Jesus Manuel Guzmán (1955-2001): MacBeth, Metal, Mariachis and Mole
Jesus on Overnight Freeform
Jesus Manuel Guzmán was born in Hidalgo del Parral, Chihuahua on May 27nd, 1955. He crossed the border at El Paso, Texas into the United States in 1976 and moved that same year to Albuquerque, where he made a living working blue collar jobs. Jesus volunteered at KUNM during the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s before joining a migrant stream through North Carolina and the upland South.
Mr. Guzmán was an active member of the Raices Collective and a regular overnight freeformer on early Sunday mornings. He was one of the voices heard on the old Adelante news program, a weekly production of the Raices Collective and El Comite de Derechos Humanos launched in the early 1980s that reported extensively on the wars, economic crises, human rights atrocities and other burning issues of the day in Latin America and the U.S. Southwest. At one point, Jesus visited Nicaragua during the Contra War.
In his varied day jobs in Albuquerque and Santa Fe, Jesus engaged in hard and physical labor. On one job he once talked about, Jesus worked at iconic Mexican singer Juan Gabriel’s Santa Fe area house.
KUNM volunteer and journalist Kent Paterson, who sometimes helped Jesus with the unforgettable Overnight Freeform shows, recalled the eclectic, electrifying and symphonic sounds the deejay from Chihuas would pump out into the New Mexico night. “Nobody could do a heavy metal- mariachi transition quite like Jesus,” Paterson said.
“He was a real wild man but he was a real great deejay,” recalled Karl Stalnaker, co-host of KUNM’s long running Home of Happy Feet show. “It was pretty spontaneous and could get way out there.”
In his Duke City days, Mr. Guzmán also spun tunes for the old Spanish language station KABQ.
“He was very flamboyant and had a big heart, and contributed a lot to the Raices Collective,” said fellow collective member Henry Gonzales. “He would always bring in some humor to the situation.”
The son of a Mexican bracero farmworker, Jesus was the appropriate voice who narrated the Spanish version of Paterson’s “Acala Gold: The Rio Grande Cotton Kingdom” radio documentary. In his cool, stray cat voice, Jesus told the story of King Cotton in New Mexico and the U.S. Southwest, a landmark rural economy made possible by labor of Mexican contract workers known as braceros.
“The blood, sweat and tears of the cotton empire ran through Jesus’ veins,” Paterson said.
Now a mechanized crop, cotton still glistens in the commercial farm belts of New Mexico where the feet of braceros once plodded the soil.
Former Adelante co-producer and longtime Raices Collective member Louis Head also collaborated with Jesus.
“I don’t use this word very often. He struck me as one of the most brilliant people I ever met. He was amazing,” Head said in an interview. “From what I knew, he came across the border (knowing little English), and he knew Shakespeare. The guy was very much an organic intellectual. And just the way he used the English language, he was very funny.”
Head reminisced about Mr. Guzman’s mastery of code-switching and his gift at dropping Spanish or English words in the right place at the right time to have an added effect.
“One time he was playing Los Alegres de Teran and Flaco Jimenez and he went into this Spanish monologue. He was talking Spanish and then saying ‘gritando (shouting) mojado POWER.’”
Overall, Jesus “had an amazing voice-English or Spanish,” Head summed up. “He was a fun guy to hang out with. He was a blast..”
Jesus served on the KUNM-In-Exile Steering Committee made up of listeners and striking volunteers who protested a program format change and other management policies during the so-called Radio War of 1987-88. The committee helped negotiate an end to the conflict and return Jesus and other volunteers to the airwaves by the end of 1988.
Jesus returned to El Paso to complete his education in 1996, graduating with a Bachelor’s of Arts in history in 2000 from the University of Texas at El Paso. While residing in the Paso del Norte borderland, he became a noted and published poet on the local scene. His poems appeared in Bridge, Voces Fronterizos and Rio Grande Review, while his translations were included in Leonardo and the Flow of the River.
Jesus was a founding member in 1995 of Tumblewords, a literary project that began in the Las Cruces area with a mission of encouraging new writers before migrating down the road to El Paso. Twenty three years later, Tumblewords still features weekly gatherings of poets, writers, artists and performers, both veterans and beginners, in the heart of El Chuco.
In an interview at an El Paso cafe late last year, Guzmán’s former partner and Tumblewords founder Donna Snyder shared samples of Jesus’ work and read her own poems that speak of sudden departures and emotional grief, inspired in part by Jesus’ passing.
“He was just beginning to let himself go,” Snyder said of Jesus’s poetry writing. “These are examples of his early work. I can’t imagine what he’d be doing now.”
In one poem published in Rio Grande Review, Jesus mocked life, death and himself:
“Jesus Descansa Aqui”
he used to smoke cigarettes
too many, his friends said.
Jesus used to eat fat foods and never exercised. He used to drink and never wanted to lose weigh.
Never paid attention to his mother who would say, “Chuy you better exercise or stop stuffing your face.”
He then responded by scarfing two more mole burritos and washed them down with a beer.
Jesus died with a big fat
pain in his chest and his epitaph read, “Here lies a
gordito cabron who paid no attention to his mom.”
Snyder, who sometimes assisted Jesus with his KUNM shows when the two were still around Albuquerque, said the talented man was “beloved” in the Paso del Norte borderland. “He had a residency at an elementary school, and he had little 7-year-old immigrant kids who wouldn’t speak get up and read the poems they had written,” she said.
Once, a housing services organization asked Snyder’s beefy partner and fellow poet to play Santa Claus in New Mexico’s Hatch Valley.
“He was a little offended by it but decided to do it. But when he came back he was illuminated, effulgent. He was so full of the happiness that he had created in those kids. They had never seen a Mexican Santa,” Snyder fondly reminisced.
When Jesus died after falling off an El Paso roof, the children he had been working with in his school residency were informed. Dutifully and lovingly, the students stuffed a manila envelope with little cards, photos and messages for Mr. Guzmán, Snyder recalled. “It was the most moving thing,” she added. “He was right away beloved by anyone who heard his work.”
For Snyder, the poetry of Jesus Guzmán was composed and delivered in the language of the borderland and borderlanders, or fronterizos, who communicate in Spanish, English and “Spanglish.” And according to Snyder, Jesus had a simple philosophy of poetry: “All good poems are short. He used Spanglish.”
More than twenty years after his death, Jesus’ name still rings a bell with a now seasoned “cadre” of once youthful, mainly Chicano poets who found their voice in the early days of Tumblewords. “He’s still remembered by poets (now) in their forties,” Snyder added.
Jesus Manuel Guzmán passed away at the young age of 45 on April 16, 2001, the day after Easter Sunday, while working as a counselor and community aide on the U.S.-Mexico border in El Paso. He was survived by his son Amado Guzmán, partner Donna Snyder and family in Mexico. Less than a year before his death, Jesus prepared a poem for the 2000 Taos Poetry Circus about the multidimensional journeys of a father and a son.
“My Father After his Stroke”
He would recite things from the past
when oxygen did not reach his brain
He would say
“When people from Torreon come around, my heart swells up.”
Or he would talk
to people from his childhood.
there were the Zamarippa brothers
who dried up their brains
with marijuana
(he said).
Or Los Gonzales who owned the corner hardware store.
He would also talk in English
To his bosses in Colorado
where he was a Bracero in 1959.
But this was 1976.
I tried to make sense of his stories
to no avail.
That was my father after his stroke.
Then my father died
and I inherited his dreams and experiences that made no sense
until I left
my country.
-Jesus Guzmán
Information: Amado Guzmán (son of Jesus Guzmán), Kent Paterson, Henry Gonzales, Louis Head, Donna Snyder, Karl Stalnaker, Taos Poetry Circus, Rio Grande Review.
edited by Kent Paterson
