Josh Garcia: A Border Poet

Tuesday, 27 October 2009 06:20

Josh Garcia, a self proclaimed “Latin American mutt”, expresses a lot of his thoughts, emotions and life experiences through poetry that he pairs with his great understanding and connection to Latin America, as his father is from Guatemala and his Mother in from Peru.

The 27-year-old is a recent graduate of the Master in Fine Arts Program (MFA) at the University of Arizona, receiving his degree in creative writing after getting a bachelor of arts from New York University as a double major in psychology and comparative literature in May of 2004.

Josh’s family ties are not the sole reason for his interest in Latin America.

He is currently working on a book that is about 100 pages of poetry that he wrote in about four months after conducting a lot of research in Latin America over the last few years.

While attending NYU, Josh received a grant to do research in Latin America in January of 2004 that initially sparked his interest in southern region.

It was after Josh spent time in Latin America, talking to people and learning more about the culture,  that he felt a sense of independence and a surge of creativity.

“I felt for the first time in my life that I had some sort of authority, walking into a room on my own. I was jus my own person and there was nobody else who was going to tell me what questions to ask, nobody was going to tell me who I had to call or contact. It was up to me to make this stuff happen and to make the research happen.”

Josh said that when people grow up in New York, everybody knows their way around the city, everybody has the subway lines memorized, but independence can become muddled.

He said that when you show up in another city with education behind you, it’s different.

“People in Mexico respect education, at least people in Mexico City, and they place a premium on intellectuals and when you go to them, asking their opinion on something, they love it. They love being experts.”

He said that the people he came into contact with in Chili, Peru, Guatemala and  Brazil loved sharing their expertise, and that expertise has stuck with Josh in his poetry, and in his character.

“I’ve always associated that feeling of being independent, on my own and cosmopolitan in a way with being in Latin America.”

Josh discovered that poetry was a creative outlet he truly enjoyed while he was working as a lifeguard growing up.  

To pass the time and to kill the boredom, Josh utilized the unfilled hours at the pool by creating ideas in his head that were often influenced from the hip-hop music that he was exposed to while living in New York. 

“I would make stuff up in my head and I would write it down when I got home – and I had poems, that was it,” Josh said.

At NYU, Josh realized that one of the places that people would go to perform poetry was a poetry café.

“I didn’t know that that existed – that you could write something, go up in front of a crowd, perform it and then have people talk to you afterwards and say, ‘thanks for writing that, that meant something to me,’” he said.

With the exception of taking a couple introductory level acting classes in college, performing was foreign to Josh. He never understood how the response from an audience could affect him as a writer, so he accepted the challenge.

“My poetry was horrible – but I performed, and I liked it because it was a challenge to memorize my stuff, to figure out how I was going to move on the stage,” he said. “It was weird being a performer and not just some writer in my brain and in my head while I was bored.”

With an interest in a lot of different things like photography and acting,  poetry was the only thing that he took seriously.

“I was not a good actor – horrible,” he said with laughter.

He said that part of the reason he stayed with poetry was because he knew he was good at it.

“I would see people performing it, and I would try to perform it, and I would suck at performing it, but I would read my poems and coming off the page I could see that they were good.”

Josh continued to write and perform his poetry for fun during college and while working until he told himself that he would love to have two years to do just that – poetry.

“No matter what else I was going through, whether I was having a hard time at work, or being bored with classes, or being unemployed, having nothing to do at all with my time, I always had poetry as the default thing that I could go to.”

Josh used it to write about everything, “I used it to write about September 11th, I used it to write about relationships, I used it to write about classes that I hated, classed that I liked, I used it to talk about my life for me.”

He thought that it would be nice to do poetry for two years and explore what he could actually do with the craft and if he applied himself to it.

After graduating from NYU, Josh was accepted by UA into the graduate program on a full scholarship.

While he was eager to study in Arizona,  he didn’t know all that UA had to offer in terms of poetry.

Places like the Poetry Center were new to him, as were the professors that he worked with during his two years.

“I didn’t know that the professors would think like I thought, about how crappy the state of poetry is now, but they do and they admit it,” he said. “They have so much hope for what students can do, and that made me feel good about wanting to come here and study with them.” 

Josh was able to teach an undergraduate poetry class after his writing samples were reviewed and he was nominated for an award in the MFA program.  He said it was an honor to be recognized, and when a graduate student makes a good enough impression to be asked to teach, you take the job.

Josh said that part of the reason he enjoys being in Tucson is that he loves talking to people and learning information that he would never know otherwise.

An interest in the border sparked for Josh and he met with the Pima County Medical Examiner to talk about what happens to bodies that are found in the desert along the border.

He became interested in not just how border crossers get deep into the desert to cross into the U.S., but what happens to the body itself after death.

Josh volunteered with Humane Borders to put water in the desert and to get the opportunity to talk to the people who deal with border crossing everyday.

“Nobody writes poetry about it really, and if they do it’s kind off pushed off to the side,” he said.

There were a lot of different reasons why Josh became interested in writing poetry about the border.

“Death in particular, because death is such an interesting subject, but the body itself and what happens afterwards is so interesting.”

Josh and a friend volunteered with Humane Borders where they saw a body in the desert for the first time. He wrote about his experience in his poem, Dry Heat, describing what it was like to see a dead body in the desert and how surreal the experience felt, seeing a body as an object and no longer a person. 

Click to listen to Dry Heat, and Josh’s experience along the border.

Written by Laura Lajiness