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Every Day We Get More Illegal

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Adapted from the English Wikipedia article Every Day We Get More Illegal, available under CC BY-SA 4.0Updated 9 August 2025
Juan Felipe Herrera
Born (1948-12-27) December 27, 1948 (age 77)
California, United States
Occupation(s)Poet, performer, writer, cartoonist, educator, activist
Years active1970s–present
Known for21st United States Poet Laureate (2015–2017), Chicano poetry

Juan Felipe Herrera (born December 27, 1948) is a multifaceted American artist known as a poet, performer, writer, cartoonist, educator, and activist. He held the position of the 21st United States Poet Laureate from 2015 until 2017 and stands as a prominent figure within Chicano poetry.

Herrera’s upbringing as the son of migrant farmworkers profoundly informs his creative output, including the award-winning children's book Calling the Doves, which received the Ezra Jack Keats Book Award in 1997. Since the mid-1970s, he has actively contributed to community arts initiatives, notably leading the Centro Cultural de la Raza, an arts center located in San Diego's Balboa Park.

His extensive oeuvre encompasses fourteen poetry collections alongside prose, short stories, novels for young adults, and picture books—amounting to twenty-one publications over the past ten years. The 2007 bilingual work 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can't Cross the Border: Undocuments 1971-2007 delves into themes of cultural duality and identity along the U.S.-Mexico border. Herrera earned the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry with his collection Half the World in Light. In 2012, Governor Jerry Brown appointed him as California Poet Laureate.

In 2011, Herrera was inducted as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and in 2015 he became the first poet laureate representing both Chicano and broadly Latino communities nationwide. On June 11, 2016, Oregon State University honored him with an honorary doctorate. The Juan Felipe Herrera Elementary School was inaugurated in August 2022 within the Fresno Unified School District.

Early life and education

Born to farm laborers María de la Luz Quintana and Felipe Emilio Herrera in 1948, Juan Felipe Herrera’s early years were marked by frequent relocations following seasonal crops across California's San Joaquín Valley and Salinas Valley. He completed his secondary education at San Diego High School in 1967 and secured an Educational Opportunity Program scholarship to attend the University of California, Los Angeles, where he earned a B.A. in Social Anthropology. Subsequently, Herrera obtained a master’s degree in social anthropology from Stanford University and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Iowa. In 1990, he served as a distinguished teaching fellow at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. After leading the Chicano and Latin American Studies Department at California State University, Fresno, he joined the creative writing faculty at University of California, Riverside in 2005 as the holder of the Tomás Rivera Endowed Chair and took on directorship of the Art and Barbara Culver Center for the Arts located in downtown Riverside.

Herrera resides in Redlands, California with his partner Margarita Robles—a poet and performance artist—and is father to five children.

Influences

Herrera’s identity as a former campesino significantly influences his artistic vision. His journeys through regions such as California’s San Joaquín Valley, San Diego’s Logan Heights, and San Francisco’s Mission District offer three distinct Californian cultural landscapes that inspire his work. Coming of age during the 1960s and attending university amidst the rise of the Chicano Movement and Beat Poets’ prominence exposed him to influential figures like Luis Valdez and Allen Ginsberg, who left a lasting imprint on his literary approach. This period of creative experimentation motivated Herrera to dissolve conventional barriers between genres, styles, and forms.

Recognized for traversing cultural and literary boundaries, Herrera often addresses pressing social topics. Mexican American essayist Ilan Stavans has highlighted Herrera’s enduring presence in Chicano literature for over thirty years as a force expanding artistic possibilities. New York Times critic Stephanie Burt identified him among the earliest poets to forge "a new hybrid art, part oral, part written, part English, part something else: an art grounded in ethnic identity, fueled by collective pride, yet irreducibly individual too."

Community arts

Herrera has been awarded grants to facilitate instruction in poetry, visual arts, and performance across diverse environments. His engagements include community art spaces such as the Galería de la Raza in San Francisco during 1983–85, creating community-oriented art and literary broadsides in San Diego between 1977 and 1978, as well as teaching poetry within correctional institutions like Soledad Correctional Facility from 1987 to 1988. Presently, his efforts are concentrated on collaborating with community colleges and educational institutions throughout Riverside County and the Coachella Valley.

Following his appointment as California’s Poet Laureate by Governor Jerry Brown in 2012, Herrera initiated the i-Promise Joanna/Yo te Prometo Joanna Project, a poetry campaign aimed at combating bullying. This initiative is named in memory of a young elementary school student who was subjected to bullying and tragically lost her life. The project encourages students to contribute poems reflecting on the impact of bullying and promotes active prevention strategies. Herrera plans to gather these submissions for a forthcoming publication.

Awards and fellowships

Bibliography

  • Rebozos of Love. Tolteca Publications. 1974.
  • Exiles of Desire. Arte Publico Press, University of Houston. 1985.
  • Facegames. Dragon Cloud Press. 1987.
  • Akrílica. Alcatraz Editions. 1989.
  • Memoria(s) from an Exile's Notebook of the Future. Santa Monica College Press. 1993. [Poetry Chapbook]
  • The Roots of a Thousand Embraces: Dialogues. Manic D Press, San Francisco. 1994.
  • Night Train to Tuxtla: New Stories and Poems. University of Arizona Press. 1994.
  • Calling the Doves / Canto a Las Palomas. Children's Book Press, San Francisco. 1995. [Bilingual children's story]
  • Love After the Riots. Curbstone Press, Willimantic, NY. 1996
  • Mayan Drifter: Chicano Poet in the Lowlands of America. Temple University Press, Philadelphia. 1997.
  • Border-Crosser with a Lamborghini Dream. University of Arizona Press. 1999.
  • Loteria Cards & Fortune Poems. City Lights Publishers, San Francisco. 1999.
  • CrashBoomLove: A Novel in Verse. University of New Mexico Press. 1999.
  • The Upside Down Boy/El Nino de Cabeza. Children's Book Press, San Francisco. 2000.
  • Thunderweavers. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. 2000.
  • Giraffe on Fire. Poems, University of Arizona Press, Tucson. 2001.
  • Grandma & Me at the Flea / Los Meros Meros Remateros. Children’s Books Press, San Francisco. 2002.
  • Notebooks of a Chile Verde Smuggler. University of Arizona Press, Tucson. 2002.
  • Super Cilantro Girl / La Superniña del Cilantro. Children’s Book Press, San Francisco. 2003.
  • Coralito's Bay / La Bahia de Coralito. Monterey National Marine Sanctuary, Monterey. 2004
  • Cinnamon Girl: Letters Found Inside a Cereal Box. HarperCollins, Joanna Cotler Books/Tempest, New York. 2005.
  • Downtown Boy. Scholastic Press, New York. 2005.
  • 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can't Cross The Border: Undocuments 1971-2007, City Lights Publishers, 2007
  • Half the World in Light. University of Arizona Press. 2008.
  • Notes on the Assemblage. City Lights Publishers, 2015.
  • Every Day We Get More Illegal. City Lights Publishers, 2020.
List of poems
Title Year First published Reprinted/collected
Basho & Mandela 2020 The New Yorker, September 7, 2020

Film, stage, and music

Herrera created "The Twin Tower Songs," a tribute performance from the San Joaquin Valley commemorating the events of September 11. Additionally, he composes poetry sequences for the PBS program American Family. His musical work, The Upside Down Boy, developed by Making Books Sing with a libretto by Barbara Zinn Krieger, lyrics by Herrera himself, and music composed by Cristian Amigo, garnered praise in New York City. Herrera holds board memberships with the Before Columbus American Book Awards Foundation as well as the California Council for the Humanities.

During his poet laureate induction at the Library of Congress on September 8, 2015, Herrera partnered with Chicago-based Mexican son ensemble Sones de Mexico and their songwriting students to co-create "Corrida de Sandra Bland," a Spanish-language ballad paying tribute to Sandra Bland. The following day, Sones de Mexico performed this piece.

In October 2016, LightBox Theatre Company located in Turlock, California, debuted The Super Cilantro Girl, a theatrical adaptation inspired by three of Herrera’s children’s books—"The Upside Down Boy," "Calling the Doves," and "Super Cilantro Girl". The play was adapted by Arnold Anthony Schmidt, a professor at CSU Stanislaus, and directed by Stefani Tsai.

Theater

Throughout more than thirty years, Juan Felipe Herrera established multiple performance groups:

  • Teatro Tolteca (UCLA, 1971 – a choreopoem ensemble blending jazz, spoken word, and movement),
  • TROKA (Bay Area, 1983 – a percussion and spoken word collective),
  • Teatro Zapata (Fresno, 1990 – community theatre led by students),
  • Manikrudo: Raw Essence (Fresno, 1993 – an ensemble focusing on multicultural performance art),
  • Teatro Ambulante de Salud/The Traveling Health Theatre (2003, Fresno – dedicated to serving migrant populations in the San Joaquin Valley), and
  • Verbal Coliseum (UC Riverside, 2006 – a spoken word group).

His avant-garde play "Prison Journal" was showcased at the University of Iowa Playwright’s Festival in 1990. Herrera’s background in theater and movement includes collaborations with Luis Valdez/Teatro Campesino along with other notable Latin@ artists.

External links

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