Since my last publication was over a year ago, I’m not sure that I can still officially call myself a poet, but in the hope that my license hasn’t been revoked, I would probably be classified as one of the Fresno poets, a loosely banded school of writers who live or have lived in central California and who have been influenced (or perhaps are simply former students many times removed of) people like Peter Everwine and Philip Levine. Anthologies that feature such work are Highway 99: A Literary Journey through California’s Great Central Valley and How much Earth: an Anthology of Fresno Poets. The latest of our band to gain national attention is Brian Turner, author of Here, Bullet, a collection of poems about the war in the Middle East.
We have a small literary magazine here in town called In the Grove, which probably claims to represent the movement but which often feels to me like the high school lit mag that features some good work and some work written by friends of the editors. (All right, so that was catty.) Anyway, I just read an announcement about a special issue dedicated to the late Fresno poet Andrés Montoya. It mentions local writers and talks about Montoya as an influential voice in Chican@/Latin@ letters.
Ah, yes, Chican@/Latin@–I have to confess that I cringe every time I come across this concept. (Yes, Puntitas is about to become even cattier.) Part of my problem is that so many of the Chican@/Latin@ people I’ve met are Other in the most superficial way. They rarely speak Spanish with anything remotely approaching fluency. They go on about specific holidays or customs without really understanding them or practicing them sans an audience. Many even scoff at the backwardness of their parents and compatriots, and none ever leaves the filter of American experience for more than a second or two at a time. What most of them calls the anomie of being between two worlds is really resentment at having dark skin and being treated like Other, but it is not actually experiencing life as Other except in those scattered instances of awareness, which are as often generated by something else.
The work that is truly Other is hard to sell. It’s values are alien, and so are its props. They aren’t recognized by editors, critics, or mainstream readers, and they’re given a chance only when framed in the context of foreign. Calling it Chican@/Latin@, West-coast, or some such provides that framework, but only to limited degree since those classifications are mostly mainstream as well.
I’m rereading this thinking, “Rant, rant; general claims; no evidence.” I’m speaking out of a resentment that comes of helping my Chican@/Latin@ siblings translate for class, of overhearing them talk about their students in condescending ways, of comparing their public personas to their water cooler selves. It is a resentment that comes out of the disservice to the people many purport to be and to the experiences many purport to have. It’s also ironic because, by the time they get to vent about their plights, most have stopped being Other. (Hmm, I guess I had to end on my cattiest note.)
Puntitas reads _In Search of Belief_ by J. Chittister.
