american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

130 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
disturbing division goes something like this: the grandparents’
Chicano-Spanish backs and joints perform North American-English
actions. Such a separation implies you can have our labor, but you cannot
have our voices or our bodies. This division is crude, especially considering
that for indigenous peoples throughout Latin America
Spanish is the language of the conqueror. Yet in Villanueva’s poem the
bifurcation is subtle and clear, as are its implications for the two languages,
but nevertheless disturbing.
The final stanza is entirely in Spanish, which might indicate that the
English-language actions are completed, silenced, and that there is
some hope for a self-determined Spanish-speaking future. Whereas in
the first two stanzas the silence and anonymity belonged to “nuestros
abuelos,” in the final stanza silence and isolation symbolically apply to
Anglo Americans who, unable to communicate in Spanish, are now
symbolically strangers in their new land. Though I do not want to
overemphasize technical linguistic terms, the notion of “marked” and
“unmarked” choices in code switching are helpful here. 9 Mendieta-
Lombardo and Cintron write that code switching “among nonbilingual
members of a community has a marked value,” whereas
“among those who live with two cultures and languages it becomes an
unmarked choice” (566). As such, the final stanza has a high markedness
value for monolingual English speakers, but for Latinas/os it is
unmarked because moving between languages is common for them.
The final stanza thus silences monolingual-English readers in
much the same way the “conquerors” did to Chicanas/os in midnineteenth-century
California.
Even as this isolation is enacted in the opposite direction, there is
still an abiding silence in “nuestros abuelos.” The poem is devoid of
interiority; because the ancestors’ suffering was “private,” it is now
somewhat inaccessible to the reader. Everything is action, surface,
body. In the final stanza there is no longer any separation between
Chicana/o bodies and North American-English actions because only
the corporeal remains. The only actions that occur in Spanish appear
in the last stanza, but neither are positive. First, “Sus manos se
hincharon de años / y de callos.” Their hands—here the Spanish is
flexible—either swelled or were swollen as “se hincharon” can be either
a simple past tense, reflexive third-person plural verb form or, as is the
norm in much Spanish usage, the passive verb form. Accordingly, this
action may be imposed upon the Chicana/o ancestors as the passive
implies a lack of agency. It forebodes the possibility that even their
bodies will be lost to them.