SOURCE: Gish, Robert Franklin. “Jimmy Santiago Baca: Writing the Borderlands of Ethnic and Cultural Crisis.” In Beyond Bounds: Cross-Cultural Essays on Anglo, American-Indian & Chicano Literature, pp. 145-50. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996.

“Language made bridges of fire between me and everything I saw. Writing bridged my divided life of prisoner and free man.”

—Jimmy Santiago Baca, Working in the Dark: Reflections of a Poet of the Barrio

Few contemporary authors write and live across as many ethnic, cultural, and genre boundaries as Jimmy Santiago Baca. Consider his artistic, cultural, and ethnic identities and roles—each defined by its own set of expected and established boundaries that Baca continues to redefine, continues to cross: poet, novelist, essayist, scriptwriter, convict, honored citizen, actor, producer, lecturer, celebrity, culture hero, Chicano, Indian, southwesterner, to name just a few.

Baca faces all of his personal and professional frontiers through writing. And his writing/riding across these borders is both illustrative of times past, especially in the development of United States literature, exemplary of this time and prophetic of the courage demanded by borderland crossings in times to come.

Baca's Working in the Dark: Reflections of a Poet of the Barrio (1992) and his film script, Blood In … Blood Out (1993), which provides much of the focus of Working in the Dark, are dramatic demonstrations of the cultural and ethnic borderlands that he faces and writes across. These borderlands of personal courage and will, individuation and epiphany, frontiers of the soul and heart, mind and spirit, are played out against geographical regions mapped both matter-of-factly and transcendentally—Albuquerque's South Valley, “Burque's” Saint Anthony's orphanage, other New Mexico locales such as Santa Fe and the Llano Estacado around Estancia, and jails and state penitentiaries standing for the mythic restrictions and freedoms of the Chicano homeland known as Aztlán.

Baca's earlier, better known books of poetry, Martín and Meditations on the South Valley (1987) and Black Mesa Poems (1989), southwestern in locale, are very much embedded in the essays in Working in the Dark and in the film images of Blood In … Blood Out, both very much West Coast in setting and atmosphere. His work has evolved then, no longer a melded monolithic “Chicano” whole but now an organic growth of separate but blending multicultural patterns. Seen in this context, Baca the essayist and scriptwriter and filmmaker crosses from the vast frontiers of Spanish, Indio, Mejicano, Chicano New Mexico to California cool, to the fantastic imaginings of the movies and the fame and infamy associated with them, particularly in Hollywood. The incongruities of east Los Angeles, of San Quentin, of the brutalities and savagery of incarceration, set against the fawning and flattery and VIP lifestyle of a Hollywood scriptwriter, provide Baca with a whole new set of crises to write around, out of, and through. Hollywood and its seductive lure and east Los Angeles and its barrio blues, set against the hopes and dreams of a Burque boy making it big in both the East Coast worlds of poetic acclaim and the West Coast world of money and fame are not the usual, prototypical Chicano borderlands. They are, however, borderlands along a familiar path toward the American dream, a path familiar to many writers faced with the promise and the pain of American “success.”

Just such choices, such crises provide the major themes of not just these recent books but also of several published interviews with Baca, which appeared in Albuquerque's NuTimes, The Bloomsbury Review of Denver, and nationally in Esquire. Speaking about his own personal borderlands of identity, the frontiers of writer and Chicano writer, Baca has this to say in his interview with me in The Bloomsbury Review, when asked if he had any advice to offer young poets, Chicano or otherwise:

First, I'm not a spokesman for Chicanos. Second, I'm not a Chicano writer. I'm a writer. Tomorrow I leave for a tour of New York, and I'll be on various panels, some with Amiri Baraka, others with Galway Kinnell, some with Allen Ginsberg. I'll be going into prisons as well as to universities like Yale. I'll be going into galleries and community centers, Black, White, and other. Writing, at its best, transcends all borders. It collapses the borders between people and becomes gift giving. It's a real falsehood to pigeon-hole people as “ethnic” writers.¹

Baca's self-proclaimed identity beyond ethnic borderlands is evidenced, in part, by his publication by New Directions, publisher of such canonized writers as William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound.

Although some Chicanos might disparage Baca as a “vendido” or sell-out, Baca's claim is not grounded so much in denial of his Chicano identity as in the affirmation of the possibility of Chicano “success.” Such a pronouncement might also be viewed as a bold—albeit unpopular in certain quarters—affirmation of the universality of art. Whether viewed positively or negatively, Baca rests in this particular context smack on the frontier between acculturation and assimilation.

When asked about the borders of barrio and larger city, of power elite and criminal, of free domain and prison cell, Baca says this:

I think that the barrio truly is the mother, the fertile mother of our folklore, our customs, and our family network. Mainstream society has chosen to ignore the barrio, doesn't give it the equal economic advantages that they do their own neighborhoods in other parts of the city. It doesn't necessarily mean that it's bad. The thing about the barrio is—a drunk is a drunk is a drunk. Up in the ritzy neighborhoods a drunk is behind doors, behind plaques, behind his job, and in a brand new Mercedes-Benz. Most of the horrendous crimes that are committed are usually committed by the psychos that live in these beautiful homes and have these wonderful lives and one day decide to go up on a tower and start shooting people. Very few Chicanos do that in a barrio. They usually go rob a store for ten dollars so they can get a fix, and they end up in prison. Then you have these other people, the judges, who have hidden agendas and have sentenced thousands and thousands of teenagers to prison, not because of their judicial insight but because of their racist views.²

As artist and person, Baca talks meaningfully and passionately about cultural space and about his crossings back and forth from respectability to outcast. In Blood In … Blood Out, the crossing stories of the three cousins, Meiklo as convict, Paco as policeman, and Cruz as artist-drug addict, all demonstrate the ironies of just what influences change ostensibly good lives for bad and ostensibly bad lives for good—and how acculturation is not based solely and exclusively on skin color and bloodline.

Blood In … Blood Out, in its varying and contradictory perspectives on La Raza identity and solidarity seems to suggest that mixed bloods can be as purely Chicano, as dedicated to cultural identities and agendas as more pure-blooded persons with assimilated roles and identities. Rudolfo Anaya dramatizes something of the same Chicano commitment and dedication despite bloodline in Alburquerque. La lucha in a wider scope continues. It is of further irony that Baca himself in Blood In … Blood Out, cast in the role of “Gato,” a killer captain to Montana, the La Honda jefe, is also the film's executive producer and scriptwriter.

This paradox of captive released and willfully, imaginatively returned to captivity for the purposes of film, is presented in Working in the Dark as a deep disorientation by Baca:

Each day that we filmed at San Quentin, where I was surrounded by men whose sensibilities were being progressively eroded by prison society, the urge grew in me to foment a revolt: tear down the walls, herd the guards into the bay, burn down everything until nothing was left but a smoldering heap of blackened bricks and molten iron. And I was filled with a yearning to escape, to go home and live the new life I had fought so hard to make. The two worlds I inhabited then were so far apart I could find no bridge between them, no balance in myself. My disorientation was radical.³

Vincent Coppola's article “The Moon in Jimmy Baca,” published in Esquire in the summer of 1993, after the wrapping of Blood In … Blood Out and after the publication of Working in the Dark, dramatizes just how Baca's rage and disorientation as a vato loco carries over into his hard-won “domesticated” life as a loving yet still longing husband and father, an esteemed poet and local celebrity, around his home near the Black Mesa south of Albuquerque and in bars in and around Burque, Bernalillo, and Santa Fe. Baca's own puzzled assessment goes this way:

That night [in the Bernalillo jail] I ask myself, How did I end up here? I'm forty years old, I got a wife, two beautiful sons, a Hollywood movie, all these books. In jail with men vomiting on the floor, burping, and shitting beer? The answer? I got this … this thing in me like a full moon.⁴

The crises of Working in the Dark, of the metaphor of working in the dark, working out of the dark, out of illiteracy into literacy, out of captivity to freedom, out of anger to love, “wolf self” and “dove self,” working throughout his life across the borderlands of vato loco and esteemed poet and darling of L.A. producers and directors—all of these borderlands are prevalent in the book's autobiographical essays. Not only does the book detail the borderlands of the Southwest and the Far West, New Mexico and California, Albuquerque and Los Angeles, it shows us the borderlands and fronteras and sub-cities of classes, cultures, and ethnicities within the larger seductions of L.A. itself:

The city has a bilingual heart: in L.A. you live in two worlds, in celluloid shadows and hard reality. L.A. is South Americans whirring weed cutters on mansion grounds; old hippies with small boy's features toddling naked in their gardens at dawn; crowds of workers on street corners hiring out to a different employer every day. It is a city of the homeless sleeping in alleys on discarded couches, and single people living in fifty-room palaces on million-dollar-a-month budgets. There you become a two-world person, inhaling the intoxicating perfume of luxury and extravagance, and turning away from the piercing sight of poverty. Los Angeles miraculously replenishes itself by drinking in dreams. It's where life runs on opposites, greed and generosity; it's where the fire of envy consumes the heart of an actor burning to step over his fallen friend's bad luck to take his turn in the cold reach for stardom.

(p. 114)

Using the mythic metaphors of Eve, Flora, and Satan, seductions attendant to the fall of man, Baca encapsulates his own vast hunger and ambition in a primal motive, an impulse to partake and eat of the city, to eat of life in all its crossings and borders—

The night is aromatic with citrus dew and the ocean opens waves for last dreamers turned down by casting directors, for Mexicans yearning for home, for the penniless young who have come to this last coast to escape from their tragic secrets back home. I twine my python imagination around the waist of an avocado tree, flickering my tongue of light faintly on the skin of an L.A. moon. And as I bite into her tropical heart whose pain is a soft glow language cannot fathom nor the spirit, “Bite me,” L.A. whispers, “Bite me.”

(p. 116)

Given such appetite for the unknown, such ambition, the crises of which Baca writes and which affect us all become questions, ultimately of the courage to bite, the courage to cross over, beyond bounds, the courage to face and confront the future, whether of feast or of famine, whether a land of waste or of promise. It is the hunger of art. The desire of life.

Jimmy Santiago Baca in this context writes/rides the contemporary cultural and ethnic borderlands with heroic courage—the courage of a heroic Chicano heart—not just to reclaim old lands and old myths but to till new fields, nourish new gardens, cross new frontiers of self and culture, and discover new powers of the word, of the writer as voyager, as explorer.

Notes

1. Robert F. Gish, “Bridges of Fire: An Interview with Jimmy Santiago Baca,” The Bloomsbury Review 12, No. 5 (July/August 1992), p. 20.

2. Ibid., p. 7.

3. Jimmy Santiago Baca, Working in the Dark: Reflections of a Poet of the Barrio (Santa Fe: Red Crane Books, 1992), p. 17. Subsequent references are cited parenthetically in the text.

4. Vincent Coppola, “The Moon in Jimmy Baca,” Esquire (June 1993), p. 48.