american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

140 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
She goes on to say that she “want(s)” monolingual readers to be able
to “stay with” her, but that she also includes “double pleasures”—
particularly resonant words and phrases—specifically for bilingual
readers (143). I do not want to suggest that Mora’s motives are representative
of other Latina/o poets, merely that her calculated use of
two languages points both to a dualistic voice and a bifurcated audience
for this poetry. Her claim also suggests that Spanish lines in primarily
English poems are particularly resonant and important, and
even these few challenge the English “tradition.”
The majority of primarily English poems that include Spanish
words and phrases literally highlight their Spanish textures in italicizing
Spanish words, phrases, and sentences. The examples are numerous.
Pedro Pietri’s “Puerto Rican Obituary” (1973), Baca’s “Mi Tío Baca
el Poeta de Socorro” (1989), Mora’s “Artista Cubano” (1994),
Sandra M. Castillo’s “En el Sol de Mi Barrio,” “Rincón,” and
“Monday Night at Pedro’s” (1997), Judith Ortiz Cofer’s “The
Changeling” (1993), Virgil Suárez’s “Poem for My Father” (2001)
and “After Forty Years of Exile, The Poet Arrives” (2002), and Martín
Espada’s “Searching for La Revolución in the Streets of Tijuana”
(2002) are just a few political poems in English that use a proportionately
small number of Spanish words and phrases. Their italicized
Spanish words foreground these poems’ bifurcated worlds—switching
between cultures is analogous to switching between languages. Many
poems of migratory agency do not have an equal number of Spanish
and English words; poems migrate between cultures as well as strictly
between languages. Even a few Spanish words serve as metonyms for
a larger world excluded from mainstream U.S. culture. However,
these poems can be politically problematic in that they may exclude a
primary audience—bilingual and non-English-speaking Latinas/os.
My reading of the next poem implicitly exposes this potential rift.
Baca’s “Mi Tío Baca el Poeta de Socorro” includes few Spanish
words but nonetheless embodies great departures between Englishspeaking
and Spanish-speaking cultures. These brief italicized phrases
are signals or slightly opened doorways to the cultures, languages, and
forces that impinge on the dominant culture. This minimal Spanish
gives Chicano-Apache Baca’s poem its most critical meanings. In the
poem, two cultures with unequal power—Chicano campesinos and
the U.S. Rangers who repress them—clash. This relationship exposes
rifts between languages, generations, methods of activism, and uses of
art. “Mi Tío Baca el Poeta de Socorro” is thus primarily English, but
its speaking voice laments for Baca’s uncle, a deceased poet and labor
organizer who in all likelihood wrote in Spanish. The poem thus