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Tomas Riley

Tomas Riley

Biography Tomás Riley is a Chicano artist and activist born in Oakland, CA and raised in the Southeast San Diego neighborhood of Emerald Hills. His work has been published in several anthologies including Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam (Three Rivers Press, 2001). His first book, Mahcic, was published by Calaca Press in December 2005.

Riley’s writing career began officially in 1994 as a member of the seminal Chicano spoken word collective The Taco Shop Poets (TSP). This group breathed new life into a cultural aesthetic movement stuck between its origin and its future. Blending live music with performance poetry in a style that tipped its hat to collectives like the Last Poets and The Watts Prophets, TSP took on the new power structure engaging California ballot initiatives like Propositions 187, 227 and 209. The group published an anthology and released a CD, both entitled Chorizo Tonguefire to excellent reviews that signaled both their tribute to their Chicana and Chicano artistic predecessors and their arrival as new poetic voices for what mass media had dubbed, for better or for worse, “Generation Ñ” (the Latino version of Generation X).   

As both a soloist and member of the TSP, Riley has performed at more than 200 venues across the country. His work has been described as a meld of Chicano bilingualism and conscious cultural politics set to a soundtrack of hip hop, jazz and indigenous ceremony. His aesthetic, however, defies the singular categories of any of these influences opting for a controlled lyricism that fuses them all in a remix on par with the pastiche of a master turntablist. “I look at fusion, as opposed to assimilation, as a conscious and necessary process that allows us as ethnically charged beings to become integrated and whole,” Riley says. “Where assimilation is an unconscious process like the way water shapes a stone over time, and the stone is offered no choice in the matter, the aesthetics of juxtaposition and fusion give us much more freedom to decide what becomes a part of our art and our being. There’s no denying that just living in this society deeply affects our vision. I just think we’re better off being aware of this affect, engaging it and negotiating its consequences. That’s one of the ways we learn how to resist.”

Publishers

  • Calaca Press
    Three Rivers Press
    SDSU Press

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