Mexican American Borderland Poet and UA Wildcat: Alberto Alvaro Ríos

The University of Arizona’s location near the U.S.-Mexico border has made it into a familiar home for many Mexican Americans and other Latinos from the borderlands. One of the most prominent Mexican Americans to attend the UA is Arizona’s first and (so far) only official State Poet Laureate – Alberto Alvaro Ríos. Born in Nogales, Arizona, on September 18, 1952, Ríos grew up between multiple cultures. Besides being raised in an interracial household (the son of a Mexican and U.S. Air Force veteran father, Alberto Alvaro Sr., and a British mother, Agnes), Ríos navigated the cultural differences and overlap between the United States and Mexico as he grew up between the border cities of Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Sonora, Mexico. Although there is much law enforcement anxiety today when the border is discussed, during Ríos’s youth the border between the two, or “Ambos,” Nogales was much easier to cross. Family ties, shopping, restaurants, barber shops, and candy stores enticed people like Ríos and so many others from Ambos Nogales to cross between one another on a daily basis. In his 1994 poem “Day of the Refugios,” Ríos described Ambos Nogales as “The places in between places, They are like little countries, Themselves, with their own holidays.”[1] In his memoir Capirotada, Ríos also described the U.S.-Mexican border as “a rough handshake.”

As a young man at Nogales High School, Ríos dreamt of writing a novel. But his teachers at the time did not support him developing his skills as a poet and writer. “At that age, you cannot write a novel, really, but you can think of one.” It was not until Ríos went to what he calls “13^th Grade” (his freshman year at the UA) that he gradually immersed himself in the world of literature and writing. Ríos earned a B.A. in Psychology (1974) and an M.A. (1979) in Creative Writing from the UA, beginning his career as a poet.

By the 1980s Ríos became a renowned Chicano (Mexican American) writer. Drawing from his bicultural, binational Latino heritage in Nogales, Ríos published Sleeping on Fists (1981), Whispering to Fool the Wind (1982), The Iguana Killer (winner of the 1984 Western States Book Award in Fiction), Teodoro Luna's Two Kisses (1992), and more recently Not Go Away is My Name (2020). The book which most raised Ríos’s stature was Capirotada, his 1999 memoir about his bicultural youthhood in Nogales. Capirotada was a reminder of a different type of interwoven and intimate border shared by a binational community – and a stark contrast from increasingly negative and violent depictions of predominantly Latino communities along the U.S.-Mexican border. Capirotada’s critical success influenced Ríos’s selection as Arizona’s first State Poet Laureate in 2013, a position created to celebrate the Grand Canyon State’s centennial. Ríos has been a Professor of English at Arizona State University since 1982, but a Sun Devil with UA Wildcat roots in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.

This highlight was made possible and greatly informed by research conducted by Hannah Fackrell for HIST 355 (Spring 2024) and the “Beyond Fronteras: The Story of Arizona’s Santa Cruz County” exhibition premiering Oct. 25 at the Historic 1904 Courthouse (21 East Court St., Nogales, AZ, 85621).