american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

126 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
Chicana/o literature. She writes, “the primary metaphor for the
experience is the migrant, who is at once the paradigmatic figure of
displacement and oppression and the leading force of persistence in
the vicissitudes of change. As both, the migrant finally underscores
life-generating rebellion against cultural erasure” (9). Arturo Islas also
rightly claims that the Mexican in the United States is a migrant, not
an immigrant: “Mexicans did not cross an ocean with the intention of
starting a brand new life in a ‘new’ world. They were already very
much a part of the landscape even before it changed its name from
‘Mexico’ to the ‘United States’ ” (5). (This idea informs the title of
Baca’s first book—Immigrants in Our Own Land (1979).) The speakers
in poems of migratory agency, then, embody both the force of
resistance to and the site of cultural and linguistic displacement.
In contrast to embodied and equivocal agencies, in which rhetorical
strategies are the means to political comment/intervention, the
rhetorical strategies of migratory agency are in themselves political.
These poets, in other words, have figured out how to make the form
of their poetry political over and above its content. The multilingual
form is itself political in challenging the dominant English discourse.
As such, there is a form/content distinction in many of these poems
similar to the one I outline in chapter 4 with regard to live hip-hop
performance. If a poem’s form is political, its explicit content need not
be political for it to do political work. However, the poems discussed
in chapter 3 are political in form and in content; the key figures of
migratory agency are both political ends themselves as well as tools for
further political comment.
In the readings that follow, I attempt to explain how the movement
between languages and cultures creates a unique type of poetic
agency. I have chosen poems that occupy varying gradients on the
English–Spanish language see-saw—I read poems that are mostly
English, equal parts English and Spanish, and one that is entirely
Spanish. Taken in combination, I hope that they successfully illuminate
the figures, strategies, and voices of migratory agency. Readers
will note, however, that many of the poems I read are largely written
in English. This fact does not privilege English over Spanish. It merely
suggests that the dominant mode for U.S. poetry still occurs on the
cultural ground of English, although that ground is rapidly changing.
Because Spanish is on this ground, it has even greater significance and
power when used in an “English” poem. Some poems have little
Spanish, but these few words have powerful rhetorical effects.