american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

MIGRATORY AGENCY 141
highlights the chasm between the uncle’s politically efficacious
Spanish poems and the speaker-poet’s self-declared ineptitude.
The migratory agency of Baca’s poem is cross-cultural, interlinguistic,
and intergenerational. The speaker is self-accusingly cynical
and faithless, but the power he summons is politically potent, even if
the spirit of that power is eulogized in his murdered uncle. According
to the speaker, his uncle’s poems were tools used to organize his community’s
resistance to oppression. As “Poet de Socorro,” a title that
suggests Uncle Baca was both a poet of “socorro” (translated as help,
assistance, or aid) and the poet of Socorro, the county in which
Albuquerque is located, near Baca’s childhood home. The title is both
honorary and practical. In Tío Antonio Baca’s world, poetry was
politically effective; his “poems roused la gente / to demand their
land rights back” (cited in The Norton Anthology of Postmodern Poetry
591–593; original emphasis here and below). These are some of the
most inspirational lines in contemporary poetry, I argue, because they
assert unequivocally poetry’s political efficacy. Even though this is one
of the poem’s few Spanish phrases, it is a repository of hope, power,
and solidarity.
As testament to the Uncle’s influence in the Chicana/o community
and to the force of his poetry, “men wearing remnants of Rinche
uniforms” invade his house and assassinate him. “Los Rinches” (the
Texas Rangers) are legendary for their history of treachery against
Chicanas/os. Rafael Pérez-Torres shows that Baca evokes the historical
violence of the Rinches/Rangers as a “disembodied presence,” which
suggests that “their power lies beyond individuals,” a technique that
“underscores the impersonality of repressive power” (Movements 81).
(Baca’s poem thus echoes Cervantes’s image of “silver buckles and
spent bullets” and the claims of absent presence.) Even though this
anonymous—their faces are “masked in dusty hankies”—but specific
repressive power drags Uncle Baca from his “one-room adobe” and
murders him, there are several agents, including poetry itself, that
oppose this violence. Uncle Baca’s Spanish-language poetry actually
organized and energized la gente (the people). For the impoverished
people of Socorro, then, their power too “lies beyond individuals.”
The power of the uncle’s poetry also resides in part outside poems
themselves and with the people who sang and chanted them in opposition
to the theft of their lands. His poetry thus lives after his death.
Baca’s poem is an elegy not only to his uncle, but to communitybased
action motivated and organized in part by poems. Though
Uncle Baca’s “house still stands” and the speaker-poet “drink(s)” in
his “spirit,” the speaker lacks hope in poetry and in the future.