Tomás Riley
Poet
Oakland, CA

Bio

Tomás Riley is a Chicano artist and activist born in Oakland, CA and raised in the Southeast San Diego neighborhood of Emerald Hills. His work has been published in several anthologies including Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam (Three Rivers Press, 2001). His first book, Mahcic, was published by Calaca Press in December 2005.

Riley’s writing career began officially in 1994 as a member of the seminal Chicano spoken word collective The Taco Shop Poets (TSP). This group breathed new life into a cultural aesthetic movement stuck between its origin and its future. Blending live music with performance poetry in a style that tipped its hat to collectives like the Last Poets and The Watts Prophets, TSP took on the new power structure engaging California ballot initiatives like Propositions 187, 227 and 209. The group published an anthology and released a CD, both entitled Chorizo Tonguefire to excellent reviews that signaled both their tribute to their Chicana and Chicano artistic predecessors and their arrival as new poetic voices for what mass media had dubbed, for better or for worse, “Generation Ñ” (the Latino version of Generation X).

As both a soloist and member of the TSP, Tomás Riley has performed at some 200 venues across the country. His work has been described as a meld of Chicano bilingualism and conscious cultural politics set to a soundtrack of hip hop, jazz and indigenous ceremony. His aesthetic, however, defies the singular categories of any of these influences opting for a controlled lyricism that fuses them all in a remix on par with the pastiche of a master turntablist. “I look at fusion, as opposed to assimilation, as a conscious and necessary process that allows us as ethnically charged beings to become integrated and whole,” Riley says. “Where assimilation is an unconscious process like the way water shapes a stone over time, and the stone is offered no choice in the matter, the aesthetics of juxtaposition and fusion give us much more freedom to decide what becomes a part of our art and our being. There’s no denying that just living in this society deeply affects our vision. I just think we’re better off being aware of this affect, engaging it and negotiating its consequences. That’s one of the ways we learn how to resist.”
cuando ganamos

shadows of the new for real
fall sixty stories
over antique row apartments
where victoria runs crooked under late victorians
dipping from the sloping sun
making room
for undone renovations
and the sprawl of this new street
maintaining life above its own
laying claim to vibrant afternoons
my town
your town
it’s anytown usa

there’s no new here
no viable
no cradle of the crescent
only after school unrest
a rumored peace
without the decency of truth telling
we armed only with obsessions for silence
and for waving hands
say get your hands up
or throw your hands in the air
but can’t stop
the double-dip parlays at the corner stores
where the homies chill in lawn chairs
the unknown warriors
that lean
un
steadily
against a mural of their own fifth sun

as if we’d need a reason
to subdue the urges of our exodus
exegesis spilling over sidewalks
where the old gods are remembered
and you just can’t step there blood
said through telepathic logic
and the passing of a paper bag
when they spit 40 ounce foam
and roll up
on the unsuspecting destiny of power lines
and patrol cars ever clocking
as the world has shrunk to this

from the moment we left dreaming
with leering sadness
sleeping on street corners
stoops have stooped too low
enduring weight of everyday absolution
in the poem
we will name the hottest corners we have been to
this the willing traces of our pens
across the pavement
corners leaning against lamppost
where malos carry on with markers
at artilleries of old strategic planning

the myths that are good citizens
have taken their good will
toward our center
we see socrates
holding a vial
at 24th and mission
where the mangoes drip from traffic lights
grown weary in the haze of gray saturdays
pulsing cars line up to start the plucking
at the intersection
those on foot survey
so many rows of luggage racks lining sidewalks
for a population bent
on traveling home
always departing as they arrive
in ten dollar duffel bags
and pockets lined with telegiros and lotto tickets
scratching at the chances for return
a una isla encantada
a una montaña en centroamerica
a un rancho lindo y lejos
de este pueblo congelado
unreachable mangoes
should those traffic lights
through civic sympathy and shame
allow their frozen fruit to fall at 24th street
we would dive within the skin and pulp
before they even hit the pavement
beyond the fleshy fiber strands
the meat
beyond original confusion
we would fight to find the pit
of fruitless searches
for beginnings
but fruit’s not gonna fall
and sympathetic poets
don’t fertilize fool
you ain’t growing no trees

bueno ‘mano,
si quieres mangos
vamos al chinito buey

hit the spot
pop the top on nectars come in cans
like the essence that is us-sense
chilling in the coolers of chinito’s corner store
and old drunks leaning sideways
on a $50 million jackpot dream
sway steadily
complaining about la renta
we exchange handfuls of change
with no change back
and change is inevitable they say

they take their crumpled tickets home tonight
the numbers etched from memory and shame
tonight
someone behind a t.v. tray
within a damp apartment
will tune in to anticipate
the call of birth dates
children’s ages
days since their arrival
street addresses
fake social security numbers
years when they were happy
and even those will not appear
will not deliver out
their random race through time
toward the going back
to leave them quietly eating in the dark

chingado ‘mano
cuando ganamos
compramos mangos

fuck that bro
when we win
i’m buyin you some mangoes


the movement:
freestyles for the dying sun

"Before their faces he places a mirror;
prudent and wise he makes them
he causes a face to appear upon them."
-Códice Matritense de la Real Academia, VIII


the movement
march panzon to guitarron
and liquified p-funk
maintain norteños mas allá
vicente fernandez
chilling in his b-boy stance
talking trash about
“que de raro tiene”
no
es mas raro que tenemos
tony lamas, timbos, tripping
ain’t no half stepping
in the movement

mariachi muse(sic) riffs
against the twilight of an olmec head nod
hands fly flecha fast
to dominate the plate
rotating in the dark
obsidian outcast on the remix
overrun by selva sagrada
con su machete
en la mano mascarada

nosotros,
hombres y mujeres
íntegros y libres,
estamos conscientes
de que la guerra que declaramos
es una medida última
pero
justa


but don’t call it a comeback
we still got mobs of modern macehuales
moving at the acceleration of gravity
meditating on the microcosm
of the 12-inch
buried mirrors more than they can stand
who-riding in a county van
movement in the middle of caras perdidas
homenaje al pasaje suroeste
where the pilot pens don’t take to vinyl
where they need to draw the line
where the morning left
a midnight of migration
on the dancefloor

damn,
you mean there’s four sacred directions
and all that ceremony shit?
yo, i might have to

take two and pass
take two and pass
take two and pass
won’t get off my ass


the movement
finds a moment in repose
a mass unanswered prayer
of signs and sirens
break beats booming off a red sun
caught
between the upkeep and the downstroke
moving mementos on a 45
waxing oh-no-myth-opaeic
when the needle hits the groove
old heads bouncing to the bank
close to the real estate

movement spin 360
freeze
let the beat drop into uprock
leaning toward the center of ciphers come lately
flair kick scissor slicing hooded heads
with ash and empty bottles
running off the r.p.m.

movement
measured in the line length
of a freestyle for the dying sun
a rough face leapt into the lyric
ticking tongue glyphs up the temple steps
rhyme from reed songs rolling to the east
where the whole house bounce to rooftops
and the sky begins brand new


just throw your hands to the sky
and wave em from side to side
but if you came here
to spark up the movement, y’all
you better get here
fo’ the whole thing dies