I'm confessing that I lived, and loved, and made music.

Review:  Rubén Funkahuatl Guevara. Confessions of a Radical Chicano Doo-Wop Singer. Berkeley: UCPress, 2018.

Michael Sedano

It’s 1974, a Mexican American musician whose Chicano Studies classes have imbued him with an Edenic vision of his Mexicano and Amerindian raices, travels to Guadalajara thinking he’ll be embraced by his gente. A random street corner encounter shakes him to those raices: a Mexicano laughs that Chicanos have no culture.

Here is the pivotal moment in Ruben Funkahuatl Guevara’s life story. That random Mexican is right. Chicano literary production consisted in the novels Chicano and Bless Me, Ultima, and everyone in C/S classes reads Rudy Acuña’s canonical textbook, Occupied America.

 

In a dramatic scene—part memoir, part magical realism—the 32-year old unemployed (again) and broke (again) musician climbs a pyramid, throws out his arms, and proclaims his affirmation of all things Chicano. The namesake of the recently defunct band, Ruben and the Jets, decides he will be a Chicano culture sculptor to help fashion what had not yet emerged. 

 

Dramatic as the scene plays, it’s one of numerous career and relationship zeniths and restarts Readers come to expect from Confessions of a Radical Chicano Doo-Wop Singer (link). Success and optimism become catchphrases, “I was on my way again,” “I was twenty-eight, and on my way again.”

 

Funkahuatl is the artist’s way of decolonizing his name. He likes his name, Rubén, and doesn’t want to change it like his early monikers. Funk stands for his Unitedstatesian identity blended into something Mexicano, -huatl.

 

Guevara calls his aesthetic “radical” for his adventurous presentations and liberation attitude. 

But Guevara’s old, so old he was there at the origins, the roots, of the LA music scene. Before he was Funkahuatl—his “pre-Chicano period”—Guevara played as J.P. Moby on the television dance program, Shindig. He’s 22 years old and he’s making music with Bo Diddley on teevee. He puts a move on Tina Turner when Ike’s not on set. He’s clubbing in Hollywood and there’s a group on stage whose singer is like an intense James Dean. It’s the Doors before they were kicking down doors. Then there was some group whose guitarist plays with his teeth--Jimi Hendrix still getting experienced.

 

Music fans will enjoy a raft of anecdotes about pop music industry luminaries and down-and-dirty heartache of the business of music and record-making. Confessions won’t inform someone’s lust for glittery slices of fantasy, nor ample details of Guevara's rich sex life, nor details of his three, or is it four, marriages? 

While there are serious personal details, these are confessions of a doo-wop singer, not a social worker. But the very best anecdote in the book comes out of left field at readers with a social work twist.

 

“Don’t give up your day job,” comrades will taunt performers. It’s a reminder that musicians rarely make a living from music. “I was living in my van again,” Guevara writes repeatedly. He works factotum jobs. Working in vinyl distribution, he finds it ironic to be shipping out his records to people who make money off them. He doesn’t. At one point, Guevara settles down from a national tour making music and bringing down the house. Back in LA, out of work, and he takes a job delivering Chicken Delight.

 

A friend points the poet toward teaching institutionalized boys. Thinking he’ll put in the 8 month contract, he works 16 years. In 1999, he takes a full-time job teaching 8-10 year olds. It’s the hardest work he’s ever done, he says. He changed some kids’ lives, like a sculptor que no?, adding to, or taking away, the shape of a kid's future.

 

The poet was doing cultural sculpture with those damaged kids. For instance, his wonderful anecdote of reading a Neruda love poem in Spanish to students. The reader, a beautiful woman, interprets effectively and the class expresses their feelings. Some had never heard a poem read in their own language. 

 

“I got to a young man who I knew couldn’t speak very well and rarely tried. I had known him for several years and was impressed with the images he would draw during class. I hadn’t intended to ask for his response, but something inside said to ask anyway. He put his pencil down and slowly said in Spanish, “Love is bittersweet. Love heals and scars. Love is life.” The nurses were astounded. He had never spoken that coherently before. That was one of the greatest poems I’ve ever heard.”

 

Readers don’t come to biography with literary expectations, but that’s a radical difference in Confessions: it’s a hybrid with poetry ending some chapters. For example, a student dies in a drive-by and the teacher writes a poem to read before the funeral. The chapter details the story. Having that poem after that narrative offers satisfying closure, no better illustration of "see what I mean?" than how a literary insertion affects each reader. 

The book observes a chronological sequence (first line: “I came into the world on fire”), but with editing and organizing, each chapter holds together on its own. There are no plot threads forcing a sequential reading. A reader will enjoy cherry-picking the work. If the Punk era is of interest, start reading there. If the Shindig years bring happy tears, read there. Read the chapters with women's names. There’s an Index for topical or research-driven readers of this 300 page memoir.

 

One of the totally un-radical features of the radical singer’s book is the old-fashioned ultra-traditional proscription against Spanish linguistic equality. Every Spanish expression gets italicized, and almost always with appositional translation into English. For criminy sakes, UC Press, we are Chicanos. It’s simply gratuitous that you translate stuff we’re supposed to know. 

Appositional translation gets insulting at times, for example “watching her make gorditas, fat little tortillas, and the way her hands would go slap, pat, slap, pat, slap to the masa cornmeal to shape them.” 

 

Italics and translating are not only old-fashioned, it’s a publisher’s way of saying to readers, “you’re not Chicano enough to make it through elementary Español, Spanish, in our text, pendejo, so here’s a translation”

 

Damn, Rubén, que gacho. Otherwise, this is a damn fine autobiography, and thanks for the music, ese.