american political poetry in the 21st century - STIBA Malang

NOTES 209
7. See Anne Shea’s “ ‘Don’t Let Them Make You Feel You Did a
Crime’: Immigration Law, Labor Rights, and Farmworker
Testimony” in MELUS 28.1 (Spring 2003): 123–144, for an in-depth
discussion of this issue.
8. There seem to be substantially more epigraphs in bilingual than in
monolingual poems. See, for example, Villanueva’s “I Too Have
Walked My Barrio Streets” (Shaking Off the Dark 51–54), where the
Spanish epigraph is from Neruda, the opposite of the case in
“Nuestros abuelos.” Another example is Maurice Kilwein Guevara’s
“The Easter Revolt Painted on a Tablespoon,” in Poems of the River
Spirit (Pittsburgh, PA: U of Pittsburgh P, 1996), 55.
9. Although the concept of markedness was developed by Roman
Jakobson and the Prague School of Linguistics and later conceived as
a Markedness model by Carol Myers-Scotton to account for code
switching in speech, for current purposes it is most simply elucidated
by Mendieta-Lombardo and Cintron.
10. See José Montoya’s “Pacheco Pass,” in In Formation: 20 Years of Joda
(Aztlán: Chusma House Publications, 1992), 81–82; See also Sandra M.
Castillo’s “Rincón,” in Paper Dance: 55 Latino Poets, eds. Leroy V.
Quintana Cruz and Virgil Suárez (New York: Persea Books, 1995),
16, for examples of migratory agency similar to “Nuestros abuelos.”
11. The image, language, and voice in the lines “Los recuerdo en la
sangre, / la sangre fértil” echoes Montoya’s lines “la sangre de / La
Raza” in “Pacheco Pass” (see the previous footnote).
12. This change is already happening. The prominence of Spanish placenames
in the United States and the popularity of Latin music are two
prominent examples.
13. While walking past a T-shirt kiosk at a recent street fair in Manhattan’s
Little Italy, I noticed a T-shirt screen printed with these words:
“Welcome to the U.S. Now Speak English!” This couplet captures
perfectly the sentiment I discuss here regarding “English con Salsa.”
14. See Mexican Victor Hugo Rascón Banda’s play “La mujer que cayó
del cielo” (The Woman Who Fell from the Sky) (Mexico City:
Escenología, A.C., 2000) for a trilingual (Spanish, English, and
Tarahumara) commentary on cultural and linguistic miscommunication.
It is based on the true story of Rita Quintero, an indigenous
woman from Mexico who appeared in a small Kansas town in the early
1980s without a clue as to how she arrived there.
15. Balaban’s translation of Borisov’s “Let Him Be,” New Orleans Review
11.1 (1984): 82 is one of my favorite contemporary translations.
Balaban’s Spring Essence: The Poetry of Ho Xuan Huong (Port
Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon P, 2000) has garnered critical
acclaim, commercial success, and controversy. Ho Xuan Huong was
an eighteenth-century Vietnamese poet, and some Vietnamese believe
she never existed and that hers was a pen name for a male government
official. For other Vietnamese, she is a national hero.