Methods of Mischief: On Rigoberto González

In a literary climate that prizes detachment over devotion and irony over intimacy, Rigoberto González commits what might be called radical acts of sincerity. His poems dare to speak of love without quotation marks, to invoke the sacred without footnotes, to let desire announce itself in both Spanish and English with equal urgency. This is poetry that refuses the contemporary tendency to diminish feeling in favor of cleverness, choosing instead what González himself might call methods of mischief—a willingness to disrupt expectations about what serious poetry can contain.

Across four decades of writing, González has constructed a body of work that is grounded in the material specifics of Latino experience while reaching—unapologetically—for universal themes of longing, loss, and transformation. Like his literary ancestors—from Federico García Lorca to Francisco X. Alarcón, to whom he pays direct homage—González understands that the particular can be a doorway to the infinite, that the most personal utterances often carry the most collective resonance.

González published his first book during a crucial moment in American letters—near the end of the nineties, when “multicultural literature” was moving from the margins toward institutional recognition, yet still fighting charges of “identity politics” that sought to diminish work rooted in specific cultural experience. While earlier Chicano poets like Alurista and José Montoya had established bilingual poetry as legitimate artistic practice, and while contemporary figures like Juan Felipe Herrera were expanding its formal possibilities, González found himself navigating a literary landscape that still questioned whether so-called “ethnic” poetry could achieve universal resonance.

González’s work bridges multiple poetic traditions—the Spanish Golden Age’s mystical eroticism, the American confessional mode of Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath, the bilingual innovations of Gloria Anzaldúa and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. His influence extends beyond Latino letters: poets as diverse as Danez Smith, Rajiv Mohabir, Ocean Vuong, and Natalie Diaz, and even prose writers like Justin Torres, have cited his work as formative. Beyond American letters, translations of his poems have appeared across the world, establishing him as a poet who crosses borders.

What distinguishes González’s practice is the integrative nature of his vision. His poetry does not compartmentalize: it fuses high and low culture, bilingual wordplay and classical mythology, childhood trauma and adult desire. This synthesis extends to his formal approaches. González is equally at home in the lyric meditation (“The Luna Moth Has No Mouth”), the narrative ekphrasis (“In Praise of Mischief”), and the bilingual love poem (“Oda al Bolillo”). His Spanish-language work isn’t a flourish or translation—it’s a core expression. For bicultural poets like González, monolingualism isn’t just a limitation—it’s a kind of exile from parts of the self. When he writes “Ay, goldo, goldito, goldo/con esos cachetitos asoleados,” the diminutives and endearments carry emotional textures that resist direct translation, reminding us that some feelings can only be fully expressed in the language that first held them.

Desire—for lovers, for bread, for belonging—is never coy in González’s work. His speakers long with full-bodied urgency. The cardinal in “Cardinal Red” becomes both messenger and betrayer, the luna moth a fragile prophet, the bread roll an object of erotic devotion. While these metaphors may evoke a surrealist lineage, González’s surrealism is rooted in the grit and tenderness of lived experience—especially the immigrant’s knowledge that meaning must be made from whatever materials are at hand.

González’s “mischief” aligns with what José Muñoz theorized as “disidentification”—the practice by which minority subjects engage with dominant culture through neither assimilation nor strict opposition, but through transformation and redeployment. Like the trickster figures of Indigenous American and African traditions, González’s speakers refuse the binary of victim or victor, choosing instead a third path: the holy fool who transforms shame into sacred irreverence. This mischievous spirit—irreverent, campy, devotional—isn’t a side note in González’s poetics. It is the method itself.

Perhaps most strikingly, González has created a poetics that transmutes shame into agency. In “In Praise of Mischief,” he writes, “I dropped my wings/and seized the scorn, little devil/me looking for the saint clinging/to my chonies like a relic.” The poem ends with a moment of self-coronation: after Young Jesus loses his halo, the speaker claims the devil’s scorn—its own kind of crown—and becomes “little devil me.” This trajectory—from marginalization to self-possession, from punishment to pride—characterizes much of his work. For writers from silenced or subjugated communities, the act of writing itself can be mischievous: a reclaiming of space, a refusal to behave.

Beyond the page, González has shaped contemporary letters as a teacher, editor, and cultural advocate. He has mentored generations of writers and expanded the possibilities of Latinx literature through his critical essays and anthologies, including the collection Camino del Sol: Fifteen Years of Latina and Latino Writing and, more recently, the pivotal Latino Poetry: The Library of America Anthology. He has been honored for his tireless public service to the literary arts by the Publishing Triangle and Los Angeles Review of Books, among other organizations.

The poems gathered here reveal a mature artist at the height of his powers, one who understands that the most subversive act a poet can commit today is to insist on the wholeness of human experience—the sacred and the profane, the bilingual and the bicultural, the erotic and the elegiac, the misfit and the mythic. In González’s hands, poetry becomes not just a vessel of beauty but a cunning device for survival—a technology of tenderness, a toolkit of resistance, a method of mischief. These are not just poems; they are provocations, devotions, declarations. This is poetry that loves the way we do—completely, contradictorily, and without apology.