Dictionary of Literary Biography on Victor Manuel Valle
Victor Manuel Valle is a poet, translator, editor, activist, and investigative journalist whose creative vision is rooted in the history of the valley of Los Angeles. Although Valle's poetry has motivated the rest of his work, his journalistic efforts have dominated his publications in recent years. Through his work as a translator, he has a thorough knowledge of contemporary Latin-American literature, which provides him with a hemispheric perspective. He is in the vanguard of Chicano literary and cultural affairs in Southern California.
Valle was born on 10 November 1950 and raised in Whittier, California; he was part of a family of dairy workers, former villistas (followers of Pancho Villa), and other political exiles in the family's third generation of life in the United States. In his own words, Valle had "a rather mundane public life and education. However, privately, I learned to raise mockingbirds, gorreones [sparrows], pigeons, crows, lizards, deer, and about 13 dogs.... But the oral tradition of my grandparents and aunts provided me with insight and knowledge on Mexican history. Before my grandfather Alfredo died, my grandma Matilde wrote all his memoirs of la Revolución down. I'll be rewriting them some time in the future."
Valle's formative years and family background provided him with a rich, inspirational resource that fuels his literary and political endeavors. In 1974 he graduated cum laude with a B.A. in anthropology from California State University, Long Beach, where he also received an M.A. in comparative literature in 1978. His thesis project involved the translation of a collection of short stories by Peruvian writer José Maria Arguedas. In 1979 for his efforts Valle received the Translation Award from the Translation Center of Columbia University. His awareness of and personal identification with contemporary Latin-American literature was strongly reinforced by these efforts. In 1981 Valle graduated with an M.S.J. from the Medill School of Journalism of Northwestern University. He currently works as a staff writer at the Los Angeles Times and lives in South Whittier with his wife, Maria Lau, and daughter, Lucina.
Besides giving public poetry readings, Valle also brings his creative ear and eye to radio and videotape. In 1978 with John Valadez he produced a video program, "A Choice of Colors," a documentary of gangs and graffiti, which was exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in a show titled "The Aesthetics of Graffiti." In 1979 he produced a live radio special, "Nicaragua: Lucha de las Américas" (Nicaragua: Struggle of the Americas), which featured prominent Latin-American and Los Angeles poets and musical groups. Later Valle worked as associate editor for Somos magazine of San Bernardino and literary editor of Chismearte magazine, a quarterly publication of the Concilio de Arte Popular, a California consortium of Latino cultural workers. Valle has also worked under an artist-in-residence grant from the California Arts Council and conducted a writers' workshop for Latino writers of Los Angeles. The material from the workshop was compiled into an anthology, 201: Homenaje a la ciudad de Los Angeles (1982), which makes a definitive statement about the Latino experience in Los Angeles, ranging from short-story, poetry, script, and story-board writing to oral history, historical archives, photography, and graphic art.
Although poems by Valle have appeared in New magazine, Tin Tan, and Rara Avis, he is comparatively underpublished as a poet, considering the special qualities of his work. His reputation as a poet is largely based on his first book of poems, Illegal, which first appeared in 1977 in a limited underground edition but later that same year won the Third Irvine Chicano Prize for poetry. Valle's poems explore the links and contradictions between the deeply personal and the historical, opposite poles of experience that are usually alienated or dichotomized in most American poetry. In Valle's poetry they reach a powerful synthesis, as he is able to perceive the workings of history in the most insignificant everyday aspects of his life and in those of the people around him.
In "Carta" (Letter), an autobiographical poem about his childhood barrio, Valle understands in retrospect the forces that determined his consciousness. Simultaneously exploring the personal and the collective, the poem establishes Valle's link to the rest of humanity through his family and extended family: "esta red de ombligos y ojos, / este continente de barrios y / vecindades / ejes planetarias" (this net of umbilical cords and eyes, / this continent of barrios and / neighborhoods / planetary axis). The title of the collection, Illegal, derives from the fascination and respect he feels for the determination of his people to pursue their lives and destinies in their northern, mythic homeland of Aztlán. In "The Fence" Valle denounces the "American throw-away-life" and its economic dependence on cheap foreign labor. In Tijuana,
At night the fence
is torn and ripped by the desperate;
has desperately torn and ripped their clothes;
the inmates have made a path with their bodies
leaving a trail of rags flapping in the wind.
"Mode of Production" (1977) is an ambitious and comprehensive overview of the clash of three civilizations: the Hispanic; the Anglo; and the Native American, a conflict from which emerges the contemporary Chicano. Rooted firmly in a dialectical vision, the poem traces the myths, religions, and ideologies of the West. Valle asks what Yahweh has to do with steel:
God and Steel with Heavy Industry,
Jesus and Mary with Capital Concentration,
the Holy Spirit with Steam and Coal,
Virginity and Purity with abstraction so absolute
there could be the damnation
of everlasting sin, everlasting life
through the lamb of god and Kansas stockyards[.]
From contemporary myths of universal profit and progress is spawned the dominant Western mode of production: capitalism. Against this, Valle contrasts a tranquil, pre-Columbian way of life based on elemental absolutes on a more human scale. The myths produced by ancient modes of production are myths of cosmic harmony, which incorporate rather than oppose the forces of nature: "We were made in the image / of the corn we plant ... / gathered fist of seeds...."
Valle's view of poetry and the power of words is strongly manifested in "To the Students of Hollenbeck Junior High" (1979), drawn from his experiences in the National Endowment for the Humanities Poetry in the Schools Program. It conveys the joy and power he finds in words, not because they express things but because they do things: "We are all poets. / Say cebolla cilantro chile verde [onion coriander green chile] smell / in the air is the sound of a burning sun in your mouth." The accessibility and power of Valle's words remind readers that somewhere not too far beneath everything else, "We are all poets," a realization that creates freedom as well as responsibility:
Poetry is a tool
because it helps you take things apart;
loosen people up.
But it's also a telephone for sending
secrets,
or a radio blaring loud
making everyone listen.
Take this power into your life,
free the words you speak.
Although Valle's concept of language as empowerment led into journalism, his social consciousness speaks through his poetry as well, with an easy fluidity in both English and Spanish, combined with a rare and exuberant enthusiasm.
Although his poetry has been anthologized and continues to appear in magazines with some regularity, critical attention to it is scant, compared to the following he has had as an essayist and journalist for Somos, Chismearte, and the Los Angeles Times. Valle reconciles the sometimes contradictory perspective of poetry and journalism: "Poetry, based on the emotions and the senses, is a reflective act; journalism is fast and reactive. But both require a sense of oral history, the skill to catch and interpret what people are saying." As a journalist, Valle expresses a sense of restlessness, using words to expose their sources, to question assumptions. That questioning is a part of Chicano reality: "Because our culture has been rejected, we harbor doubt within ourselves: 'What I'm seeing, is it real"' 'What my father is saying, is it true"'"
Valle's poetic and journalist gifts are well contrasted in a 1982 Los Angeles Times article, "Ancient Art Survives in Whittier," and an unpublished poem, "Teófilo," both about an octogenarian uncle of Valle's who cultivates the giant maguey in his Whittier backyard for the pulque, a wine fermented from its uncooked sap. In the article, Valle cites scientific and anthropological studies of the agave, its vitamin-laden juice, and its importance in agriculture. In both article and poem, Valle alludes to the mythology of pulque, the milk of the Aztec goddess Mayaguel, the mythical mother with her many breasts who led the Aztecs on their migration to the Valley of Mexico. In both works, he quotes his uncle Teófilo on the details of agave husbandry, but the poem is lyrical:
"Cut only a few," he said, "to save aguamiel,"
The sweet blood of Mayaguel,
Mother of one hundred breasts.
She gives sustenance
To the people who walk in the desert,
Suckles children who drown in rivers,
Mothers that die in childbirth.
Her Blood is burned on the pyre,
Let upon the altar.
Such a pastoral sense of life in urban California shows the well-rooted vision of Victor Manuel Valle, investigative poet/reporter.
This is the complete article, containing 1,493 words
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