american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

MIGRATORY AGENCY 137
comparing the immigrant’s future use of English to parts of the
Mexican world appears in the last line of the first stanza: “you / can ask
for a raise, cool as the Tuxpan River.” Whereas this line clearly has a
negative connotation, many that follow do not. The speaker claims
that “in this class,” they “speak English refrito.” This refried English is
invigorated and transformed by Mexican places and experiences. They
learn to speak English “tuned like a requinto from Uruapan,” “lighted
by Oaxacan dawns,” and “spiked / with mezcal from Juchitan.” These
juxtapositions exclaim a dissident sensibility: Students, English is yours,
take it, make it your own, and do not lose your language and culture.
Speak English like Pancho Villa or Emiliano Zapata, not like George
Washington. She suggests that immigrants must reimagine the
language of Washington in order to speak it themselves.
The abundance of Mexican place names (Benito Juarez, Zochicalco,
Toluca, Tuxpan River, Teocaltiche, Uruapan, Oaxacan, Juchitan,
Zapotec, Nahuatl, Lake Patzcuaro, and Jalisco) Mexicanize English
and render it accessible to immigrants. More critically, the speaker
eventually shifts from what the students will be able to do practically
with English to what the students will bring to English and how
they will change it—how they will attack it, have fun with it, and stamp
new vibrancies on its syntax, its surfaces. These impulses emerge primarily
from the notion that these immigrants/students have political
agency, as the English they will learn to speak will be “poured from /
a clay jug.” As such, it will originate with their histories, experiences,
poverty, and their sense of the earth; it will not be poured into them by
the dominant North American culture (from a Coke bottle, for
instance). The students will do the pouring of their cultures into the
dominant one, which suggests both a type of power and the potential
danger of their culture being swallowed by the dominant one.
Valdez might overestimate the agency immigrants have in their transition
between cultures and languages; nevertheless her images of the
power of these Spanish speakers to transform English are inspiring and
inclusive. When the speaker “welcome(s)” the “amigos del sur,” she
encourages them to “bring” a variety of things with them, including
their “Zapotec tongues” and “Nahuatl tones.” In doing so, she opens
wide the linguistic and cultural doors of welcome, especially because
even in Mexico indigenous speakers of Zapotec and Nahuatl (even if
bilingual) are often marginalized from the mainstream. She also
encourages them to “bring” their cultural icons with them. If North
American “patron saints” are Batman and Washington, their “patron
saints” are “Santa Tristeza, Santa Alegria, Santo Todolopuede.” Here
earlier dualisms prevail—if there is a saint of sadness, there is also one of