american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

132 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
greater emotional outrage to the poem than does the third-person
narrator of “Nuestros abuelos.” Whereas Villanueva’s poem enacts a
split subject and a cultural/linguistic migrant, “Poema para los
Californios Muertos” enacts an embodied first-person subject who is
bilingual, bicultural, and fissured between languages as well as
between an inaccessible past and a future haunted by a ghostly
absence of her cultural heritage.
As in “Nuestros abuelos,” Cervantes’s poem begins with an epigraph.
This one, however, is brief: “Once a refuge for Mexican
Californios . . .” It appears on a “plaque outside a restaurant in Los
Altos, California, 1974” (42–43). This historical marker, Candelaria
suggests, “operates as a mnemonic stimulus” for the speaker’s sense of
heritage (“Rethinking” 125). The poem thus deals with a local history
of small, dying California towns once home to Mexican Californios,
and as the first lines make clear, the notion of progress as false
promise. An image of violent transformation marks the first lines:
“These older towns die / into stretches of freeway. / The high scaffolding
cuts a clean cesarean / across belly valleys and fertile dust.”
Here an image of death exists simultaneously with one of life. As
Chicana/o towns die, they morph into that prototypical beacon of
prosperity—the freeway—and into the image of an unnatural, invasive
parturition. Cervantes suggests that what is progressive is also regressive.
The inevitable result of this death and birth is “a bastard child”
of a city full of ghosts.
The speaker’s sense of dispossession becomes clear in the second
stanza when she is physically present in Los Altos. Cervantes writes,
“I run my fingers / across this brass plaque. / Its cold stirs in me a
memory / of silver buckles and spent bullets.” Here the speaker gives
us simple information about what she touches, how its surface feels,
and what memories it arouses. She narrates in English her actions and
the images the cold plaque “stirs” in her memory. These lines betray
little emotion or overt opinion. Her actions are measured and composed,
and her response is cold, distant. Even “silver buckles and
spent bullets” have little affective power despite the reader’s suspicion
that these objects are symbols of oppression and colonization.
Spanish, on the other hand, plays a role contradictory to the measured
English. As Jeraldine R. Kraver explains, Spanish “is the language
of anxiety, frustration, and rage” in the poem (202). When the
speaker switches languages in the second stanza, she moves from a
narrative voice to one of rage, but also one that expresses collective
identity, solidarity, and cultural heritage. About the dead Californios
(“Californios Muertos”) she proclaims: “Yo recuerdo los antepasados