At first, José Olivarez wanted to be a rapper. That was his dream. But, as he says, “I was really terrible at rapping. So luckily for all of us I quit that and became a poet.” His poems still have that hip-hop sound to them though, as Olivarez cites rappers like Tupac and Common as early influences on his poetry. “I wanted to play with words, with language the same way my favorite rappers did,” he says. “I wanted to be able to convey meaning, but I also wanted to have my poems have the style of hip hop. I wanted people, even if they felt like emotionally I was tugging on their heartstrings, to still be like but why does this also kind of make me feel good? Why do I also want to bounce to this?”
In addition to hip-hop, Olivarez says he also owes a lot to the Black communities in Chicago, specifically Black mentors in Chicago who taught him about Afro poetics and Afrofuturism and opened his mind up about the potential of Latinx stories. Traditionally, Olivarez only saw three options represented for Latinx stories: death, deportation, or assimilation. It wasn’t until he heard Krista Franklin, a Chicago-based poet, talk about Afrofuturism that he thought, “Well, let me answer that as a Latinx person. Let me try and imagine what a future might look like for us that doesn’t end in death, assimilation or deportation.”
Citizen Illegal by José Olivarez
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And as the son of Mexican immigrants these themes have been prevalent throughout Olivarez’s life. His mother and father are from Cañadas de Obregón in Jalisco, Mexico, a little town about two hours away from Guadalajara. They crossed the border in the trunk of a car while his mother was pregnant with him, headed for Chicago because his father heard there was permanent work in the steel mills. Eventually, they landed in Calumet City, Illinois, a working class suburb of Chicago, where Olivarez developed a working class mentality toward writing. “I think of myself as a plumber. I have to show up and do my job. A plumber, if they’re not feeling inspired they can’t look at a toilet or a bathroom and say, ‘I’m gonna go and I’m not gonna touch this toilet today, I’ll come back later.’ I try to take that same approach to writing. I always have to show up, even if I don’t feel any particular inspiration.”
So far, with that mentality and approach Olivarez has garnered much-deserved acclaim for his work. His debut book of poems, Citizen Illegal, was a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Award and a winner of the Chicago Review of Books Poetry Prize, as well as being named a top book of 2018 by The Adroit Journal, NPR, and the New York Public Library. He is also the co-editor of The BreakBeat Poets Vol 4: LatiNEXT along with Felicia Chavez and Willie Perdomo. Watch and read excerpts from Olivarez’s contributions to My America below, and explore the exhibit virtually at my-america.org.
