Jimmy Santiago Baca is a lyric and narrative poet of great feeling who lives in the shadow of Black Mesa in northwestern New Mexico. He is half Chicano, half Apache and was orphaned young in a time of great anti-Hispanic and anti-Indian feeling in this country. He ran away from the orphanage before he was a teenager and spent the next fifteen or so years drinking and shooting up and doing petty crime. As you might imagine, he “never ever learned to read or write so well” and that alone should have doomed him to a life of poverty and helplessness. But while he served a seven year prison term for drugs, Santiago Baca learned to read and write mightily. In prison he discovered the salvation and magic inherent in words and relearned himself into being, discovering the glory of his Mexican and Indian heritage and legitimately claiming his place at the table of European letters. In his own words, from his memoir. Working in the Dark: Reflections of a Poet of the Barrio, he tells us, “While I listened to the words of the poets, the alligators slumbered powerless in their lairs.”
In a little over twenty years. Jimmy Santiago Baca has gone from convict to husband and father, from junkie to poet, from illiterate to Wallace Stevens Fellow at Yale, “detribalized Apache” to screenwriter, from some petty thief to a dominant voice in Chicano writing.
Santiago Baca’s reputation rests chiefly on four books. The first, “Immigrants in Our Own Land & Selected Early Poems,” consists mostly of poems written in prison, poems that deal with the humiliation, institutionalized racism and class prejudice inherent in the prison system. The second book is the corner-stone of Santiago Baca’s work, “Martin & Meditations on the South Valley,” a remarkable, nuanced poetic-fictional autobiography that first showed his ability to sustain tone and his adeptness at observing and reproducing character. In essence it is a long narrative autobiography in verse, full of naked emotion. “Black Mesa Poems,” a book of poems based on the poet’s home outside of Albuquerque is a strong follow-up. Finally, “Working In The Dark,” with prose as poetic as any by Whitman, Durrell, or Greene, is a kind of summing-up, a gloss on the life-of-the-mind to that point. In addition, Santiago Baca wrote the screenplay for the controversial Taylor Hackford film Bound by Honor.
After a period of prolonged silence, Santiago Baca left his longtime publisher, New Directions, signed on with Grove, and wrote — prolifically. He published his fourth and fifth books of poetry, “Set This Book On Fire” (Cedar Hill) and “Healing Earthquakes” (Grove) to universally good reviews. His second memoir, more strictly autobiographical, called “A Place to Stand” (Grove) continued his exploration of identity and writing in dialogue. In an apparently successful attempt to assist in that process for others, Santiago Baca also created a literary workshop for steelworkers (employed and unemployed) in Indiana and Maryland. The short story anthology that came out of this project, “The Heat,” was published by Cedar Hills. The Village Voice reviewed it positively, saying it “packs a bigger emotional punch than a year’s worth of stories in Zoetrope.”
To locate him in history, Santiago Baca is a spiritual heir to Whitman, the coming-to-be of the great and generous generality “democracy.” As, in part, a Chicano poet, Santiago Baca starts from a base of heterogeneity. For him, and others of this tradition, that which Whitman saw as a strength a century ago, they know as a forgone conclusion today. Whitman seemed to say, “let us raise our various and distinct voices into one mighty choir.” Santiago Baca and those of the Chicano tradition, being Indian, European, Mexican, American, and more at once, say “my one voice raised is already a choir.” He proclaims in Invasions from Black Mesa Poems:
I am the end result
of Conquistadores,
Black Moors,
American Indians,
and Europeans,
bloods rainbowing
and scintillating
in me.
Even Santiago Baca’s language itself is multifaceted. In “rainbowing” the primary English of the poems with Spanish words and Chicano slang, rhythms and sentence structures, he creates a fully-fleshed poetry that expresses what one critic (Tino Villanuevo) called “the bisensibilty” of Chicano literature.”
Pero el Benny murió hoy
todo el barrio was saying
the day they found him dead.
On porches guitarristas sang death songs,
old viejas prayed for his soul
before their small altars in bedrooms,
At paint & body shops
vatos locos milling outside were saying,
“…el vato thought
he could swim across,
y luego un current
Ie pescó y Ie tumbo.”
(Part XXV, from Meditations on the South Valley)
Santiago Baca’s writing is a chorusing of languages, English, Spanish, high, slang, literary tradition, folk traditions, experience, theory, the languages of carpentry and drugs, romantic love, prison, politics, the languages of violence, family and reconciliation, of Anglo America, Black America, Indian America, Hispanic America, of Mexico, of Rome and Greece and Israel, of Albuquerque and New York, Isleta and Aztlan. In order to express exactly what he wants to, his heart’s language, he must use a type of speech that is capable of holding it. That way of speaking is the Creole, the pidgin, the Chinook of American poetry. E plurbus unum. Out of the many, one. To which we might add—Out of the one, many.
“Language,” he said, “has the power to transform, to strip you of what is not truly yourself. In language I have burned my old selves and improvised myself into a new being.”
Where he is, Albuquerque, and where he was, the world of the rural Hispanic poor, both contribute to what he does, which is to write a kind of poetry that is truly new because it unites the traditions — from the Renaissance to the barrio — that have made him. Jimmy’s fight out of a dead-end world of drugs, violence and voicelessness into the light of expression (and into the spotlight from Hollywood to New Haven) is a deeply felt and human journey. The fact that the writing that issues from that journey is widely recognized as some of the best that contemporary America has to offer just adds to his value.
***
Since I wrote this, Jimmy has published at least three more books, one of poems, “Winter Poems Along the Rio Grande,” (New Directions) and two of prose, the short story collection (his first) “The Importance of a Piece of Paper” and “C-Train and Thirteen Mexicans: Dream Boy’s Story” (both from Grove). All of Jimmy’s books are available on the large online booksellers, like Amazon.com and Powells.com, as well as at his website and (who knows?) maybe even in bookstores. He also has a host of CDs, which is NOT a waste of time as he is one of the very few poets alive who knows how to read well.
