Contemporary Poetry

dialects, idiolects and multilingual poetries 193

Whereas the men’s poetry was more linguistically free, when

Chicanas started publishing it was all about perceptions, what

was observed. To me, it’s not history, oral history, written.

It’s a matter of the relationship between power and language.

But again, that kind of participation through the language was

for us one of our strengths. It’s the keen power of observa-

tion.^59

This drive towards personal female experience is validated by critic
theorist Gloria Anzaldúa, who echoes the perspectives of Moraga
and Cervantes by emphasising that ‘The danger in writing is not
fusing our personal experience and world view with the social
reality we live in, with our inner life, our history, our economics
and our vision’.^60 She adds that ‘No topic is too trivial’, since the
danger for the Chicana writer is ‘in being too universal and human-
itarian and invoking the eternal to the sacrifi ce of the particular and
the feminine and the specifi c historical moment’.^61
An immediate feature of Cervantes’s early poems is the inter-
section of Spanish and English language. Born in the Mission
District of San Francisco and raised in San Jose, Cervantes was
deprived of speaking Spanish – or, as she puts it: ‘Mama raised
me without language / I’m orphaned from my Spanish tongue’.^62
As a consequence, her poetry is splintered with phrases from the
Spanish that often assert a disjunctive and warring texture in the
poem. ‘Poema para los Californios Muertos’ is inscribed with
the epithet: ‘Once a refuge for Mexican Californios, plaque outside
a restaurant in Los Altos California, 1974 .’ Cervantes meditates
on the battles of the Californian–Mexican Wars of the 1840 s.
The Amerindian narrative of Aztlán is read here in a feminised
description of the original Mexican California (inhabited by native
Californios), with its present-day landscape of the freeway exert-
ing ‘a clean cesarean / across belly valleys and fertile dust’ (p. 42 ).
This rewriting of the Aztlán myth is accompanied by refl ections
in Spanish on revenge for the loss of life and native inhabitants:
‘Yo recuerdo los antepasados muertos’ (p. 42 ) [I remember the dead
ancestors]; ‘Soy la hija pobrecita pero puedo maldecir estas fantasmas
blancas’ (p. 42 ) [I am only your poor daughter, but I can curse
these white ghosts]. The intersection of both languages excavates a