Luis Carranza waiting for 2 de asada con cilantro (The Gate/Gloria Talamantes)
I had the honor of eating tacos and talking art, poetry and life with Luis Carranza recently. Born and raised in Little Village, Carranza is a poet, Young Chicago Authors (YCA) teaching artist and a young man looking to do great things in Chicago.
On May 1, the Brown Wall Project in partnership with Community Sustaining Academics (CASA), a program at Richards Career Academy (RCA) hosted Carranza for a workshop. The students from CASA program will recite their poems at Microfoam Open Mic on May 9 at the Back of the Yards Coffeehouse from 3 to 5 pm. The Open Mic will be recorded live by RCA Pop Up Youth Radio. You can tune in online at: http://mixlr.com/yollo-radio/
Carranza is leading Shout Out, a Back of the Yards (BOTY) Open Mic at Sherman Park later this spring.
I met with Carranza at La Chaparrita in La Villita. He’s excited to be working in BOTY and here’s what he had to say:
Luis Carranza: Dos tacos de asada solo cilantro, gracias
Gloria Talamantes: Dos tacos al pastor con piña, cebolla y cilantro por favor
GT: What are some of your thoughts about the Back of the Yards (BOTY) neighborhood?
LC: I have a lot of friends in Back of the Yards. I have never worked there until recently. My mom goes to the Back of the Yards festival (Fiesta BOTY) I know how the area is or how it could get. I also think though, that there is a lot of work that we can put into BOTY in academics but also in the arts. I feel that if we can do that, if we are able to accomplish good arts programs and good education programs, then we will have a really strong community.
GT: Tell me a little about your work there this spring.
LC: I think it’s exciting. It’s a little bit challenging at times not knowing 100 percent which students I’m going to be working with sometimes but I feel that it comes with doing art right? You’re not going to know who you’re working with most of the time. So, I find it amazing. I just did my first workshop there last week. I thought it was awesome. I think the people were trying to really invest themselves in the art so it was really cool and it was really fun.
I’m part of YCA and YCA connected me since I am an apprentice teaching artist for them. That’s how it came about. I did poetry in high school, I do poetry now. I really enjoy poetry. I feel that poetry changed my life. I am able to do a lot of things that my peers are not able to do, due to resources or just the environment itself. I feel that poetry was able to pull me away from some of the negative things of the community and I am grateful for that.
GT: What would you say are some of the negative things that exist in Little Village?
LC: Specifically, I would say gangs, I lost one of my closest homies because of a gang. I feel like this is not where I want to end up. I feel that I can do something bigger for myself but it’s not to say that my peers who are in gangs are less than me. They are also really smart people, some of them are even smarter than me academically. It’s just sometimes the environment you know? And it’s also part of what makes the neighborhood beautiful too. It gives us a sense of where we come from and where we want to go.
GT: How did you become an apprentice at YCA?
LC: I went to Gary Elementary School in Little Village. I started doing poetry in elementary school. I didn’t make the team (laughs). I was bad but eventually, I started putting in the work.
Freshmen year, I tried for the team in [Little Village] high school. I was like okay I really want to do this and I was looking at the people before me. One specific kid who I always wanted to be like, his name is Marlin Salgado. He was the poetry captain of our team at our school. I was like, Oh I really want to be like Marlin. Eventually, I figured out that I couldn’t be like Marlin, because Marlin is himself and I’m myself but I did learn a lot of things and he also taught me a lot of things. We learned from each other and then later, in my sophomore/junior year I became captain because he graduated and I took on that role.
I feel like it was a really important role that pushed me to go outside just my local workshops in my community. That’s when I started to go to YCA to take more workshops. The other peers in my teams used to tell me ‘You’re getting a little bit better at this, can you teach us these workshops that you’re learning from’ some of them had to work or just had to do things at home for their families and I was lucky enough to not have to do those things.
Starting at YCA, I remember sitting there not talking just kinda being there and then my senior year in high school I made it to Louder than a Bomb semi-finals and because I made it there, I qualified into Bomb Squad. That is when you take the top 12 poets of the city and I became one of them.
I couldn’t believe I was one of the top 12 because I’m just a kid from little Village. It felt really cool to accomplish that. It was a really big accomplishment for myself. Being on Bomb Squad, they taught us what life can be if you become a teaching artist for a month or two. It was really cool because they would take us to different spots around the city and we explored the city and other artists. Not just poets, but also visual artists and others.
GT: With April being national poetry month, have you ever challenged yourself to write a poem a day?
LC: Yeah I tried last year. I made it to only writing 20 of them out of 30. I wasn’t really proud of all the poems I wrote. However, I did like a couple of lines. I noticed that if I liked a bar I could take that bar and expand from there and see some of the possible options for each of them.
GT: What inspires you to write poetry?
LC: I feel like when I write poems, it’s not about inspiration. It’s more about my fears. So I just try to write about my fears in a sense of trying to become familiar with them so that when I encounter them I know how to react to them. My fears play into it a lot but also my parents didn’t go to school. I am the first one to go to school so that plays into a lot of my writing. I feel like I write for my parents most of the time. I also think that I go to school for my siblings because I feel like if I don’t set the bar high then, when they go to high school or college they’ll just be like, well, he didn’t even go to college, he didn’t even finish high school, so it makes me push through with writing and my education as well.
GT: What college are you going to right now?
LC: I am going to Malcolm X College right now, just because it’s a little bit cheaper to get my general education out of the way.
GT: What are your thoughts on fear?
LC: I think that it’s important for us to face our fears because if we stay away from them I think they can always come back and bite you. The faster you encounter them, the faster you learn how to live with them, the happier you can live.
Jose Olivares, who is one of my mentors, has a great poem that talks about going to the therapist and telling his therapist that he has these fears and his therapist says something like, I can’t make these fears go away but I can bring them into the room and we can talk about them. I think that it is a great poem. He also has a book coming out called Citizen Illegal that is coming out this September.
I was actually watching Batman Begins, and the whole movie is revolving around fear. Bruce Wayne is trying to learn about his fears but is also trying to overcome them and I remember the main evil guy saying that if you control the fear over someone then you control them. That’s when I asked myself, do I really want someone manipulating my fears and pinning them against me all the time or do I want to take the initiative on them and have them help me learn more about myself and the journey and try to overcome them?
GT: What are your plans for the workshops in Back of the Yards?
LC: I feel like if I can help someone expand their point of view and have the youth say something along the lines that they want more of these workshops happening more often. I feel like that would be doing my job as a teaching artist but also as a person and for myself because I want to give back to my community. I want for someone to learn from me and eventually, have those students lead the workshops and build a stronger community where we can network with each other and ask each other for our opinions and share ideas. I think that if I could create a real strong support system where everyone supports each other, I think that is my vision or my goal with Back of the Yards–to have these youth trust within each other to have these workshops or open mics led by themselves.
