american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

MIGRATORY AGENCY 131
In this final line, the speaker describes his ancestors’ deaths in
Spanish. Even though Spanish is now the controlling language, they
remain silent, wordless, absent. “Sus cuerpos” (their bodies), in
Villanueva’s final stanza, are “cansadas cicatrices” (tired scars) that
have arrived (“han llegado”) at a “humilde tumba.” Their bodies,
then, arrive at a single humble tomb—this communal grave ends the
poem on a note of collective experience, community, and heritage.
But here humility comes not in the language of the conqueror, as it
does in the epigraph, but in the Spanish “humilde,” which is a more
mellifluous word than its English counterpart, “humble.” Small
consolation, then, that they die in the beauty of poetry, in “la humilde
tumba.” For the speaker, this end seems inevitable due to the momentous
“por eso” (literally for this, but usually translated therefore) in the
final stanza: “y por eso / sus cuerpos, / cansadas cicactrices, / han
llegado / hasta la humilde tumba.” Though not as dramatic, this
therefore hangs on the end of the line and strongly suggests an
inevitable outcome much as it does in James Wright’s “Autumn Begins
in Martins Ferry, Ohio” (1963). In Wright’s poem, the destitution,
frustration, and latent violence of poor fathers in the steel belt of the
Ohio Valley is made manifest in their sons’ high school football games:
Therefore
Their sons grow suicidially beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other’s bodies. (636–637)
These lines show how the Spanish “por eso” packs an emotional
punch in comparison to “therefore,” which sounds cold, distant, and
legalistic; “por eso” sounds like a plea, a slow drip into sadness whose
three syllables can be painfully drawn out.
Villanueva’s poem sets some basic groundwork for my understanding
of migratory agency. The poem moves strategically between
languages like a migrant worker does between locations. Without this
migration, these poems would not be able to exert external influence
back on the forces of culture and language that work to dissipate
Latina/o communities. 10 Cervantes’s “Poema para los Californios
Muertos” (Emplumada 1981) shares many strategic and rhetorical similarities
with “Nuestros abuelos,” but Cervantes prominently features
the voice of a first-person speaker dramatically present in the poem’s
actions. This first-person speaker vivifies both the identity of the
Chicana agent and her collective cultural memory, thereby bringing