american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

MIGRATORY AGENCY 151
sadness. I could have chosen, however, to include a poem such as
Cruz’s “Areyto” (Red Beans 1991), which is a sprawlingly inclusive,
utopian vision of a multicultural, continental America joined by
music, dance, and song. All of these poems, though, have at their
cores a communitarian spirit in search of shared space—a nascent
desire for a shared, multicultural America acceptable to (im)migrants,
indigenous, English- and Spanish-speaking. After all, what these
poems do is share—languages, cultures, and spaces.
Whereas the poems of this chapter model (and lament for) potential
forms of sociopolitical agency, most of their authors already have
cultural agency generated by their institutional positions. I have
claimed that poetry can be countercultural and counterinstitutional,
but—with the exception of Baca—each of the Latina/o poets discussed
here teach at U.S. universities. They garner state salaries or
ones funded heavily by U.S. corporations and foundations. This fact
raises some perplexing questions, not only for the ways that bilingual
poetry challenges the English “tradition” taught in most U.S. universities.
In writing about the testimonio’s introduction to literature
classrooms and to critical inquiry, Georg M. Gugelberger asks: “What
happens when modes of transgression become sanctioned and canonized?”
He suggests that “if you are housed in academia, you will have
lost the power” of independence and subversion (2). His question and
conclusion are meritable; many transgressive modes, such as bilingual
poems and progressive hip-hop music, are in some ways “sanctioned,”
“canonized,” and “housed in academia.” But if the goal of much
Latina/o activism (and poetry) is full immersion in U.S. culture
(while retaining important elements of other cultures), then this
institutionalization might begin to look more positive. In this case,
bilingual poets at U.S. universities may begin to ensure that Latina/o
poetry will reach students who may otherwise be exposed only to
Anglo-American and some African-American literature.
With over 40 million Latinas/os in the United States, many of
whom are bilingual, and with immigration increasing, the United
States may soon become one of the largest hispanohablante, or
Spanish-speaking, countries in the world. Further, now that NAFTA
and other global socioeconomic forces have made for more fluid borders
in the Americas, Spanish- and English-speaking cultures are
meeting on an unprecedented scale. The poems of chapter 3, then,
foreground voices and a type of agency that will become increasingly
more common and more important in U.S. culture. They foreshadow
coming cultural exchanges and conflicts, protracted linguistic
interchanges, and a latent, but powerful, shift to a bilingual country.