
Vic Romero met with Joe Ray Sandoval thirty minutes before I arrived at Rize Nightclub in Santa Fe, New Mexico to interview the nationally renowned Spoken Word artist, poet, and writer. Vic was nice enough to cover Sandoval’s childhood and young adult life up until he headed to Virginia for his Graduate Degree in creative writing. Here is a rundown on what the two of them covered:
While in Catholic school, Joe Ray thought of Santa Fe as a huge influence in the arts, worldwide. He thoroughly enjoyed the Pasatiempo and one day longed to be featured within its pages. At eighteen years old, Joe Ray fell into writing. Joe Ray started college at New Mexico State University with the intention of becoming an electrical engineer; that was before he started open poetry mics in his college-apartment’s living room. Eventually, Rock Island, a bar in Las Cruces, New Mexico, gave Joe Ray a back room as a place to have his open mics, and it was here where Spoken Word was born.
Joe Ray moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, after finishing his bachelors at NMSU. Shortly after, a friend of his killed himself, and the reality of the situation fueled Joe Ray’s life of excess through the 90’s. Then, when Joe Ray was in his early twenties, everything changed.
DRM: Alright, Thanks again for meeting with me, Joe. I know Vic gotcha up until then, so, you got your MFA at George Mason.
JRS: Yeah.
DRM: What was that experience like? When you went into George Mason, what was your intent when you arrived? Was it to study writing? Creative Writing and Poetry?
JRS: Yeah.
DRM: That’s what you went in for. Did you have a Bachelor’s before that?
JRS: I got my Bachelor’s from New Mexico State.
DRM: Was your Bachelors in writing?
JRS: Creating Writing
DRM: Was there anyone at Mason that really influenced you, or put you on the track that you are on now? Or was it just –
JRS: I started on the track I’m on now in undergraduate. This guy named Joe Smozal; he turned me on to the whole Spoken Word scene. That’s what got me into the whole performance aspect of poetry. And then when I got – I wanted to get as far away from here as possible. I love Santa Fe and all, but… So I went to a top twenty writing school, studied with Kevin Forshay who was probably the biggest influence as far as the actual academics – part of the reason I went to George Mason –
DRM: Forshay was at Virginia?
JRS: Yeah, and C.K. Williams was the other guy, but I wanted to get a straight up, legitimate Masters Degree, so I went to a really hard, academic school, so that way, when I did what I liked to do, the performance aspect of it – there’s a big debate, whether there was room in poetry for the Spoken Word people, you know, “this is boring” and it kind of was – the writing was great, but the performance aspect had such a rush. A larger audience and it was so much more entertaining and the biggest influence were the people I was studying with and writing with, and uh, they were all decent, well known writers – they were all actually really good writers
DRM: So it was your fellow matriculates, they were the –
JRS: Well, yeah. They were the influence and we’d push each other to write, you know, it was crazy, we would go on tour, you know I worked for DC WritersCorps, and uh, with DC WritersCorps it was –
DRM: Was that during your time at George Mason?
JRS: Yeah, during that time – it was government funded, like AmeriCorps, but for writers. So we went in and taught writing to all these different communities, so there were twenty writers, three cities: San Francisco, Brooklyn, and DC, and I was the only Brown dude, so I we would see Latino kids, and Guatemalans, Dominicans, and working with those kids taught me a lot. Working with the other writers taught me a lot, and we were on tour, there were three of us. There was DJ Renegade, this big giant black dude, Jeff McDaniel was the crazy white guy and I was the Brown guy. And we got hired, so we would go up and down the coast and do performances –
D: And this was all the while you were going to school.
JRS: All while I was in school. And it was just great. And Virginia is such a white state, and it was something that I never experienced, it was the first time I ever saw a black dude speak Spanish – it was a living experience, and more than just graduate school, that was the vehicle to get out there and to learn all this stuff and to go do it.
DRM: And you said, using your words, you were the only “Brown” guy around – were you the only “Brown” guy in the whole program?
JRS: Oh yeah. In the program, in WritersCorps.
DRM: That’s crazy. We’re you received well? Did you experience much resistance from the others?
JRS: No. I was an enigma to them as much as they were to me. I mean, I was from New Mexico, which is the Wild Wild West on the East Coast, you know what I mean?
DRM: Absolutely. I’m from Minnesota; I hear the same shit there.
JRS: So they had no idea – but they were fascinated, I was fascinated. I remember the first time, there was this girl Carmen Johnson, she had dreads and I asked her point blank, ‘can I touch your hair?’ I mean, I didn’t know, you just didn’t know. Santa Fe was a much smaller town back then.
DRM: And how old were you when you were in WritersCorps at George Mason?
JRS: I started when I was 23, 24.
DRM: It sounds like you’re saying the experience of the program was the catalyst for you. The environment you were in.
JRS: Yeah, then Forshay, recommended me to the hilt, “we want you to come do this program” and like I said, I met all these different writers and we helped each other and we pushed each other. It was an awesome community. And it probably was one of the most fun times of my life. I was around people that were motivated to do something all the time.
D: You mentioned you were getting hired and that you were on the road. Can you explain that a bit? Were you just being – did you have to seek out these gigs?
JRS: They started coming to us. They heard about us.
DRM: How’d they hear about you?
JRS: We just got a lot of press. We were the group that went into the Martin Luther King Library and we were doing all this great work with kids.
DRM: So when you were touring on the East Coast, then, you were doing DC.
JRS: Atlanta
DRM: Manhattan, Brooklyn.
JRS: Yeah, we were all over New York.
DRM: And you were still in your writing program while this was going on?
JRS: Yeah.
DRM: That’s amazing to have that level of exposure while you’re still getting your degree.
JRS: Absolutely.
DRM: That’s nearly unheard of.
JRS: By the time I left George Mason, I had already; I was connected around the country. We’re not that big of a community, you know. Its growing and it’s still super strong. We just saw on HBO, they’re doing this “Brave New Voices” it’s this poetry slam, youth poetry slam that they do in San Francisco, actually they do different places too. I took a team from Santa Fe, because when I came back, I brought all this experience back with me, and the thought was leaving Santa Fe was always such a big important part for anyone that wanted to make it and be successful, because you had to get the fuck out of this town, otherwise you weren’t taken seriously. I can tell you right now that is false.
DRM: Really?
JRS: Yeah, it’s good, and you need to get out and go experience, but living here and doing your work here, isn’t a failure. I’ve done more stuff in Santa Fe, and Santa Fe has always managed to keep me here and has fed my art and my creativity and brought me opportunities that I might not have gotten had I lived in other cities. I don’t know what would happen. I can’t second guess. What if I had gone to Columbia instead of George Mason like my friend did? What if I had not left minor league baseball? It all could have led to different paths, there’s no point in second guessing, my point is that coming back here is just – I feel like I’m me here. So I brought all that experience working with city kids and I started workshops in Santa Fe, and have been doing it for years and years. These kids appreciate it because they can look at me and say, ‘hey, that guy looks like me,’ with the brown skin, and we all have the same experience because we grow up here. People would always ask me, “What’s your nationality?” “Where are you from?” And I always tell them “I’m New Mexican.” It’s very unique. Spanish, Native American, White folks forever, since we started as a state and the influence is great, all of us growing up together with all these different types of people. We have the Moors, the French traders… when I left Santa Fe, I was telling Vic that I was pretty hip on how the world worked.
DRM Do you think it helps, working with youths now, that they see you as someone who was here, left, and then came back?
JRS: Yes, because they can believe it.
DRM: Do you think that discourages them from leaving?
JRS: No. I tell them, take the situation to leave and then you can come back. You can do whatever is important to you. As long as you’re doing it, it doesn’t matter where you are. That’s up to you.
DRM: I think a lot of people have the mentality that you gotta get out of the town you grew up in otherwise you’re never going to experience anything.
JRS: But that happens.
DRM: So you encourage your kids to go.
JRS: Absolutely. I encourage everybody to go. Go see what else is out there. Coming back is not the bad thing, that’s where shit gets confused.
DRM: Right, it’s seen as failure.
JRS: Right, because they came back. Every time that I came back: Documentaries, then all the spoken word stuff, the movie and all that shit came out. The CDs came even before the documentary, because it was ripe. There were all kinds of talent here – all these kids that I was working with – and we just started doing shit. And it led to where I am now, and each project was bigger and better than the last. Which is scary now, you know, cause what’s next? How do I keep progressing? The movie we just made was four million dollars, but they stretched every penny – we had a wonderful cast.
DRM: An amazing cast.
JRS: The producers and the director are all well known. Victor Nunez is like an independent film hero.
DRM: He’s remarkable – Ulee’s Gold.
JRS: Exactly.
DRM: Well I find it interesting what you say about leaving and coming back.
JRS: Right. I mean, my girlfriend loves it here, she went to Miami, did her college, moved to New York, hated it, she’s happy right here, she doesn’t want to go anywhere else. And that’s cool with me. I’ve made my peace with this town. We’re cool. Me and this town are cool.
DRM: You guys fought it out and moved on.
JRS: Right. We duked it out and decided that we love each other. Don’t get me wrong, I mean if someone were to call me up and say, “Joe Ray we like your new project, we want you to be the staff writer for it, want you to write your own show, you need to move to L.A.” I’m not gonna say no.
DRM: [Laugh]. You’re like an amicable divorced couple. So this is leading into the movie, Spoken Word, which I saw the premier of and I was here the night of The Lensic, I thought it was great – I’ve seen it twice. As you know, I’m a writer and growing up in Minnesota, then Wisconsin, and even in Chicago, I did not have much exposure to Spoken Word at all, and when I moved back here is when I started hearing a lot of Spoken Word and to be honest, in my mind it was the “Chess Club” of literature, this small, compact group of drama dorks, then I saw the movie and I was blown away. I didn’t know who you were and I saw this facet of literature that I knew existed but I brushed off, shit on, spoke badly about, and to see it done so well, and beautifully, it really opened my mind up to it. And I’ve been helping Vic out with Spoken Word, in very small dosages, up at El Farol, and when you see something like this with people that are really good at it, and there are shitty writers too that do it, but my initial reaction was based on a lack of intelligence, and to see what people can bring to these events is wonderful. My long-winded point being, where you doing this before you knew it existed – you were doing Spoken Word at undergrad and suddenly were like, “Wow, there’s this group of people that are doing this,” or, were you introduced to it and realized that this was inside of you.
JRS: I was introduced to it. I was already writing at the time of course, but you have to remember something else too, oral tradition predates writing, and what I argued when I was in graduate school for my thesis, they wanted, you know, thirty writers, and I said, well, one of my ‘writers’ is stories that have no writers attached to it because these are stories passed on generation to generation. Even sitting around the dinner table in this culture was a huge important thing, dinner being three hours long, four hours long because youre sitting there telling stories, your sharing and laughing and it was an important time for the family, and I just took that to another level, and I shared it. The thing that I love about Spoken Word versus the written word is that when you write, you can write it, put your name on it, send it off and you don’t have to be accountable for it, but when you’re up there on stage, people can boo you, people can tell you you’re a fucking asshole, or a liar – there’s a physical relationship. Ethride Knight said when you speak, your voice vibrates and hits the bones in the ear and that’s how sound works and there is an actual physical connection that takes place. And that, when you put it that way, there is a connection between you and your audience. You’re accountable for what you say – and that’s the positive too, when you hear a crowd erupt because of what you’re saying or when they moan, you know they’re getting it and hearing every word, it’s an amazing feeling.
DRM: What about when you hear silence?
JRS: The respect of silence.
DRM: Having done standup, it almost sounds like it’s easier to get someone to laugh than it is to respect your poetry.
JRS: Well, for me, poetry is a lot of personal shit.
DRM: When you go up there… it’s not written? You’re going up there. I’ve seen so many people do Spoken Word with nothing in front of them. Do you find yourself improvising on your sets?
JRS: Yeah, you have to.
DRM: Gauging the crowd?
JRS: I’m from the older school. I started off writing with a pen and paper, and more times than not if you see me on stage I’ll have a stand and my work. I could memorize it I guess, maybe I’m just lazy. There’s something about reading it, the presentation… for me it’s about the in-between. The kids now, no way. You don’t have paper, you learn it and it this shit and that. For me it’s not imperative to not have paper. The performance is inflection and how you present the material and how you interact with the people. Just because it’s written down, doesn’t mean I can’t change shit in the middle. I’ll switch order and the way that I write, I can put pieces together in all kinds of different ways. It depends on the audience – if it’s a bunch of young people you can’t do some of the hardcore shit, and if it’s an older audience, you can be more appreciative.
DRM: And you do all of that on the fly?
JRS: I’ll decide. I want this here, put it together and prepare each one for a particular audience.
D: I like that, Nabokov wrote on note cards and he would move the cards around to tell his story, the story always having the same message, regardless of the order.
JRS: [laughs] Everybody has a different way of seeing things. There’s people that go onstage and hammer it home, and I’m like, hey, there’s little kids here, you can’t be ‘fuck, shit, fuck, shit.’ Don’t shit where you eat. It’s a fucking business. I would never shit on anyone just to be seen as punk rock or avant-garde. There is a time and place for it. Don’t get me wrong – when George Bush got elected the second time I was in DC reading and I went to town and boy did those fucking people love it. They were like, “Fuck Yes!”
DRM: Would you say a lot of your work is political?
JRS: It’s political, it’s functional, the fact that any minority, any disenfranchised group that writes or performs and puts their work out there, is political. You’re giving a voice to the voiceless. Even my girlfriend wanted to know some Chicano movies to watch, she’s researching roles, she’s getting a lot of Chicano roles, and you know what, there’s not a whole lot. We got Edward James Almost, ya know.
Joe Ray had to go move his car so a nameless woman could leave the club. The interview picks up after this – discussing Joe Ray’s critically acclaimed film named after the very performance literature he is so married to.
DRM: You co-wrote Spoken Word with William Conway, correct?
JRS: Yes.
DRM: Was Spoken Word your idea or his?
JRS: Here’s how this played out: Several years ago, Bill Conway’s kid graduated from high school, form Prep, that year Santa Fe Prep had asked me to give their commencement speech. So I did the commencement speech for his son’s class and that’s where we kind of first crossed paths. He started a film company here in town, Luminaria Films, and he talked to our friend Rob Wilder, he teaches at Prep, so they hooked us up, and so they asked me to go in for a meeting and I didn’t really know for what or why, so I walked in and I said, so I heard you guys are making movies, and I pitched my story, and I had some poems in my hand, and I pitched the story about this writer who lives in San Francisco, working with youth, he comes back, you know, we had to come up with a gimmick for why he came back, which was the dying father, because you know, what they wanted to do was make New Mexico stories. One of the biggest kicks I have had as an adult was reading with Joe Hayes from Taos, the story teller! He was just this great story teller and we all knew him and stuff, and it was kind of a big deal. I remember hearing his stories, and now we’re telling our stories – there’s a line in the movie that says, “We need to tell people about our history even as we’re making it.” Spoken Word is now a piece of New Mexico that can never be taken away. It is a documentation of this part of life, this frame in time, one of family dynamic, one of culture. I went to New York once to do a reading and it was in front of six hundred people, sold out venue in Spanish Harlem. They watched the movie and we did a Q&A after, and it was amazing how these people related to the movie, being from a completely different part of the country, all the Dominicans and Puerto Ricans, which was Spanish Harlem, but they related to the family dynamic, the father/son relationship, the brother/brother relationship and that’s what I took away as much as anything else even thought this story was told in a very specific place. It’s a universal story.
DRM: It resonates.
JRS: Exactly. It’s not just Latino culture. White folks in Ohio like it.
[Vic Romero interjects a helpful piece of relation]
VR: I think too, especially with the relationship where they get it, is when they tap into that whole old school idea of your dad never talks to you, it’s just “Get your shit done,” “Get your ass up” and the son says, “Dad I want to ask you something” and the dad says “Don’t be so fucking stupid.” I think a lot of us, sons of fathers, can relate to that.
JRS: Yeah.
DRM: It is all relative. Even though this story could be in any place, what I find fascinating is, as I watched it, I remember thinking, this is the well of this cultural information, and even though it could take place anywhere, I could not think of a better environment for this to come from – especially because it is so foreign to most people. This is silly as hell, but even with my wife, Denise, she’s from Illinois, and after she moved here, I swear to God, half of the people she knew didn’t even know it was a state. They thought she was moving to Mexico the country.
JRS: Same with people in Virginia. “You speak really good English,” I got that all the time. I’m like… are you kidding me, I live in fucking New Mexico. This is third grade shit! How do you not know this? Come on!
DRM: I know you got to get going, so I’ll move this right along. Do you still speak with Conway?
JRS: Oh yeah!
DRM: You guys are buddies?
JRS: He’s got other projects going on, but let me tell you one thing about Bill Conway and Karen Koch (she was the other producer). She worked on some of the best movies ever, like Dead Man with Johnny Depp, Drugstore Cowboy, and I will tell you that the people that worked on this movie were adamant about keeping it true and New Mexico and not dumbing it down, and not sugar coating it. I appreciate them so much for that, more than I can tell you. In fact, my dad became a consultant on the movie when it came to the funeral scene because they wanted to do it in English. They didn’t believe that they would do it in Spanish.
DRM: And where was that scene?
JRS: In Chimayo, across the street from the Santuario. You know, they just didn’t understand that they would do this in Spanish for real. So they kept it authentic, and that’s a huge testament to a group of producers that were willing to keep it authentic.
DRM: That’s great – not your typical Hollywood shit.
JRS: Right, not your typical Hollywood shit. They kept it New Mexico. I am honestly proud of how this came out. I’m proud to be a part of it. I’m proud to have worked with the people I worked with.
DRM: What I loved was even the most detrimental of places in the movie were still so beautiful. The most depressed areas are so lovely.
JRS: Chimayo has been written up in the New York Times, several times as the heroin capital of the country, and you know part of the deal was we wanted to show the beauty and desperation that comes out of here, and there is a lot of both. There are things that belong. And you know, I thought my first movie was going to be this super hip, fast, bang, hip hop soundtrack, hot chicks and a lot of fucking, and ironically the opening scene, the beginning, Cruz is this rock star and when we first see him he’s banging these two chicks in a hotel room, you know what I mean, and then we anteed up. We had to find out, ‘what is this about?’ and it’s about the family dynamic. It’s about the relationships within families. And it’s a slow movie, and a lot of people didn’t realize how big a production this was, which goes back to the narrative of going home; whether you’re going back home to Ohio, or Minnesota or Iowa or wherever. And then being from New Mexico, I had so many people tell me how impressed they were with the quality – this is a real full-on movie, and there are so many that aren’t and again, this idea of how can that be in New Mexico? There’s Thor and Transformers and all this other shit, and I think [Martinez] is finally coming around, giving a little more love to it. My next project I want to do it in New Mexico, I want to film in New Mexico again.
DRM: How did Nunez get involved? Did you seek him out?
JRS: He and Karen were close, ultimately what got Sandoval and Blades and Victor Nunez involved is that they dug the script.
DRM: How was co-writing it with Conway? Easy?
JRS: Awesome. It’s essentially an auto, and we don’t say that, we say that it’s based on a true story, based on my poetry, but my poetry is all about me. I don’t know what else to write about!
[Vic, Joe Ray, and myself all laugh]
JRS: But the movie is not about me. It’s about families and relationships. It’s so much bigger than me. It’s so important to me that these stories come out. I’m happy that it’s out there and I’m happy that people went out and saw it. When we did it at the Lensic, that’s the most special show I’ve ever had because when I saw all these guys in the audience, and I heard crying and hollering in the audience, I get goose bumps thinking about it right now. I saw my name like that on screen… I started crying. This movie is about them.
DRM: That’s really cool, Joe. More humility than I was expecting.
JRS: It’s about all of us. What changed my life were the kids. We were working with this gang prevention program, and all this shit, and all these bangers, and I would see them selling crack in the junior high parking lot, you know, and there are a number of them that are dead. And when I was there, one of the kids got shot in a drive by, was killed, and one of my students was pregnant with his baby and their kids who should just be dealing with high school shit, and you know what man, instead of all these guys gunning up and going looking for revenge, we had a make-shift service in the Latin American Community Center, and all these kids got up and they read their pieces they wrote for this dude.
DRM: That’s incredible.
JRS: That’s what did it. That kind of power that art has and how much it can help young people… the fact that were even discussing cutting education and art programs is beyond me – we’re going the wrong fucking way, if you want to stop these problems and all the drug problems and alcohol – don’t forget, we live in Santa Fe and we’re in this weird oasis in the second poorest state in the nation, what goes on here doesn’t really go on anywhere else, but we don’t want to nurture the arts. We’re the second largest art market in the goddamn country; there should be no reason that any kid that wants to in the state of New Mexico should have access to the arts. I’ll tell you right now, if we allow this, all of these kids will go on to do bigger and better things. I’ve never told one of my students, you should be a poet, no, I tell them they need to express themselves in any way that is important to them, whether its music, making beats, art, drawing, freestyle, beat boxing, painting, I don’t give a fuck what it is that you choose, dance, theater, express yourself, create it for yourself. I tell these kids as soon as you put something on paper and as soon as you present it to the world, it’s out there, it’s now tangible. When you walk in all pissed off, fuck you! Fuck life! That doesn’t help, but when you express yourself in an honest way then people will listen to you and they have to pay attention and they can’t ignore you anymore. You’re not just telling people to fuck off, you’ve explained why you’re pissed off and you have a right to be pissed off.
DRM: One of my favorite scenes in the movie is when you’re in San Francisco, in the classroom, it’s very short, after you get the call announcing your father’s death, and you have to go back. And it really shows your connection to the kids. After the movie, I read that your first Poetry Allowed, 900 kids showed up? I forget the name of the place – I thought I would have remembered it, I should have written it down.
[Silence for a minute]
JRS: You know what, I did a – me and Rockwell did a performance, this Spoken Word performance. It was at Sweeney.
DRM: Yeah! Sweeney, that’s it!
JRS: Nine hundred grade school kids. I kid you not. And Julia Goldberg and all them showed up.
DRM: What was it like to show up and see nine hundred people in the audience?
JRS: IT WAS INSANE! INSANE! I’m thinking to myself, ‘holy shit.’ So I knew already what set I had to do. It was a bunch of schools, you know.
DRM: Did that throw you off?
JRS: Oh, yeah, I thought it was going to be in this classroom. It was nine hundred kids and it was awesome.
DRM: What was the event?
JRS: They just asked us to come so all these young people could see your performance and your art. I did Spoken Word, and what I did a long time ago, is I brought in a DJ, me and my DJ, he would throw down beats so that way, because when people think of poetry, its old white dudes with pipes, it’s boring.
DRM: They think of Walt Whitman.
JRS: Right, who was badass! He was a gangster when it comes down to it, he was all about fucking and hanging out and partying. He’s always writing about having a good ol’ time, this dude is gangster. And so, when I reintroduced the DJ aspect to it, people immediately changed their tastes, I mean, one of the first times when I brought it back, we dropped a Dr. Dre beat, and I’m busting out original Spoken Word over Dr. Dre beats. Like when I did the commencement speech, it was Nothin But a G Thang and shit like that, and I’m quoting [J. Christian Averte] and Robert Frost, because that’s how you – that’s the end road for me, that was how I reach these kids. I start with a simple story. You know, and when I was a kid, I was out there and I had a bb gun and we’d go out there and shoot shit, that’s what kids did was shoot things. One day I’m cruising around and I see this rabbit, and I was like, I’m gonna shoot that rabbit, I got a gun, so I shot this rabbit and I hit it and its back legs quit working and it was paddling like hell to get away from me, and I’m like, what do I do now:
I grabbed my gun
I pumped ten times and I pulled the trigger
I pumped ten times and I pulled the trigger
Pump ten times and I pulled the trigger
Pump ten times and I pulled the trigger
I pump ten times and I pulled the trigger
And it still wouldn’t die.
So I grabber a large rock and bashed its head in
Over, and over, and over until it no longer moves
My words won’t bring the rabbit back
And my words won’t let me forget
JRS: And then it becomes poetry. If you look up the word poetry, it is the maker of things. I argue that a good mechanic is a poet, or a plumber. There’s poetry in art, there’s poetry in theater, there’s poetry in music. All advertising is poetry, in the news – the blizzard of ’96. You’re using all these words and onomatopoeia. It’s all poetry. It’s everywhere. So why is it not a viable art form?
DRM: Coming from Joe Ray Sandoval, I want to know, is there a dichotomy between hip hop and poetry?
JRS: There is not at all.
DRM: So it’s the same?
JRS: It’s not the same. There are very poetic hip hop artists, but not all hip hop is poetry. Poetry is a forced language form and every word is important, there’s a lot of stupid shit out there, and it works for a mainstream audience, a larger audience. But it doesn’t mean you can’t have educated rhymes. People say Tupac was a poet and to some degree I think he was, and people say Bob Dylan is a poet, and there is a lot of it that is. Poetry is a high art form. If you listen to Emmerson and Therault, who came after Whitman, they see a poet as the lens between God and the People. But I don’t think about all that shit. I think of a poet as a vehicle for storytelling and for sharing the beauty of the world and the harshness of life. I’m proud to be a poet, and it’s not what you want to tell your Hispanic father, “Hey, Daddy I’m a poet.” It’s one step up from being a gay guy, you know what I mean?
[Vic interjects: “Hey!”]
JRS: No, you know, in the culture, you know?
Vic: No, you’re right.
DRM: Can you tell me about Chicanobuilt? I don’t even really know what it is.
JRS: It’s expressing modern Chicano culture through film, poetry, art, and clothing. We started making t-shirts just to celebrate more of Chicano culture. It’s saying we are Chicano built and we’re proud of it.
DRM: Where could someone that wanted to get these items, find them?
JRS: My Facebook page. Chicanobuilt Sandoval. I’m also opening Chicanobuilt.com again. I bought it – finally bought it back, and now I’m reopening it.
DRM: So this is something that means a lot to you?
JRS: Hell yeah. One thing you know about Chicano people and New Mexicans is that we’re a proud bunch of people, man. You’ll see 505 everywhere and guess what, we got Chicanobuilt now.
DRM: That leads into my last question: Being here for seven years, a Polish white guy from Minnesota, I’ve seen more Santa Fe Pride than any other city, and I’ve been all over this country. There’s so much pride here, and I wanted to ask you Joe, what’s the difference between Santa Fe Pride and Chicano Nationalism?
JRS: Good question. Chicano, part of it is its place, but the part about Santa Fe Pride, more so, is its New Mexico Pride.
DRM: So it’s more New Mexico Pride than Santa Fe Pride?
JRS: That’s right, because Santa Fe is an enigma in this state; it’s like Austin in Texas.
DRM: Yeah, it’s funny. When I go to Albuquerque, a lot of the people there shit on Santa Fe.
JRS: Yeah, they hate Santa Fe. It’s arty-farty, and it’s gay, and its fancy restaurants. I play poker and a King Trey, King Three – it’s a Santa Fe waiter. Pair of Kings they call a Santa Fe couple; it’s all Santa Fe jokes. And a lot if it is ignorance and it’s unfortunate, that the rest of the state doesn’t embrace it. But you know, so many Hispanics are Republican; they’re Catholic, why do think we have so many goddamn kids? No birth control, no abortions, none of that shit. I’m forty one years old, I’ve never been married and I have no children – do you know how rare that is here?
DRM: So you’re saying that Chicano Nationalism is something that exists within the state of New Mexico and within the New Mexico Pride and that here they are not separate?
JRS: Absolutely. Being in New Mexico is a part of being Chicano and that’s part of being Spanish and there are all kinds of different schools. My grandmother is Spanish, Spain. Period. Which is not Chicano! Chicano is Mexican descent, natives, and I find it hard, that’s why I say New Mexico because we are all here. All that influence is here. I know so many Hispanics that dump on Mexicans, all the time. It sucks.
DRM: Real quick, and I’ll let you go. Are you working on anything right now – any upcoming projects?
[Vic: Ask him about his award. He’s getting nominated for some awards.]
DRM: Great. What’s that all about?
JRS: Spoken Word has four nominations for the Imagen Awards – it’s sort of like the Latin Image Awards.
DRM: Where’s that at?
JRS: In L.A. Beverly Hills Hilton – black tie event. We have four nominations.
DRM: That’s excellent. What’s it being nominated for?
JRS: Rubén [Blades] and Kuno [Becker] are being nominated for best actor, Miguel Sandoval is nominated for Best Supporting and Spoken Word got nominated for Best Picture.
D: Really? Nice! Congratulations! Good luck, Joe. It’s been really great speaking with you. I was coming in here expecting some slippery “cool guy” arrogant poet and you’ve been humble, educational and quite interesting. Thank you so much for your time and your words.
JRS: Hey, I’ve been a prick in my life. But I’m proud of who I am and I quit drinking’ a couple of years ago and now, I’m chill and mellow and just enjoying my life.