Immigrants in Our Own Land, and: What's Happening (review)

119 reviews Jimmy Santiago Baca, Immigrants in Our Own Land. Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1979. 56 pp. Cloth, $11.95; paper, $4.95. Jimmy Santiago Baca, What's Happening. Willimantic, Ct.: Curbstone Press, 1982. 32 pp. Paper, $4.50. In 1973, at the age of twenty-one, Jimmy Santiago Baca was convicted on a drug charge and sent to Arizona State Maximum Security Prison, where he remained, without parole, for five years. It was in that place that all or a great majority of these poems were written. Baca is Native American and Chicano. "My blood is Native American," he has noted elsewhere, "but my mind is Chicano." Prison, in one respect, reminds him of his old neighborhood: I look down and see new immigrants coming in, thinking they'll get a chance to change their lives. But in the end, some will just sit around talking about how good the old world was. ... so very few make it out of here as human as they came in, they leave wondering what good they are now as they look at their hands so long away from their tools, as they look at themselves, so long gone from their families, so long gone from life itself, so many things have changed. ("Immigrants in Our Own Land") Early in his first book, Immigrants in Our Own Land, Baca offers the reader the objectives he had set for himself during the period of his incarceration, when at all times men are 'Coerced . . ./Into conditions that make them reckless and savage." These might be simply stated: To keep his "real self alive, while remaining faithful to his roots ("Walls and fences cannot take me away from who I am, and I know/ . . . where I come from"): Here on this island of death and violence, I must find peace and love in myself, eventually freedom, And if I am blessed, then perhaps a little wisdom. ("I Will Remain") It is to the influence of his father, a man who "held the mystique of travelers/that pass your backyard and disappear into the trees," that Baca attributes a great deal of his own personality. "He offered us to the wind," Baca observes, and under such circumstances one ' grow[s] up quick and romantic." A Romantic vein is evident in Baca's poems. To write seriously in the Romantic mode, which demands a severe openness to sensation, is risky under any circumstances. It implies a continual exposure to the possibility of pain, just as a body is exposed to infection under the primitive conditions of surgery. In the "blood-and-misery" atmosphere that is prison, where the tendency, obviously, is for one to close off his feelings and thus to become as invulnerable as possible, it is all the more difficult. But for those who choose to remain as emotionally alive as possible, it is the only alternative. It's not a path taken by many of us, irrespective of our degree of freedom. "We must have the courage/of love, to live," Baca argues. Poetry is his chosen means, his "cry and song." Immigrants in OurOwn Land and What's Happening might be envisioned as Baca's nonchronological Odyssey of self-exploration, with the distance he has traveled being judged on two levels: what he has to report with regard to his findings, and the emotional demands he has fulfilled along the way. The latter we can only surmise, and by that standard I find Baca's achievement impressive . Merely to have substantially eluded the recurrent self-doubts, to have kept one's head above the currents, is sufficient grounds for satisfaction and joy. The poetry, however, must not be viewed as an end in itself. There are the spiritual gains and losses of the poet's life to consider as well. If Baca were to have lived solely for the printed word, he would have been either a potential martyr or a fool. It is clear that his ef- 120 the minnesota review forts, up to this stage, have not been self-defeating. Baca's report deserves attention. Although some of the poems draw upon typical prison complaints, he is far more...