US news This article is more than 19 years oldObituaryLalo Delgado
This article is more than 19 years oldChicano writer who gave Mexican-Americans a voiceWhen Abelardo "Lalo" Delgado started writing about the American-Hispanic experience, there was no recognised literature dealing with the lives of Chicanos, as Mexican-Americans call themselves. Indeed, Delgado, who has died aged 73 of cancer, was credited with giving the genre its name.
He wrote 14 books of poetry, mostly self-published, as US literary houses have only recently become aware of Chicano literature. Many of his verses, written in English, Spanish and the hybrid Spanglish, were also included in anthologies. As a part-time teacher for 17 years at the Metropolitan State College, in Denver, Colorado, he lived to see his culture widely established in the academic world. Many Chicano writers were first inspired by his recitations.
Devotion to poetry with social-justice themes, and decades of volunteer work in left-liberal causes, including early participation in the farm labour movement founded by the late Cesar Chavez, left Delgado in poverty all his life. Despite this, however, his influence stretched across the west.
His best-known poem, Stupid America, reflected his frustration with his adopted country, where, in his youth, people of Hispanic origin suffered similar racial discrimination to African-Americans, and where he himself experienced school segregation.
Written in 1969, it goes in part: "stupid america, hear that chicano/ shouting curses on the street/ he is a poet/ without paper and pencil/ and since he cannot write/ he will explode./ stupid america, remember that chicano/ flunking math and english/ he is the picasso/ of your western states/ but he will die/ with one thousand masterpieces/ hanging only from his mind."
Delgado was born in rural Chihuahua, in northern Mexico, to a Hispanic soldier father, who already had American citizenship, and a Mexican mother, who only took hers at the age of 83. When Lalo - the usual nickname for boys called Abelardo - was 12, his family moved to the US border town of El Paso, Texas, and he grew up in a tenement occupied by 23 families sharing three bathrooms. He knew hardly any English, but quickly learned, and worked at a boys' club after leaving high school.
At 21, Delgado met the love of his life, Lola Estrada. Finding work in a luxury hotel in California, he bought her a diamond engagement ring on credit and sent her a $1 bill every day - inscribed with a brief love poem - so she could buy a wedding dress. In his late 20s, already married and with children, he managed to get into the University of Texas at El Paso, graduating in Spanish studies.
During the 1960s, in the civil rights movement in Texas, he wrote and read his poems everywere - on protest marches, at meetings, to picket lines and in the streets. Metropolitan State College colleague Luis Torres would sometimes pick them up, mimeograph them, and hand out copies to his students. "They were supposed to be English classes in those days, but we were trying to turn them into a literature course," he recalled.
Delgado and his family moved to Denver in 1970, and he worked briefly at the University of Colorado. Among his better known collections of poetry were Chicano: 25 Pieces Of A Chicano Mind (1969), and The Chicano Movement: Some Not Too Objective Observations (1971).
Delgado, who thought of himself as a people's poet, loved writing verse for special occasions, and distributing it at anniversaries and weddings, where he read in a booming voice, without a microphone. Every Mother's Day and Father's Day, he read a special new poem at his Catholic church.
Lola survives him, as do his two sons and six daughters.
ยท Abelardo 'Lalo' Barrientos Delgado, poet and political activist, born November 27 1930; died July 23 2004
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