Poet Jose Montoya dies at 81

The little farm towns of Central California held a poetry all their own for Jose Montoya.

From childhood he knew their people, mostly immigrant laborers like his own family. He knew the labyrinthine rows of fruit trees, the dirt-floor houses and trailer camps. He knew the hardship and humanity of places named Del Rey and Fowler and Laton, Yuba City and Delano.

"He just marveled that they had such a singsongy ring to them," said the poet's son, actor-playwright Richard Montoya of the L.A. performance group Culture Clash.

As a man, Jose Montoya would translate his knowledge and affection for those landscapes and their campesino residents into poems like "The Resonant Valley" and "El Sol y Los de Abajo" -- The Sun and Those Below, or, colloquially, the Underdogs -- as well as into drawings, prints and paintings etched in fierce empathy.

He also would channel his awareness of migrant workers' harsh living conditions into a lifetime of political activism and union organizing that would link his name with those of close friends like Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, co-founders of the United Farm Workers.

And he would synthesize his various roles and concerns -- community organizer, Chicano-rights advocate, Central Valley bard -- as a co-founder of the Rebel Chicano Art Front, or RCAF, the slyly subversive Sacramento art collective later re-christened the Royal Chicano Air Force.

Montoya, a leading figure in California Latino culture of the post-World War II era, died Sept. 25 at his Sacramento home. The former Sacramento poet laureate, who had been battling lymphoma, was 81.