17 years ago, my first encounter with the boisterous Xicano, Andrés Montoya, was a crazy one. He could speak with enormous fire and passion, and in a small room it blew you away, and pissed you off royally if he was speaking against you, which he was, to the group of students I was part of in 1992. You see, my encounters with the man was not with his poetry, it was with his activism on behalf of MEChA. An accidental encounter with his poetry would come later. I was in a coalition of Black, Gay and Xicano students looking to overthrow (via fair election) the administration-backed Greeks currently in power of the Associated Students (The Student Government) at Fresno State. I was one of the gay ones.
At that time on the Fresno State campus, a dynamic new student organization was formed, called GLSA, the Gay and Lesbian Student Alliance. With our rise in importance, our inclusion in the leftist and rightist (yes, rightist, based on pro-business, pro-Capitalist or nationalist principles) alliances contending for seats in the student government had become prominent. Our movement made us "out of the closet", running as Lesbians and Gays in the open with beliefs in diversity and inclusion in all leadership, business and other functional organizations and institutions of society.
The leftist organizations, needing to balance out who gets how much inclusion, always ran into trouble allocating roles agreeably. An annual ritual was to start out working with the MEChA leaders, almost like brothers, welcomed into their homes, and then would come "the walkout" and the establishment of a competing party with a name like "The RAZA Party." You can't blame them. They would go on to kick our ass and leave us going, "maybe we should have compromised more." The problem would arise when one club or group feels too left out of the slots to run in the student election on the "unity" "alliance" or "coalition" party ticket (whatever name we were going with that year).
The largest minority was the Hispanic, with the MEChA club in the forefront.
As a Gay participant, I always felt more comfortable with the Black leaders, who were disciples of the Black Panthers and Peace And Freedom Party, while the Xicanos, I felt, were a group I didn't understand. Were they homophobic? Were they racist? From my point of view they had to run WITH us to prove they weren't! Unfair? Maybe.
For two years I was involved in the student elections. The first year, Andrés Montoya led a walkout with a divisive, hateful speech against the coalition, full of ad-hominem attacks against the black man at the head of the party, but also implicitly at the rest of us who remained. The second year, a more conciliatory group worked with us until the night we really did the wrong thing. Before walking out after they were unfairly disenfranchised by the rest of us at a big, dramatic meeting. We really blew it.
I came to regard Andrés Montoya as rather unfriendly after his big walkout speech the year before that disaster. That was too bad, because a true glimpse inside the man might have proved otherwise. He would soon be moving on in his life, deeper into the realm of being a great poet.
One day, i was in the Free Speech Area staffing the fabulous pink LGBSA booth and he was at the Free Speech podium speaking intense words so incredible I couldn't reconcile the words with the man delivering them. It was Andrés Montoya, the fearsome rebel, laying down truth with the raw power of language. In the audience, professors. That's right. Reacting to the words like they were at a rock concert and listening to a genius.
That would be the last time I ever saw him, simply because our paths never crossed again. I was listening to KFCF radio yesterday afternoon and I heard what appeared to be mention of a certain Andrés Montoya. My ears perked up like a little dog and I turned up the volume. Turns out that incredible poetry of his had gained some attention and he had gone on to do really good stuff in his life after Fresno and Fresno State. But what was this about memories they kept going on about? Memories? What the? Each detail about him blew my mind. He had gained recognition in the world of poetry. He came from the streets of Fresno. While at Fresno State he studied under Philip Levine and went on to earn a Master of Fine Arts at Oregon University. He won many literary prizes for his poems and his books. He was born well after I was born (me=1963, him=1968), yet somehow passed on right in his prime a few years ago. A poetry prize scholarship established in his name is now awarded every year at the University of Notre Dame.
At Amazon.com, you can buy his book "The Iceworker Sings". It too has been honored with critical acclaim.
Indeed, a native son about whom Fresno can be proud, and proof that through Fresno State, our local public university, you can leave the mean streets of Fresno and become somebody very achieved and recognized. I am proud now to give to Fresno State, a place that has transformed the lives of so many people from the valley thanks to its accessibility and its location right here in Fresno.
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