Broken Souths: Latina/o Poetic Responses to Neoliberalism and Globalization

1. Hemispheric Otherwises in the Shadow of “1968”: Martín Espada’s Zapatista Poems

29 Chapter One chapter one Hemispheric Otherwises in the Shadow of “1968” Martín Espada’s Zapatista Poems The culture in which we live is perhaps the most claustrophobic that has ever existed; in the culture of globalization [ . . . ] there is no glimpse of an elsewhere or an otherwise. The given is a prison. And faced with such reductionism, human intelligence is reduced to greed. —John Berger, The Shape of a Pocket (214) With border-crossing products, persons, and capital, and with treaties linking states under the auspice of market freedom, conceptions of a hemispheric America are possible in myriad ways unimaginable even to visionaries such as Walt Whitman and José Martí. But the neoliberal incarnation of global capitalism has also augmented boundaries between rich and poor, citizens and the undocumented, and “you and I.” If “Room 5600” maps hemispheric integration and fragmentation, the January 2, 1994, edition of NPR’s All Things Considered program juxtaposed NAFTA—the sign and vehicle of integration—and a revolutionary “otherwise ” to its logic. That a New Year’s poem appeared on NPR is unremarkable ; that it was Espada’s “Imagine the Angels of Bread,” however, defies NPR’s moderation. With its anaphoric “This is the year” praising poetry’s capacity to facilitate change, the poem reverses relations between judges and immigrants, capitalists and workers. Its template for a radical break with the neoliberal order foreshadows scores of NAFTA-era migrants by inverting their negative reception: “This is the year that those / who swim the border’s undertow / and shiver in boxcars / are greeted with trumpets and drums / at the railroad crossing / on the other side” (Imagine the Angels 14). That NPR aired a subversive poem may be taken as anomaly, oversight , or the will of a defiant producer. That it aired “in the same broadcast 30 • Chapter One as the news of the Zapatista uprising,” as Espada notes (Zapata’s Disciple 125), and hours after NAFTA’s implementation, is a striking irony. Given no evidence Espada had advance notice of the Zapatista uprising while writing “Imagine the Angels of Bread,” its allusions to borders, migrants, factory workers, plantations, and “rebellion[s] begin[ning] with [an] idea” pre-historicize rather than prophesy the rebellion against the triumphalist free-trade narrative: “if every rebellion begins with the idea / that conquerors on horseback / are not many-legged gods, that they too drown / if plunged in the river, / then this is the year” (16, 18).1 The poem’s compound conditional clauses (“if . . . if . . . then”) connect “idea[s]” to the material conditions of possibility embodied by iterations of “to break” emerging from repetitive historical conditions of oppression. Similarly, when the Zapatista rebellion began on New Year’s Day, many Mayan rebels used wooden sticks carved as mock rifles. Though some had guns, all were symbolically armed with the “idea” that “globalization” augments suffering rather than emancipates. Against NAFTA’s promises of progress, competition, efficiency, and cheaper prices, the Zapatistas began their campaign chanting, “NAFTA is death.” For the Zapatistas, Luis Hernández Navarro writes, “naming the intolerable” as neoliberalism required “constructing a new language” of resistance (65). Their bold act of belief called to account the heterogeneous “many-legged gods” of neoliberal globalization against which, the story went, resistance would be futile, by exposing them as “drown[able]” human creations and extensions of the conquest. “Imagine the Angels of Bread” charts a hemispheric vision of a different freedom than that portended by “free trade,” private property relations, and divisions of class, race, and nation. Its deictic anaphora “this” fortuitously pinpoints the year and day of NAFTA’s implementation and the Zapatista rebellion. In this sense, NPR tacitly authorized the poem’s advocacy of uprising , which it contextualizes in real time by suggesting the idea animating this uprising in Chiapas is akin to that against slavery, the Holocaust, and the destruction of indigenous peoples. Whereas the poem implicitly links neoliberalism to the conquest and puts the Zapatistas in the lineage of abolitionists, labor activists, and Puerto Rican independence advocates (independentistas), the Zapatistas’ subcomandante Marcos explicitly views neoliberalism as extending conquest and colonization. He calls it “a world system” striving to conquer “new territory” (270–271). Klein defines it similarly as “an attempt by multinational capital to recapture the highly profitable, lawless frontier that Adam Smith, the intellectual forefather of today’s neoliberals, so admired.” Neoliberals, she continues, “set out to Hemispheric Otherwises in the Shadow of “1968...