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                              Alurista


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Alurista is the nom de plume of Alberto Baltazar Urista Heredia (born
August 8, 1947), a Chicano poet and activist.

Urista was born in Mexico City and attended primary school in Morelos.
He came to the United States when he was fourteen, settling with his
aunt in the border city of San Diego, California. He graduated high
school in 1957 and began studying business administration at
Chapman University in Orange County, California. He disliked the field,
however, and transferred to San Diego State University (SDSU) to
study religion. He changed his major several times before earning a
B.A. in psychology in 1970. He went on to earn an M.A. from SDSU in
1978. He doctoral thesis, accepted by the University of California, San
Diego in 1983, was on the fiction of Chicano lawyer and author Oscar
Zeta Acosta. He has taught at California Polytechnic State University in
San Luis Obispo, California, Escuela Tlatelolco in Denver, Colorado,
and at the University of Texas at Austin. He has also lectured and read
his poetry in venues throughout the world.
Urista's first experience writing poetry was as a student in Mexico, when he began writing love poems for his classmates as a
way to earn money. He began writing poetry for publication in 1966. In 1967, he co-founded the SDSU chapter of MEChA, the
Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán, ("Chicano Student Movement of Aztlán") and organized students in favor of the United
Farm Workers grape boycott. He held several jobs, including working for the Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) program,
part of the Lyndon B. Johnson administration's War on Poverty.

In 1969, he attended the First National Chicano Youth Liberation Conference, hosted by Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzales's Crusade
for Justice, and read a poem to the attendees. The poem so moved the youth present that they adopted it as the preamble of
the Plan Espiritual de Aztlán, the political manifesto of the Chicano Movement. Upon returning to San Diego, he helped to
establish the Chicano Studies department at SDSU.

As an active member of the San Diego-area Chicano Movement, Urista was instrumental in the 1970 takeover of Chicano Park
and in the foundation of the Centro Cultural de la Raza, a cultural center. It was at this time that he began using the name
"Alurista". The assumption of a pen name was as much for anonymity as it was for artistry. According to Urista, "My apartment
was shot up by the Minutemen. I didn't want these people to be able to associate my last name with my family, so I changed it."
[1] However, the name change was also a reflection of his Marxist philosophy: "The notion was to synthesize--to bring things
together. So I tried to do that with my name."

In the 1970s, Alurista organized the Festival Floricanto, an annual event that convened Chicano writers and critics to share and
critique their work.

In addition to his own poetry, Alurista has written works of non-fiction, literary criticism, and many essays on Chicano culture and
history. He is credited with popularizing the Chicano Movement-era concept of "Aztlán" and imbuing it with a spiritual dimension
through his poetry. His Spanish-language writings were among the first by an American to be taken seriously by critics from
hispanophone countries. In the United States, he was one of the first critically-acclaimed poets to mix the Spanish and English
languages.

During the mid-1990s, he traveled and performed with the Taco Shop Poets. However, he has expressed disapproval of the
new, Hip hop-influenced style of Chicano poetry. Regarding a poetry slam hosted by the Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino
Americana (MACLA), he said, "That's not Chicano poetry, it's nice that they're doing it, but it's not part of the tradition of
Chicano literature."

Alurista has been married twice and has four children. He spent the years 1995 – 1998 in a "spiritual meandering", about which
he said, "Being an artist is not all creativity. There are periods of self-destructiveness. You internalize things that destroy you.
You end up blaming others for your pain--whatever or whoever those 'others' happen to be--which makes you a resentful
person. That resentment turns inward, and you end up eating yourself up."  In 1998, after family problems and rumors of
substance abuse, Alurista left his longtime home of San Diego for San Jose, California, attracted by its active cultural arts scene.

Spiritually, Urista identifies as both a Buddhist and a Roman Catholic, as well as acknowledging indigenous practices such as
the sweat lodge. Politically, he identifies himself as a "...socialist. With a definite Mayan bent to everything."
                                                                                      Bibliography
Alurista is one of the leading literary figures of the Chicano Movement era. He is most well-known for his support of the Chicano
Movement through his literature and poetry. Alurista was an early Chicano activist, credited in helping to establish The Centro
Cultural de la Raza in San Diego. During the Chicano Movement Alurista authored significant manifestos of the movement. He
was one of the first poets to establish the concept of Aztlan in his writings. A concept which envisions a return to the praises of
the Aztec civilization. He is also the co-founder of Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan, Mecha which when translated,
means Chicano Student Movement of Aztlan helped organize the Chicano Studies Program at San Diego State College.

Alurista was born in Mexico City on August 8, 1947, given the name Alberto Baltazar Alurista. It was in 1966 that he began to
write ardent poetry for publication and adopted the pen name Alurista, which is the only name he uses now. When Alurista
began to publish poetry in the late 1960s he soon became recognized for his dexterity in English, Spanish, Raya, and Nahuatl,
and also for blending standard and slang languages in his writings.

After coming to the United States as a teenager, Alurista graduated from High school in 1965 and began studying business
administration at Chapman College, in Orange, California, only to find that this field was uninteresting to him. He then
transferred to San Diego State College and began studying religion. However, when he found the overwhelming dogma of the
instructors too much for him, he switched to sociology, then to social welfare. It was at San Diego State that Alurista helped
establish MECHA in 1967. During the Denver Youth Conference in 1969, Alurista helped draft El Plan Espiritual de Aztlan (The
Spiritual Plan of Aztlan), which offered support to the resolutions being adopted by the conference members. After working as a
psychiatric child-care worker and as a counselor, he worked with Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) and the Brown
Berets. He then graduated with a BA in psychology from San Diego State in 1970.

Alurista went on to earn his M.A. from San Diego State in 1978 and then his Ph.D. in literature from the University of California,
San Diego in 1983. He focused his dissertation on the novel, The Revolt of the Cockroach People, by Oscar Zeta-Acosta. Hc
has since then published five anthologies of his poetry. He has written many essays and literary criticisms on the Chicano
Movement as well as on Chicano culture, that have been widely published in anthologies, journals, and newspapers. He has
lectured at many colleges, universities, and at other establishments worldwide. Alurista taught at California State Polytechnic
College in San Luis Obispo as a professor of Spanish from 1986 to 1990. He now resides in Denver, Colorado, where he is a
faculty member at Escuela Tlatelolco teaching Chicano thought, culture, and literature. He also continues to lecture and give
readings at universities throughout the country.

The Alurista papers were established in CEMA in 1991. The collection consists of scripts, correspondence, photographs,
autographed books and ephemera.

For his earlier literary transcripts researchers will want to consult the Benson Latin-American Collection at the University of
Texas, Austin. Alurista's literary manuscripts up to the year 1972 are located there.