Juan Felipe Herrera’s poetry is vibrant, musical, and deeply rooted in the lived experiences of Mexican-American and Chicano communities. His poems often blend memory, history, activism, and personal storytelling, creating a unique voice that feels both intimate and collective. Herrera writes with a rhythmic energy—sometimes playful, sometimes fierce—using language that switches easily between English and Spanish, reflecting the cultural fluidity of his world.
A hallmark of Herrera’s work is its celebration of ordinary people: farmworkers, immigrants, street vendors, musicians, and families shaped by struggle and resilience. He elevates their voices with compassion and dignity, turning real-life hardship into powerful art. His poems frequently explore themes of migration, identity, social justice, and belonging, often drawing on his own childhood as the son of migrant farmworkers.
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| juan felipe herrera |
Herrera also experiments boldly with form. His poetry can feel like a song, a collage, a protest chant, or a dream. He stretches lines, plays with spacing, and lets images crash into one another, creating an almost cinematic movement on the page. This inventiveness mirrors the complexity and hybridity of the Chicano experience he represents.
Emotionally, Herrera’s poems oscillate between tenderness and urgency. He writes about love and family with warmth, but also confronts systemic inequality, political injustice, and violence with courage. His voice is inviting—never distant—and he often speaks directly to readers, encouraging empathy, action, and imagination.
Overall, Juan Felipe Herrera’s poetry is a rich tapestry of culture, activism, and lyric beauty. It stands as a testament to the power of storytelling, community, and the human spirit’s ability to create hope even in difficult times.
Borderbus
A dónde vamos where are we going
Speak in English or the guard is going to come
A dónde vamos where are we going
Speak in English or the guard is gonna get us hermana
Pero qué hicimos but what did we do
Speak in English come on
Nomás sé unas pocas palabras I just know a few words
You better figure it out hermana the guard is right there
See the bus driver
Tantos dÃas y ni sabÃamos para donde Ãbamos
So many days and we didn't even know where we were headed
I know where we're going
Where we always go
To some detention center to some fingerprinting hall or cube
Some warehouse warehouse after warehouse
Pero ya nos investigaron ya cruzamos ya nos cacharon
Los federales del bordo qué más quieren
But they already questioned us we already crossed over they
already grabbed us the Border Patrol what more do they want
We are on the bus now
that is all
A dónde vamos te digo salà desde Honduras
No hemos comido nada y dónde vamos a dormir
Where are we going I am telling you I came from Honduras
We haven’t eaten anything and where are we going to sleep
I don’t want to talk about it just tell them
That you came from nowhere
I came from nowhere
And we crossed the border from nowhere
And now you and me and everybody else here is
On a bus to nowehere you got it?
Pero por eso nos venimos para salir de la nada
But that’s why we came to leave all that nothing behind
When the bus stops there will be more nothing
We’re here hermana
Y esas gentes quiénes son
no quieren que siga el camión
No quieren que sigamos
Están bloqueando el bus
A dónde vamos ahora
Those people there who are they
they don't want the bus to keep going
they don't want us to keep going
now they are blocking the bus
so where do we go
What?
He tardado 47 dÃas para llegar acá no fue fácil hermana
45 dÃas desde Honduras con los coyotes los que se — bueno
ya sabes lo que les hicieron a las chicas allà mero en frente
de nosotros pero qué Ãbamos a hacer y los trenes los trenes
cómo diré hermana cientos de
nosotros como gallinas como topos en jaulas y verduras
pudriendóse en los trenes de miles me oyes de miles y se resbalaban
de los techos y los desiertos de Arizona de Tejas sed y hambre
sed y hambre dos cosas sed y hambre dÃa tras dÃa hermana
y ahora aquà en este camión y quién sabe a dónde
vamos hermana fÃjate vengo desde Brownsville dónde nos amarraron
y ahora en California pero todavÃa no entramos y todavÃa el bordo
está por delante
It took me 47 days to get here it wasn't easy hermana
45 days from Honduras with the coyotes the ones that — well
you know what they did to las chicas
right there in front of us so what were we supposed
to do and the trains the trains how can I tell you hermana hundreds
of us like chickens like gophers in cages and vegetables
rotting on trains of thousands you hear me of thousands and they slid
from the rooftops and the deserts of Arizona and Texas thirst and hunger
thirst and hunger two things thirst and hunger day after day hermana
and now here on this bus of who-knows-where we are going
hermana listen I come from Brownsville where they tied us up
and now in California but still we're not inside and still the border
lies ahead of us
I told you to speak in English even un poquito
the guard is going to think we are doing something
people are screaming outside
they want to push the bus back
Pero para dónde le damos hermana
por eso me vine
le quebraron las piernas a mi padre
las pandillas mataron a mi hijo
solo quiero que estemos juntos
tantos años hermana
separados
But where do we go hermana
that's why I came here
they broke my father's legs
gangs killed my son
I just want us to be together
so many years hermana
pulled apart
What?
Mi madre me dijo que lo más importante
es la libertad la bondad y la buenas acciones
con el prójimo
My mother told me that the most important thing
is freedom kindness and doing good
for others
What are you talking about?
I told you to be quiet
La libertad viene desde muy adentro
allà reside todo el dolor de todo el mundo
el momento en que purguemos ese dolor de nuestras entrañas
seremos libres y en ese momento tenemos que
llenarnos de todo el dolor de todos los seres
para liberarlos a ellos mismos
Freedom comes from deep inside
all the pain of the world lives there
the second we cleanse that pain from our guts
we shall be free and in that moment we have to
fill ourselves up with all the pain of all beings
to free them — all of them
The guard is coming well
now what maybe they'll take us
to another detention center we'll eat we’ll have a floor
a blanket toilets water and each other
for a while
No somos nada y venimos de la nada
pero esa nada lo es todo si la nutres de amor
por eso venceremos
We are nothing and we come from nothing
but that nothing is everything, if you feed it with love
that is why we will triumph
We are everything hermana
Because we come from everything
Enter the Void
I enter the void,
it has the shape of a viola:
Israel, Jenin, West Bank, Nablus—a rubble boy
shifts his scapula as if it was his continent, underground
Gazaground, I want to say—his only bone,
the rubble boy is a girl, I think,
her hair tossed, knotted and torn under
the green shank of fibers, tubes and shells.
She digs for her rubble father, I say rubble
because it is indistinguishable from ice, fire, dust,
clay, flesh, tears, concrete, bread, lungs, pubis, god,
say rubble, say water—
the rubble girl digs for her rubble mother,
occupation—disinheritance—once again,
I had written this somewhere, in a workshop, I think,
yes, it was an afternoon of dark poets with leaves, coffee
and music in the liquor light room.
A rock, perhaps it's a rock, juts out, two rocks
embrace each other, the shapes come to me easily,
an old poetic reflex—memoria, a nation underground,
that is it, the nation under-ground,
that is why the rocks cover it.
I forget to mention the blasts, so many things flying,
light, existence, the house in tins, a mother in rags.
It is too cold to expose her tiny legs,
the fish-shaped back—you must take these notes for me.
Before you go. See this
undulate
extend
beyond
the pools of blood.
I ride the night, past the Yukon, past
South Laredo, past Odessa, past the Ukraine,
old Jaffa, Haifa and Istanbul, across clouds,
hesitant and porous, listen—
they are porous so we can glide
into them, this underbelly, this underground:
wound-mothers and sobbing fathers, they
leave, in their ribboned flesh, shores lisp
against nothingness, open—toward you,
they dissolve again into my shoes—
Hear the dust gong:
gendarme passports,
cloned maize men in C-130's, with tears
bubbling on their hands, pebbles
en route—we are all en route
to the rubblelands.
I want to chant a bliss mantra—
Prajnaparamita
can you hear me?
I want to call for the dragon-slayer omchild.
I am on my knees again.
On the West Bank count
the waves of skull debris—a Hebrew letter
for "love" refuses me,
an Arabic letter for "boundary"
acknowledges me.
Sit on an embankment,
a dust fleece, there is a tidal wave ahead of me.
It will never reach me. I live underground, under the Dead Sea,
under the benevolent rocks and forearms and
mortar shells and slender naked red green
torsos, black,
so much black.
En route:
this could be a train, listen:
it derails into a cloud.
I Am Merely Posing for a Photograph
I am merely posing for a photograph.
Remember, when the Nomenclature
stops you, tell them that—“Sirs, he was posing
for my camera, that is all.” . . . yes, that may just work.
My eyes:
clear, hazel like my father’s, gaze across the sea, my hands at my side, my
legs spread apart in the wet sands, my pants crumpled, torn, withered, my
shirt in rags, see-through in places, no buttons, what a luxury, buttons, I
laugh a little, my tongue slips and licks itself, almost, I laugh, licks itself
from side to side, the corners of my mouth, if only I could talk like I used
to, giggle under moonlight, to myself, my arms destitute, shrunken, I
hadn’t noticed, after so many years sifting through rubble stars, rubble toys,
rubble crosses, after so many decades beseeching rubble breasts—pretend I
came to swim, I am here by accident,
like you.
My face to one side.
Listen to gray-white bells of rubble, the list
goes on—the bones, hearts, puffed intestines,
stoned genitalia, teeth, again I forget how
to piece all this together, scraps, so many scraps,
lines and holes.
The white gray rubble light blinds me,
wait, I just thought—what if this is not visible,
what if all this is not visible.
Listen here, closely:
I am speaking of the amber thighs
still spilling nectar on the dust fleece across Gaza,
the mountains, the spliced wombs across Israel, Syria.
The amber serums cut across all boundaries,
they smell incense, bread, honey—the color
of my mother’s hands, her flesh, the shrapnel is the same color
the propellers churn.
Raindogs
by Juan Felipe Herrera
Juan Felipe Herrera
dancing in spite of lost fathers stolen mothers & bitten lands
in cerulean torrents Indian stones clownish leaps & demolished
howls
against armies against the wind itself the shredded graves
eyes gone dumb the garden in flames the divine sestinas formless
they were scribbling things down one opposite here one opposite
there
in shrunken cafés Tibetan scarves & prayer beads
dancing in spite of lost fathers stolen mothers & bitten lands
Punk Half Panther
Juan Felipe Herrera
Lissen
to the whistle of night bats—
oye como va,
in the engines, in the Chevys
& armed Impalas, the Toyota gangsta’
monsters, surf of new world colony definitions
& quasars & culture prostars going blam
over the Mpire, the once-Mpire, carcass
neural desies for the Nothing. i amble
outside the Goddess mountain. Cut across
the San JoaquÃn Valley, Santiago de Cuba,
Thailand & Yevtushenko’s stations;
hunched humans snap off cotton heads
gone awry & twist
nuclear vine legs.
Jut out to sea, once again—this slip
sidewalk of impossible migrations. Poesy mad
& Chicano-style undone wild.
Rumble boy. Rumble girl.
In wonder & amazement. On the loose.
Cruisin’ shark-colored maze of presidential bombast, death
enshrined archipelago fashion malls, neutered wars
across the globe come barreling down
on my Neo-American uzi mutations, my uppgraded
2Pac thresholds. My indigo streets, i say
with disgust & erotic spit, Amerikaner frontier consciousness
gone up long ago. Meet my barriohood, meet me
with the froth i pick up everyday & everyday
i wipe away with ablution & apologia & a smirk, then
a smile on my Cholo-Millennium liberation jacket.
No motha’, no fatha’,
no sista’, no brotha’.
Just us in the genetic ticktock
culture chain, this adinfinitum, clueless Americana
grid of inverted serapes, hallucinations of a nation,
streets in racist Terminator
coagulation.
Get loose
after the day-glo artery of a fix.
Power outages propel us into cosmos definition,
another forty-million-New-Dollar-Plantation Basilica,
or is it tender chaos?
My upside-down
Kahlúa gallon oración drool
blackish metal flake desires, the ooze of Dulcinea—
Tepeyac stripper, honey
from Tara’s open green fans. Tara?
Tara, where are you?
Tara of the blessings & weapons against illusion.
Against administrator pig,
against molester snake,
against rooster corporate lust. Remember me?
i am the black-red blood spark worker,
Juana Buffalo’s illegitimate flight usher,
back up from Inframundo.
Quick ooze again,
this formless city space
i live in—
my circular false malaria.
Fungi Town says everything’s awright
without your Holy Wheel,
your flaming tree wombs, this sista’ bundle
i ache for, the one i lost
in a fast brawl for redemption
at the gates of this Creation Mulatto Hotel,
this body passage, this wonder
fire from the chest.
i stand alone on Mass Man Boulevard.
Look east, look south. Bleary sirens
come howling with vats of genocide &
grey prison gang buses jam
with my true brotha’ wetbacks.
Pick another bale of tropical grape,
another bushel of pesticide & plutonium artichoke.
Cancer tomatoes the biggest in the world.
Bastard word, bracero produce, alien culture—
power & slime.
Crawl up my back, heavy
loaded on cheap narratives,
Salinas doubles, Atlantis sketched on Gorbachev’s forehead:
you, yes, you, gator-mouthed agent—like gila progeny.
Let’s hustle. Let’s trade.
It is 1:27 A.M. in da rat Arctic.
What do i trade passion for?
Language escapes me. Passion is smoke.
i dissolve.
It is in my nature to disappear. No sista’, no brotha’.
No motha’, no soul. This shred iciness is all,
a crazy register that destroys itself into Polaroid,
into a glacial sheet of multicolored border walls.
Let’s foam & spin flamey
bluish tears for the Thing-Against-Itself, soul-less soul,
this film word surface. Sing out, baby.
Wobble & bop to town.
Drag yo’ hands
across my fine-tuned work train named Desastre
en route to Freetown—engineered African shaman houses
smell of licorice, Ebola & famine blood, of hair torn,
of death owls & cancerous alcoholic livers, of babies sucking
this deep night to come,
then—a busted chink of afternoon copper light wakes us,
yo’ sista’ rolls in with a bag of lemons for Evil Eye,
for the seven-inch ache in her abdomen.
Keep me in stride. You.
i am talking to you, fool. Don’t
just sit there stretchin’ yo’ face.
Tell me why fire yearns for the heart.
Write it down. Say it. Fool. Speak the names.
Conjure the recitations from the coffee cup,
the steel-toe, border-crosser boots.
The grass rips up the morning snow lights, jagged & yellowish.
My AIDS face is hidden. Your rot, my epistemology.
i stand in pure light, a blaze of eyes & arms,
volcanic & solar, autistic, anti-written,
burned by mad friars & clerics, uptown
octopi readers, my long hair falls as reddish honey,
on a naked supple back,
on breasts small & secretive.
Mystery evades me. Shadows crumble.
Without attention i locate the love void & yet,
i know all is well. My blood rocks to a bolero
out of rhythm, a firefly’s bolero that is,
the one in the dog eye. Hear me
warm up to the multi-night. Scribble poems &
shout rebuke for the sake of scarred angels,
for Tara, who guides me
in her emeraldine, sequined night of lies.
Hear me now,
kin to the half-collie language that i keep & walk.
Kin now, to the leaves that plunge to the floors;
swivel whiteness without axis, tectonic blasts
without mercy. Straitjackets float on the river infinity.
Pink-skinned fishes stare back
as they evolve into my shape, my babble stream
magnetic juan-foolery. Arm wrestle me
on the soccer lawn, kick me in the balls.
The murder music is for everyone.
The Last Mayan Acid rock band
plays Berlin’s latest score:
dead trade market systems for the dead proletariats,
rip up from Bangkok to Tenejapa. Everyone is
meaningful & vomits, everyone deposits
a stench pail, into the Cube—
Neo-America,
without the fissure of intimate thighs. Cross over into fire,
hunger & spirit. i write on my hand:
the road cuts into a star. Go, now, go, fool.
In your lyric wetback saxophone, the one yo’ mama left you,
the Thing-Against-Itself strapped across your hips.
Do not expect me
to name—this Thing-Against-Itself. Play it. Screw it.
Howl up to the Void, the great emptiness,
the original form.
Night Journal:
Keep on rockin’, blues fish, the gauze of hte day into night. Out there
somewhere, Dis-America, pick up a chrome bone, the shards of the last
Xmas Presidential extravaganza. You, of course, fool.
Swivel into the clear. Float over the greenish migrant barracks pocked with wire
torsos, toes wiggle & predict our forthcoming delirium—there is a velvet panther
shouting out OM in funk, there is a tawny word in the middle of the city
thoroughfare, a planetary semi of lives slices the wet animal in half. i am that
punk half panther. My fierce skull & mandible, formidable, my pelt is exact as
witch quartz, a slashed leg tumbles down the highway, battered by every dirty,
steel wheel. Face up to the sky, you, i said, to the brilliant gossip from the
Goddess parade. Outside, outside.
So. Crawl up, baby, come on, keep on floatin’—
sliding’, always: for black journeys, always in holiness.
Dear Prudence
Towers rumbled & gassed down
Missiles gnawed & sawed down
The dictators transterred out of this moment-world
Severed money sky-scrapered up
Ancient oil & the bank shooting blood across the fiber grid
We walk the darkness the hunger streets
Fire fountains fire oceans we idle at the gate
We bow down before the ignited world
We Were Approaching Wabash Street
we were approaching Wabash Street
crossing Stater Bro's supermarket my blond Shar Pei turned to the
left
toward the sky I followed her eyes and noticed the heights
the bluish mountains had moved from their usual positions
One with a dome shaped by the clouds and the clouds
were gauze a seamless mist or canvas but it wasn't a canvas
I traced the early dust of light from a hidden orb in the higher realm
there was darkness in that place the one few dare to touch or paint
at the higher margins of that contained layer the one folding into
itself
a woman's head or her face or simply the burning void
arms too they were open and a dress-like expanse below
my sisters came to mind Sara 83 yrs this month of May and Concha
90 yrs
dust weakened or unknowns multiplied
on my way back through the traffic back home now
