Manazar Gamboa was a local area poet. His image and one of his poems are on the side of the Manazar Gamboa Community Theater in Long Beach.
The poem:
"Bottomwillow:
tiny town in Kern County, California
1939: My family is picking cotton. My mother
drags a ten-foot canvas sack behind her- a white giant
worm glowing in the sun.
She stoops over to drag it, her hands move
rhythmically, pitching soft, cotton balls from the
low claw-like plants.
It's hot...hot...hot I stoop behind her dragging
an old potato sack: imitating.
When I tire, I straddle her canvas sack.
She pulls white worm and brown child along the
long, dusty row.
Dark, Indian eyes determined;
her long, black hair a horse's tail;
swaying, and swaying, and swaying.
Slowly, my head goes down. I fall asleep on
the peaceful, cotton-stuffed sack...
To the rhythm of the picking, and the dragging,
and the swaying, and the rays of the morning sun."
From his 1/7/2001 Los Angeles Times obituary (
visit link) :
"Manazar Gamboa, a convict-turned-poet who devoted his life after prison to writing and sharing the liberating power of literature with others from troubled backgrounds, has died.
Gamboa died Dec. 13 at a Long Beach hospice from complications of liver and heart failure. He was 66.
An important Los Angeles poet who began writing about the urban Chicano experience before it was fashionable, Gamboa led Beyond Baroque, the Venice literary center, in the late 1970s and was published in such respected magazines as the Chicago Review."