Politics and Art Help Professor Find His Identity as Poet, Activist

Max Benavidez says he is semifluent in Spanish. He says this apologetically, as if it were something shameful. He is, after all, a Latino poet and activist, a third-generation Mexican-American who learned Spanish as a child and a man excruciatingly aware of his cultural identity.

Benavidez is only semifluent in Spanish because when he was 5 years old and starting Catholic school in a bucolic suburb of Los Angeles, his teachers urged him to forget the Spanish language.

As he puts it, “It was the 1950s. It was McCarthyism. It was suggested that I just speak English.”

Benavidez’s parents--pious, law-abiding, blue-collar folk and one of the first Latino families to move from East Los Angeles to Montebello--complied.

Things are different today. Benavidez, now 35, is an assistant professor in the Chicano studies program at California State University, Northridge. He helps arrange for literary figures such as Mexican writer and diplomat Octavio Paz and exiled Salvadoran writer Manlio Argueta to lecture on campus. In 1983 and 1984, he spent almost a year researching and documenting Chicano mural art in Los Angeles.

Lifelong Struggle

“All my life, I’ve struggled with what it means to be Chicano,” Benavidez says. “What I’ve learned is to feel good about myself. And that comes through art and being politically aware.”

And not necessarily from living in the barrio.

“I don’t believe we should all live in an enclave and shut ourselves off from everyone else,” says Benavidez, who lived “a poet’s life” in Venice Beach for eight years.

He now lives in Santa Monica with his Irish actress wife, Kate, and 8-month-old daughter, Nora, named after the wife of one of his favorite authors, James Joyce. Vanessa, a 16-year-old daughter from a previous marriage--named after actress and political activist Vanessa Redgrave--lives with her mother.

Benavidez calls on theater, literature and politics for more than just his daughters’ names, however. They are continuing interests and inspirations that have helped mold his life.

Being an educated, articulate Latino has also helped. It gets him on radio and TV talk shows, where he can discuss Latino politics and literature. But Benavidez says he dislikes being typecast as a Latino spokesman.

“A lot of times, people say, Oh, I want you to talk about Latins,” Benavidez says. Instead, he sometimes will try to turn the conversation to more global issues, he says.

Colleagues at CSUN accuse him of being a romantic.

“Sometimes Max lacks political realism. He sees a society where people are good people. I tend to look at it, that structures are basically corrupt,” said Rudy Acuna, a Chicano studies professor at CSUN who is known for his confrontational, radical politics.

Despite their ideological differences, Acuna says he has “the utmost respect for Max.”

“He has an awful lot of integrity. He’s an excellent teacher. The students like him. If the world would be made up of Max Benavidezes, it would be a better place,” he says.

Benavidez is also admired by local bards. Los Angeles poet Charles Bivens, who has read with Benavidez at the Basement Coffee House in Echo Park, calls Benavidez one of his favorite poets.

“There is a mystical streak to his work, but it doesn’t come off sounding flaky,” Bivens says.

Both Benavidez’s poems and prose reflect a duality--between the Anglo and Latino world, between illusion and reality, between sensual craving and spiritual fulfillment. In “Ophelia Deceived,” he writes:

Not long ago I was spurred to write, to work,

By a woman’s love, she coaxed me with her

well of whispering depths, her psychic agitation

sent me to a bed crawling with suicidal tendencies.

Benavidez also draws strongly on images from his Roman Catholic childhood and a Pueblo Indian ancestry. In his poetry, a sojourn to New Mexico becomes a Don Juan-like search for enlightenment. The hypnotic rituals of the Catholic Mass turn into a quest for spiritual fulfillment. From “I Go About”:

“I remember statues of Mary and Jesus. Smoky musk incense. The tremulous chanting of our adolescent bodies. From the choirloft, we faced the Virgin. We were mesmerized by the goddess, the Christess standing gazeless in a lonely shadow by the altar.

“Her son hung from the cross bleeding bright ruby-red paint down his dark-salmon face. . . .

“During the consecration the priest would say: “Hoc est enim Corpus meum.” (For this is my body.) “Hic est enum Sanguinis mei.” (For this is my blood.) He would drink it. Then, we took communion of a god’s flesh and blood but I still went about in sadness.

In his teens, Benavidez wanted to be a priest. Later, at UCLA, he was a philosophy major, supporting himself by working the graveyard shift at a printing factory. His father, meanwhile, hoped his son would take up law.

Benavidez says some of his childhood friends became heroin addicts, and others wound up in prison. He said his experiences with discrimination and what he called “a corrosive educational perspective” could have destroyed him as well.

“It was very constricting to be Mexican in my neighborhood. It wasn’t something you were proud of. . . . There was the feeling that . . . you were not worth educating.”

Benavidez overcame the “negative expectations” by instilling in himself a sense of worth, a sense of cultural integrity. It is this that he emphasizes to his students in class. That they can succeed. That they are important.

Not surprisingly, inspirational college professors first stirred Benavidez’s social conscience, he says. After graduation, a six-year stint as editor of Equal Opportunity Forum, a nationwide publication devoted to social issues, education and employment, continued the process.

As editor, Benavidez traveled widely, interviewing university and corporation presidents, political activists and welfare mothers. Then he went home and wrote about them.

“A lot of my ideas were honed during that era,” Benavidez recalls. “We were all very idealistic. We thought we could change the world.”

Those hopes collapsed when the magazine folded in 1982, victim of a lack of advertising and the conservative political climate during the Reagan Administration, he says.

Benavidez turned to teaching. At CSUN, his students were young adults from the San Fernando Valley. But, in 1983, they were also thieves, murderers and rapists--inmates at Chino State Prison to whom he taught creative writing as part of the California Arts Council Artists in Social Institutions program.

That experience inspired “Ravens,” a poem in which Benavidez compares the sleek, black birds he saw on trees outside the prison to the men he taught inside.

We walked past the guards

into the prison

to work with

killers, junkies,

pornographers, thieves.

They were the true ravens,

sad, dark souls.

They swaggered and lied

and one night, one of them wept.

We listened to their fantasies,

stories better than our fictions.

From 1983 to 1986, Benavidez also debated current events on Sunday afternoons as a KNBC talk show panelist. With other panelists such as feminist attorney Gloria Allred, Benavidez took on issues such as affirmative action, the INS, national defense and welfare.

He also wrote about Latino artists for local newspapers and, in 1985, published a book of poetry called “The Stopping of Sorrow.”

Benavidez’s most ambitious achievement, however, was a 1984 study on Mexican art that he and his wife wrote for Vanderbilt University’s Center for Latin American and Iberian Studies in Nashville, Tenn.

The work traces Latino politics and culture in Los Angeles from the early 20th Century to the 1970s, focusing on the way Latinos expressed themselves through graffiti, murals and street art.

According to Benavidez, it was a time of great ferment and creativity for the local Chicano community, one that produced artists like Willie Herron, Gronk and Harry Gamboa Jr.

Walls Became Statements

It was also when “the blank wall became the preeminent space for Chicano art in Los Angeles,” Benavidez wrote.

The muralists “invented and used a unique visual language, complete with its own code of imagery. . . . Their symbols spoke to people within the community in terms that they could understand. With allusions to Aztec mythology, everyday cultural artifacts, police brutality and gang violence, the murals covered the streets of East Los Angeles with enormous marquees,” according to the study.

Despite his commitment to art and politics, Benavidez says there are times when he still feels like a cultural outcast.

He sees the same alienation mirrored in his Latino students. To help them bridge the gap, he discusses their human potential and tries to inspire them through political debate.

But sometimes the old feelings return.

“If I go to Mexico, I’m not Mexican. If I visit the Hopis, I’m not Hopi. If I’m with Anglos, I’m not Anglo,” Benavidez says.

“You can get beyond that. But it takes a lot of effort,” he adds softly.