Overview

California Southern: writing from the road, 1992-2025 is the first collection of prose and poetry by longtime Los Angeles-based poet and journalist Adolfo Guzman-Lopez. Guzman-Lopez writes about the head-swirling images and sounds at the U.S.-Mexico border crossing in Tijuana, as well as growing up Mexican and undocumented in blue-collar National City, and surf-city Pacific Beach, as well as the Los Angeles he's spent nearly 25 years reporting on for the NPR affiliate in L.A. Join Guzman-Lopez as his writing takes the reader along the neighborhoods of Southern California seen through the lens of an immigrant, father, husband, son, poet, journalist, Mexican, and American.

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9781954640078

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Reviews

Adolfo Guzman Lopez is at once a poet, performer, reporter, and urban guru of SoCal streets y cultura. Whatever he chooses to zero his pen on we can trust it is critical and worth the read. California Southern is a vital collection of poems told with fierce compassion, a journalist's relentless eye, a searing activist heart, and infinite wisdom. In well-crafted verse we hear his authentic voice calling out to us from the other side of palm trees, protest lineas, busted concrete, ravaging fires, and tangled highways. This is the urgent testimony of a man who has lived and breathed the experience, and these pages are his sacred offering to all of us. This is one of the most highly anticipated debut collections of poetry to come around in a quarter century! -Tim Z. Hernandez, author of They Call You Back Adolfo Guzman-Lopez illuminates the interconnectedness of two countries from the hem of their borders, revealing the shared tapestry that defines Southern California. His language is intimate, cinematic, and painterly, with complexities loosened on the breath, on the refrain, and the orange wheels of the skateboard of his youth. With precision, Guzman-Lopez maps the sacred paths that intertwine with the freeways, boulevards, and riverways along the ""Spine of Califas."" Trust where he takes you. ""Use your heart, dig deep,"" he implores. California Southern celebrates the sacredness of hands, of work, and the prayers that exhale color and dreaming. - Imani Tolliver Adolfo Guzman-Lopez's California Southern is a collection of poems that maps the migration of a Mexican turned Chicano across the mythical south of Califas. Part documentary, part memoir, Guzman-Lopez offers a manifesto caught somewhere between 80s Reaganomics and the liminal spaces of a border crosser. It's ""la linea, where X marks the spot,"" where no one needs ""no stinking papers!"" and ""The liberty bell of the barrio / is a car horn on a '67 Chevy."" Bilingual & experimental in border culture, California Southern is a dissident expression, a wild & playful cruise through the barrio streets where love for Aztlan meets Los Angeles and love for San Diego meets Tenotchtitlan. This is the seer with a fractured identity, ""littered with accents,"" ready to bite. - William Archila

Author Information

Adolfo Guzman-Lopez has been a reporter at LAist 89.3, the National Public Radio affiliate in Los Angeles, since 2000. He's been a poet even longer. In 1994 he co-founded the performance-poetry group The Taco Shop Poets in San Diego. The group toured nationwide for a decade. In the early 2000s he founded the Spine of Califas poetry series with Xiuy Velo and Willie Herron of Los Illegals. But to appreciate how the Mexicano-Chicano-American parts of him were hard to hold together, check out the 1990s Chicano true crime podcast he reported and hosted for LAist Studios, The Forgotten Revolutionary. It won a Golden Mic for 2022. Adolfo lives in Long Beach with his family.

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