american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

148 AMERICAN POLITICAL POETRY
that violence and oppression are passed down through the oblivion of
history and through seemingly innocuous cultural practices.
Most importantly, though, the speaker’s bicultural vision/perspective—
as both Spanish-speaking Latino and English-speaking North
American—gives him keen insight into indigenous oppression by both
English speakers and Spanish speakers in the history of the western
hemisphere. In his vision, therefore, los palos become “machetes,” and
he claims, “Es fácil sacar la sangre dulce / y las tripas azucaradas de los
primeros. / Que juguete, cecean, que cosa” (It’s easy to dry the sweet
blood / and the sweetened intestines of the first [Indians]. / What a toy,
they [the Indians] lisp, what a thing). This visceral image indicates that
the historical memory of oppressed indigenous is easily transformed
into a child’s game (and reward), even as “El indio patea como conejo”
(the indian kicks like a rabbit) and “La soga encoge el cuello” (the rope
shrinks its neck). The poem ends appropriately with the speaker watching
the candies scatter in his “yarda del olvido” (yard of oblivion).
Villatoro’s poem gives insight into how Spanish-language poems
can embody migratory agency, but it also signifies how U.S. Spanish
poems might have a changing cultural value, and on chapter 1’s closing
discussion about the embattled, heroic poetic speaker/witness.
On the back cover of On Tuesday, when the homeless disappeared, in
which “La Piñata” appears, in a final section of Spanish-only poems,
this section is described as “a statement of ascendance, a strategy for
identity preservation, a gift to the cognoscenti” (my emphasis). The
first two descriptions are detailed in chapter 3; the third strikes me in
its claim that Spanish-language poems are elite, intellectual-academic
enterprises. Indeed, how things have changed since the Chicano
Movement. More strikingly, Villatoro’s biography begins: “Marcos
McPeek Villatoro lived in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua during
those countries’ war years.” Thus, before we learn about his writing,
we learn that Villatoro has cultural capital as a heroic
poet-witness. Michael Palmer, even Carolyn Forché, would cringe.
Migratory Agency and
Register Switching
Victor Hernández Cruz distinguishes between types of bilingual literature,
“making a clear differentiation between elite choices and colonial
impositions” (cited in Aparicio 164). On one hand there is
bilingualism “that is a writer’s interest in other languages,” and on
the other there is “imposed” bilingualism that impacts “an entire
group of people, a whole culture” (Panoramas 128). This distinction