Francisco Alarcon

educator, community activist, children’s book writer, gay advocate and a leading Chicano poet

A third-generation Californian whose family founded the Los Angeles County town of Wilmington, Alarcón moved to Guadalajara, Mexico, when he was 6. He returned to California when he was 18

parents were cannery workers who didn't finish high school but raised seven children who all became professionals. Alarcón's four brothers and two sisters are a surgeon, an architect, a priest, a dentist, an engineer and an advertising agency executive. His family was named Los Angeles County's 1999 Latino Family of the Year.

Alarcón started writing poetry when he was 13. "I wanted to transcribe the songs my grandmother used to sing. Sometimes I would forget the lines so I would make up those lines”

He thought at the time that the songs were traditional Mexican folk songs but later learned that the words were his grandmother's own, in her native Nahuatl language

Snake Poems: An Aztec Invocation.

Alarcón's Ph.D. studies, when he was conducting research in Mexico City on a Fulbright fellowship in 1982-83. There, at the National Museum of Anthropology and History, he discovered a manuscript completed in 1629 by a Catholic priest, Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón, hired by the Spanish inquisition to record the native spells and myths.

Alarcón believes the priest, who tortured some of the Indians to complete his task, is a distant relative of his.

Snake Poems, published in 1992, combines translations of the priest's texts, the native incantations and original poems by Alarcón. The book won the Before Columbus Foundation's 1993 American Book Award.

Some poetry books translated into Swedish, gaelic, other languages

Francisco X. Alarcon, “looks somewhat like a Mexican buddha with a round face, glasses and a long ponytail. “

"Yes, I'm a poet first then a teacher. When I'm not teaching, when I'm not eating, I'm a poet..

He is the author of seven books of poetry. Many for Children. Some in English and Spanish.

Common subject: Food, crops, and family

"Here you have a woman who suffered a great deal...moving from Mexico to the United States in 1919, and then, during the Great Depression in 1931, back to Mexico...and yet she was happy within herself. She was the one who really raised us. I had a lot of fun with my grandmother."

Alarcon grew up both in the United States and Mexico. "I consider myself bi-national," he said. "In fact, my family has been bi-national for four generations."

I'm concerned about the loss of the oral tradition...and for awhile I was concerned about Chicano writing. I was worried thinking there were no writers in the generation behind me. But I think the problem was there were no venues. When I was at Stanford there were at least 50 Chicano literary magazines (which don't exist anymore). But in the past few years there has been a wealth of Chicano writing

From the Bellybutton of the Moon Poem:

Whenever I say 'Mexico'/I hear my grandma telling me/about the Aztecs and the city they built/on an island in the middle of a lake/'Mexico' says my grandma/"means: from the bellybutton of the moon"/"don't forget your origins my son"/maybe that's why/whenever I now say "Mexico"/I feel like touching my bellybutton.