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
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