Latinx Poetry in Chicago: Indigenous Roots, the Immigrant, and Belonging

What is poetry? It is text that evokes a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience or a specific emotional response......its tool, language, language chosen and arranged for its meaning, sound, and rhythm.

What will your verse be?

History indicates that poetry is generally the first literary expression of politically driven movements, and this was certainly true of the Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s. "ln any movement toward liberation," Seamus Heaney said in a 1990 Oxford lecture, "it will be necessary to deny the normative authority of the dominant language or literary tra­dition." The education provided by U.S. schools and universities has been dominated by English and Anglo-American fiction. Latina and La­tino writers coming of age during the Chicano movement rebelled by creating their own genre: politically charged poetry featuring the bilin­gual idiom used in homes and in the streets from New York to Miami and Los Angeles.

In the early 1970s, how­ever, Chicano politicization encountered the American women's libera­tion movement. Liberated, politically experienced, college-educated Latinas began to explore new directions in bilingual poetry, drama, and fiction, but most especially in poetry. The stylistic and thematic homo­geneity that had existed earlier in the Chicano movement was driven primarily by an almost unconscious need for collective self-definition as La raza, as a single people. While a collective sense of Latina sisterhood survives in the literature to this day, individual creative vision has re­placed cultural/racial/political unity as the driving force. Likewise, most Latinx writers have accepted English as their predominant mode of lit­erary expression, although they have succeeded in reshaping the lan­guage to their own ends.

Martín Espada wrote: “The common expectation is that literature born amid social and economic crisis by nature must be didactic and polemical, obsessed with simplistic affirmations of identity and written in a raw idiom unconcerned with nuance,” but a look at LatinX poetry “will frustrate that expectation.”

Throughout the 1980s, Latinx poets increased in both number and ar­tistic sophistication. One of the Latina writers who has taken a scholarly interest in the matter of identity is poet and novelist Ana Castillo. Defining herself as "mestiza/Mexic Amerindian," Castillo writes in Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma that the group labeled as Latina or Hispanic in the United States can be neither "summarized nor neatly categorized." The quest for identity persists as the single most important theme of Latina literature. Chicanas, in particular, have traced their roots from beyond such historical figures as Malintzin, Our Lady of Guadalupe, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz into a purely American mythos, developing, in the process, the Aztec pantheon into a source of literary symbolism and allusion, in somewhat the same manner as earlier European mined Greco-Roman mythology.

Ana Castillo

Ana Castillo was born in the Chicago inner city. After graduating from Jones Com­mercial High School, she attended Chicago City College for two years before enter­ing Northeastern Illinois University, where she earned her bachelor's degree in 1975. Castillo went on to earn a master's in Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Chicago and a doctorate in American Studies from the Univer­sity of Bremen, Germany, in 1991. She was on the faculty at DePaul University, in Chicago, until she moved to New Mexico. Always an activist, she uses her fiction, poetry, and nonfiction as tools to illuminate the plight of Hispanics, especially women, in contemporary American culture. She confounded the journal Third Woman and also serves as a contributing editor to Humanizante Magazine.

Castillo explored the destructive powers of heterosexual relationships as well as the importance of women as keepers and transmitters of culture and the sense of tradition at the heart of mestizo civilization. In her seminal book Massacre of Dreamers: Essays of Xicanisma (1994), Castillo pre­sented a theoretical framework through which to understand the plight of Latina women. particularly those of Mexican American descent. In her view. the Chicano Movement achieved important political changes but left women's roles untouched. The philosophy of Xicanisma-its playful name refers in part to the Mexicas in pre-­columbian Mexico is meant to be a call to spiritual but also erotic life, with an acknowledgment of traditional healing and of the mother-bond principle that is repressed in the process of becoming an adult. Her views have made Castillo, like Moraga and Anzaldua, an influential thinker among feminist women of color.

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We Would Like You To Know

Breakout Room Activity

1. What is the topic of the poems? Consider how the title and conclusion shape the poem’s overall theme, main ideas, or central message. State the poems' central idea or themes in a singular sentence.
2. How do the themes in the poems reflect the pressing issues in our present-day world? Select or think of phrases, words, or images that resonate with you regarding the discussed themes. How do these elements connect to your own experiences or viewpoints? Please provide references from one or two of the poems and analyze how the language used shaped meaning.
3. What are the most prominent literary devices used in the poems? (Please refer to the List of Poetic Devices handout)
4. What is conveyed in the first lines of each stanza? Please carefully examine the opening lines on each verse, as they often set the tone or introduce key motifs. How do they engage the reader's interest and frame the poem's direction?

With the line "I ask the impossible: love me forever," Castillo opens her poem with a sense of longing and desire. The juxtaposition of asking for the impossible while requesting eternal love seems to convey a mix of ambition and vulnerability. It's as if the speaker is aware of the audacity of such a request yet is driven by an undeniable yearning. The idea that the strength of love can transcend the impossible adds depth and complexity to the poem. I Ask the Impossible is a poem in which the speaker asks for the absolute unconditional love of the addressee. The theme is universal. There is not one instance of linguistic code-switching, and none of the figurative languages marks it as uniquely Latinx. In short, it bears none of the hallmarks of Latinx literature. There are numerous pieces of Latinx literature that do not thematically register as Latinx. Relatedly, there is the burden of representation that Latinx writers seemingly labor under because of community expectations, marketing pressures, and perhaps writer desires. Much pressure is imposed either from external or internal forces requiring that writers with Latinx surnames produce work that is recognizably Latinx. While there are numerous examples like “I Ask the Impossible,” where recognizable Latinx themes are absent, the majority of Latinx works call up familiar stories of migrant workers, embattled barrios, and tightly knit families.

Johanny Vazquez Paz

Johanny Vazquez Paz was born in Puerto Rico. Her book, Querido voyeur, was published by Ediciones Torremozas. She is the author of Streetwise Poems/Poemas callejeros (Mayapple Press, 2007), and co-edited the anthology Between the Heart and the Land/Entre el corazón y la tierra: Latina Poets in the Midwest (MARCH/Abrazo Press, 2001). Her poems have been included in the anthologies City of Big Shoulders, En la 18 a la 1, and Ejército de rosas, among others. Until recently Vazquez worked at Harold Washington College as a Literary Studies professor.

The present state of the locations of contemporary Latina/o poetry is destabilizing, a process that is gaining momentum and increasingly becoming difficult to reverse. Our Latina/o literary legacy, tracing the lines from our heritage nationalities to our anti-US imperialist ancestors to our civil rights–era forebears and into the twenty-first century, has always been rooted in place. No ethnic community in the United States finds more things to know in posing the question Where are you from? than Latin@ poets.