american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

128 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
Villanueva’s seamless use of both languages symbolically redeems the
“private suffering” (55) they endure in this state of physical, economic,
and linguistic limbo. He immediately frames the poem in a state
between languages—images of community are in Spanish whereas
courtroom legalisms are in English. The first instance of this dualism is
an English epigraph from the unjust, predatory courtroom of midnineteenth-century
California. It appears, as is customary, between the
title and the first line of the poem, which is also “Nuestros abuelos,”
and is attributed to “The Honorable Don Pedro de la Guerra,” a
California senator, lawyer, and judge of Spanish descent.
The epigraph and its footnote are key to understanding the poem’s
suggestive framework. 8 According to the footnote below the poem,
Guerra’s speech was originally delivered in court on April 26, 1856,
“in opposition to the ‘law to settle land titles in California’ ” that was
“approved by the legislature” that year. The epigraph and footnote
suggest to readers that the poem will be directly oppositional as well,
but they soon learn otherwise. The italicized epigraph begins with the
seemingly rhetorical question, “Who are the plaintiffs?,” which Guerra
answers instantly and unambiguously. The plaintiffs in the case, which
gave Chicana/o lands to white settlers, were the “conquered who are
humbled before the conqueror asking for his protection, while enjoying
what little their misfortune has left them.” The plaintiffs, moreover,
were unable to comprehend the “prevalent language” (English) of
“their native soil,” which makes them “strangers in their own land.”
Here Villanueva (and Guerra) portrays the migrant’s (not immigrant’s)
lament depicted by Islas, Baca, and McKenna. In choosing
this epigraph, Villanueva uses the terms of colonial conquest, terms
that highlight the dislocation of Chicanas/os and their inability to
resist it due to a lack of speaking skills in the conqueror’s language. As
such, they have been rendered childlike and obsequious and, most
disastrously, silent. They have not been driven off of their own land to
other lands, but made inferior on their own lands to “their
conquerors,” which is colonization at its worst.
The epigraph appears between the repeated “Nuestros abuelos”
and is huge and forbidding in relation to them. The epigraph and
footnote combine for parts of eleven lines; the poem itself has sixteen
lines. Chicanas/os’ ancestors are both figuratively and literally made
small in the U.S. courts. However, “nuestros abuelos”—represented
in Spanish—suggests that identity, family, and heritage are the
province of Spanish-speaking roots, not Anglo North American ones.
These two words imply that the poem’s speaker considers himself a
product of a collective heritage of Chicanas/os, not of our heritage,