194 contemporary poetry
violent history of conquest and subordination. Commenting on the
development of Chicana writing, Norma Alarcón poses that her
aim was to encourage those who challenged linguistic hierarchies:
‘the silence and silencing of people begins with the dominating
enforcement of linguistic conventions, the resistance to relational
dialogues, as well as the disablement of people by outlawing their
forms of speech’.^63 Moreover, Louis Reyes Rivera proposes that:
‘When you speak the language of your oppressor you either absorb
all of his values or your recreate your tongue to change each
image and syllable into weapons for the people’s awakening’.^64
Read within these critical contexts, Cervantes mounts an attack,
using Spanish as an agency for recovery and reaffi rming cultural
complexity. The actions of revenge and memory are also viewed
in gendered terms: ‘tierra la madre’ (p. 42 ) [mother earth], as well
as ‘Los recuerdo en la sangre, / la sangre fértil’ (p. 42 ) [I remem-
ber them in my blood, my fertile blood]. It seems particularly
apt that the poem closes with a refl ection upon the Californian
indigenous tree, the eucalyptus, as ‘the pure scent of rage’
(p. 43 ).
Cervantes comments on her use of Spanish that ‘I don’t want
to pretend I know more / and can speak all the names. I can’t’
(p. 45 ). The amalgam of English and Spanish in ‘Freeway 280 ’
grants an intimate perspective on the speaker’s relationship to
the land, culture and past wishes of escape. Opening with the
Spanish description of ‘Las casitas’ (p. 39 ) [small houses] next to
an industrial site, a sense of intimacy is continued by the descrip-
tion of the ‘abrazos’ [embraces] of wild roses around the houses
(p. 39 ). Chicano critic Juan Bruce-Novoa proposes that this
form of combined language use differs from the experience of
bilingualism:
The two languages inform one another at every level. There
are certain grammatical usages, words, connotations, spell-
ings which to a native speaker of Spanish or English, or to the
true bilingual appear to be mistakes, cases of code switching
or interference in linguistic terms, but which to the Chicano
native speaker are common usages, the living reality of an
interlingual space.^65