I arrived from El Salvador in 1980. I had left behind friends, family, strikes, the dead, a civil war that even though I had left it behind, it was never too far away. My soul, my heart, my spirit were sad. “Don’t you even think of coming back?” my mother’s letters would say.
I used to work cleaning tables and washing dishes at Café La Boheme in the Mission District neighborhood in San Francisco. I liked working at La Boheme and even when I wasn’t working, I would visit the coffee house. Here they spoke Spanish and would allow people to sit for hours at a table. People would converse and read. At La Boheme I didn’t feel so sad and lonely.
One morning while I was working cleaning tables, a young man arrived with books under his arms. Must be a student, I imagined. The man was thin and medium height, with a pleasant smile like a bird, and he said to me, “Tonight we are going to be reading poetry for El Salvador at Book Works.” This bookstore used to be between 24th and 25th Streets on Mission Street.
The one who had just invited me to the poetry reading didn’t know if I was a poet or if I was from El Salvador. But maybe my looks betrayed me. Maybe he recognized the fear of war that still lived on in my eyes, the feeling of wanting to scream and cry at the same time. Maybe he recognized in me the pupusas or my loneliness.
That night I arrived on time at the bookstore, timid and shaking with fear and with my folded papers in my pocket. The man who had invited me was there. “We have among us a poet who has just arrived from El Salvador, someone who has survived the terrible war of injustice going on in this country. Help me welcome poet Jorge Argueta, said Juan Felipe Herrera.
This is the way I was received in 1980 by the now U.S. Poet Laureate, Juan Felipe Herrera to my first poetry reading here in the United States. Thank you so much, Juan Felipe Herrera. I’m proud to be your friend. Today I celebrate with you the fields and the amazing rain of poetry.