This article has been updated.
The City of San Antonio has chosen its new poet laureate. Author, visual artist and Chicano activist Nephtalí De León has been selected as the sixth poet to hold the three-year position, following Carmen Tafolla, Laurie Ann Guerrero, Jenny Browne, Octavio Quintanilla and Andrea “Vocab” Sanderson.
During his 2023-2026 term, De León will be tasked with developing public events and programs meant to promote the art of poetry and deepen understanding of San Antonio culture.
A public investiture ceremony will be held April 10 at 6 p.m. in City Council chambers in the Municipal Plaza Building, led by Mayor Ron Nirenberg with representatives of the Department of Arts and Culture.
De León said he will approach his term with humility, and plans to create “the kind of poetry I hope makes people happy, while considering serious issues, but with humor, with a sense of balance, where we can all deal with it in a tranquil and happy and joyful way.”
Krystal Jones, executive director of the city’s arts department, praised De León’s work in the community as exemplary for a poet laureate and praised his lyrical poetry.
In a poem titled “Taco Megamarch,” De León exhorts fellow members of La Raza — a term for the Latin American and Indigenous diaspora — to march for justice:
Hey Raza !
come out of your casa !
we gotta demonstrate
the sleeping giant is awake !they raid us in Chicago
police state Arizona
they break up our homes
consider us an alien race
creatures from outer space !
The stanza recalls De León’s use of cosmic inflections for the ancient Indigenous peoples of North and South America in a large-scale 1991 mural painted for the now-defunct Lo Nuestro restaurant in San Antonio, titled El Molcajete Cosmico.
The Laredo native and son of migrant workers lived in locations throughout Texas and Mexico, including Brownsville, Matamoros and Lubbock, where in the early 1960s he published his first book as a high school senior, titled Chicanos: Our Background and Our Pride. He relocated to San Antonio as a playwright, according to an undated video interview made for the Texas Christian University Civil Rights in Black and Brown Oral History Project.
Prior to relocating, De León was publisher and founder of the Lubbock newspaper La Voz de los Llanos, which in a 2013 oral history interview for Texas Tech University he described as a forum for the bilingual community to “to express their discontentment, to express the injustices … that they were experiencing … from the white Anglo American society.”
While acknowledging the persistent issues that have informed his life and work, De León said he sees the role of poet laureate as a unifying force, “one of embracing our common denominators being together as a city, as a people, as a community.”While acknowledging the persistent issues that have informed his life and work, De León said he sees the role of poet laureate as a unifying force, “one of embracing our common denominators being together as a city, as a people, as a community.”
De León begins his term as poet laureate April 1, the first day of National Poetry Month.
