My God Looks North and Other Extremes

This post is part of a project I started last year to document the ways in which writers and artists from Latin America depict the experiences of Latinx people in the U.S. It began with the idea that contemporary Latinx writers who live in the U.S. are often in dialogue with writers and ideas from Latin America, be it for reasons of personal identity, political solidarity, linguistic experimentation or resistance to nationalisms. One instance of a Chicano writer expressing solidarity with South American experiences is in the 2008 poem “Exiles” by Juan Felipe Herrera, the U.S. poet laureate from 2015-2017. “Exiles” circulates through images of Southern cone dictatorship, disappearance, utopia, economic inequality, and displacement to present the Americas as a purgatorial site of transit:

At the greyhound bus stations, at airports, at silent wharfs
the bodies exit the crafts. Women, men, children; cast out
from the new paradise.   

They are not there in the homeland, in Argentina, not there
in Santiago, Chile; never there in Montevideo, Uruguay,
and they are not here

in America

They are in exile

Herrera’s poem provides one of many examples we might look at of U.S. Latinx poets expressing hemispheric solidarity by writing about Latin American experiences. Yet we don’t see as many instances of the opposite: of Spanish-language Latin American writers expressing aesthetic, political, or positional solidarity with Latinx or diasporic communities in the U.S. (though Puerto Rico is understandably an outlier).  

In some cases, Latin American writers have been consciously hostile toward U.S. Latinx experiences, starting of course with Octavio Paz’s derisive essay “The Pocho and Other Extremes,” from The Labyrinth of Solitude. In most cases, it’s less conscious, less malicious than this. The U.S. Latinx experience is not something Latin American writers are necessarily conversant with, so it doesn’t enter into the range of things they might write about. Over the last year I’ve asked many scholars and writers for good examples of Latin American artists writing about U.S. Latinx experiences. This response, from an experienced scholar of Chicano Studies, is telling: “you mean what do Mexican writers and artists think about Mexican American writers and artists?….they don’t even know we exist.”  

That was my starting point. But the more I’ve investigated, the more I’ve discovered that it’s not so simple, and that there are more examples than I first thought (e.g. have a look at the song “Dreamers” by the Mexican band Molotov, who do have one U.S.-born member). I won’t go too deeply into these examples right here (and if you know of some interesting ones, send to me please). Instead, I’ll share some of the early writing that got this project started.  

Apology Note: I was invited to write this post in December, 2019 and asked to submit it by March 1, 2020. It’s the middle of March and I still haven’t submitted it (my apologies). I had wanted to scrap this writing for something that speaks more to our particular COVID-19, locked-down moment. But the truth is I’m unsure of what poetry should do or say right now. I don’t have answers. And so I’m sticking with my original post, and thus turning to my literary heroes, Raúl Zurita and Cecilia Vicuña. Not in the hope that they can tell us what to do. But because they are models of artists who keep making the work, who keep saying what needs to be said, and who keep allowing us to see what art makes possible in our bleakest moments, in our interconnected economies of horror (and so maybe now they are more relevant than ever).  Since the 1970s, their work has always been deeply committed to the social, to the communal, to the interconnectedness of historical times, languages, and political experiences. They are models for me, and for so many others.  

***Thanks to the Chicagoland Poetics Initiative 2019 for offering so many helpful ideas about this piece and for your own work and brilliance!***

LA VIDA NUEVA
 

LA VIDA NUEVA (THE NEW LIFE) by Raúl Zurita

Written with an airplane in the sky above New York City in June 1982, Chilean poet Raúl Zurita’s “La Vida Nueva” subsequently appeared as photographs of that sky-writing in Anteparaíso (1982). The poem can be read against two competing forces: dictatorship and utopia. As Zurita puts it in the “Introductory Note” to the English translation of Anteparaíso:

This work was written under conditions common to Latin America: a military dictatorship and the tragedies that always follow in its wake… But I also think that the only meaning of art, its only purpose—quite aside from the issue of specific schools or formalisms—is to make life more humanly livable. In brief, we should keep on proposing Paradise, even if the evidence at hand might indicate that such a pursuit is a folly.

Zurita’s “La Vida Nueva” also asks to be read theologically. In “My God is No,” a section of poems from the 2011 anthology Zurita (and in the Action Books anthology The Country of Planks) whose titles are taken from the lines written in the sky in 1982, he uses an epigraph from Luke 10:20, “Your names are written in heaven.” The preceding verse, in Luke 10:19, which Zurita does not cite, reads: “I have given you authority to trample on snakes and scorpions and to overcome all the power to the enemy; nothing will harm you.”

With these lines in mind, one way of understanding “La Vida Nueva” is that the poet is writing the names of God upon the heavens as a means of immunization from the power of the enemy, the enemies of paradise: the Chilean military-backed government, the U.S. government that supports it, and the cannibalistic regimes of global capital.

But in Zurita’s poem, the God whose name is written in heaven is neither beautiful nor peaceful; it’s not a God that heals, saves, or blesses. Rather, it’s a God that does not satisfy, that causes hunger. It’s a God that freezes, a God that negates, a God that disappoints, that rots and gets picked apart by vultures; it’s a God that, like the Chicano mentioned in the 8th verse, is defined by displacement, by resistance, and by a subversion of national and linguistic identity. In this vision wounds are overcome by the finality of love and the unquenchable will to propose paradise.

Dictatorship amplifies the need to propose paradise. When daily life itself is turned into the inferno through the brutalities of state oppression, the need to imagine paradise is not just whimsy but can be understood instead as a mechanism that allows one to keep living.

In 2009, I interviewed Zurita and asked him about how he conceived of writing the poem in the sky above New York.  He said:

The idea came about in the most desperate time of my life. I got the idea far before it happened, in 1975….I remembered that when I was a kid, a really young kid, I remembered having seen an airplane write the name of a soap in the sky. I didn't know if it was a dream or if I had really seen it because it was an extremely old memory. . . . And so then it occurred to me that it would be beautiful to write in the sky. This was 1975 and I was totally desperate, but thinking about this helped me to stay okay. . . .I thought about this, and I was able to escape from the horrors of life.

DB: And in practice, how did this function? How did you find pilots?

RZ: Originally, we tried to do it with the Chilean Air Force, because I thought that if these same guys who bombed La Moneda (the presidential palace) for their government are capable of writing a poem in the sky, then it would prove that art would be capable of changing the world. Of course, it didn't happen. The idea went as far up as a comandante. Then we had some friends who were in the U.S. And I wrote to them and asked if they knew of any agencies that wrote advertisements in the skies with airplanes. And so that’s how it happened . . .

With this work, Zurita originally proposed a radical repurposing of military weapons to create a utopian text in the context of a horrific death zone. He refers to this as a matter of personal survival.

Homage

“In Anteparaíso,” writes Zurita “I’ve employed new poetic forms, from the use of mathematics and logical systems to distortion, breaks from conventional poetic diction, and aerial writing. In my poem ‘La Vida Nueva,’ for example, the fifteen verses written in Spanish against the blue sky over New York City were composed as an homage to minority groups throughout the world and, more specifically to the Spanish-speaking people of the United States. When I first designed this project, I thought the sky was precisely the place toward which the eyes of all communities have been directed, because they have hoped to find in it the signs of their destinies; therefore, the greatest ambition one could aspire to would be to have that same sky as a page where anyone could write.”

Zurita’s “La Vida Nueva,” then, was written for a particular audience, whose language was deemed minor, and who were asked to not speak their minor language in public. Whether he knew it or not, Zurita’s 1982 “La Vida Nueva,” written in the sky in Spanish, arrived at a political moment where the movement towards English-only legislation, and the designation of English as the United States’ “official language,” was having a boom.   

Here is the text of the proposed federal “English Language Amendment,” introduced by California Senator S.I. Hayakawa in 1981: “The English language shall be the official language of the United States…Neither the United States nor any State shall make or enforce any law which requires the use of any language other than English.”

The Federal route proved unsuccessful for the English-only crusaders. But more success would come at the state level. The next 10-15 years would see Official English Laws in half the states; a few states, like Illinois, already had such laws on the book. Farcically, Illinois in 1923 declared “American” as the Official Language of Illinois (this was repealed in 1969):

Whereas, Since the creation of the American Republic there have been certain Tory elements in our country who have never become reconciled to our republican institutions and have ever clung to the tradition of King and Empire; and Whereas, America has been a haven of liberty and place of opportunity for the common people of all nations; and Whereas, these strangers within our gates who seek economic betterment, political freedom, larger opportunities for their children and citizenship for themselves, come to think of our institutions as American and our language as the American language; and Whereas, the name of the language of a country has a powerful psychological influence in stimulating and preserving the national ideal; and Whereas, the languages of other countries bear the names of the countries to which they belong, now therefore Be it enacted by the People of the State of Illinois, represented in the General Assembly: The official language of the State of Illinois shall be known hereafter as the “American” language and not as the “English” language.

Not the language of the Americas but the American language.

***

Fast-forward from the 1920s to the 1980s. In 1981, Virginia became the first in a new wave of states to pass official English language laws, mandating that no state agencies should provide documents or information “in any language other than English,” and that “School boards shall have no obligation to teach the standard curriculum…in a language other than English.”

With this in mind, consider essayist and cultural phenomenon Richard Rodriguez, the Mexican-American affirmative action beneficiary who came to fame in 1982 with the publication of his memoir Hunger of Memory, which denounced affirmative action as racist. Rodriguez proclaimed that it was dangerous to expose immigrant children to bilingual education programs. A darling of the English-only right because of the ‘authentic’ position from which he spoke, Rodriguez avowed that the problem with bilingual education was that it confused public and private. He wrote that supporters of bilingual education “do not realize that while one suffers a diminished sense of private individuality by becoming assimilated into public society, such assimilation makes possible the achievement of public individuality.” In his view, bilingual education did not allow for such assimilation to take place.

Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory and Zurita’s poem “La Vida Nueva” both appear in 1982, amid a percolating debate about how Latinx people should comport themselves in the public sphere. According to right-wing legislators and their enablers like Rodriguez, Spanish should only be used in private. “La Vida Nueva” asserts the opposite: that Spanish belongs in public.  

My God Is Chicano

“La Vida Nueva’s” lyrical insistence that “My God Is Chicano” moves away from simpler questions of linguistic audience and into more complicated territory: that of political identification with Mexican-American resistance movements, a rare position for South American poets in our interconnected virtual world to take today, and an even rarer position in 1982.  

As Chileans were being killed and disappeared under the dictatorship, Zurita, by allying himself with Chicanos in the U.S., was proposing a form of hemispheric solidarity in which the sky above New York was itself an essential point on a triangle between the Chilean military dictatorship, Wall Street and U.S. commerce, and the migration of Mexicans and Latin Americans to the U.S.

We know that the Chilean coup would not have occurred without the United States. The economic circumstances of Mexicans compelled to leave their country would also not exist without the United States. To critique the Chilean dictatorship is to also critique U.S. foreign policy and U.S. economic policy, which are inextricable from the formation of the Chicano movement—all of which are inextricable from the purgatorial destabilization of exile.

Ground Below     

If Raúl Zurita is thinking about Latinx language and experiences in the sky above New York City, another Chilean poet of his generation, Cecilia Vicuña, interrogates what happens to immigrants underground in New York City, what gets buried and destroyed by the cruelty of the neoliberal state.  

Born in 1948, Vicuña was 25 years old when the 1973 military coup took place in Chile. She was studying art in England at the time of the coup, and she would never again reside in Chile. She lived in Colombia for many years, before settling in New York in the 1980s. She is a poet, performer, filmmaker, and visual artist. Her work seamlessly moves through genres, languages, aesthetic styles, cultural traditions, and critical discourses. She has made work about Chile and the dictatorship; the utopian spirit of the Allende years; migration; sexuality; and indigeneity, among other themes. She stages performances in Spanish and English drawing on indigenous traditions and languages. She makes paintings in the form of poems; and she makes films about poetry.  

In her seminal 1980 documentary film Qué es para Usted la poesía? (What is Poetry to You?) she travels through Colombia asking men in bars, women in brothels, children on the streets, the simple question: what is poetry to you? A man in a club answers this question and responds: “Poetry depends on many factors—fundamentally on the system in which we live. In the case of Colombia, poetry is divided in two: bourgeois poetry and real poetry, revolutionary poetry.”

A street musician answers by saying: “Poetry is inspired by the facts of life. In them we find poetry, then culture and education, then philosophy and literature. I’ve learned this myself in my life and in my art, in what life throws my way, and also because I’ve had to work like a dog in order to survive. But in this struggle I find the materials needed to write the truth.”

This connection, between poetry, labor, and everyday life, is one that Vicuña has concretized. For her, this is more than just theory of performativity or conceptualism: it’s fundamentally linked to art, human rights, and social justice. Her film underscores poetry’s place in the public sphere, affirming that it is inseparable from the lives of working-class people. For Vicuña, a commitment to human rights and social justice applies not just to the relationship between art and life in Latin America; it applies in the United States as well.

Spit Temple: The Selected Performances of Cecilia Vicuña (translated by Rosa Alcalá, Ugly Duckling Presse, 2012), includes the transcription of a performance she gave at Woodland Pattern Book Center in Milwaukee on September 29, 2001, a few weeks after September 11th. It tells of a disappeared man named Luis, an Ecuadorian migrant in New York, who is “digging a hole for Con Edison.” Luis falls asleep in the hole, his coworkers cover him with rubble, and he dies:

And his brother
came to the work place and said:
Where is my brother Luis?
Your brother Luis? Nobody even remembered him
And this is very telling
because this is like our position
the position of the little dark ones
Nobody even notices
whether we are
or we are not
there
And this man, the brother,
insisted: He’s here in this hole [tapping lectern]
And they fought him and said no, no he’s not
He probably disappeared  
He went somewhere else
If he was here we don’t remember
Denying the whole thing
Until he pressed, he pressed, he pressed, and finally they opened the hole and there it was:
Luis, crushed, like this
Of course, he was dead
So this poem is in memoriam for Luis Gómez

I highlight this poem for a few reasons: first, it is another example of a Latin American poet asserting hemispheric solidarity by documenting the murderous treatment of Latin American immigrants to the U.S. Furthermore, because of this piece’s insistence on memorializing the disappeared, it feels as if these words could have been written in Chile or in other places in Latin America that have lived under dictatorship. “If he was here we don’t remember,” declaims Vicuña, and this line speaks to how histories are concealed so as to cover up the violences of capitalism and immigration policy. In this case, the immediate history of Luis Gomez is concealed; the history of Latin American emigration to the U.S. is concealed; the history of how immigrants and workers are treated by corporations is concealed. These concealments thus prevent the very possibility of a communal understanding that might ultimately allow for an honest reckoning and eventual reconciliation.

These circuits of hemispheric solidarity highlighted above counteract the concealments that neoliberal capital seeks to impose on nations, communities, and landscapes. These works, we might say, help to prevent, in Raúl Zurita’s words, “the disappeared from disappearing again” by asserting both the presence of absence, the presence of criminalized languages and bodies, and the presence of death in our landscapes. As a result, they link the ways in which U.S. and Latin American regimes of capital work together to destroy and disappear immigrants, dissidents and the poor. Finally, Zurita, Vicuña, and Herrera demonstrate hemispheric approaches that document the realities of these interconnected circuits of violence, and propose radical alternatives.