The Southwest as Imaginary Landscape (Review of "The Revenge of the Saguaro")

 

As the confluence of different cultures and the embodiment of the eternal frontier, the Southwest has long occupied a special place in the American imagination. For those of us who grew up in this region, it is hard even for us to overcome the popular images and tropes that dominate even our view of this physical and psychic domain. One thinks, for example, of lean men with big hats and weathered boots, as sparse with their words as the skies are with the meager rainfall that besets this year, or the abundance of withering sunlight that grounds down both people and places like a molcahete does to chiles. Images of isolated towns and ramshackle huts, of dogs and rattlesnakes camped out under porches (but never together!), of magical and lush expanses of green evident in so many golf courses and the endless expanses of air-conditioned houses, many in a faux Southwestern architectural style that represents a curious mix of Mexico and the Mediterranean, housing elderly Anglos who seeking relief from the gloom of colder climes. I think as well of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans such as myself, lying immobile in a sort of torpid sonambulance, without the benefits of air-conditioning or summer camps with access to pools, reading as I did science fiction novels such as Frank Herbert’s Dune and wishing for an end to the summer.

The Southwest is an open landscape that appeals to the imagination. It is filled with formulas, with the mythos of a conquering people who bought a fixer-upper and went about remolding it to satisfy their urge not only to remake themselves, but also to buy into a certain dreamlike quality that was associated with the idea of escaping the weight of the past. Perhaps as Americans we don’t have a long historical memory, at least, not anywhere near that which obsesses other nationalities, for example, my Mexican parents who seem to relive on a daily basis the indignities of the conquest. The Southwest hits different notes for different groups, but for all communities, I would venture to say that it represents an opportunity to reimagine oneself free of the limiting roles that are imposed by history and by what may seem oppressive economic and cultural conditions. Whether we grew up in a small pueblito in New Mexico, or the much larger but still cohesive entity such as East El Lay, we feel that this is a terrain that is infused with a certain latent energy, a vast space that, yes, is open to boom and bust cycles, but for the most part, is more closely attuned to the idea of becoming, rather than existing. At least I would like to believe that this is part of the reason why the individualist ethos that proves so amenable Libertarianism is so powerful here, and is as much prevalent in rural Arizona as in the more cosmopolitan Silicon Valley in San Jose, California.

The romantic imagination has long been obsessed with solitary figures in search for the conditions that allow them to express their individuality without constraint. The individualist has a personal moral code, and isn’t necessarily hidebound to legalistic formulas. Everyone aspires to their own private domain, and even if so many of us live in congested urban landscapes, deep inside, those of us who live in the Southwest with to assert authority over this private expanse, to live as cowboys do. The romantic imagination is always, so to speak, in search of a canvass to appropriate and fill, and thus it may be that so frequently we seem to be that much more open to quirky individualism, because to impose and pretend to dictate to others seems out of place in a landscape in which we wish to assert our own freedom for self-expression. I was reflecting on this as a way of explaining how it is that so many different political ideologies can coexist in this region, and trying to find the point of communality between blue-state California and red-state Texas, for example.

The book Revenge of the Saguaro is a collection of what we can term are sketches about the Southwest, probing along the edges to find what unites this region. One might be led to expect an analysis of a familiar laundry list of elements, but to do such a thing would be to commit an injustice to this book and the intent of the author. I first encountered Tom Miller’s writings when I read The Panama Hat Trail twenty years ago as a college student at UCLA. I don’t know what attracted me to it other than the promise of an alternative travelogue that would, hopefully, be less cynical than Paul Theroux’s classic The Old Patagonian Express.  I found Miller’s book immensely appealing from the outset, because it was structured along the lines of a quest, to find the origin of the famous Panama Hat, one which originated in Ecuador, and was produced as part of a long-standing cottage industry in regions of that country. For someone who was a little frustrated with his choice of study, but who felt that an engineering degree was the only possible ticket for leaving behind a working-class background, I found a poetry in that travelogue, and especially appreciated the deep sympathy as well as the touches of folklore that were included in this book. Who can forget Miller’s reflections on the ubiquity of roadside crashes, and the fantasy that, somewhere in the Andes, was a village populated by fugitive bus drivers who were forced to flee in order to evade reprisals by the family members of passengers who had been killed in accidents for which they bore more than a small role?

There are many aspects and themes and notes associated with the Southwest that are covered in this collection of sketches. Each one hits several notes, for they treat different subjects and the transitions aren’t as smooth as they could be, stretching as they do to offer coverage of a vast terrain. This is evident in sketches (I insist on describing them as such, because they don’t have the tight formal structure of essays, and because they rely heavily on description and the evocation of place and time) that encompass Ritchie Valens and La Bamba, the significance of the son jarocho genre of music for Chicano activist, a George Jones ballad called “Open Pit Mine”, and the evocation of a place called Rosa’s Cantina, and the history of smuggling in El Paso.  The transitions aren’t smooth, and they jump between communities and experiences, but perhaps they can best be described as unwieldy structures that are stitched together with emotion and a sense of yearning. There is more to the Southwest than meets the eye, a hidden history that is arrayed in overlapping layers that cross and permeate the landscape, and that are reflected as well in other sketches.

The subtitle for this collection is the following: “Offbeat travels throughout America’s Southwest”. If I could quibble with this subtitle, I would take objection to the adjective “offbeat”, one which seems to me more of a marketing ploy than a true reflection of the approach taken by the author.  It seems to me that the word is vaguely patronizing, for would “offbeat” be synonymous with “quaint” and the evocation of something that is familiar and comic but ultimately not threatening nor serious? There is nonetheless a certain obsession with outsiders that is evident, and as a seasoned reporter Mr. Miller was trained to seek it out in order to carefully burnish and present it as part of what one would imagine is an approach that has much to do with mordant wit of a modern-day Mark Twain.

There are certainly a wide variety of quirky topics as well as characters covered in this collection. We can start, of course, with ornery environmentalist Edward Abbey, the writer who did so much to lay the foundations for the environmental movement by writing books such as Desert Solitaire and The Monkey Wrench Gang, and who is introduced in comic fashion in one of the sketches. Abbey’s activism encompassed anarchic elements but also a deeply-seated individualism that brooked no compromise, and that one gathers could make him a fairly difficult person to entertain. He had his own contradictions, for while meditating on the influence of the landscape, he was also quite happy to eat hamburgers (as if the cattle industry necessary to produce this product were in any way more conducive to environmental concerns) and inveigh against a sentimental approach to outsiders, whether they be Hollywood types who were interested in consulting with him on projects or what he criticized as “the Latino invasion of this country” (p. 50), an unfortunate sentiment that sounds particularly galling to a Mexican American such as myself who has heard it so often from so many quarters, and which is used to construct the notion that we aren’t native to the Southwest and aren’t entitled to a place. There are sketches of much less accomplished but no less memorable authors such as Walter James Swan, “a semiliterate author of no repute” (p. 213) who wrote a book with the homely title of me ‘n Henry, in which he cast himself as the neer’do well who aspired to a degree of authenticity and innocence that was deeply appealing to those who came from the outside and were looking for what they imagined was a Southwestern ethos. As a matter of fact, this last character, as were most characters in this book, was deeply sympathetic to me, and Miller was able to evoke their singularity while revealing a self-deprecating note that shows us how he included himself in a homespun fashion in this journey of exploration.

There are also stories of proletarian awakening, such as that involving the strike against mining company Empire Zinc, in a region that was notable for the existence of many one-company towns. Once again we enter into a psychic landscape of paternalist structures, of an authoritarian streak that bided no challenge, in which thugs were called in frequently to break up strikes or to expel workers who proved recalcitrant. In a region of open spaces paradoxically we still had these closed societies that were very unequal, and in which communities such as the Mexican-American community were subject to severe exploitation, depending as they did at times on the intervention of outsiders in a formula that is common to many westerns. In one bruising historical episode Miller narrates the story of one strike, and the role played by a group of blacklisted Hollywood filmmakers who arrived in the scene and who were able to undertake a retelling of this episode, producing the film in the same community and with several of the same figures who had figured so prominently in the episode. As the author notes, “The strike and the movie blur; one defines the other” (p. 132), and by doing so, he also narrates the transformation of one of the strike leaders, Juan Chacón. Miller is deeply sympathetic to this fight and to the sage of the making of Salt of the Earth, and yet, perceptively he describes as well the contradictions that would undermine the legendary (fictive) qualities of some of these episodes and characters. The thing about legends, nonetheless, is that they prove remarkably resistant, and rather than erode the appeal of myth, they prove remarkably impervious.

Such is the case, for example, with the story about Jack Ruby’s kitchen sink, and the growth of the memorabilia market. It is precisely this need to tap into the legendary quality of these episodes and these characters that we see how it was that, in the contention of Miller, this market was first established in the Southwest during the tumultuous decade of the 60s. It sprang, so to speak, from the national trauma of the Kennedy assassination in 1963, and the personal experience that this represented for so many in this country. This was an episode that was shared with the public in a very intimate way, via the medium of television in particular, and as such was a tragedy that loomed large and that hit many dramatic notes. Of course, one can’t help but imagine that Miller is exaggerating slightly, for surely, memorabilia were collected before this episode, and there must surely have been a market for said items among collectors, but the author traces the expansion of this market to conditions in place during this moment, the intersection of image and commerce. What is notable was how so many prospective collectors expressed the view that this type of acquisition represented a form of investment, while also at the same time taking note of a certain historical aura that pervaded these items, things that were traced even to the humble workaday items that had been collected from Jack Ruby’s estate. As narrated by the author who was present during this first major auction of memorabilia, Miller was present to document the event as well as to join in the mania, intending as he did to buy Ruby’s kitchen sink, an object that would have no other collectible value (such as that accorded to Hitler’s luxury cars) other than that provided by that mysterious aura of connection to historical events. It is best left for the author to relay the results of this quest.

These essays are, quite frankly, embellishments on the legends. There are at times attempts to provide an perfunctory explanatory background, but these seem somehow incomplete, relying as they do seemingly on interviews (such as those relating to the authorship of the item of food known as the “chimichanga”, a creation of the Southwest) or on personal literary sources, as if we had consulted our Tía Chencha or the cousin of a neighbor, or obscure books that could easily be fictive imaginations. (As least that is the impression one receives, although it may very well be that they could exist.) There is at times a subtle political note in these sketches, evident, for example, in the description of the strike against Empire Zinc, or the shooting episodes that involve Mexicans being killed on the border (la linea refers to the actual border, whereas the term frontera is much more amorphous, much more grander in scale, and refers to a netherworld). It passes judgment at times, as is the case with the figure in the title sketch, Revenge of the Saguaro, a title that is in itself a parody of the western.

As I wrthe narration of the experiences of a neer’do well by the name of David Michael Grundman. A transplant born in New York, he enters this collection of lore by virtue of the fact that he was killed by a saguaro during a drunken afternoon in which he had taken to shooting the long-lived and emblematic symbols of Southwestern (and particularly, Cochise county) wildlife. Leave it to Miller to refashion this story as one of the outsider who terrorizes a community (of saguaros) and who engage in a duel with one individual (we were treated, so to speak, to the life story of this tree), where the purity and innocence of the latter triumph over the malevolence and sheer stupidity of the former, even though both die. This episode hinges on precisely this comic element that creates a pathos necessary for this successful telling of the story, in which villains as well as heroes are clearly delimited, and in which many of the themes of the book are repeated: the endurance and hardiness of the native, the destructive energy of the outside invader, and the romantic conception of a duel, a shootout, a conflict in this crossroads of cultures and times and civilizations. It occurred to me as I read this sketch that Miller omitted what would have been the perfect simile to describe the saguaro, not only as an example of an ornery native inhabitant who wishes nothing more than to be left in peace, but as a symbol to the outside world. Think of the saguaro as a fist, with the middle finger directed against the viewer.

 

(Doesn't this encapsulate what many of us imagine as the attitude of a state like Arizona?)

These sketches constituted an enjoyable collection of stories that were filled with humor and colloquial turns of phrase. They brought attention to a wide array of elements, symbols and characters that exist in the Southwest, but that are in no way new elements. They feed in precisely to the prevailing notions and stereotypes of this region, but do so in a deeply sympathetic fashion that only serves to underscore the appeal of these legendary qualities and to refashion them by connecting them into new constellations. They point to the continual appeal of storytelling, and to the ability to pounce on the telling phrases as well as the gestures and unexpected connections to map out notable outposts in this fertile terrain of the imagination that is the Southwest.


OGRomero © 2013
(Copyrighted by OGRomero, 2013)

Review of Spielberg's "Lincoln"

 

 

The ghost of Lincoln continues to haunt us. He looms large over our imagination, a figure who has been mythologized to the point that we despair about ever really understanding the man. To a great degree, this is due to the fact that mythology has a momentum that is hard to stop. We elaborate these stories about singular people who have accomplished great things, and we associate them with telling gestures, phrases and characteristics that help to support these myths that we create.

As a young man, I remember hearing about our 16^th president and his achievements during the period of the Civil War. We were told that he had helped to preserve the union by fighting against the secessionists, and that furthermore, he was a paragon of uncompromising rectitude. The Civil War was a tumultuous period in our history, of course, but what does this mean to an eight year old who is dealing with his own crisis of self-identity, living as it were between two worlds and anguishing about whether or not he will ever truly be considered an "American"? The telling gesture and appearance proved more memorable than the consideration of the factors that led to this conflict, and the sight of a tall and lanky man with a somber visage, grave and penetrating, cloaked in black, was one that was quickly burned into our imagination. He was so somber of visage, with sunken cheeks and stony visage, that it is easy to imagine him provoking fear rather and trust, if not for the fact that we also, for some reason, associated him with gentleness and moral rectitude, "Honest Abe" as he was known in popular parlance.
 

But the Civil War was about more than just preserving the many resources and markets found in this territory (as stated in Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States", p. 193), or state’s rights (as the unrepentant Confederate apologists would still seem to insist), or about freeing the slaves. It was a moral question, undoubtedly, and a political one, and also an economic one, but more to it than that. The intervening 150 years have produced an extensive bibliography by scholars who continue to investigate this period, and the figures who played such a prominent role. It seems to me that the ghost of Lincoln cannot be laid to rest because there are still too many unresolved conflicts, one that revolves around the national imaginary, that conjunction of disparate elements that will cohere to form a nation. The story of Lincoln, and by extension, of the Civil War, is a story that is all-too-modern, and it comes down to the way in which we imagine ourselves as citizens and participants in this grand experiment that is the United States of America.

It is with these considerations that I wanted to begin my review of Spielberg’s movie “Lincoln”, one that was released to much critical acclaim in November of 2012. It is a historical film that may be termed a “biopic”, and as such, given the liberties and the broad brush typically used by Hollywood in such films, it was one that faced the very real possibility of perpetuating what are more comforting and simplifying myths about this historical figure, sacrificing subtlety and psychological insight. Many times, what we tend to find in movie treatments, is the temptation to settle for shining surfaces, and not for the imperfections and contradictions that lie underneath. Hollywood has not had an outstanding track record when it comes to these types of films, because the dictates of a commercial film are such that they have little room for exposition, and reserve much more for traditional narrative formulas that are dramatic in nature, because so often they are predicated on direct confrontations, and on what we may term the culminating point.

Refreshingly enough, we don’t have those worries in this film. Spielberg may be a very commercial director, and he is a master of the narrative formulas described above, but he also happens to be a very adept creator who knows when and where to reign in the impulse to embellish and exaggerate in order to highlight important cultural or historical processes. This is not a bloated special-effects laden film, although there is much room and temptation to rely on spectacle, especially for a director with a track record such as that of Spielberg. We have almost no battle scenes, except for what I remember is a short scene illustrating the bombardment of a military base. To the credit of the director, he has chosen to rely on the work of a highly talented screenwriter, Tony Kushner, who wrote the screenplay, and to focus on the drama behind the passage of the 13^th Amendment ("Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction"). It is hard to envision that these elements would have proved as compelling as they do in this film, one that takes place in dim or dark interiors, denoting as this does a type of internal anguish that torments the characters.

We are, of course, taken by the portrayal of a morally ambiguous president, played by accomplished English actor Daniel Day Lewis. How can we give life to a legend, clothe the specter in flesh and allow us to imagine him not as a grand mythological figure, but as a man who had many doubts and qualms, and who had to struggle with these and other personal difficulties? To the credit of the screenwriter and the director, we have the portrayal of a man and not a myth, even if, at the beginning of this film, when Lincoln has just won reelection and is on the verge of winning the Civil War, it is acknowledged by the characters that the man has already become a myth. (We see him in an opening sequence, sitting at night on what appears to be the back of a wagon, lit by candles and a few torches, greeting soldiers, black and white, groups who may not trust each other, or nonetheless unified by the president, who appears almost as a patriarch, in a pose that is a much more informal rendering of that evident in the national monument in Washington.)

 

What makes this film compelling is that, ultimately, it is about a man who is flawed, who is never as consistent as he is portrayed, despite the folk appellation that is assigned to him and that is familiar to any child, that alluded to above, of “Honest Abe”. He is a man of integrity, of course, but he is portrayed as a calculating figure as well, one who was intimately aware of the accommodations and promises and the “dirty business” necessary to garner votes. (The movie doesn't mince in this portrayal of the necessary "horse trading".) He is eloquent, of course, and very charismatic, but we also see a man who is at times overwhelmed, who retreats into himself, pushing away his wife in the course of this hopeless venture, and beseeching her to help him make the load that he carries a little less intolerable. It seems as if we have a man who is complaining and who is less gracious than portrayed, but this representation, rather than diminish him, instead increases his stature, because it makes him much more recognizable, much less distant because he is so like us.

The passage of the 13th amendment was a saga in and of itself. It was predicated on the notion, as explained in the film in terms of the legalistic conception of a trained lawyer such as Lincoln, that no loose ends should be left behind. The Emancipation Proclamation had proclaimed that African-Americans (“negroes”, in the parlance of that time) were now free, and while it was motivated by a military necessity, that of undermining the economic basis of the South so that it wouldn’t be able to continue to muster resistance to the North, it was also motivated by the platform of a party that was created, in large measure, to fight for the abolition of slavery. Whether Lincoln did believe in the eventual incorporation of Negroes as citizens, is a question that hasn’t been fully resolved in my mind. He was a stout Republican, however, and as such, one would have to imagine that he believed in the platform of his party, and the film certainly attributes to him much sympathy towards this group, even if prejudice and discrimination was deeply incorporated into the fabric of national thought throughout the United States.

In a film which can be characterized more as a character study, there is much less scope for grand dramatic action. The conflicts that do occur are evident in the arguments that take place within the White House, either between Lincoln and his cabinet ministers, or between him and the party leaders, or in the debates that take place in Congress. The film relies on witty disputation and on occasional telling and comic stories and put-downs, but as mentioned before, we do not have grand battle scenes or duels or flashy gestures. And thank God, little of the endless explosions that are such a mainstay of Hollywood blockbusters. We have morbid scenes that detail the tragedy of this conflict, with dead bodied laid on the battleground, with looks of utter destitution, while a somber president rides among them, lost in quiet thought, reflecting on the sacrifice that has been paid. (Yes, perhaps the director does pull at a few heartstrings in these scenes, but thankfully, the John Williams score is understated, and doesn't seem too manipulative.)

One of the most refreshing touches in this film is to give us a figure who loved anecdotes, and who no doubt loved not only to embellish them as he told them, but to share them as necessary, during circumstances in which he needed to build rapport with his collaborators, break the tension or convince and shame his antagonists. One of the best of these is the story attributed to Ethan Allan, the American patriot who, while on a visit to the British Isles, found that the still bitter and dismissive British lords had put a portrait of George Washington in the privy as a form of insult. The rejoinder, in which the American patriot turns the insult on its head, is earthy but also has the effect once again of humanizing the myth, showing us a man who was able to cultivate a sense of camaraderie and who knew the value of stories: “It is a valid place for the portrait, and efficacious, for everyone knows that a portrait of George Washington is just what is needed to make the British shit all the faster”, to paraphrase.

 

 

We have three houses that are at war, which represents level upon level of internecine conflict. Besides the conflict between the Unionists and the Confederates, and between the Republicans and the Democrats, we have as well the conflict within the Lincoln household. The president is always being accused by his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, of not doing what is politically expedient, and of sacrificing the interests of the family. She would seem to have a point, for Lincoln seems to spend much more time with his cabinet than he does with her, and one wonders at how strained this marriage must have been. We also have two sons who demand attention, and who Lincoln is tasked with nurturing with what seems to be little help from his wife. The elder son is ashamed of not serving in the army, and he asserts his own need to claim his own space, his own “secession”, in the same way that Lincoln’s wife asserts the priority of her own household and her own kin over the demands of the nation, claiming her own “space” as well. There is a continual search for dignity by those who feel constrained, and these conflicts can’t help but touch upon the grander political and military struggle, and the difficulty that we all have to compromise and cede a little territory, in the same instance in which we have a president who is in charge of reincorporating a group of states, willed as he is to reflect and defend on both personal and public domains. 

And it is in light of this that we can point, once again, to the enduring value of this man and this historical epoch. As I was watching it, I couldn’t help but reflect on the struggles during the Civil Rights movement of the 50s and 60s, and the way in which the task of emancipation was left uncompleted. We know that Lincoln believed in “liberality” when it came to Reconstruction and to reincorporating the leaders of the rebellion, and didn’t wish to create a climate of persecution that would lead to simmering discontent and reprisals, even if the mood in the North seemed favorable to a more vindictive approach. But we also are aware of the fact that Reconstruction was a deeply flawed process that needed a stronger guiding figure, and a stronger institutional (political, economic, social) basis, and because it lacked these elements, it resulted in a process that was left incomplete, with a century of Jim Crow laws to follow in the South and with a legacy of second-class status for many minority communities.

In that sense, I am left to consider how the Civil Rights struggle has also failed to achieve many of the aims that it sought to achieve, and how it remains current in our national imagination. This is all the more so since so many indicators would tend to show that the African American and Latino populations lag behind in many social indicators, and yet, we face a political climate of recrimination that leads us to believe that this legislation was somehow mismanaged. We have, thus, reflection upon reflection, and the wound has still not been healed, with the result that divisions persist, and the legislation that resulted from President Johnson's tenure as president is also under renewed attack (a new bombardment of Ft. Sumter?). This become all the more evident in the recent affirmation of the Supreme Court during the first week of July of 2013 that provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1965 can be stricken down (specifically, those that have to do with federal supervision of voting rights implementation) because they don’t take into account the new political reality in these southern states that were subject to federal scrutiny. It must have been just as grueling a political fight when Johnson sought to garner support for this legislation during the 60s, and as I watched Spielberg’s film, it seemed to me that I was seeing an episode of recent history.

That is why the ghost of Lincoln cannot be laid to rest yet. There is still a vital debate, and still too many unresolved questions. The fact that Lincoln had to coerce and bribe politicians in order to garner the necessary votes for the amendment, does not subtract from the legend, but instead, shows us a figure who had to rely on much more than just mere charisma, intelligence or soaring eloquence. He knew how to deal with a contentious congress, and he was a man who was able to appreciate and follow the political math, while remaining true to certain principles that, in one telling scene in the film, are summarized in terms of Euclid’s axioms, and one in particular: “Two things that are equivalent to the same thing are equivalent to each other”, to paraphrase.

When it comes to our current president, who was invested in so much hope in a time of such dismal political partisan and a divide that seems to be every bit as wide now as it was 150 (or 50) years ago, I just wish that he had the courage to rely less on his own soaring eloquence and professorial manner and instead show a willingness to visit the trenches, and fight for those things that distinguish us, so that we can finally complete the process of emancipation and determine what it means to form part of a commonweal of citizens.

 

 

OGRomero © 2013
(Copyrighted by OGRomero, 2013)

Review of "A Place to Stand"

                                              I drew kindness from the silence of the prairie at noon and the

                                              streams trickling between rocks and through canyons where I roamed;

                                             from the birds that crowded fence lines, the horses I stopped to pet along

                                             the road, the dogs that trailed me. In the same way that nature broke

                                             down leaves and stones, it broke down the hardness in my heart.  

                                                                                                                                                (p. 104)

 

Jimmy Santiago Baca is a renowned Chicano poet from New Mexico who has garnered much critical acclaim during the past few decades. In addition to his poetry, he has also written novels, and his works detail the experiences of someone who has come from difficult circumstances, finding a unique expressive voice that savors the beauty of language. This is the case with his autobiographic novel A Place to Stand, a work that that is as much a denunciation of the penal system as an affirmation of the ability of art to redeem.

As indicated before, Baca’s formative experiences were hardly promising. He begins by describing a visit to see his father in a prison cell, having been jailed for public drunkenness. We quickly are able to ascertain that this episode serves as the cautionary prelude to what will befall the author, who eventually will end up in a similar place. But what is different is that both his mother and his father came from stable if very different families, and despite their early marriage that forced them to drop out of school in their teen years, had benefited from their years in high school. Baca will have no such favorable circumstances.

The conflicts that tear apart this family are those that are unique to communities who come from historically disadvantaged communities. In this case, there is the fact of discrimination, one that is felt most strongly by his father, who is of darker appearance. He is acutely aware of how his parents are treated, and it leads the author to feel a sort of anxiety that will be more than confirmed by his subsequent experiences, as he relates how he and his brother were evaluated in the most humiliating manner while interred in the Catholic Boys’ Home, never able to measure up to the expectations of prospective adoptive parents: “Our hair, our color, our speech—everything is wrong about us. She asks me how I feel and other personal questions, and I respond with shrugs, not really caring about anything.” (p. 174)

There is a common thread in the early childhood experiences narrated by Baca. This has to do with the inability to find a stable home, that “place to stand” that he can affirm as his own. After his parents separate, he is shuttled off to live with his grandparents, an experience that he recalls as idyllic but as all too short. He will not attend school on a regular basis, an action that is somehow condoned by his grandparents who prefer to have their grandchildren at home, and I can’t help but wonder if it is motivated as well by a long historical memory of how these institutions have failed children who come from an ethnic background. There are, of course, other issues that underlie the experiences of the author, and if they don’t occupy center stage to the drama of institutional neglect and lack of guidance and stability, they nonetheless are present.

A sense of abandonment seems to permeate Baca’s narrative, and like the desolate landscapes of the small New Mexico pueblos, he is unable to find a proper direction. There is, of course, a strong community ethos in these pueblos, because there is a strong tradition that unites families that have lived in this area for hundreds of years. But there is, also, the case that there is a process of displacement , one motivated not only by economic transformation and the arrival of new industries and new interlopers from adjoining states, but also, by the fact that there is as always a tension between what is considered traditional and modern.

His parents where, to all appearances, very modern. His father was a popular high school athlete, and his mother a cheerleader. A narrative undercurrent that seems to permeate this work is that his parents succumbed to a few of these pressures, and were tempted by modernity and the promise of self-transformation. What is evident is that Baca seems to celebrate a community ethos but he perceives it as being under threat, and the happiness of his parents as young adolescents aspiring to achieve a middle-class lifestyle and fulfillment is also one that is tempted by consumer culture and the breakdown in family stability. It is as if his parents were to be considered victims of a type of biblical fall, a temptation that will follow their descendants (Jimmy, his brother Mieyo and his sister) as a curse. His father will not be able to fulfill the promises of such a transformation (politics is the ultimate medium for expressing this), and his mother will also abandon him, setting the pattern for subsequent displacement and loss that will characterize their lives.

There will come a period in which the author will be shuffled from one institution to another, from a Catholic Charity house, St. Anthony’s Boys’ Home, to a state boarding institution. He will, of course, always yearn desperately for family unification, but will know full well the rejection that he has experienced, not only by his mother who has abandoned him, but by his extended family members, by aunts and uncles that seem distant, and by the unfortunate death of his grandfather. He lacks the ability, as well, to give expression to anything other than his anger, for without the example of bonds of affection, his life will be consumed by fear and by a defensiveness that will give way to unconscious acts of violence that will sabotage him throughout his early life. Intimacy eludes him, and instead, he acts out by becoming an adept street brawler, and by immersing himself in a life of petty crime.

After another short interlude in another idyllic setting (this time, not the household of his grandparents on the plains of New Mexico but in San Diego, CA), he is able to form relationships that would appear to represent a breakthrough. Unlike his frustrating relationship with Theresa, the New Mexico girlfriend who was as distant as a mountaintop but who obsessed him nonetheless, perhaps with the beauty of an impossible ideal or because she was the analogue to his mother who had a similar effect on his father (he is in many ways recapitulating those experiences, and the desperate search for cohesion and a sense of belonging), he is able to start a relationship with another woman who seems much more responsive. He is, as always, trying to reestablish that family circle that he lost as a child, and his “brother”, in this case, is a Michigan transplant by the name of Marcos. The memoir is predicated on encounters such as this one, on periods of intimacy that never last, because he isn’t able to overcome the fear that lies below the surface, a fear that expresses itself in blind rage and acts of violence.

The most dreadful experiences still await him, and in a way, they were foreshadowed from the very beginning, for as noted above, one of his earliest memories of his father involved a visit to see him in jail. Jimmy was also institutionalized as a child, and tried to run away repeatedly, but always returned. He came to prefer these places, as uncomfortable and threatening as they were, because these institutionalized spaces perhaps represented an element of regularity in his life, places that substituted for the comfort and family stability that he lacked otherwise. As much as he ran and tried to escape, he always carried his fear with him, and this mindset was also confining and delimiting. It led him to have several encounters with authorities, culminating as they did in his conviction for distributing narcotics while live in Arizona.

At this point, the full weight of his experiences hit him, and we enter into a new phase of this novel, one with a reformist agenda. The prison system, of course, is one that no longer offers opportunity for rehabilitation, and instead, is predicated only on an escalating dynamic of punishment and control. He has been sentenced to five years in prison, and he meets many others who mirror his own experiences. They are the dispossessed of society, the ethnic and economic underclass, Chicanos in the majority but also African-Americans and members of other races, who have in a sense been doomed to incarceration because of unfavorable family circumstances and because they haven’t been afforded the opportunities that others have had. In this case, while I recognize that there are many valid points to this argument of institutional exclusion, I would have to also question whether it doesn’t also skirt responsibility for individual choices. While Jimmy seems to be suggesting that he needed to sell drugs in order to earn the money to buy a contractor’s license, it seems to me that his judgment was also clouded, and that even if he couldn’t stop selling drugs because it would invite reprisal from his suppliers, he seems as if he did suffer from tunnel vision.

What follows is the narrative of a terrible and dehumanizing experience in the prison correctional system of New Mexico. It is a narrative that represents a logical conclusion to his story of abandonment and victimization, because in this environment, life is predicated on withstanding a series of perpetual threats and learning how to navigate a society that encapsulates the worst excesses of predatory conduct. it isn't only that the prison guards abuse and humiliate them continually, it is the fact that so many inmates lose hope and choose to victimize, threaten and punish each other. In this environment everyone seems to be armed with prohibited items, and there is a code of conflict resolution that relies on instant retribution. There is no possibility for him to reform his spirit, and as he is punished by being banished to successive cells that are all the more brutalizing for the isolation they impose, he discovers hope. It resides in art.

He narrates, then, how in his darkest moments he learns how to read and write, undertaking a correspondence with a good Samaritan who has sent him a letter. Literacy opens up new landscapes, and it is in this discovery, which is slow and gradual, that he comes to orient himself and to gain a measure of open ground in a space that would otherwise deny it to him. This is not to say that he can transcend his circumstances, but it is evident that the development of a poet’s mentality allows him to break that barrier of communication that he had only been able to do seldomly before, with his friend Marcos, with his girlfriend Lonnie, with that cousin from childhood with whom he played so freely, not having to wonder if he was being judged as somehow different or other. It all comes to the fore in another of a continuing series of confrontations with prisoners, this time with his cellmate Boxer, who he attacks and is in a position to kill:

 

                                While the desire to murder him was strong, so were the voices of Neruda and  

                                Lorca that  passed through my mind, praising life as sacred and challenging me.

                               How can you kill and still be a poet? How can you ever write another poem if you

                              disrespect life in this manner? Do you know you will forever be changed by this

                              act? It will haunt you to your dying breath.

                               (p. 206)

The poet is making the slow climb out of the depths, and is finding a new rationale for being, a new pursuit that will open up new vistas for him, allowing him to claim that peaceful mental landscape he had described before when he talked about rural New Mexico. It is a respect for life and, particularly, for his own life and experiences, for the relationships he cherishes and seeks to make whole, even when they were damaged through no particular fault of his own. Ironically, this awareness is tinged by pathos, because he will lose his father, his mother and his brother, the first dying of alcoholism without ever having been able to reclaim his wife, his mother being killed by a furious husband who refuses to consent to a divorce, and his brother Mieyo to drug abuse and the depredations of criminals on the street, being found with his skull crushed in an alley in Florida.

But he has found and been reaffirmed by his relationship with others in prison. He found this sense of bonding and protective concern in Macaron, an older prisoner who lived in the adjoining cell, and who counseled him on how to survive, and who served as one of his most honest critics, and who cautioned him against assuming a voice that wasn’t his:

                                He had a critic’s instinct for knowing a good poem; this talent came from his

                               motto: NEVER BACK UP. He had put his life on the line so many times that he had

                               an uncanny sense of what’s real and what’s not. There was no room for academic

                              foreplay or pretentiousness. His convictions came by standing his ground in the

                              trenches, face-to-face, chest-to-chest, and eye-to-eye with the enemy.

                             (p. 249)

They came as well from his interactions and friendship with another Chicano convict, one who went by the name of Chelo and who was tattooed from head to toe with symbols that together constituted a narrative of survival, a language that he related to Jimmy:

                              I wear my culture on my skin. They want to make me forget who I

                              am,  the beauty of my people and my heritage, but to do it they got to

                              peel my skin off. And if they ever do that, they’ll kill me doing it—and

                              that’s good, because once they make you forget the language and history,

                              they’ve killed you anyway. I’m alive and free, no matter how many bars

                              they put me behind.

                              (pp. 223-224)

And, sadly, in the senseless violence and sacrifice of convicts such as Mask (Mascara), who when Jimmy was feeling despair at having his release date postponed and wishes to engage in a retaliatory strike against another inmate, commits the act of violence himself, saving Jimmy the penalty of having to have an extended sentence imposed upon him. (What is troubling is not that Mask would undertake this action, but that neither one, neither he nor Jimmy, expresses any remorse about knifing another inmate and possible killing him, thus rendering grotesque an act of charity and supposed fellowship and showing the long stretch that the author will have to walk in order to heal himself.)

But he will be released, eventually, and he will be able to undertake a new career, fashioning himself as a poet and eventually starting a family when he moves back to New Mexico after a sojourn in the South. He will manage to reclaim his family, teaching his mother the Spanish that he picked up in fellowship with other inmates, and reclaiming a heritage that will represent a new beginning. It is fitting that he will finally be able to stop running, so to speak, and this book represents a document that seeks to draw attention to those he left behind, those whose lives are wasted in despair and acts of violence, but who nonetheless are crying out for hope. This helps us to understand this novel as constituting as much a personal autobiography and a narrative of authorial awakening, but also as a social document:

                                My job was to witness and record the ‘it” of their lives, to celebrate those who

                               don’t have a place in this world to stand and call home. For these people, my

                               journals, poems, and writings are home. My pen and heart chronicle their hopes,

                              doubts, regrets, loves, despairs, and dreams. I do this partly out of selfishness,

                              because it helps to heal my own impermanence, my own despair. My role as

                              witness is to give voice to the voiceless and hope to the hopeless, of which I am

                              one.

                             (p. 244)

Perhaps this will allow him to close the circle and expand the reach of what is understood as family, to encapsulate a social role for the writer, akin to that of the poets he had mentioned before, Neruda and Lorca.

OGRomero © 2013
(Copyrighted by OGRomero, 2013)