languages, start to speak to each other until we get the bilingual poems where the words from two different languages are seducing each other down the page. A book to keep your library warm.
hibernating-or-reading-sporadically
July 23, 2015On page 55. Have to return it to the library. Will put it on hold again.
January 6, 2020
This is a great book if you're looking for hybrid texts. There are moments that shine so amazingly and are poignant despite their age. Unfortunately, I'm not clicking with the style.
November 28, 2017
National Hispanic Heritage Month - National Hispanic Heritage Month: 2017-2018. I will spend one year reading works by and about Latinxs. My goal is individual growth, individual acquisistion of knowledge, and the promotion of fantastic cultural reads. My goal is to speak as frankly as I can about what I like and don't like, and to basically see what I discover about myself as a result of reading these 136 works that I've put on my "to read" list.
187 REASONS MEXICANOS CAN'T CROSS THE BORDER
Some of the work here just doesn't hold up over time.
Some of the poetry is a cluster of disconnected words, ideas, and images.
Some of the poetry is gorgeous.
Some of the prose is beautiful and lyrical.
And some of it is just shit.
Maybe I need to give this another reading. I want to "love" this work.
What do I learn about my culture and myself?
That I'm thoroughly disconnected from that Aztlan discourse that pops up in this text. And that when I look back on myself as a young student taking Chicano Studies coursework, I never really purchased the ideas about Aztlan in the first place. I thought it was hokey.
I do want to read this work again, in spite of not liking it. I want to re-read with an eye to specifically looking at "imperialist nostalgia" or just through the lens of nostalgia. I can't help but feel that there should be some lovely nuggets in this work, but the first read was just disheartening to me. Nothing spoke to me at all.
187 REASONS MEXICANOS CAN'T CROSS THE BORDER
Some of the work here just doesn't hold up over time.
Some of the poetry is a cluster of disconnected words, ideas, and images.
Some of the poetry is gorgeous.
Some of the prose is beautiful and lyrical.
And some of it is just shit.
Maybe I need to give this another reading. I want to "love" this work.
What do I learn about my culture and myself?
That I'm thoroughly disconnected from that Aztlan discourse that pops up in this text. And that when I look back on myself as a young student taking Chicano Studies coursework, I never really purchased the ideas about Aztlan in the first place. I thought it was hokey.
I do want to read this work again, in spite of not liking it. I want to re-read with an eye to specifically looking at "imperialist nostalgia" or just through the lens of nostalgia. I can't help but feel that there should be some lovely nuggets in this work, but the first read was just disheartening to me. Nothing spoke to me at all.
Read
February 8, 2011A hybrid collection of texts written and performed on the road, from Mexico City to San Francisco, from Central America to central California, illustrated throughout with photos and artwork. Rants, manifestos, newspaper cutups, street theater, anti-lectures, love poems, and riffs tell the story of what it's like to live outlaw and brown in the United States.
May 31, 2008
This is Juan Felipe Herrera at his best.
January 15, 2009
unBELIEVABLE! The best thing I've come across in maybe 10 years, since I discovered Jo Carol Pierce. Better than Springsteen. It's not music, but it moves like music.
July 16, 2009
Herrera is a giant and just won't let Xicanos be invisible.
July 21, 2011
2009 PEN Center USA Poetry Award Winner
February 12, 2017
I saw the author read the title piece in Arcata somewhere around 1995 (that's the year on my photocopied copy). Wonderful!
December 14, 2013
I have a new favorite poet and his name is Juan Felipe Herrera.
September 11, 2015
Amazing. One of the most interesting collections of poetry I've ever read
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews