SOURCE: “Poetry and Masculinity on the Anglo/Chicano Border: Gary Soto, Robert Frost, and Robert Hass,” in The Calvinist Roots of the Modern Era, edited by Aliki Barnstone, Michael Tomasek Manson, and Carol J. Singley, University Press of New England, 1997, pp. 263-80.

The guy who pinned
Me was named Bloodworth, a meaningful name.
That night I asked Mom what our name meant in
Spanish.
She stirred crackling papas and said it meant Mexican.

—Gary Soto, “The Wrestler's Heart”

In this scene from his autobiographical sequence Home Course in Religion (1991), the adolescent Gary Soto wrestles not only with an Anglo empowered by a “meaningful name” but also with his manhood as he tries to make sense out of his defeat. He finds he must—like so many young men in U.S. literature—turn his defeat into a victory if he wants to become a man. And yet Soto's path to manhood is unfamiliar, even, we might say, un-American. As traditionally understood, U.S. literature is expected to depict a “pure American self divorced from specific social circumstances” confronting “the promise offered by the idea of America” (Baym, “Melodramas” 71). That promise, furthermore, is supposed to be threatened “with particular urgency” by “the figure of one or more women” (72). Soto, however, not only turns to his mother for succor but asks her for a heritage. He thus refuses to enter the New World naked and forge a new, self-reliant manhood. He rejects the role of Adam that so many critics have defined as the essence of the Americanness of U.S. literature. We inherited the role of Adam, of course, from the Puritans who saw the continent as an opportunity for the individual to forge an unmediated relationship with God. By turning away from this opportunity and concerning himself instead with heritage—with what different “bloods” are “worth”—Soto breaks what critics have valued as the “countinuity of American poetry” with Puritanism.¹ This break means either that Soto's poetry does not measure up to our best literature or that we will need new ways of describing our literary history.

We might begin with the notion that the term “U.S. literature” is larger and more inclusive than “American literature,” which is centered by its writers and critics alike around a Puritan origin that posits the “American self as the embodiment of a prophetic universal design” (Bercovitch, Puritan 136).² This model of American literature reproduces the distinction first made by the Puritans between their City on a Hill and a surrounding wilderness populated by savages, a distinction I will call boundary, by which I mean to suggest both a perception of difference and a will to conquer.³ Boundaries are created by leaps or bounds into the unknown or that which is different, and those leaps—like the Puritan leap into the Americas or the sudden jump of the U.S. boundary in 1848 across the northern half of Mexico—stretch across wilderness that must be filled in or conquered. For an alternative to boundary, we might turn to Gloria Anzaldúa, who describes the border as the place where “two or more cultures edge each other, … where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy” (3). Etymologically, border signifies a “cut” across a landscape, thus suggesting both difference and similarity, the difference arising from some prior, historical act of violence. To think in terms of borders, then, is to be aware of the differences that exist on either side, to know their historical causes, and to look for opportunities to cross those borders, letting difference “shrink with intimacy.”

With this border model in mind, we can reread Gary Soto's wrestling scene not as a failure to produce. American self-reliance but as an attempt to resist it. Home Course in Religion, I will argue, tells the story of Soto's growth into manhood, describing his replacement of boundaries with borders as he gradually extricates himself from the domination of the American self. Empowering this reconception of the self and of masculinity is a Chicano Catholic understanding of the border as mediator rather than boundary.⁴ That Soto's conception of mediation is Chicano Catholic rather than simply Catholic becomes clear when we compare it to Robert Hass's use of mediation, which is Catholic but also American. My desire, however, to replace an American literary history centered around Puritanism with a border one focused on cultural exchange also requires that we begin to see even the most American literature as a border product reflecting the plural origins of the United States, and toward that end, I begin by briefly considering a third California poet, Robert Frost.

I

The most popular of all the major modernists, Robert Frost is also the most American, frequently promoting a history of the United States based on boundaries. The most dramatic example is the poem he read at John F. Kennedy's inauguration, “The Gift Outright.” Right away, the first line—“The land was ours before we were the land's”—suggests a boundary, as the British leap onto this continent is seen as manifest destiny. The settlers must only fill in the boundaries preordained for them.

There is, however, a deeper understanding of boundary here. Although the poem is explicitly concerned with the conquest of the continent in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, its assumptions belong instead to the dawn of the twentieth century and the 1898 war with Spain. In a 1934 interview, one year before he wrote “The Gift Outright,” Frost claimed that one of his ten favorite books and “surely one of the very best of our modern best-sellers” was the historical romance The Prisoner of Zenda (Collected 738), which was published in 1894, just two years after Frost graduated from high school. As Amy Kaplan explains, historical romances of the 1890s like The Prisoner of Zenda created a new form of masculinity more appropriate to the overseas empire gained after the Spanish-American War.

This new overseas empire required a fresh understanding of boundary both for the nation and the masculine body. During the earlier, continental expansion, U.S. writers compared the nation to a body that must expand or die, but the new overseas empire was “informal,” economic rather than territorial.⁵ Rejecting an older European-style colonialism, the United States concentrated on controlling trade routes and establishing military bases in former Spanish possessions like Cuba and the Philippines, while leaving these countries varying degrees of putative political independence. Because expansion was now disembodied, Kaplan argues, the united States required a “double discourse” that depicted the nation and the masculine body as “spectacles” that must be continually re-presented. Andrew Jackson, Indian-fighter, was replaced as masculine model by Teddy Roosevelt, who was seen simulating, doubling, his masculinity in photographs and in “authentic” costumes constructed in New York (Kaplan 655). While Jackson was simply vigorous, Roosevelt's spectacular masculinity was a technological feat. Roosevelt's virility was as disembodied, as “informal,” as the empire he represented.

A product of this new double discourse of imperialism, “The Gift Outright” emphasizes not manly vigor but its doubling. The one reference to physical conflict takes place in a parenthesis, while the rest of the poem emphasizes the disembodied, spectacular nature of manifest destiny:

Such as we were we gave ourselves outright (The deed of gift was many deeds of war) To the land vaguely realizing westward, But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,

The “unstoried, artless, unenhanced” land is, of course, the Puritans' wilderness. What is new is the “land vaguely realizing westward,” as if the land only became real—tangible, embodied, em-boundaried—as Americans took possession of it. More importantly, the conquest of the continent requires the mastery of the self, since Frost emphasizes not the hardihood of the frontiersman but his confusion and lack of self-knowledge. “We were England's,” he tells us, “still colonials,” and because of that, we were “weak.” Ultimately, we possessed the land only when we “found salvation in surrender” and stopped “withholding … ourselves.” Significantly, the “we” here applies specifically to white, English settlers and to any readers who can identify with their position, not to those already inhabiting the land. In fact, part of Frost's evidence that Americans have failed to “story” the land is that they have named their lands “Virginia” and “Massachusetts,” after the English queen who sent them here and the Native Americans they conquered, not after themselves. Although “The Gift Outright” acknowledges as “deeds of war” the border conflicts with Mexico in 1846 and Spain in 1898, Frost's understanding of “story” represses full knowledge of these conflicts in favor of an emboundaried notion of national and racial mission. He cannot face squarely the Spanish-American War that necessitated a spectacular masculinity and informal empire. “The Gift Outright” thus represents a modern doubling of Puritan boundaries.

A border history of our literature, however, should look not only for its Puritan roots (the boundaries that have been drawn) but also for the borders that have been crossed. We might remember, first of all, that Frost was born in California because his New England father had lit out for the territories in 1873, wanting to be part of the “settlement” of the West, which of course had already been settled by Mexicans and Native Americans.⁶ After his father's death, the eleven-year-old Frost moved to New England with his mother and sister, making him both foreign and native to New England. His experience moving back from the frontier thus revealed an inner border between New Englanders and Californians.

The crossing of this border, in fact, made possible his birth as a poet. John Walsh's biography has shown that the poet who, according to legend, struggled for twenty years unnoticed by an outdated literary establishment was instead a mediocre poet struggling to find his “voice.” Frost only discovered his voice, Walsh tells us, when he stopped writing poetry in 1908 and started imitating the vocal mannerisms of his farmer neighbors (63). After two years, this tutelage inspired a writing process that ultimately resulted in the brilliant dialogues of North of Boston (1914). The origin of Frost's poetry is thus plural: he became a poet when he learned the language of his New England neighbors, letting “difference shrink with intimacy” as Anzaldúa says it must on the border.

Frost's border-crossing created not only his distinctive use of language but also the theme for much of his early work, particularly in North of Boston where two versions of American boundary frequently conflict. These dialogues have generally been seen as typical of regionalism's depiction of conflicts between rural folk and sophisticated urbanites.⁷ “Mending Wall,” for example, presents a confrontation between a New England farmer and the poem's speaker, who, like Frost, is knowledgeable about New England ways though perhaps not a New Englander himself. Instead of seeing a country-city conflict here, we might see the farmer as a Puritan who expresses the purity of his faith by adhering to tradition—“He will not go behind his father's saying.” His father's belief that “Good fences make good neighbors” itself descends from the Puritans, who fled Europe in part because European society threatened to corrupt them. The Atlantic thus formed a “fence” between the New World and the Old, a different kind of boundary than the one we have been discussing but a boundary nonetheless. Emerson echoes and develops this distrust of neighbors when he claims in “Self-Reliance” that “Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members” (2:49). The farmer acts on this advice when he “wall[s] out” neighbors' threats to his rootedness in tradition.

The speaker, meanwhile, rebels against tradition. Like a frontiersman, he cannot abide fences that carve up the land, robbing him of space in which to remake himself. And it is reinvention that motivates the speaker, the possibility that the “something” that “doesn't love a wall” is a mischief inherent in us that defies and goes “behind” every “father's saying.” The speaker's antinomianism is an inheritance every bit as Puritan as the farmer's, but their roles in filling in American boundaries have put them at odds.

“Mending Wall” intends, however, to bring the two American perspectives together even though no simple healing is possible. The speaker may begin the poem proposing that the gaps in the wall are so large that “even two can pass abreast,” but he ultimately imagines, as Puritans do, that the Other is an “old stone savage armed” (emphasis added). Healing thus comes not from the characters, who remain locked in conflict, but from us, the readers. Frost's note at the beginning of North of Boston tells us that “‘Mending Wall’ takes up the theme where A Tuft of Flowers in A Boy's Will laid it down,” and in “The Tuft of Flowers,” we learn that “Men work together … / Whether they work together or part” only when they focus on the work itself, letting community come in visionary moments. In “Mending Wall,” that community is never realized by the speaker, but it can be there for the reader as we watch the characters work together and “mend wall” despite their disagreements. As Frost later said, we must lift such conflicts to a “higher plane of regard” (“Comments”). From this viewpoint, the differences between the two men “shrink with intimacy.” Frost is a border poet when he crosses the division between these two different kinds of American, and he can do so partly because his childhood on the border has made him aware of the differences that lie within our boundaries.

On rarer occasions, as in “America Is Hard to See” (1951), Frost can step outside our boundaries and create a true border poetry. This poem revises the first one he ever wrote, “La Noche Triste,” an account of Cortez's defeat of the Aztecs inspired by Frost's adolescent reading of William Hickling Prescott's famous History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843). In “La Noche Triste,” as in Prescott's history, the defeat of the Native Americans is romanticized. The Native Americans are no longer “savage” in the Puritan sense, but the inevitability of European victory testifies to the superiority of “civilization,” thus retaining the manifest destiny of Puritan historiography. Revising this poem, Frost extricates himself from its racist imperial history to understand that the destiny of the United States has never been manifest. Ending with Cortez's raid on the Aztecs, Frost spends much of the poem demythologizing Columbus's discovery of the Americas. Columbus was a bad mariner (“He wasn't off a mere degree / His reckoning was off a sea”), and his motives were suspect: “Not just for scientific news / Had the Queen backed him to a cruise.”

As Frost suggests, the promise of America has frequently been pecuniary, but he is more disturbed by the Puritan claims for the continent as a New World, “The race's future trial place, / A fresh start for the human race.” Strikingly, he admits,

I was deceived by what he did.
If I had had the chance when young
I should have had Columbus sung
As a god who had given us
A more than Moses' exodus.
But all he did was spread the room
Of our enacting out the doom
Of being in each other's way,
And so put off the weary day
When we would have to put our mind
On how to crowd but still be kind.

Frost's history is still flawed—the continent was not wilderness but was already “crowded” with Native Americans and, later, with Mexicans and Mexican Americans—but he has still crossed a border. Reflecting on the history of Mexico he read as an adolescent, he realizes that the myth of American exceptionalism has prevented the United States from learning how to live on the border Anzaldúa describes, a place where peoples meet and “crowd” but can still be “kind.” In his most perceptive poetry, Frost sometimes finds himself living on just such a border.

II

As a border poet, Gary Soto does not find his roots in Puritanism; he finds instead that Puritan roots threaten his growth. To thrive, he must struggle against the Puritan desire to make boundaries, and Home Course in Religion recounts his effort to create a masculinity liberated from the American self that dominates so much of Frost's poetry. This reconception is made possible when Soto sees the border as mediation rather than boundary. Before tracing Soto's reconstruction of a border masculinity based on mediation, however, we will need to explain how Soto's use of mediation is both Chicano and Catholic.

Unlike Calvinism, Catholicism emphasizes mediation. While Calvinism sees nothing between God and the self, Catholicism believes that the Church can both intercede with God on the self's behalf and represent God to the self (Bercovitch, Puritan 22). By “Church,” Catholics mean not only the institutional body of priests, nuns, bishops, and so on, but the entire community of the faithful, both the living and the dead. The Church can mediate between God and the self because as the “body of Christ” it embodies the divine while remaining human. Justus Lawler uses this corollary, analogia entis, to distinguish between Catholicism and Protestantism: Professing analogia entis, Catholics believe that “the contingent self is paradoxically merged with the absolute, while … nevertheless remaining contingent.” Protestants, however, believe that “the finite is so imprisoned … that it cannot become the infinite; … it can only be breathed upon, as one would breathe upon a piece of metal to polish it” (95). Frost represents this Protestant view when he speaks of poetry as a “momentary stay against confusion”: Just for a moment, he suggests, the divine breath makes the soul's metal shine, but confusion tarnishes it quickly, requiring the soul's constant renewal.

Robert Hass, on the other hand, represents the Catholic view in “Meditation at Lagunitas” (Praise 1979). In this poem, Hass reflects on the continuity of recent philosophy with Plato—“All the new thinking is about loss. / In this it resembles all the old thinking”—and decides that although desire is indeed “full / of endless distances,” still “There are moments when the body is as numinous / as words.” Hass's “moments” differ from Frost's “momentary stays” because Hass follows the doctrine of analogia entis in believing that such moments occur when we experience “wonder at … presence,” the numinous within the body, within words—in Lawler's terms, the infinite merged with the finite. Frost's work is marked by whimsy and caprice: one can never tell when God's breath will stay our confusion. For Hass, however, wonder is always available in the presence of the body, just as it is always available at the Catholic Eucharist.

Despite his Catholicism, however, Hass remains American (and therefore Puritan) in his attitude toward the land. This attitude can be traced back to Stevens and, behind him, to Emerson, whose vision of a “new man in a paradisiacal New World” Bercovitch has traced to Jonathan Edwards and Cotton Mather (Puritan 157). Stevens ends “Sunday Morning” with this promise:

Deer walk on our mountains, and quail whistle
About us their spontaneous cries,
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness

Retaining the Puritan sense of boundary, of the encircling “wilderness,” Stevens points with pride to “our” mountains, the frontier again representing for Americans the chance to rejuvenate the self. America, he implies without irony, is the chosen world for supreme fictions; no place is better suited since no place is, as Frost says in “The Gift Outright,” so “unstoried, artless, unenhanced.” Inheriting much of Stevens's thought and imagery, Hass concludes “Meditation at Lagunitas” by remembering “Sunday Morning”'s ripening berries:

There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

If the first line is Catholic, then the rest are American, investing the land—as Stevens, Emerson, and the Puritans do—with redemptive promise. Only our attention to this American land, to its berries and bodies, Hass suggests, will help us recover our millennial mission.⁸

More even than Hass, Soto is convinced of analogia entis, but he looks not to an individual and visionary relation to the land as Hass, Stevens, and the Puritans do. Their repeated desire for transcendence is replaced by Soto's desire to learn how to be “nice,” to build healthy relationships with others—this is what he means by “holiness.” Hass's patronym is no more English than Soto's, but Hass's people belong to those Europeans who were eventually accepted economically, socially, and institutionally, racism turning into prejudice and finally acceptance. Because of that shift, Hass can be “Anglo” and his poetry American, despite his Catholicism. For Soto, however, people are more important than the land because they mediate between God and other humans. Living in an “occupied America,” Soto lacks the classic immigrant's faith in the land's promise, knowing instead that the boundary of the United States crossed his people in 1848.⁹ Soto thus places his hopes in community, expecting to find himself and God through the mediations of others.

We can see both Soto's Catholic similarity to Hass and his Chicano difference by reading “A Sunday” with “Meditation at Lagunitas” in mind. Soto's poem begins where Hass's leaves off: “There are moments when the body is as numinous / as words, days that are the good flesh continuing” becomes

That the flesh should go on now seems to matter.
And goodness in the meantime. I'm trying
To be like others in the church. Katie
Says it's possible, even at this corner,
Leavenworth and Bush, drab men in three sweaters,
Bum on his beat between a boarded-up grocery
And hell.

(70)

Soto is silent about what happened at church to make the “flesh continuing” “seem to matter,” but Hass focuses precisely on that moment—the visionary transcendence achieved when the “flesh continuing” is simply “good,” as the land America is simply good when Emerson steps onto the common to become a transparent eyeball. Soto is silent about his epiphany perhaps because Sunday Mass is supposed to remind one of the goodness of the flesh, of the miracle of the Incarnation. In fact, we might notice here that Hass functions as Matthew Arnold believed poets should, performing the role religion once did. In the United States, this understanding of the poet dovetailed nicely with Emerson's belief that the poet should create a sacred yet secular America. But Soto stands outside these traditions since, for him, the visions and consolations sought by Emerson, Arnold, and Hass occur at every Sunday Mass, where it “matter[s]” that “the flesh should go on now.” Soto can thus turn his attention in the poem from transcendence to the kind of “goodness” that happens “in the meantime,” between Sundays as we work as God's intermediaries for others. Katie reminds Soto of just that point when she explains that “God is someone who is with you, / Like now” (71). The double meaning of “someone” (God or Katie) implies that Katie mediates between God and Soto just as Soto mediates between God and Katie.

This Chicano Catholic emphasis on mediation—on the border where God and humanity meet—distinguishes Soto from the more Puritan or American Hass. Soto tries “To be like others in the church” while Hass transcends the “endless distances” between people in order to discover their individuality, “the way her hands dismantled bread, / the thing her father said that hurt her.” Soto tries to be “nice” by finding a road or mediation between his own mean streak and others' sensibilities while Hass jumps, bounds, from “distance” to “tenderness.” What moves “A Sunday” forward is not the possibility of transcendence that is so palpably in the offing in every line of Hass's “Meditation” but the many borders across which niceness must travel. Katie reminds Soto that he “should know better” than to watch her “running water / In the bathroom sink” (71), and he ends the Sunday evening by reminding himself not to look at his students' underwear when they uncross their legs (74). In between, he realizes that playing backgammon with Katie differs from playing chess with his daughter because Katie “wants my company” while “Mariko wants my money” (72), thus understanding that games require different kinds of niceness from him. With Mariko he is a “kind fool with dead bishops” (72), while he and Katie “smile at our losses / And stare out the windows” (71). Each Hass poem, like each Frost poem—like each day for the Puritan—represents a new, determined effort to achieve transcendence, bounding the distance between finite and infinite. But each Soto poem crosses—mediates between—borders, seeking the community that is found when we recognize not only the differences between us but also the commonalities.

III

“A Sunday” appears late in Home Course in Religion, representing a self that is learning how to “be like others” and be “good,” to mediate “holiness.” But much of the volume is devoted to describing how that growth was made possible only after Soto learned to understand masculinity outside the bounds of an American self. Properly understood, the masculinity Soto exhibits in the later poems is machismo, the masculinity of a strong and loving husband and father, not its degraded form, a violent misogyny born of poverty and oppression (Anzaldúa 83). Although Catholicism both helped and hindered Soto's growth from a degraded to a virtuous form of machismo, both the process and the product of his growth lie outside the bounds of American poetry and its corresponding Calvinism and masculinity.

The key to machismo, to either form of it, is that it is mediated, taught, Soto suggests, by others. He learns it first as “meanness,” the invasion of the sensibilities of others. In “Apple,” a retelling of the Fall, Soto places his “first temptation” to steal (14) in the context of looking into the family album and remembering the mean tricks to which his family subjected him: his brother telling him that “Captain Kangaroo / Lives in that house” or that “That kid said you were black”; his uncle asking him to help start the car—“I pulled / From the front fender and was dragged up the alley, / The engine whirring warm air into my face.” “I didn't catch on right away,” he tells us in a characteristic understatement, “That meanness was part of the family” (12). Soto retains responsibility for his Fall (his mature machismo will allow nothing less), but his awareness that the Fall was a border he crossed means he also realizes the role of mediation. Falling was taught to him. Although Soto blames no single person for this culture of meanness, he does focus on his tyrannical stepfather, Jim, who liked to claim that the young Soto was having the “Best years of your life” even while he presided over a home in which “Everyone was scared … even Mom.” Jim's claim makes the young Soto remember more meanness:

The best years,
He said, and I thought of my brother and David,
How earlier they had pinned me to the ground.
And let Pinkie, David's homing pigeon,
Perch on my forehead, weight like a warm stone.

(“Best Years” 19)

Although Jim is not directly responsible for this violence, he creates the conditions for it, thus mediating a degraded machismo.

U.S. literature is littered with abusive fathers, but ever mindful of the border, Soto implies that Jim's meanness results from American boundaries, the Puritan desire to conquer the wilderness. Drunk and watching a Western on TV, Jim rages about Pearl Harbor while his three stepchildren look on:

We were scared,
The three of us, and when he said Nips
Should be dead, a TV Indian tumbled
From a cliff with a fist of smoke in his back.

(20)

Soto's imagery is precise and allusive: the putatively treacherous Indian is shot in the back while Jim describes Japanese treachery at Pearl Harbor, the “fist” of smoke communicating the personal hatred that belies the unreality of the TV image. Jim embraces the simplicity of TV, reproducing its emphasis on the boundaries between “white” and “red,” American and “Nip.” Crossing the border, Soto is aware of both the Anglo and Chicano origins of the meanness that dominated his youth.¹⁰ To read Soto as a border poet thus means we must abandon quests for the continuity of U.S. poetry and articulate instead the struggle of some of our writers to forge selves out of non-Puritan origins.

Soto resisted the culture of meanness represented by Jim, not by being self-reliant as a Calvinist and American must, but by opening himself to mediations that represented other ways of living. First of all, Catholicism gave him pride in his difference from his Anglo neighbors (“Palm-leaf crosses withered in the kitchen window / For our Okie¹¹ neighbors to look at in awe”), and then in church a “good priest … stared holiness / Into my body,” creating a new set of values:

Now I'm quiet,
The telephone is quiet, my family
And the people I like best are quiet.
The nuns would be proud of me …

(“Pink Hands” 7-8)

Soto's self-presentation here may seem tame, even small in its solicitation of the nuns who taught him in grade school, to readers trained to appreciate the grand ambitions of Whitman and the ironies of Frost—the drama of the isolate self struggling to fulfill the promise of America. But Soto cares about a rather different drama—the question of how to build healthy communities—and thus he focuses here on how the example of particular priests and nuns provided an alternative to his own meanness, his brother's and uncle's cruelty, and his stepfather's reproduction of American boundaries.

Because Soto's resistance to a culture of meanness that is both Chicano and American originates in mediation rather than in self-reliance, the process of his transformation takes an unconventional shape. Much Anglo men's literature combines rejection of the father with some form of repatriation, some reestablishment of the patriarchy in another name. Either the son/quester experiences transcendence, thus discovering patriarchal power in the self; or he declares himself a figurative orphan and finds a new man to father him, as Robin does in “My Kinsman, Major Molineaux”; or he displaces blame onto women and seeks escape from their feminine and feminizing world, as Rip Van Winkle does (Fetterley 3).

As many feminist critics have argued, the first two forms of repatriation rely on the third in some way, but through mediation, Soto remakes masculinity without blaming women or placing them outside any bounds. For example, he experiences transcendence as a healthy response to pain but not as a satisfactory way of living. In “Best Years,” he tells us that

Sometimes you don't want to get up after
A brother has slapped you around,
But look skyward between branches of sycamore—
The pinpricks of stars, planes, end-of-the-world colors.

(19)

Despite the efficacy of this “skyward” vision, transcendence is finally too apocalyptic, too “end-of-the-world” and dependent on extreme duress for Soto, who wants to live in a community in which people can treat each other well. For this purpose, the solitude of transcendence, even the transcendent solitude of Hass's lovers, is simply not enough. Furthermore, instead of scapegoating women or finding a mythic father, Soto discovers the father through a woman: “That night I asked Mom what our name meant in Spanish. / She stirred crackling papas and said it meant Mexican.” In this telling phrase, which is his only use of Spanish in the volume, Soto suggests that his father—his papa—is the potato his mother fries, a cultural legacy larger and more communal, if less glamorous, than any patronym.¹² The young Anglo who pinned Soto has the “meaningful name” Bloodworth and can point to a private legacy that descends only through his father's side or “blood,” but Soto can point to a culture that gives him worth (“The Wrestler's Heart” 36). He is repatriated into a community, not a self.

This communal legacy means that, if the father is bad, Soto can find other mediators—a central theme in Home Course. The volume portrays Soto as both resisting and participating in the culture of meanness for which his stepfather mediates. While the Church first provides Soto the motive for resistance to this culture, at adolescence Soto turns to masculinity. Again, unlike many other coming-of-age stories, the achievement of masculinity enables, not the creation of a single, isolate self, transcendent in its separation, but a place in a growing community. Soto learns about that place through his relationship with “Scott, a real friend,” whose father is also dead (“Fall and Spring” 34).

Soto's friendship with Scott is a border meeting between the self and other selves. They share their secrets: their feelings about their dead fathers, the girl Scott “liked in seventh grade” (34), and Soto's conviction that “I have lived before” and may be “Chinese” (33). But perhaps the most important element in their friendship is their decency. Although they share a degraded machismo—they siphon gas, destroy abandoned houses, and flirt with self-destruction—and despite the fact that “Neither one of us / Believed in hell, and neither believed / In good grades,”

We both agreed that Mrs. Tuttle
Was a nice person, and, Scott first,
Said that we were sorry for parking in front of her house
And thinking weird thoughts about her La-Z-Boy recliner.

(“School Night” 39)

Catholicism has lost its hold on such doctrinal issues as hell, but it impresses on the young men a respect for “nice” people. They show true machismo when, “Scott first,” they confess their sin against Mrs. Tuttle. The moment recalls our first knowledge of Soto's Catholicism. In “Pink Hands,” he tells us that “I never understood / The Trinity, and still have doubts” (7), but in “The Dictionaries,” he says he thought the Trinity “was something like / People inside each other / And was somehow like manners” (11). We see here Soto's consistent doctrinal uncertainty as well as his consistent valorization of “manners” and “niceness,” those social and cultural forms that mediate or cross borders between people. However degraded his machismo becomes, Soto retains this Chicano Catholic belief, building community as he resists the culture of meanness.¹³

Resistance becomes an open break with the patriarchy that underwrites this meanness when Soto learns that machismo goes beyond men's fraternity to a community with women. To achieve this community he must eradicate the misogyny from both his Catholicism and his early machismo. The volume's title poem describes Soto's frustration with studying religion in college. Quoting several books, he comments on the relative clarity of each one, stating that even the intelligible ones made him sleepy, using up “the good air in my brain” (49). After the seventh book, “I woke only when / My girlfriend came over with a bag of oranges” (52), and after she leaves, he reads the Bible's description of Doubting Thomas, who touched Jesus's wounds. The poem ends,

I began to feel ashamed because my left hand
Turning the pages was the hand that had snapped
Her panties closed. I got up from the couch
And washed that hand, stinky trout that I took to bed.
It was then, on a night of
More Top Ramen and a cat-and-dog storm,
That I realized I might be in the wrong line of belief.

(52)

From now on, Soto suggests, he will base both his theology and his sexuality on something other than misogyny.

The “wrong line of belief” is not only the notion that sex—particularly women's sexuality—is dirty, but also the idea that women are only sexual objects. Soto's relationship with his girlfriend is not nearly as healthy as the one he shares with Scott:

She said that she was lonely
When I wasn't around. I said that people feel
Like that because they don't know themselves.
I said just be mellow, just think of
Yourself as a flower, etc.
When I placed my hand on her thigh, she opened her legs
Just a little. …

(52)

Instead of entering her emotions as he did Scott's, Soto responds with the language of boundaries, of self-reliance (just know yourself, he tells her), and moves immediately to a formulaic attempt at seduction (“think of / Yourself as a flower, etc.”), taking no heed of her reluctance as she opens her legs “just a little.” There is no meeting at this border. By the end of the poem, Soto realizes that the machismo that brought him so close to Scott has failed to create true intimacy between the sexes.

Soto does not describe the road that led him across the border from this realization to his mature relationship with women, but the evidence of that maturity lies all about the second section of Home Course in Religion. In “The Asking,” displaying true machismo, he gives his wife and daughter respect, treats them well, and works with his wife to provide for their family and to perform household chores:

Carolyn is tired. She went to work,
Cooked. After dinner she'll want to be by herself.
To smoke and run a garden hose in our pond.
Mariko and I talk while we eat.
.....I do the dishes. …

(60)

This picture contrasts sharply with Soto's stepfather, who ruled the house from his armchair and gave his wife and children no psychological space.

The maturity of Soto's new machismo is clearest when he addresses his failures. Returning to “A Sunday,” which features Soto's growing understanding that “God is someone who is with you,” we also see an occasional inability to cross borders. When Soto returns from Mass, first his wife, Carolyn, jokes with him and then she shows him “where an arbor should go”:

I look at the ground and try to find
Something to say. I want my wife to like me.
I look up to a homing pigeon cooing
On the neighbor's fence. We call Mariko,
Our daughter, who comes out of the house
With a book in her hand. That's a homing pigeon,
I point. You see the band on its leg?
We forget about the arbor. We go inside.

(72)

Soto's response begins with a profound awareness of a failed border crossing—he has nothing to say about the arbor even though Carolyn has asked for a comment. He wants to be “nice,” for her to “like” him, but apparently he cannot, at least not in the way she would like. Instead of giving up and allowing a boundary to form—what Hass calls in “Meditation” an “endless distance,” or in “Heroic Simile” the “limits to imagination” found in the “silence of separate fidelities” between two people—Soto turns to another kind of mediation. By being nice to his daughter, Mariko, Soto communicates his love for Carolyn. They can now “forget about the arbor.” There is loss here, a confession of his ineffectiveness that reminds us of his earlier acknowledgment that Carolyn's friends at her Japanese Methodist church “are nicer than me” and “that I would never be / As nice as they” (“The Family in Spring” 65). But he partially makes up for his inability to discover anything nice to say about the arbor by creating an eloquent reminder of his love. When he and Carolyn call Mariko out of the house to see the “band” on a homing pigeon, the poem picks up an important image from “The Family in Spring”—the wedding band, which he once never wore but now does because it “says you're married” and makes him feel like “I was in the right place” (64). Soto cannot be as nice as he wants to be, but he can still make his love felt. His love of and through his daughter brings him and Carolyn “inside.” Mariko becomes Soto's pigeon, carrying him home to wife and family. The homing pigeon with which his brother had tormented him in “Best Years” now has a finer purpose as Soto replaces the culture of meanness with a love of border crossings.

Finally, this mature machismo transforms Soto's understanding of his own masculine physicality as he replaces his teenage violence and self-destructiveness with karate. He realizes that karate's physicality is an attempt to deal with the past—“Finger pokes / Can blind a stepfather” and “You admit / You're a playground kid who never had enough” (“The History of Karate” 57)—but he again applies masculinity to the end of building community. He teaches karate to “dirty angels in dirty gis” at the Boys' Club (55), giving these boys, who are growing up much as he did, a mature father figure. He understands that

They need love, Christ but not Christ,
A father with unexpected gifts in one hand,
A glove in the other.

(“The Asking” 60)

These children do not need dogma; they need a mediator who can embody Christ's healing grace, like a father who can bring “unexpected gifts” as well as a constructive discipline like karate. Soto himself had no such father—unless we realize that fathers can also be found in the good father staring holiness into him and in his mother stirring crackling papas.

Living on the border has meant for Soto a transformation of the self as profound as any in U.S. literature, though it cannot properly be called American: Soto faces no wilderness either within or without; his manhood is neither “beset” nor “spectacular”; transcendence is only useful when he has been decked; and people draw the best out of him more than the land does. Soto was born only a year after Frost realized that we must learn how to “crowd but still be kind,” but for Soto that is what living in the United States has always meant. Perhaps this is what our literary history can mean as well once we think of Puritanism not as the origin of our boundaries but as just one edge along our many, crowded borders. If the modern era must accomplish something, it is surely a new understanding of our world that recognizes, in the words of poet Jay Wright, that the “multi-cultural is the fundamental process of human history” (14).

Notes

1. Lewis's American Adam and Pearce's Continuity of American Poetry have helped define American literary history around these themes. Although Bercovitch is critical of Puritanism, he too finds it central to American identity in works like The Puritan Origins of the American Self. In “Melodramas of Beset Manhood,” Baym explains how these literary histories are masculine and therefore partial at best, and TuSmith extends Baym's argument to U.S. ethnic literatures, describing their emphasis on community. I will contrast a community similar to those TuSmith describes with Bercovitch's description of the individualistic American self instituted by Puritanism.

2. For the purposes of this essay, “Anglo,” “America,” and “American” will represent the hegemonic discourse of the United States that limits its history and literary criticism to Puritan and English origins. From this perspective, assimilated Germans, Italians, and other European immigrants can be seen as “Anglo” and “American” insofar as they subscribe to a specific ideology described by Bercovitch (Puritan), Takaki, and others: the belief that the U.S. has a special destiny, inherited through and most fully embodied by those of English descent. For a fuller explanation of this dynamic, see also Marinaccio's essay in the present volume.

3. For a history of this distinction between civilization and savagery, see Takaki 24-50. Takaki explains that settlers in the Virginia colony viewed Native Americans as ignorant but educable heathens, while the Puritans demonized them as devilish savages. Ultimately, Puritan ideology won out, setting “a course for the making of a national identity in America for centuries to come” (44). I call this construction of a difference that must be conquered “boundary.”

4. Chabram notes a recent shift from studies that describe a “uniform response to mainstream practices and literary assumptions” by marginalized social groups to studies that “unearth their heterogeneous—and oftentimes contradictory—responses” (141). I hope to indicate some of this heterogeneity by describing Soto's perspective through a multiple adjective—Chicano Catholic. Many Chicano writers, for example, from Alurista to Anzaldúa, have criticized the role of Catholicism in oppressing their people. A fuller study would describe Soto's position as a middle-class writer while remaining sensitive to the changed meaning of middle-class in this context. Pérez-Torres touches on class in contrasting Soto and Ana Castillo (268), while Sánchez demonstrates what a more detailed analysis would require.

5. The term “informal empire” is LaFeber's.

6. For the Puritans and the American ideology they instituted, land was “wilderness” and required “settlement” if its denizens were “savages” (Takaki 39). For a description of how these attitudes carried over into the conquest of Northern Mexico in the 1830s and 1840s, see Takaki 171.

7. See, for example, Kemp's fine study.

8. Raised Catholic, Hass has rejected his childhood faith for a “mystical” one that yet shows a debt to both Puritan ideology and Catholicism. First, in essays on Lowell and Wright, Hass opposes Calvinism—the “evangelical side of American culture,” with its “hatred of intelligence” (Twentieth 39), “stylized violence” (42), and contribution to the “annihilative rage of capitalism” (20)—to the “unborn myth which American poetry was making” (19). As his language shows, however, this unborn myth still participates in Puritan ideology in its jeremiad-like rhetoric. Second, although Hass wants to replace Catholic “sacramental mediation” with a “contemplative peace beyond any manifestation in the flesh,” he still calls his “mystical” apprehension of God an “embodiment of what can't be embodied” (22, emphasis added). He thus develops a secular American mysticism through a partial rejection and refinement of a Catholic apprehension of analogia entis. In this sense only is he a Catholic writer.

9. See Acuña's landmark history, Occupied America.

10. Although racism means that “most / Of us wouldn't get good jobs, some / Would die,” Soto also suggests in “The Levee” that “We deserved this life” because television has been internalized, “wreathed in dollies / And the glow-in-the-night Christ on the windowsill” (38).

11. Literally, Okies are the impoverished Oklahomans who moved West after the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.

12. In the Americas, papa means “potato,” which in Spain is called patata. Papa can also refer to the Pope, thus combining the themes of religion, culture, and masculinity. Soto, meanwhile, means “grove” or “thicket,” the wilderness Puritans hope to conquer, making very apt Soto's mother's quip that the name means “Mexican.”

13. Soto reaches a low point when he imitates Jim's prejudices. In the last two poems of the first section, Soto carefully juxtaposes his teenage prejudices—“Fuckin' queers” (“Drinking in the Sixties” 43)—with his stepfather's—“He had words for blacks, / Stalin, the yellow race that could jump up and down / And destroy us all” (“Spelling Words at the Table” 45). The phrase “had words” recalls the poem that introduced Jim (“our stepfather had words / For men with long hair” [“The Music at Home” 17]), thus giving us one origin for Soto's early homophobia. Soto will become a poet when he no longer possesses or “has” words but travels across their borders.

I am grateful to Anne Macmaster, Marianne Noble, Carol J. Singley, Timothy Spurgin, and Kathryn Manson Tomasek for their assistance on this essay.