A First Generation Mexican American’s Search for Identity

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A First Generation Mexican American’s Search for Identity

  Jose Olivarez’s second poetry collection Citizen Illegal (Haymarket, 2018) pointedly critiques the discrimination against and exploitation of Latinos, placing him firmly in the Latino social justice tradition (Rodriguez 124). Olivarez writes in English, with Hip Hop inflections, Spanish seasoning, Chicago area references and pop culture allusions. If there is an overarching motif to Citizen Illegal, it is the struggle for a sense of identity. A first generation Mexican American, Olivarez was born and raised in Calumet City, Illinois, just south of Chicago. His parents immigrated to the United States sin papeles [without papers]^[1] (41) from Cañadas de Obregon, Mexico. Many of the poems such as “If Anything Is Missing, Then It’s Nothing Big Enough to Remember” deal with being torn between two countries, two cultures. The struggle for a sense of self also involves coming-of-age, exploring parental and romantic relationships, personal insecurities, and body image. Ultimately, of course, these are all part of one piece.

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  “Mexican Heaven,” whose stanzas appear one to a page throughout this work, unite its five sections. Olivarez first published this poem in The Adroit Journal in January 2018^[2] in a unified form with the stanzas in a different order under the title “A Mexican Dreams of Heaven,” which is how it is best known. He wrote the first stanza at Young Chicago Writers workshop from a prompt to reimagine a personally meaningful myth. After struggling to craft a narrative, he finally left the poem as a series of vignettes (Olivarez, “How I Wrote”). The poem written in the vernacular, irreverent Chicano poetic tradition (Noel 287) shines a light on the reality and longing of immigrant Latino family life.

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Heaven is a metaphor for the marginalized and ghettoized immigrant community. The poem begins “all of the Mexicans sneak into heaven” (5),^[3] alluding to those who cross the southern border without documents. The heavenly powers-that-be are all Mexicans. St. Peter, for example, is named Pedro. He gives a shot of tequila to everyone entering heaven and gets drunk himself (28). The speaker says St. Peter allows Mexicans into heaven “only to work in the kitchens” (p. 28, line 2), critiquing how American capitalism, as Denise N. Obinna says, “includes and excludes” Latin American immigrants, pushing them into “menial-dead end jobs,” known as “Mexican jobs,” which are paid at a lower-rate called “Mexican pay” (246-7). Although critiquing capitalism, the speaker shows work to be the perceived way to become part of America, when he says that the Mexican kitchen workers “dream of another heaven, / one they might be allowed / in if they work hard enough” (28). “A Mexican Dreams of Heaven” ends with this verse, which, with the title, give the poem a sense of longing. The final stanza of “Mexican Heaven,” found earlier in “A Mexican Dreams of Heaven,” shows God reading the Bible, thumbing a rosary, and pretending the Mexicans are reformed while they party in the basement and smoke weed outside.^[4] The last line reads, “hallejuah. this cycle repeats once a month. amen” (56). If the arrangement of the verses in and the title of “Mexican Dreams of Heaven” make it more critical of the ghettoization of Mexican immigrant families, the “amen” at the end and the title “Mexican Heaven” reveal a sacredness in Mexican immigrant family life, despite its flaws and challenges, of which one of the greatest is White^[5] racism.

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Citizen Illegal criticizes Whites for gentrification, violence against Latinos and insensitivity. In “Mexican Heaven” the speaker says, “there are white people in heaven, too. / they build condos across the street / & ask the Mexicans to speak English” (35). Olivarez says in an essay about how he wrote this poem that he originally concluded the stanza this way, thinking that it showed Whites messing up even in heaven. He added the lines, “i’m just kidding, / there are no white people in heaven” (35), when he realized that he “had failed to imagine an existence without gentrification and the presence of white violence” (Olvarez, “How I Wrote). If “Mexican Heaven” obliquely criticizes White violence against Latinos, “Mexican American Obituary,” inspired by Pedro Pietri’s “Puerto Rican Obituary,”^[6] explicitly condemns it, saying,

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“I Walk into Every Room & Yell Where The Mexicans At” calls out White insensitivity and microaggressions, too. A “liberal white woman” tells the speaker that “she doesn’t meet too many Mexicans / in this part of New York City” just before a “brown” waiter, carrying a tray of hors d’ouevres, comes through the kitchen doors with the sound of Selena singing ‘pero ay como me duele’” [but oh how I hurt] (31). The poem ends with her waiting for the speaker’s to thanks. These poems resist White hegemony not only semantically but also linguistically through the use of Spanish.

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William Carlos Williams, the son of a Puerto Rican mother and an English father, was also a first-generation immigrant, being born, growing up and living most of his adult life in Rutherford, New Jersey. Williams was one of the first in the Latino literary tradition to use Spanglish in his 1917 poetry collection Al que quiere [To the one who wants] and 1920 Kora in Hell^[7] (Hernandez Cruz 349). The inclusion of Spanish not only affirms Williams’ and Olivarez’s latinidad (Aldama 2), but also undermines the narrative that the United States is or should be an English-language-only country.^[8] Olivarez further undercuts this narrative in the footnote to “Getting Ready to Say I Love You to My Dad, It Rains,” which says ironically, “America loves me most when i strum a Spanish song. mi boca guitarrón^[9] [my guitarrón mouth]. when i say me estoy muriendo [I am dying], they say that’s my jam” (61). What “they,” who can only be understood as non-Spanish speaking Americans, believe is the speaker’s “jam” actually reveals his deep distress. In “Mexican Heaven,” after Whites ask the Mexicans to speak only English, the following verse responds with four lines in Spanish: “tamales. tacos. tostadas. / tortas. pozole. sopes. / huaraches. menudo. horchata. / jamaica. limonada. agua.” (44). Stylistically, the use of a period after each word, which in the last twenty years has become popular in informal writing, indicates that the individual is speaking slowly, deliberately emphasizing each word, which in this case is food or drink associated not with Mexicans. The lack of capitalization at the beginning of sentences in all the poems of Citizen Illegal and even proper nouns in some poems such as “I Walk into Every Room & Yell Where the Mexicans At,” also, undercuts the hegemonic linguistic narrative by violating standardized English grammar. The speaker in “Note: Rose that Grows from Concrete,” who says that the “emperor’s muddy boot” views both the rose and concrete as a “welcome mat,” encapsulates this resistance by succinctly enjoining “be a rusty nail. make the emperor howl” (18). Semantically, linguistically, and stylistically, this collection challenges the status quo in the United States, which has placed Latinos in an inherently ambiguous status.

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The roots of this ambiguous status can be found in the earliest years of the American republic. The Naturalization Act of 1790 required a person to be White to become a citizen. Article Eight of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican American War, granted citizenship to the approximately 100,000 residents of the territories Mexico ceded to the United States, tacitly declaring them White, which has been the official position of the United States government ever since, except for the 1930 census, when there was a separate category for Mexicans. If legally considered White, Latinos have never been accorded the same rights and privileges, frequently being treated as second class citizens and discriminated against throughout American history. Latinos’ ambiguous status can be seen in the poem “Mexican American Disambiguation.” At the end, the speaker expresses his conflicted position in American society saying, “the Chicano / in me … should not be confused with the diversity / in me or the mexicano in me who is constantly fighting / with the upwardly mobile in me who is good friends / with the Mexican American in me, who the colleges love, / but only on brochures, who the government calls / NON-WHITE, HISPANIC or WHITE, HISPANIC”^[10] (Original capitalization, 42). Stylistically, the use of all capital letters reflects the U.S. government’s official racial/ethnic categories designation for Latinos. All capitals also show the offensiveness of this categorization since that is considered yelling in informal writing. “Gentefication,” the next to the last poem in the book, however, offers some hope for a more just society. Mexicans, gente [people], have taken back the neighborhood block, the reverse of White gentrification. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo has been “rescinded” and “the whole block is alive & not for sale” (64). When the army and the migra, an informal Mexican word for the border patrol, arrive to return the status quo ante, the people have gone. Even though forced to flee, Mexicans had taken back their neighborhood, showing that they can achieve gains. Although Citizen Illegal rightly garners attention for its social justice poems, the book’s last poem is “Guapo” [Handsome], the name the speaker gives himself.

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Citizen Illegal, if it were a novel, would be considered a bildungsroman with its narrative arc stretching from infancy in the first poem to maturity in the last. The poem “River Oaks Mall” relates childhood insecurities such as a crush on a girl. The thrill of a teen party is seen in “Ode to Cal City Basement Parties.” “Summer Love” relates getting dumped at a train station after a summer fling and “Not Love is a Season” recovering after a breakup. Three poems specifically explore the speaker’s relationship with a father who uses corporal punishment and only grunts when his son says he loves him. Although some poems such as “Boy & the Belt” have no social justice references, these themes are often intertwined as in “River Oaks Mall,” which relates how the speaker’s family works so hard to fit into American society it is obvious they do not.

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The coming-of-age poems have two main foci. The first is dealing with one’s own imperfections, which is best summarized by “My Therapist Says Make Friends with Your Monsters.” The second is the struggle to understand and negotiate interpersonal relationships. These are encapsulated by a line from “I Wake in a Field of Wolves with the Moon,” which says, “i know no love without teeth / & have the scars to remember” (17). Love, though, does not always bite, as the speaker relates in “Love Poem Feat. Kanye West,” dedicated to Erika, saying, “i don’t know how love works / but i remember the day my grandma died // we talked on the phone. / i don’t remember what you said / or whether it helped. / i only remember / when i called you answered” (60). “Guapo” concludes the entire collection. The baby of the first poem has become a mature adult who accepts his own imperfections and that he looks like his parents, metaphorically coming to terms with them and his heritage, if not necessarily his place in America.

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Jose Olivarez powerfully and poignantly explores the struggle of a young first generation Mexican American, who has a “half-everything, / all nothing nature” (49), to find his identity. His poems pull no punches. They clearly delineate the injustices of racism against and the exploitation of Latinos, who inhabit an inherently conflicted status in American society. The speaker in “I Walk into Every Room & Yell Where The Mexicans At” says his father sings “Por Tu Maldito /Amor” (31) [For Your Cursed / Love] to America. These poems also relate the joys and struggles of coming to terms with oneself and one’s parents and finding love..

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Works Cited

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Aldama, Frederick Luis. Formal Matters in Contemporary Latino Poetry. Palgrave MacMillan, 2013.

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Hernandez Cruz, Victor. “Encounters with an Americano Poet: William Carlos Williams.” Conjunctions, no. 29 (1997), pp. 345-9, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24515747. Accessed August 21, 2023.

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Noel, Urayoán. “Poetry.” The Routledge Companion to Latino/a Literature, edited by Suzanne Bost and Frances R. Aparicio. Taylor & Francis Group, 2012.

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Mack, Kristen, and John Paltrey. “Capitalizing Black and White: Grammatical Justice and Equity.” McArthur Foundation, August 26, 2020, https://www.macfound.org/press/perspectives/capitalizing-black-and-white-grammatical-justice-and-equity. Accessed August 20, 2023.

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Noe-Bustamante, Luis, et al. “Majority of Latinos Say Skin Color Impacts Opportunity in America and Shapes Daily Life.” Pew Research Center, February 4, 2021, https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2021/11/04/half-of-u-s-latinos-experienced-some-form-of-discrimination-during-the-first-year-of-the-pandemic/. Accessed August 20, 2023.

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Obinna, Denise N. “Lessons in Democracy: America’s Tenuous History

with Immigrants.” Journal of Historical Sociology, vol. 31 (2018), pp. 238-52.

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Olivarez, José. Citizen Illegal. Haymarket Books, 2018.

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Olivarez, José. “José Olivarez: How I Wrote ‘A Mexican Dreams of Heaven.” The Adroit Journal, February 27, 2019, https://theadroitjournal.org/2019/02/27/jose-olivarez-how-i-wrote-a-mexican-dreams-of-heaven/. Accessed August 17, 2023.

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Rodriguez, Ralph E. Latinx Literature Unbound: Undoing Ethnic Expectation. Fordham University Press, 2018.

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1. All translations from Spanish to English are the author’s unless otherwise noted. ↑

2. See José Olivarez, “A Mexican Dreams of Heaven,” The Adroit Journal, issue 24 (January 2018), https://theadroitjournal.org/issue-twenty-four-jose-olivarez/. ↑

3. The “Mexican Heaven” parenthetical references are to the page number for the stanza of the quote. ↑

4. Olivarez based this verse upon his mom pretending not to know his brothers are partying in the basement (Olivarez, “How I Wrote”). ↑

5. The racial category White is capitalized in this article as is Latino and other racial groups. The traditional orthographic standard of upper case for other races and lower case for Whites implies that they are “the standard and norm” (Mack). ↑

6. See Pedro Pietri, “Puerto Rican Obituary,” Selected Poetry (City Lights Books, 2015), Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/58396/puerto-rican-obituary. Accessed August 17, 2023. ↑

7. The kora is a West African harp. ↑

8. A 2021 Pew Research survey found that 23% of Latino adults had been criticized for speaking Spanish in public (Noe-Bustamante). ↑

9. The guitarrón is a large six-string bass guitar frequently played in Mariachi bands. ↑

10. In Directive 15 on May 12, 1977, The Office of Management and Budget promulgated the following categories that the federal government has used with only slight variation since that time in censuses and governmental forms to collect demographic information and categorize the population: Race: American Indian or Alaskan Native, Asian or Pacific Islander, Black, White. Ethnicity: Hispanic origin, Not of Hispanic origin. ↑

John Kenneth Gibson is a graduate student in Spanish literature and cultural production at North Carolina State University. His research interests include religion, the body, gender, and neoliberalism. His essay “The Contested Travesti Bodies of Las malas and Tesis sobre una domesticaión” is forthcoming in Lexington Book’s Non-Normative Sexuality in U.S. Latinx and Latin American Literature.