american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

138 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
happiness. For the speaker, all is apparently possible because, she
believes, abundant optimism is not only within the purview of North
Americans; the saint of you-can-do-anything (“Todolopuede”) comes
with immigrants rather than it being discovered in the United States.
Such hopefulness is perhaps sardonic, a tongue-in-cheek nod to the
unflappable “American Dream” that rejects more dreamers than those
who actually live theirs, but there is hopefulness in the speaker’s
proclamations about immigrants’ abilities to change English, and by
extension, the United States. The proclamations are playful and witty,
but they also suggest an agency capable of enacting transformation:
the students “will sprinkle / holy water on pronouns, / make the sign
of the cross / on past participles, jump like fish from Lake Patzcuaro /
on gerunds, pour tequila from Jalisco on future perfects.” Sprinkling
holy water, making the sign of the cross, jumping from water to air,
and pouring tequila are all emblematic of transformative processes,
the passing from one state into another. Each action moves from the
quotidian to the transcendent. The students will transform the boredom
of grammar to the transcendence of religion, the splendor of flying
fish, and the festiveness of revelry. Finally, the students are in
power positions. They will act upon English pronouns, participles,
gerunds, and future perfects.
Like Cervantes’s poem, English is the main language of narration
in Valdez’s “English con Salsa.” In the latter, however, the speaker
implies that English will be spoken differently by Mexican immigrants,
that it will be spoken through a mask. Near the beginning of
Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, the narrator speaks of his grandfather’s
advice to treat white people with the utmost deference and respect
when face-to-face with them while silently subverting their authority
and power. In other words, his advice is to speak their language but
not to believe in it (Ellison 16). Such is the implication in “English
con Salsa.” In this ESL “course,” the immigrant students will have
fun with English. They will put it on happily, rejoicing in their new
language. They will “say shoes and shit”; they will “grab a cool verb
and a pollo loco / and dance on the walls like chapulines.” In other
words, they will happily do the song-and-dance that some U.S. citizens
expect from immigrants: be happy that you are here, and if you
don’t like it and don’t want to speak English, go back where you came
from. Until then, make sure you show gratitude. 13 As such, the students
will act like stereotypical buffoons or children, inanely repeating
“shoes and shit,” dancing the crazy chicken (“pollo loco”), and
bouncing around in ecstasy like grasshoppers (“chapulines”), all the
while silently working to change English and “American” culture.