For 12 years, San Antonio has selected a poet laureate to represent the city and elevate the written word. On Wednesday, March 20, Eduardo “Eddie” Vega was selected to serve as the city's seventh poet laureate. He begins his three-year term on April 1.
Vega said his poetic journey began in childhood. “I've been writing poetry since I was a kid. I used to write to my mother because I didn't have an allowance,” he said.
He added: “But I could write her a little poem for her birthday or for Mother's Day. And I wrote a lot through high school, through college. I wasn't really letting people know that I was writing. Professionally, I'd say the last 15 years or so, I've been taking it a lot more seriously.”
Vega's day job is at Holy Cross High School. “I'm an administrator here, and I do some campus ministry functions. But I also teach sixth grade and 12th grade,” he said.
Vega also has a long background in spoken word and open mic poetry, a style of poetry which has a more accessible entry point for a lot of listeners. He said San Antonio is a good place for that brand of poetry.
As he got older and took poetry more seriously, he realized that elevating to the next level meant learning to perform his writing in front of people.
“I went to open mics, to little shows that were put on at bookstores. My friend and mentor Jesse Cardona, another poet, took me out there and said, ‘you've got to read in front of people,’ and I've been reading in front of people ever since.”
Writing poetry is one skillset. Performing it is quite another. He encourages young people to find their own voices.
“We don't have to sound like, those old poems that you had to study over and over when you were younger,” he said. “So that gets people's attention, and our subject matter gets people's attention, too. We're celebrating what's going on here in our city and our community.”
His bilingual skills have also proved to be an advantage.
“That's correct. I write in English, and in Spanish, and I write in the combination of both. Whether we call that Spanglish or Tejano, or Pocho or whatever we want to call it,” Vega said. “A lot of my most recent work really highlights that melding of all the languages together.”
When he was younger, he was told to write in English. Or in Spanish. But not in both.
“I finally got a lot more comfortable with what I'm writing, and I'm able to go back and forth, because honestly, this is how we talk here in South Texas. We add English to our Spanish and Spanish to our English all the time,” he said.
Vega noted that poetry isn’t static. It evolves to fill the needs of those drawn to it. And poetry from Europe 200 years ago and poetry from now in San Antonio are quite different.
His second collection of poetry, Somos Nopales, has just been published.
Vega will be celebrated at an April 15 city council chambers ceremony.
He said he writes about food, Tejano culture, social justice, and embraces nickname the "Taco Poet of Texas."
