“From Meditations on the South Valley” Analysis

Baca’s book of poetry From Meditations on the South Valley focuses on his experiences as a Chicano writer. He uses very specific cultural imagery and the Spanish language to illustrate his heritage without losing its significance by making it purposefully accessible to non-Chicano readers. Baca’s poetry emphasizes the importance of language, especially in blending Spanish casually into his verse. He shows different characters who have influenced his life and his work, and how they embody different aspects of his culture, from its images, to its language, and its history. The language constructs an inclusive community that appeals directly to Chicano readers.

In section IX, Baca merges language and image to portray a tragic event in a way that makes it seem as though the event belonged to Baca and his heritage. “Eddie blew his head off / Playing chicken / with his brother. Para proof / he was man … His tío Manuel shatters a bottle / of La Copita wine against the adobe wall” (IX.1-12). The casual inclusion of “para” instead of “for” does not seem out of place in this stanza, because the mentions of La Copita and an adobe house ground the lines in the whole setting of the event. Those same mentions take away the universality of the event; this could not have happened to a suburban white Eddie, because it is so powerfully and purposefully connected to the Chicano elements that Baca thought were important to his subject Eddie, and in extension, to Baca himself.

Poem XIV reinvents the image of street gangs, imposing Baca’s cultural experience on the popular image of the 1950s greaser clubs. “El Pablo was a bad dude. / Presidente of the River Rats / (700 Strong), from ’67 to ’73. … El Pachcón was cool to the bone, brutha” (1-12). This verse divorces the stereotype of the Chicano street gang, which is steeped in violence and drugs, from his experience and instead pairs it with the teenage rebellion that surrounded the 1950s and 1960s clubs in suburban white neighborhoods; Baca mentions the ducktail hairstyle and cuffed pants that are associated with white greasers, making sure to reassociate the iconic image with his neighborhood leader; Baca reclaims the iconic gang image for his own culture, carving out a space for it in the larger twentieth-century Mexican-American cultural narrative.

The poem XVI talks about the erasure of the culture and heritage that Baca spent so much time praising in his previous poems. “Under color of race / on your death certificate, / they have you down / as White. / You fought against that / label / all your short life, jefe…” (3-9). Baca opens the poem with Spanish and continues to refer to the subject as “jefe,” emphasizing the Chicano background he shared with the dead man. Baca changed his friend’s death certificate in the final stanza to reflect the negative effects caused by the conflict between the identity Jefe chose, and the identity forced upon him. Baca uses this poem as a way to show that the conflict between White culture and Chicano culture can be toxic, especially when the White culture is imposed on Chicanos. Jefe did not get the benefits of the imposed whiteness until his death when he could no longer fight the label himself; Baca had to continue the battle for Jefe’s claim to his own Chicano heritage post-mortem.

In this poetry response, Baca’s writings show exactly how important the Chicano culture is to him; he idolizes the men who uphold the Chicano images, like the gang leader who took a popular image and made it his own, and Jefe, who refused the identity given to him by outside cultures. Baca keeps his language grounded in the Spanish influence of speech patterns and the language itself to keep his poetry strongly connected to his culture in its very construction.