Alurista

Alberto Baltazar Urista Heredia (born August 8, 1947), better known by his nom de plume Alurista, is an American poet and activist. His work was influential in the Chicano Movement and is important to the field of Chicano poetry. Urista was born in Mexico City and attended primary school in Morelos. He went to the United States when he was thirteen, settling with his family in the border city of San Diego, California. He graduated from high school in 1965 and began studying business administration at Chapman University in Orange County, California. He disliked the field, however, and transferred to San Diego State University (SDSU) to study religion. He changed his major several times before earning a B.A. in psychology in 1970. He went on to earn an M.A. from SDSU in 1978, and his PhD in literature from the University of California-San Diego in 1983. His doctoral thesis was on the fiction of Chicano lawyer and author Oscar Zeta Acosta. He has taught at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, California, Escuela Tlatelolco in Denver, Colorado, and at the University of Texas at Austin. He has also lectured and read his poetry in venues throughout the world. Urista's first experience writing poetry was as a student in Mexico, when he began writing love poems for his classmates as a way to earn money. He began writing poetry for publication in 1966. In 1967, he co-founded the SDSU chapter of MEChA, the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán, ("Chicano Student Movement of Aztlán") and organized students in favor of the United Farm Workers grape boycott. He held several jobs, including working for the Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) program, part of the Lyndon B. Johnson administration's War on Poverty. In 1969, he attended the First National Chicano Youth Liberation Conference, hosted by Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzales's Crusade for Justice, and read a poem to the attendees. The poem so moved the youth present that they adopted it as the preamble of the Plan Espiritual de Aztlán, the political manifesto of the Chicano Movement.