Analysis Of Jimmy Santiago Baca's A Place To Stand

On January 3, 2009 around 11:00 PM the phone rang with what I thought was exciting news about my newly born sister, Tristyn ,but quickly turned to horror. I could heard the fright in my dad's shaken voice as he told me Tristyn had to go into immediate heart surgery because she needed a stent to open up the blood flow to her heart. Being eight at the time the only thing I could think about was how she might not make it. My dad said to me “look after your sisters, and tell them nothing about the surgery”, which terrified me more than before. I knew I needed to be brave and take charge of the situations for my sisters. Bravery is something I learned for a situation I never knew would happen.

In "Coming Into Language," Jimmy Santiago Baca describes how he went from being illiterate to learning how to read and write and eventually becoming a poet while being in prison. From being embarrassed for not understanding and asking questions Baca become illiterate, and in ninth grade he decided to drop out. The only thing that seemed to interest him was books with pictures of people of the same nationality as him. When listening to prisoners talk in “ Chicano language” out loud it had inspired him to learn his own language. In this narrative Baca explains to us that becoming a writer helped him through tough years when he was an inmate.

As a person who came from another country to the USA. learning how to read and write wasn’t easy. At the beginning, I found it so hard to read and write I would sit for a long time trying to read one page and most of the time I didn’t understand what was it about. writing one complete sentence was very difficult I had to learn read and write for that reason I feel that I have a lot of similarity with Jimmy Santiago who also had a hard time reading and writing and he had to teach himself how to read and write. I have a lot of similarity with Jimmy Santiago Baca. Jimmy Santiago was born in poor Mexican Family.His dad was addicted to alcohol and his Mom left him when he was a kid because of the financial problem they were facing and married a rich man. Regardless the struggles that Jimmy Santiago Baca faced he was able to cope with them by teaching himself how to write poems. Jimmy found a place for him in the community and he felt that by writing poems he was able to connect with people. He found a place to stand. A place that he was always searching for and he mentioned that in his book,“ A Place to Stand The Making of a poet.” by saying,“I was searching for something to make me feel more a part of the world, I couldn’t share with anyone the pain that still drove my exploration to find a place to stand comfortably in my skin.”, also, he was able to get rid of his anger that he was born with wrong skin color. reading, writing, and becoming a poet helped Jimmy Santiago get

Richard Blanco, a famous Cuban-American poet who became the first Latin American, immigrant, and openly gay Inaugural Poet in 2013, wrote a variety of works based off his life and all the things that were going on in it. In Richard Blanco’s, “El Florida Room” and “The First Real San Giving Day”, Blanco provides the readers with a look into his personal life with information about his family and some characteristics of his life. Dealing with many different societal issues due to his culture and even his sexual orientation, Blanco describes what his life was truly like, more specifically geared towards his culture; being Cuban-American. Through his use of a chronological storytelling in his memoir and a reflection on the past in his poem,

“ In Colorado My Father Scoured and Stacked Dishes” by Eduardo C. Corral is a poem about the speaker's father who was smuggled into the State. Coming into the State the speaker's father faced many hardship and struggles to make a living in the desert, the mountain, and Oregon. Corral the speaker shows empathy toward his father because he see’s all of the struggles that his father had faced and the speaker couldn’t do anything to help the father out. Corral used code-switching, diction and symbolism to show the hardships and struggles the speaker and his father faced as being Mexican American due to their identity. The struggles to survive when they don’t have money, family support, and also trying to fit in even though he is being disrespected because of his cultural background.

Pat Mora is an award-winning writer that bases most her poems on tough cultural challenges and life as a Mexican American. She was born in a Spanish speaking home in El Paso, Texas. Mora is proud to be a Hispanic writer and demonstrates how being culturally different in America is not easy. She explains this through her experiences and the experience other’s. In her poems “Elena”, “Sonrisas”, and “Fences”, Mora gives you a glimpse of what life as a Mexican American is; their hardships, trials, strength that make them who they are.

Poetry is often used as a form of writing to express emotions or tell a story. The poems “LA Nocturne: The Angels”, by Xavier Villaurrutia and “Meditations on the South Valley: Poem IX” by Jimmy Santiago Baca, are two distinctive poems. In Baca’s poem he expresses the disbelief and the sorrow of the death of a boy named Eddie. While, in Villaurrutia’s poem reveals an expression of secret desire men have. Baca and Villaurrutia’s poems, both use repetition, imagery and metaphors in their poems to convey their message.

The article, Jimmy Santiago Baca: Poetry as Lifesavor retells the challenges and hardships Baca experienced. Rob Baker, the author, informs the readers that past experiences will continually influence decisions in the future. In the beginning it is revealed that the characters parrents abandoned him at the young age of seven. His troubles only worsened as time went on for he dropped out of junior high, due to not performing well academically and socially. Therefore, he fell into the wrong crowds and was eventually sentenced to prison for five to ten years, at the age of twenty-one. Poety helped him to overcome the mental and emotional impact that prison imparts with the individual. Baca now uses his experiences to reach out to the community by becoming a teacher to encourage children to embrace their own stories.

Abstract: In Jimmy Santiago Baca’s book, A Place to Stand, prison isolation serves as a way for Baca to heal the wounds from his past and rediscover what he wants to do with the rest of his life. Initially, isolation is a destructive force, but over the course of his sentence, it becomes a positive, life-changing force for self-realization instead.

Jimmy Santiago Baca’s poem “Oppression” discusses the importance of remaining emotionally and mentally strong when enduring oppression. For those suffering from the emotional trauma of being held captive illegally, singing is one solution a poet offers to those who are oppressed as he states, “Look deep to find the grains of hope and strength,/ and sing, my brothers and sisters” (Baca 6-7). Singing is an act that a person can generally freely participate in, which is why Baca suggests it since it is a small symbol of retaliation against the oppressors. Even though captors may rob a person of his physical freedom, the person can still show self-control by choosing to make the best of the situation by singing to uplift his emotional state. In

An ambulance came and carried out my mom. I didn’t know what was going on, so many questions running through my mind, what was wrong with her, was she going to be ok. I was scared, more scared then I had ever been. My sister Sheridan who was 8 asked me “what’s happening?” through tears. On that day a little piece of me began to change because if I let her see my fear that would not help anyone, and so even though I didn’t know what was happening I responded “everything is going to be ok” even though I did not trust my own words.

In A Place to Stand, Jimmy Santiago Baca introduces the readers to his life, providing many details from his past that allow the readers to understand his present. Throughout the novel, Baca finds himself in the midst of violence where ultimately, these instances lead to a common theme of abuse. The physical and mental abuse that Baca endures throughout his childhood plays an important part in shaping Baca’s entire life. Furthermore, the abuse that Baca suffers inflicted by his father, his mother, and his ex-girlfriend, negatively affects his future life and point him towards crime and distrust in people around him.

　　Natalie Diaz's debut collection, When My Brother Was An Aztec, is a book of poems that accounts Diaz's skills in imaginative and lyrical language. The collection explores her past in unexpected form and images, tackling the subjects of her family, most notably her meth addicted brother, life on the reservation, and being a Native American woman. In this collection Diaz has filled the pages with rich and interesting images that rely on Native American culture, experiences of her own as a Native American woman, and mythology. As I read this collection I was struck by how heavy her images rested on the page and yet how weightless they seemed to fly off.

As a working-class Mexican immigrants’ son, Rodriguez inevitably sense the separation between him and his family, whom he feels deepest love, as he advanced his academic level. Through education, Rodriguez changed but his parents didn’t change as much as him. His parents saying and behavior often reminded him of the person he once was and the life. Instead of admiring his parents, he felt embarrassed at their lack of education. He deliberately

The challenges I have gone through has made me the person I am today and has made me a stronger person mentally and physically. I’m more of an independent type of person because I’m not one to express my feelings to people I don’t trust or don’t know. I can tell my friends certain things, but when it comes to adults asking me about what’s going on in my life, I can’t open up to them. I feel anxiety every time an adult wants to talk to me because I don’t like to say what I’m going through or how I’m feeling. I’ll just tell them that everything is fine because I don’t want to be asked more or been told more about talking to someone about my problems. I just like to do things on my own so I don’t have to rely on having someone to be here for me whenever something is wrong.