Alberto Álvaro Ríos

Who is Alberto Álvaro Ríos?

Gerardo Del Guercio.

Alberto Álvaro Ríos (1952).

Biography

Alberto Rìos was born in 1952 at Nogales, Arizona, a town spanning the Mexican border to Alberto Alvaro Ríos, a judicial officer, and an English mother, Agnes Fogg Ríos, a nurse. Alberto Ríos' poems are filled with themes of multiculturalism, food, and local color. During his childhood, teachers chastised Ríos for speaking Spanish on school grounds. In rebellion, Rios and his Spanish speaking friends composed notes in Spanish leaving them in the garbage bin for each other to read later. Teachers punishing this foul resulted in Rios forgetting Spanish completely for several years. His poem “Nani” describes an encounter with his paternal grandmother as well as incapability to converse with her, although they ultimately manage to bond with each other, through body language and food. An esteemed poet, Alberto Ríos was named the 2009 Markin-Flanagan Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Calgary where he served as writer-in-residence from March 4 to March 13. Ríos started teaching creative writing at Arizona State University in 1981 where he is the current Regents’ Professor and chair. In addition, he is the author of ten books and chapbooks of poetry, three collections of short stories, and a memoir.

Ríos started writing in the third grade, although he referred to it as "daydreaming". It was a secret act, like speaking Spanish. He did not believe his friends or family would appreciate him, so he kept his writings concealed in the backs of his copybooks. He did not share his poems with anyone until high school, where a teacher recognized his aptitude and initiated him to beat writers like Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Ríos shortly rediscovered his lost Spanish tongue, although the dishonour of speaking it stayed with him, memories of being "squashed" by his teachers still intimidated him. His formal education includes a bachelor’s of arts in literature from the University of Arizona, where he graduated in 1974. A year later he earned a degree in psychology and studied law for a brief period, but he returned to the University of Arizona to pursue creative writing. He earned his MFA in 1979 from the University of Arizona. During the same year he married Lupita Barron and they currently reside in Chandler, Arizona. They have a son, Joaquin, who is a graduate of the Sandra Day O'Connor School of Law at Arizona State University.

Capirotada was published in 1999 by the University of New Mexico Press. Alberto Ríos describes the novel as being “Mexican bread pudding, and a mysterious mixture of prunes, peanuts, white cheese, butter, cinnamon and cloves, Old World sugar and all things people will not tell you” (University of New Mexico Press). Like its Mexican namesake, this chronicle is a rich concoction, stirring together Ríos’s memories of family, neighbors, friends, and secrets from his childhood in the two Nogaleses—in Arizona and through the open gate into Mexico. The vignettes in this memoir, exploring the borders of memory and narrative, are not loud or fast. Yet, like all of Ríos’s writings, they are remarkable. The reader is presented with the story about a wobbly magician, his chicken, and a group of little boys, but who plays a trick on whom? The story about the flying dancers and mortality and about going to the dentist in Mexico because it is cheaper, and maybe dangerous. It is also about Ríos’ British mother who sets out on a vessel for America with the confidence that her Mexican army boyfriend will be waiting for her in Salt Lake City. The book also tells about the adult son who looks at his father and comprehends how he must provide for his own boy. The text’s rare contribution is how it stops to attend to the quiet, the overlooked, the everyday side of growing up. Capirotada is not about outlaws or well-known heroes, but it is instead about life in the middle, which is often the most appealing and tricky place to find news.

Well composed poetry collections that track a narrative can be among the most pleasant books to analyze because its narrator can give the bard more room to investigate thoughts over the progression of time, as well as act as a mesh to pull readers in and expressively engage them in the world of the story. Alberto Ríos’ The Theater of Night is set in a desert town on the border between Mexico and the United States, and goes after the lives of two protagonists, Clemente and Ventura. These two characters are explored for almost a century of courtship, marriage, adulthood and bereavement and their lives are exposed through uneven viewpoints that sometimes depicts Clemente speaking, at other times Ventura, at times an unknown narrator, from time to time townspeople or family members. Through this meditative rendering of family history, Ríos examines marriage, heritage and time. The shifting narrative voices are signs of the natural free flow of the poetic imagination which has its origins in the British Romantic era and stretches into the twentieth century with stream of consciousness in the works of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. The Theater of Night is perhaps Ríos’ crowning achievement.

The Theater of Night was Ríos’ first book since The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body, which was chosen for a National Book Award in 2002. Ríos’ book is filled with surrealism, sometimes bordering on magic realism, such as in “The Drive-In of the Small Animals,” (Lanzendorfer, n.pag) where insects, lizards and other creatures observe humans as if watching a movie at the drive-in. The poems are cautiously portrayed portions of actuality, such as “Coffee in the Afternoon,” where a narrator visits a grandmother figure, possibly Ventura, for cowboy coffee and conversation.

Time moves without warning in this book of poetry—sometimes quickly, and at other times slowly. Even though the compilation is more or less sequential, the poems spend more time on elderly life. Midway through the book, the protagonists are already in old age. The poems later loiter on after their deaths, creating an abnormal, sorrowful sense of not wanting to let go of life.

In Ríos’ verse, an instance can enclose years within it. Clemente and Ventura meet when they are children trading a pomegranate for a kiss. In the moment of the kiss, they feel the electricity of their future together. Their son, Margarito; their two daughters; grandchildren all follow this passionate kiss. Like a split second, the kiss is little and great at the same time and conflates and metamorphoses instantaneously. It’s the innocent display of childhood echoes Coleridge, Keats, and Blake, and it is also the operation that sets the family’s future into play.

A moment can also turn something ordinary into something superb. The perfect scene is when Clemente catches a glimpse of a horse turning red in the manifestation of the setting sun. This instant makes two horses, one unpredictably larger that stays with him, enduringly altering him. In other poems, an old man contains in himself all the adaptations of himself that he has ever been all at once. In another, an unclear snap shot of a woman kissing an infant confines the profusion of her love. The Theater of Night becomes animated when Ríos explains the desert and town. “The Donkey Men of Sonora in the 1930s” vocalizes the men who acted as town peddlers. “Santa Teresa in Nogales” explores faith, curing and womanly association. These characters, along with the animal and plant life of the desert, fill out the corners of the book and help create the physical topography that cements Clemente and Ventura so well. As the story continues, the book turns into more than just a story about two characters. Like all good poetry, the poems turn to the core of life, exploring delicate emotions that come as reactions to the outer countryside of the desert moving The Theater of Night beyond a precise culture and into something unexpectedly collective.

The marvelous and the real hold hands in this collection by a young poet whose work has been described as ‘written miracles.’ The poems are often centers on the Luna family, and the idea that a small sign can stand for the gatherings of a lifetime. Through Teodoro Luna, who stepped into a marriage “eighty-three miles long,” we are alerted to just what a kiss was intended to be. The landscape is Arizona and northern Mexico, where a world of borders prevails--between two cultures and two languages, and between what is open and what is secret. Himself born in Nogales, of Mexican-English parentage, Ríos speaks, in these magical poems, “to both my grandmother and my son at the same time” (Ríos, 88). His many characters (the book is a crowded village) are dealt with tenderly and humorously. If Ríos' work is charming (and it is, amply), it is so in the sense of magic, where charms turn one thing to another and reveal essential truths.

First published in 1984, The Iguana Killer, is considered a classic of Chicano fiction, and now available only from the University of New Mexico Press. More than anything, Alberto Ríos's first book of short stories, is a book of secrets. It takes the audience on a charming journey into the heart, to those places where it is most generous to live, and to those where it is not. While each story is strong and diverse, The Iguana Killer is a true collection, a novel almost. The character’s names change, the places and the times, yet one necessary character, one conglomerated experience comes out: these, then, are the tales of the Chicano, starting in Mexico, crossing the border at Nogales, and maturing up in the United States. Donald Justice’s comments about Ríos's first book of poems can be applied evenly to The Iguana Killer: “[this book] gives what is basic to literary art—that felt sense of life demanded by Henry James, though the life, the whole culture here, could hardly otherwise be less Jamesian .... and whoever reads through this work must be impressed, as I was, by the power the most natural-seeming and casual image has, in the hands of a true poet, to transform and illuminate.” (University of New Mexico Press). As a poet, then, Ríos makes the recognizable seem novel and bizarre—enigmatic. Also, by dissimilarity, he makes something abnormal or innovative into something common and authentic. The stories collected in this book might be described as small and wonderful. Ríos faces some big dilemmas—often from a child's point of view—but he does so in the language of a poet, so that we discover, for example, that “The Iguana Killer” is really a baseball bat, an object far more important for gathering food than playing games. The future will make you tall, says Madre Sofia, the gypsy, toward the end of the book. We find comedy in discovering just how incorrect her forecast is, wit in the flat middle of sadness, but humor most of all. These stories, then, show us a civilization in constant evolution that reaching back all the way into the jungles of Mexico, rooted in the ancient Mayan and Aztecan civilizations, but extending all the way into the postmodern realm as well, a present where confused governments go to war over trifles and almost anything can happen to a young Chicano, including love and generosity. The moral is that we see that The Iguana Killer is the story of a collective human experience.

Alberto Alvaro Ríos is a prolific postmodern literary figure for his rich blend of Romanticism, Anglo-American modernism, and the natural free-flow of the poetic imagination. Among his life achievements include 2002 finalist for the National Book Award. At the request of Governor-elect Janet Napolitano, Ríos wrote and delivered a poem at Arizona's gubernatorial inauguration in 2003 and at Governor Napolitano's request, wrote a poem for the visit of President Vicente Fox of Mexico. In 2002, he was the recipient of the Western Literature Association's Distinguished Achievement Award. Ríos also received the Arizona Governor's Arts Award; Guggenheim Foundation fellowship; National Endowment for the Arts fellowship; Walt Whitman Award; Outstanding Latino/a Cultural Award in Literary Arts or Publications, AAHHE, 2004; Western States Book Award for Fiction; six Pushcart Prizes in both poetry and fiction. His place in the literary canon was solidified when he was included in The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry and The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Throughout his career, Ríos has been included in over 175 other national and international literary anthologies; selected as a 2005 Historymaker by the Arizona History Society's Museum, a Smithsonian affiliate, at Papago Park, Tempe, Arizona; 2007 recipient of the PEN Open Book Award (formerly titled the Beyond Margins Award) for The Theater of Night. His memoir about growing up on the Mexico-Arizona border, called Capirotada, won the Latino Literary Hall of Fame Award and was designated the OneBookArizona choice for 2009.

References:

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Century American Short Story. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. 483.

Ellmann, Richard and Robert O’Clair, “Ríos, Alberto” The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry.

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