Poet Raul Sanchez on finding a voice that transcends language and borders

Each day during the month of April, KUOW is highlighting the work of Seattle-based poets for National Poetry Month. In this series curated by Seattle Civic Poet and Ten Thousand Things host Shin Yu Pai, you'll find a selection of poems for the mind, heart, senses, and soul.

In the 1940s, the Bracero program was an agreement between the United States and Mexico that brought millions of migrant workers the U.S. Many families settled in Central and Eastern Washington during this time, working in fields while U.S. servicemen were drafted abroad. Raul Sanchez's father was one of those workers, and the influence of American culture, tangled with Sanchez's Mexican roots, is a source of inspiration for his poetry.

"His experience here prompted him to have his son — me, the first one — to learn English and speak the way those people did in the north," Sanchez said.

And so Raul learned English. In his teens, he went back and forth between Mexico and the United States, caught between two cultures. His poetry has that same kind of listlessness over the borders of Spanish and English, a formal language and offhand slang.