750 The American Century: Literature since 1945What the poetry of Soto and Baca does not possess is suggested by someone else
who maps out la frontera, the border territory inhabited by Mexican-Americans: the
chicana poet Lorna Dee Cervantes (1954–). Certainly, Cervantes can rise to a
powerful performance rhetoric just as Soto and Baca do. She is acutely aware, as
other chicano/a poets are, of division and dispossession. “Everyday I am deluged
with reminders / that this is not / my land,” she declares in “Poem for the Young
White Man Who Asked Me How I, An Intelligent, Well-Read Person Could Believe
in the War Between Races” (1981). “and this is my land,” Cervantes then adds; “I do
not believe in the war between races / but in this country / there is war.” What
Cervantes adds to this, however, is a subtle use of speech and symbol, and an even
subtler understanding of tensions sometimes within Mexican-American culture.
Specifically, these tensions have to do with machismo, the tradition of male
dominance. Sometimes, as in a poem with the tell-tale title “Macho” (1991), she
exposes those tensions simply and directly. At other times, she links them with her
notion of struggle as the sign and support of all life. What is the enemy is also the
guide, Cervantes intimates. What is other to us can enslave or, through struggle, it
can liberate. In personal terms, that other for her is men, in ethnic terms it is
machismo. In social terms it is Anglo-America; in aesthetic terms it is the English
language. In the most elemental terms of all, it is nature. The alternative in either
case is either to submit and surrender to the enemy and guide, or to enter into an
encounter: an active engagement that can lead, in the long run, through mastery to
harmony and unity. One of her finest poems, “Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway”
(1981), shows this process. On one level, it is a celebration of a multi-generation,
all-women family: her grandmother, “our innocent Queen,” her mother, the “Fearless
Warrior,” and their successors, surviving in the face of the “shadow,” oppressive
social forces that are determinately male. On another, related to it, it is a celebration
of her own life and art, as she builds a home in the world for herself: a harmonious
identity with nature, with one “gentle man,” and with herself and her own needs.
Linking the several forms of survival, homebuilding and harmony, are the images of
birds that run through this complex piece. Drawing on the Native American element
in her Mexican-American past, Cervantes uses the traditional image of birds –
mockingbirds singing all night – to describe the state of harmonious being in the
world enjoyed, in turn, by the several generations of women in her family. Playing
on pluma, which in Spanish means both feather and pen, she also links such harmony,
earned through struggle, to her own vocation as writer, maker of words and the
making of this poem. In that way, the poem itself becomes an interlingual,
intercultural signpost to survival, personal and communal. “I plant geraniums, / I tie
up my hair into loose braids,” as Cervantes puts it in the closing lines, “and trust only
what I have built / with my own hands.”
In fiction, the appearance of a distinctively chicano literature was anticipated by
the publication of Pocho by José Antonio Villarreal (1924–2010) in 1959. Setting his
story in the turbulent period from the Mexican Revolution of 1910–1920, when
Mexican migrants flowed across the border, to the beginning of World War II,
Villarreal concentrates on two characters: Juan Rubio and his son Richard.GGray_c05.indd 750ray_c 05 .indd 750 8 8/1/2011 7:31:43 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 43 PM