Selena Didn't Know Spanish Either
In one especially poignant poem from Marisa Tirado’s debut chapbook, Selena Didn’t Know Spanish Either, the Latinx speaker compares herself to Selena Quintanilla Pérez, at once identifying with the beloved Tejano icon, while also wrestling with her own birthright:
When I learned that at first, Selena didn’t know Spanish
either,
I entered a moment beyond my own poetics.
Truth is, white kids get more gold stars per language,
get corporate jobs in Mexico City. I watched them take
family cruises down to meet my ancestors before I could.
Do you know what it’s like to be off-limits from yourself?
The sense of dissociation from one’s linguistic and cultural inheritance underpins this multifaceted chapbook, in which Tirado fuses personal heritage and colonial history in poems that often center around the amalgamated site of the speaker’s body. In one poem, the speaker considers the conditions of her employment:
My new job is inside a school inside the country
where my ancestors are from, ancestors who pillaged
my other ancestors while they made my blood.
In another, she considers the origins of her skin: “A hundred years ago, a Spaniard stole a matriarch // and put her in his redbrick home. This, I say, / made my skin.” Ascribing her speaker’s corporeal features to this long history of colonization and violence is a way to reconnect with her origins, despite the pain and conflict it entails. The result is a difficult, nuanced depiction of intergenerational trauma and its impact on the speaker in present day.
Borderlands soil is also thematized in this collection, with its many references to petrological terminology. Commenting on “the obsession with story,” the speaker notes: “The anti-time mask clings to my nose, / clay settling into another layer.” And in “The Source Has Exhausted Itself,” we learn that “everyone is dinner / and all else dries into freckles of gypsum.” In “Ancestry,” the speaker’s mother steals back stones from tourist sites like Gold Butte, Mt. Rushmore, and the Crazy Horse memorial, reclaiming small tokens of her people.
Like bedrock outcroppings or New Mexican mesas, Tirado’s chapbook exists fully formed, yet promises further formations, deeper excavations of her poeticized self.