The Glorious Next Steps of the Next Generation of Chicano Poetry
The new generation of Chicano poets is negotiating ever-present themes such as identity and masculinity but through a decidedly millennial lens — one that is fully aware of the issues and challenges in their communities, but whose consciousness has been shaped by the previous generation’s successes and shortcomings in shaking off the burdens of machismo, assimilation, and identity politics. Two of the more compelling debuts of 2020 that offer an emotionally charged vision of growing up aware of their Mexican birthright in the contemporary American cultural landscape are Alan Chazaro’s Piñata Theory and Michael Torres’ An Incomplete List of Names.
In Chicano letters, the most notable presence of the pocho is in José Antonio Villarreal’s novel Pocho, published in 1959. The book is set in California in a community of immigrants, including people who fled Mexico after the Mexican Revolution of 1910. The title character is Richard Rubio, a young man whose Americanization through the educational system (and later military service) foments irreconcilable differences with his nationalistic father who wants to preserve the old Mexican ways. Instead, Richard chooses a different path, one that acknowledges he now belongs in a new country with a new language.
A similar scenario unfolds in Chazaro’s poem “Julio César Chávez vs. Oscar De la Hoya, 1996,” a fight that represented the rivalry between Mexican and Chicano cultures, with the Mexican side having the upper hand since boxing, like soccer, is sacrosanct in Mexico. The speaker, a child witnessing the enthusiasm in his family’s crowded living room, observes that when De la Hoya (whose propensity to be tongue-tied and stutter his way through televised Spanish-language interviews irked many a native Spanish speaker) enters the ring,
Everyone booed, telling him to go back
to his locker like the traitor he was. The Mexicans
thought he was gringo and the gringos thought
he was Mexican. I should’ve smiled
with missing front teeth for the Golden Boy
in his mixed-up outfit, a combo
of U.S. and Mexican flags, but I didn’t.
Chazaro’s speaker, like the disparaged boxer, like Richard Rubio, is also a pocho, once a pejorative term for an American-born child of Mexican parents, judged negatively for their presumably precarious connection to their ethnic heritage. It has since been reclaimed with pride as a form of resistance, or at the very least, as an assertion that this identity, too, is as complex and valid as any other.
In the poem “A Pocho Boy’s Mixtape,” for example, Pocho Boy’s reconnecting with his ancestry during one of many visits to Mexico is a sensory experience best communicated by cataloguing the sights and the thoughts they trigger, like the reality that no matter how Mexican he looks, he will undoubtedly be pegged an American, and possibly a target: “My fear?/ Being kidnapped by space pirates and beheaded for the syllables / inside my wallet. / It’s sensationalist, I know. / But what’s a peso to a dollar if they take away/ my hands?” These moments of gravity, however, are balanced by Pocho Boy’s humorous takes on getting lost in the tourism: “listening to Mariachis/ in Tlaquepaque is the death I’m asking / for.” And later: “I’m sitting in a courtyard with Acapulco / chairs — flamingo pink, lime green — avoiding April / taxes.”
The mixtape in question is a whirlwind of thought and activity that actually leads to clarity, and maybe even a hard-won peace when the poem concludes: “there are more than two sides to every story, just / like there are more than two stories in every mouth.” This is a startling departure to the countless poems written on the subject of biculturalism and bilingualism that express “getting caught in the middle” of two nations or living in the hyphen of a hyphenated identity like Mexican-American. That sense of confusion or feeling like the perpetual outsider is present in Chazaro’s work, but it doesn’t remain stuck on binaries like North-South, English-Spanish, Mexican-American, which is refreshing. The poem “While Visiting Mexico I Binge Watch the First Season of Stranger Things on Netflix,” affirms the breakdown of the binaries mentioned above in one line: “I consider multi- / dimensional travel as we make / jokes in English then laugh / in Spanish.”
Chazaro’s use of American pop culture, particularly music, as a vehicle for expressing his state of being is empowering. The dilemmas and bittersweetness of yesteryear’s pocho are now stages on a journey that yield more positive results like self-acceptance. In the poem “Broken Sestina as Soundscape,” for example, what begins as “mixed / feelings about not recognizing Pedro Infante’s lyrics, about playing / more Tupac than mariachis” ends with:
But I’ve learned how to break different neighborhoods
open and let oceans swim inside me, a mixtape
of blood and knuckles swelling against these unbordered
soundscapes, something new in my stereo always playing.
The guilt perceived in the poem is not of having to replace one set of cultural values and artifacts with another, but in not arriving at the moment of understanding that instead of competition there’s reconciliation — the antidote to feeling “voiceless and misguided in my body” — sooner. The tension of the tug-and-pull of two cultures is unnecessary when both can be embodied by the same individual, just like said individual can exist in two — indeed multiple — places at once. From “Reading Autobiographies”: “The summer I was saved I was sitting / on cobblestone steps in Xalapa / while Massive Attack played inside // my headphones.”
The trope Chazaro uses to signify this inner turmoil turned self-affirmation is the piñata, hence the title. “Tonight / I live to be undone,” remarks the speaker in “Psychoanalysis of a Piñata,” pronouncing the mission statement — to search for the self in the chaos. And in “These Hours Are So Colored and Wasteful,” reveals the stage of reflection: “We all carry certain amounts of piñata / inside us, stringed to whatever tiny or giant / truths we’ve tied ourselves to.” And finally, in “Piñata Theory,” recognition not resignation. The former leads to agency:
If I am piñata then hang
me with strings of coriander
and rainbowdust while playing
retro surf music and popping
party balloons until I am
spilling myself and you are
reaching to gather whatever
part of me is unbroken.
Chazaro’s confidence in presenting Piñata Theory’s Pocho Boy in a language that uplifts his identity with positive reinforcement, rather than bogging his story down with trite rhetorical questions (Who am I? Where do I belong?) or worse, mired in existential angst, breaks new ground, energizing those pervasive conversations about self-hood with renewed perspective.
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If Chazaro toes the line only into an exploration of masculinity with a few poems early in his collection, Torres dives all in with An Incomplete List of Names. It’s worth noting that critiquing toxic masculinity, while at the same time celebrating manhood, is a practice found in the works of a number of celebrated Chicano poets like Luis J. Rodríguez, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Andrés Montoya, and Tim Z. Hernández. Torres adds a surprising tenderness and affection, certainly an expression of love between heterosexual men, mostly unencumbered by the homophobic baggage or language that even the best poets can’t help but invoke, if only to underscore the fear of being Othered as queer. There is one instance of such an awkward step in the poem “Learning to Box,” in which the young men “[call] each other / putos like hocking loogies.” Torres is at his best in poems like “All-American Mexican,” whose imagery is calculated to keep the focus on the affectionate exchange without letting it be overpowered by the anxiety of appearing gay:
When I left, the homies told me they loved
me. And I loved them, even though when we
said it, we chased our I love yous with
laughter the way you cage the air
to catch a butterfly. You can’t be too sure
who’s listening.
It’s important to note that the potential for emotional growth has always been there for this remarkable speaker who in the poem “The Pachuco’s Grandson Smokes His First Cigarette” understands the tension between his interior life and the exterior one when he ascertains: “Just because I don’t say love / doesn’t mean it doesn’t stir // within me.” The poem “Learning to Box,” on the other hand, offers insights on the indoctrination of youth into the aggressive male culture during puberty: “That summer / I learned men are born from muscle tees, // sharp teeth, and pink scars on smooth faces.” And later, “No one told us // we moved with such grace, or that passion / didn’t have to be violent.”
What Torres does exceptionally well in these poems is to stretch beyond the anecdote to shape a multivalent story that invites more than one protagonist or encounter into a more expansive conversation about perceptions of Chicano masculinity and identity. In the “Pachuco Grandson” poems, for example, the Pachuco — think zoot suits of the 1930s and 40s and the young Mexican American men who were demonized and victimized for their choices in speech, dress, and music — speaks to the legacy of defiance and self-realization. And then there’s the gem “After the Man Who Found Me Doing Burpees at the Park Said: ‘I Can Tell You Learned Those on the Inside’” (perhaps a nod to Chicana poet Lorna Dee Cervantes’ celebrated “Poem for the Young White Man Who Asked Me How I, an Intelligent, Well-Read Person Could Believe in the War Between Races”). As in the “Pachuco Grandson” poems, Torres lets the title tell one story as he launches into a different albeit parallel narrative about assumptions and presumptions:
I came here to write you
a story
where four brown boys set out
to solve a murder
in their hood.
But my characters keep
getting stopped
by cops
and told to stay
still.
The speaker’s journey toward enlightenment about his place in the world, however, is fortified by an important decision made during the formative years of his life, which affords him the opportunity to sidestep the trappings of gender expectations or at least to define manhood on different terms. A persona is created — REMEK —a graffiti tagger.
As REMEK, the speaker is now an outsider from even his own community and therefore not bound to his family’s rule or rules. “On Being REMEK,” reimagining the self begins with the adoption or reclaiming of a name, a political act pachucos, Chicanos, and pochos have exercised. REMEK expresses the context by which his agency has become possible:
REMEK of remembrance of the many other Mexicans who
became names their fathers never gave them. Names created.
Or taken from textbooks. The end of a song. Names from the
Wandering imagination, plucked like an orange — something
glowing — among the branches of the mind.
The purpose of naming is to make the self visible. The eighth section of the poem “Roll Call with Elegy” underscores this sentiment: “We name things because we don’t want them / to vanish.” Incidentally, the book’s title “An Incomplete List of Names” is the ninth section of “Roll Call with Elegy.” In it, the names of other taggers, a motley crew of youths who eventually grow up (though not all of them, like REMEK, move away) connected into adulthood by their shared experience and history. From these tags on walls, bridges, and other street surfaces, a community of men is born, as well as REMEK’s drive to take ownership of his identity and destiny, as expressed in the third “All-American Mexican” poem:
I’m building my own country. Looks like
My 7-year-old self, rocking a Looney Tunes
Raiders tee and throwing-up the Westside.
My county doesn’t speak Spanish but
It knows when you’re talking shit.
My country fits onto this very page.
My national anthem gets getting mixed.
We’re working on a website.
In the poem “[White] America” the speaker asks “What do you see when you see me?” That’s one of the questions that Torres attempts to answer, but not for the benefit of the America that doesn’t see past the surface. The depth of understanding selfhood and manhood is in service to the communities of the speaker — and the speaker himself — as an act of tribute and self-examination, gestures of love and respect.
In this outstanding debut, Torres certainly proves that he is a formidable voice and a poet with a vision that invigorates the continuing dialogue on masculinity. Both he and Chazaro — Piñata Theory and An Incomplete List of Names should be read and appreciated side by side — enter the Latinx literary landscape with extraordinary books that deliver exciting new avenues toward the critique and consideration of identity and gender.
Piñata Theory. Published by Black Lawrence Press on August 14, 2020, 95 pages, $16.95 paperback; An Incomplete List of Names. Published by Beacon Press on October 6, 2020, 128 pages, $14.99 paperback]
To read Michael Torres’ On The Seawall conversation with Alan Chazaro, click here.