After years of struggling against serious illness, Alfred Arteaga, a poet and professor at UC Berkeley, passed away on July 4, Sound Taste reports. Arteaga is author of "Chicano Poetics," a seminal work in Chicano literary theory. The East L.A. native was also an energetic and inspiring teacher. Journalist Carolina Gonzalez writes:
I first met Alfred when I took Bahktin seminar he taught my first year of grad school. The fact that he was a theory head, a practicing poet, a small-c Chicano who despised ethnic orthodoxies and a Shakespeare scholar quickly made him one of my models for how to reconcile my academic, cultural and political interests. Long after the seminar ended, we developed a relationship that based on poetry, on rock'n'roll and deeply connected to the importance of language, justice and beauty.
At Berkeley, I was among the many students whom Artreaga introduced to the poetry of Lorna Dee Cervantes, who shared a close bond with the profe. Arteaga would lead these really thrilling close readings of poems from Cervantes's book "Emplumada," which to this day remains my most prized volume of California verse. His final book, "Frozen Accident," was published in 2006. Alfred Arteaga will be missed.
* Above, reproductions of a portrait of Arteaga by Harry Gamboa Jr., from his "Chicano Male Unbounded" photo series.