Next year will be the twentieth anniversary of San Diego City Works Press. In the lead-up to this and the publication of Sunshine/Noir III: Writing from San Diego and Tijuana (in 2025), The Jumping-Off Place will be featuring some of the highlights from City Works Press’s many publications.
“author’s preface” and “introducción” are from Adrián Arancibia’s Atacama Poems, which can be purchased here.
author’s preface
This collection of poems and prose is based on my father’s life. It features the stories he recounted about his childhood. In many ways, he was the first author of this text. From the time we were children, to the time we were adults, my siblings and I heard most of these stories in one form or another.
Through these re-collections, my brothers and sister and I, learned early on the importance of reading and writing. We learned the power of ‘alfabetismo’ as my father calls it. His stories usually related how his father, a man who could hardly read knew the importance of education and of learning to read. This was so much the case that my abuelo, a man of very modest means, managed to send his children to a boarding school to learn.
It wasn’t until I’d reached adulthood that I realized the importance of these tales. I remember the day I decided to write these poems. It was a Saturday in 1992. While speaking to my mother that morning, I had managed to ask what they had done the night before. She plaintively told me that I ought to spend more time listening to my father. As I quizzically looked at her and asked why, she explained. The day before, in tears, my father had explained to her how much he wished he could conjure up his father’s spirit. He only wanted to see him once to thank him, to explain to him how he’d raised his children to go to college, to show him the fruits of his lessons.
This text then, offers some of these oral histories of a generation of pampinos (the people who lived on the high plains of the Atacama Desert). This piece is an homenaje (an homage) to my father’s parents
Adriana and Emilio Arancibia. They met in the driest desert on earth, the Atacama Desert in Chile. In that desert, their love endured nearly two decades. Miraculously, some say, it bloomed like a desert flower without any water. Two generations later, these stories speak to us about the hard- ship of their lives. They describe the oppressive beauty and sadness of life’s struggles in the desert.
This text also includes a version of a tale that my father wrote. In the ten years since this piece was first written, I have managed to convince him of the importance of writing down these histories. So, in an attempt to cap- ture the intra-generational quality of this text, I have included a piece by him so readers can better understand how such dialogues occur and result in texts such as this.
introducción
you,
here to see
what this land
is all about
a land, running to hide itself
under mountains
or seas
a needle country
esta tierra se ha puesto
the darkness of a land of too much sunlight
dust blinding us
air set deep in lungs
choking
constricting hearts.
squeezing out souls
leaving it
dripping like an echo
crossing canyons and ridges
of this desert
never known to cry;
now waiting for you.
Adrián Arancibia is an author and critic based in San Diego, California. He is a founder of the seminal Chicano/Latino performance poetry collective Taco Shop Poets and is the author of Atacama Poems on San Diego City Works Press. Born in Iquique, Chile, he is a Literature Ph.D., and currently works as a professor of English, Creative Writing, and Chicano Studies at Miramar Community College.