(Poet, historian, and college professor, E. A. Mares is on...)
Poet, historian, and college professor, E. A. Mares is one of the true underground poets of the Chicano renaissance. His Unicorn Poem, first published in 1980, has been hailed as a Chicano epic.
E. A. Mares was an American writer, Indo-Hispanic in culture, global in perspective, and as much at home in the international community as in his own mixed ethnic communities.
Background
Ernesto Antonio Mares was born on May 17, 1938, near La Plaza Vieja de Albuquerque, New Mexico. He was the son of Ernesto Gustavo and Rebecca Devine Mares.
His father, was related to the family of the nineteenth-century New Mexican priest, Antonio Jose Martinez, who personified cultural resistance against the American occupation. His family, however, came upon hard times and had lost their ancestral lands near Raton, New Mexico, in the 1920s. Like many New Mexicans during that time, they moved to Albuquerque to find work with the railroad, despite the risk of becoming alienated from their cultural heritage.
Mares’s mother was a descendant of an Irish sergeant of General George Custer’s Seventh Cavalry. He and his family adapted to the prevailing culture of the Southwest and, as Lamadrid explains, “became Hispanicized.”
Education
Mares went to the San Felipe de Neri School in Old Town Albuquerque. Despite the school’s Spanish name, it was run by Midwestern nuns and was his first experience with the dominant, Anglo culture. Mares pursued an education in Spanish and history, culminating with a Ph.D. in history, but found that during his training, he spent more time in the poetry workshops run by writer Jim Whitehead than he did in the history department.
After earning his Ph.D., Mares taught at several colleges, including Colorado College and the University of New Mexico, and was the curator of the Albuquerque Museum until 1987.
Mares began publishing his work with the Academia de la Nueva Raza (Academy of the New Chicano People) and the academia’s journal. The academia was the most active and progressive organization of the Chicano movement in New Mexico, and inspired Mares to continue his creative and academic writing.
Mares began working as a playwright in 1979 with the Compania de Teatro de Albuquerque. His first production was a bilingual comedy, Lola’s Last Dance. This was successful and led Mares to become a regular collaborator with the Compania de Teatro, writing Spanish adaptations of plays. One example is Arthur Miller’s View from the Bridge, which Mares adapted and set in the Albuquerque barrio. Mares also wrote an original play, El Corrido de Joaquin Murieta (The Ballad of Joaquin Murieta), about a California bandit who began as a horse trader in New Mexico. Other historical plays by Mares include Santa Fe Spirit, a musical, and The Shepherd of Pan Duro.
In the early 1970s, when Chicano nationalism was popular, Mares voiced a different opinion in his article, “El Lobo y El Coyote: Between Two Cultures,” about the assimilation of the Chicano people. Mares knew the value of cultural nationalism but noted that people who did not fit neatly into any ethnic categories might be marginalized or disregarded. Perhaps thinking of his Irish ancestors who adopted the Hispanic culture, he wrote that culture is not “in the blood,” but is learned, and used the term “coyote” as a metaphor for the mix of Native American, Hispanic, and Anglo culture in New Mexico.
He believes that there are two different positions that regional writers can take: One is to view themselves as peripheral to the mainstream of American letters and resigned forever to the imitative and derivative backwaters. The other is to view the region, or, in this case, New Mexico, as a center from which creativity flows out to the nation and the world.
Quotations:
"My work is not a parochial, ethnic or regional undertaking, but rather an international one. I hope it is one very small part of many efforts that will eventually make this planet a much more humane, a much more habitable planet than it is now for human beings.”
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
“Mares recalls that the stunning contradictions revealed in the process of his own indoctrination and anglicization remain the source of his curiosity as a historian, his perseverance as a political activist, and his inspiration as a poet.” - Lamadrid
“Almost symbolically, it seems, E. A. Mares possesses the ability to create in his own poetry a cultural harmony and synthesis.” - Stanley Noyes, critic