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This past Saturday was Dia del Niño, or Children's Day, in Mexico. A time to celebrate the little ones among us.

The biggest public celebration in Albuquerque was appropriately at the National Hispanic Cultural Center. It was a bang-up time, packed with kids, including my own for a spell.

But while the face-painting, cotton candy, and those strange mini choo-choo trains held the attention of the younger set, inside the building - and up the road in a nondescript building Downtown - there were other reasons to celebrate where kids are coming from.

In the early afternoon, the three theaters inside the cultural center held the early rounds for the second annual middle-school poetry slam called "Voices Emerging Equals New Thunder."

Organized by Sal Treppiedi, who teaches eighth grade at Harrison Middle School, said the event has grown from seven schools a year ago to 19 teams this year, including a home-schooled team.

At the same time, judging for a statewide essay contest called "Bullying at School - Not Child's Play" was being hotly debated among a group of grown-ups, me among them.

Let's put it this way: Dashing to the slam following the judging and attending the evening's finals as well made for a fairly exhausting kid day.

But that's a small price for an enormous privilege.

On the essays, more than 400 entries came in, asking kids to define a bullying incident in which they were involved. Simple enough. Not so simple were the directions to address that incident from a specific point of view: Were you the perpetrator, victim, collaborator, helper or bystander?

Some entrants groped their way around the keyboard. But others found it.

Keep in mind, we have adults judging, seeing the issue through our own filters. My filter was as a reed-thin black kid who sported thick glasses in a white suburban school in the late Õ60s. Trust me.

It all came back.

A power of such force was on display in these pieces that it defied description.

The angst of the former perpetrator and collaborator, the agonizing guilt from the bystander, the tortured words of the victim struggling to make sense of why them.

Not child's play at all.

Fewer than two miles away, there were words on paper, but also voices to express them.

Slamming is not beholden to the rules of poetry, so rhyme and pentameter was a little hard to find, but who cares.

I don't know what they're serving in the cafeteria at Jefferson Middle School, but dang. Jefferson, as a reminder, cleaned up earlier this month in The Tribune's annual Poetry in the Paper contest, and it was the defending middle-school slam champ as well. In this weekend's contest, it did not disappoint.

It did, however, end up in a tie with Harrison Middle School because the event ran out of clock. That was kind of a neat outcome. Harrison very much deserved the plaudits with a ton of talent and heart on display.

That heart, as well as a high level of courage, was especially on display for one topic in particular: race relations. And not in a way you would automatically think.

Mixed into what would be expected from Hispanic and black kids riffing on their experience were Anglo kids laying it down on what their lives are like when they're in situations where the tables are turned.

It was intensely honest. Sometimes brutally so.

These middle schoolers are going to be the generation that finally gets its hands on this city's lapel and shakes it.

Be it bullying, race, gender and sex relations, being gay, or anything else, they have a zero-tolerance policy for hypocrisy.

Something we so-called grown-ups could read, listen and learn from them.

Dia del Niño indeed.