LITR 5731: Seminar in American Multicultural Literature

Poetry Presentation, spring 2006

Thursday, 6 April

Poetry: Jimmy Santiago Baca, "V"

Poetry reader / discussion leader: Sara Moreau

Jimmy Santiago Baca

Born in New Mexico of Chicano and Apache descent, Jimmy Santiago Baca was raised first by his grandmother and was later sent to an orphanage. A runaway at age thirteen, it was after Baca was sentenced to five years in a maximum security prison at the age of twenty-one that he began to turn his life around: there he learned to read and write and found his passion for poetry.  He is the winner of the Pushcart Prize, the American Book Award, the National Poetry Award, the International Hispanic Heritage Award, and, for his memoir A Place To Stand, the prestigious International Award. 

“V”

-Read Poem

-Objectives

            The boy/man in this poem is part Mexican, part Apache. It seems that he did not choose his life, but is forced to live this way. He is torn between his old life, the way things used to be, and having to get along in this new American society.

Obj. 1a- Involuntary or forced participation

             “railroad workers with tin hard hats”

“City workers’ tin carts and long-handled dust pans clatter in curb gutters”

These workers are the minorities that were forced to participate in society. They had to get jobs to support their families.

“I wished I had had a chance to be a little boy, and wished a girl had loved me, and wished I had a family- but these were silver inlaid pieces of another man’s life”

He has no family- they may have been killed by the Americans- only dreams of what his life could have been. He did not want to be part of this society, but he had no choice.

            Obj, 3 b&c- Native American Indian alternative narrative “Loss and    Survival” and the Mexican American narrative “The Ambivalent Minority”

             “I lean against an office building brick wall, nothing to do, no where to go”

            - He is resisting assimilation. He does not feel like a part of this society.

“de-tribalized Apache entangled in the rusty barbwire of a society I do not

            Understand”

-          Their culture was taken away from them by the Americans. Now he is Torn between his old life and his new life. He does not understand these new people or their way of life.

            “Mejicano blood in me spattering like runoff water from a roof canale,

            Glistening over the lives who lived before me, like rain over mounds of

            Broken pottery”

-          He feels like he is betraying the ones who lived before him by living in this society, but he does not know what to do now.

Discussion Questions

Since the Mexican identity may be this fusion of Spanish and Indian, what happens when you pull out the "Apache" as something separate?

Is the "Mexican" that opposes or differs from "Apache" just "Spanish" or "European?" Or does it remain something more complicated?

What other parts of the poem, besides those identified above might reflect the division of Mexican and Apache?