Gary Soto’s Vision of Chicano Experiences: The Elements of San Joaquin and Human Nature
by Paula Hayes
The skin of my belly will tighten like a belt
And there will be no reason for pockets.
Gary Soto, “Rain,” The Elements of San Joaquin
It was winter, another cold night, another rejection.
The stars were the mangled tiaras
Of every beauty that waved from a float
But had to come down in time…
Gary Soto, “Phone Call,” Human Nature
When I think of the poet, Gary Soto, my mind inevitably goes back in time to Soto’s first published work, The Elements of San Joaquin (1977). While The Elements of San Joaquin was published before my time, it was one of the first works of poetry that I read where I really stopped to ask, “What is the poet doing here?” and “How is the poet doing, whatever it is that he is doing?” This is a set of questions that I continue to ask when I read any poet, but certainly the questions apply to the work of Soto. For, Soto’s writing is rich in telling the stories of the lives of Chicano experiences, and as such adds to the American fabric of stories of what it means to grow up as the child of immigrants. The Elements of San Joaquin established a Chicano voice in literature and poetry. Soto’s poetry raises questions about the meaning of immigrant experience in America. While Soto has never actually used the term immigrant in his poetry, his images are still filled, nonetheless, with a vision of what it means to belong to a communal space carved out by immigrants. In a more recent collection of poems, Human Nature (2010), Soto asks how identity in America gets defined.
Take as an example the poem, “Being Difficult on ‘Voice of America,’” which recounts how on the public talk show he decides to dodge the interviewer’s questions about his identity as a Mexican-American. The interviewer’s questions are ironized in the poem, as she probes Soto’s perception of his ethnic identity. Soto’s answers fail to meet the interviewer’s conventional expectations about “old Mexico.”
Old Mexico? I think
Of a campesino with a burro
And fat bags of coffee beans
Listing with each step,
Plus the portly mariachis singing
With their mouths full of gold?
I remember the serape over my grandfather’s shoulder,
My grandmother on her knees
Before La Virgin de Guadalupe,
Incense wrapped around her face--
Grandmother praying for the winning ticket
In the Super Jumbo lottery?
The lines from the poem recount what Soto thinks in response to the interviewer’s question about “Old Mexico,” but he shares none of these aspects of his heritage with the female interviewer. His memory of “Old Mexico” is populated with family stories, and with contradictions. The interviewer is unable to penetrate to Soto’s real childhood memories or to reach his subjective, inner world of experience. Soto presents the interviewer with a mystified and curt reply to her question about “Old Mexico.” But, wrapped inside his curt reply are cultural signifiers, though the interviewer is unable to decode these cultural signifiers because she is an outsider to Chicano communities.
“I once fell off my bike,
And a cactus martyred me,”
I answer.
Silence. Then the interviewer asks,
“What was that about a cactus?”
The interviewer does not understand the proverb about the cactus and so cannot unravel the proverb’s cultural significance, its relevance, or importance to the childhood memory Soto shares. The interviewer tries again, asking a banal question about singing—“In your family, there must have been singing?” Once more Soto’s reply goes against the grain of the interviewer’s expectations about Mexican-Americans.
Here I crack my knuckles
And tell her about the snapping melody of a belt
Across my legs—did that count?
Was that singing?
The interviewer crumples a piece of paper.
The engineer switches to Mozart.
I’m shown the door,
My tongue deserving a paddling
From an old Mexico cactus.
The poem’s ending, of Soto being shown the door and the radio station’s swift return to the insulation of its European signifiers (such as Mozart), is amusing. The buoyancy of the poem’s tone could make it easy for readers to miss the larger problem that the poem reveals—and, this is the question of how does cultural identity, really, get shaped and formed? The poem reveals the dichotomous existence of Chicanos, of a double-consciousness, that originates in living somewhere between the mental borderlands of a Europeanized culture and a Mexican culture. Who can locate or pin down the psychological barrios of Chicano experience? Who has the right to claim identity for another? These questions, though left unsaid, are what the poem is mostly about.
As I read Human Nature, I cannot help but notice that what Soto presents as constituting ‘human nature’ (or the essence of human character or the human spirit) has dramatically shifted away from the philosophical and literary determinism of his early poetry. While some might disagree with the assertion that his early poetry was deterministic, I maintain that indeed it was, but that his use of determinism is not be taken as a negative characteristic of his early poetry. Rather, the determinism of his early poetry was a deliberate technique Soto adopted—a technique that made it possible to examine the social alienation produced by living in a capitalist, industrial economy. The determinism of his early poetry likewise made it possible to explore the dehumanizing effects of modernity, especially as related to the lives of Mexican immigrants in America. I should also point out, here, that the term determinism, sometimes, is used in connection with literary realism when used in contexts discussing literature.
In place of determinism, what the reader will find in many of the poems in Human Nature is a jocular, even optimistic appraisal of life. To be sure, this optimism has been evolving and bubbling to the surface for some time in each of the genres that Soto has mastered—fiction, non-fiction/memoir, and poetry. With this said, buried between the pages of the poems in Human Nature that are lighter in content, such as “Indecision” and “Romance at the River Bend Called Three Rocks,” there are other poems that narrate episodes from Soto’s family history.
As I noted, I believe, though again some disagree with this assessment that Soto’s poetry has shifted in some ways over the decades. This is not unusual that a writer’s work may change over time. There are several reasons for the shift in Soto’s style after The Elements of San Joaquin. I will point out a few of the most important reasons, at least within the broader context of the alteration in poetics from modernist poetry to contemporary poetry. One reason is that the landscape of poetry drastically changed from the late 1950s through the 1970s—there arose, during the brevity of two and a half decades, the preference for poets to adopt a confessional mode in their writing. The confessional mode offered poets the freedom to write about their personal experiences, as opposed to hiding autobiographical experiences behind poetic masks or poetic personae. For Chicano poets, the confessional mode became a way of describing to readers intimately personal memories of a homeland.
During the 1970s, Soto’s poetry absorbed some of the influences of the era. The literary scholar, Don Lee, describes how Soto began to immerse himself in reading other poets, from the Beats to the Confessional school of poets. As Lee writes,
At a library, he [Soto] picked up an anthology, The New American Poetry, edited by Donald Allen. The poems—by Edward Field, Gregory Corso, Kenneth Koch, Allen Ginsberg, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti—were lively, irrelevant, and audacious, and Soto was hooked. ‘I thought, Wow, wow, wow. I wanted to do this thing.’ He transferred to California State University, took workshops with Philip Levine, and fell in with a group of poets that would eventually be known as the Fresno School of poets, which included Leonard Adame, Omar Salinas, Ernesto Trejo, and Jon Veinberg (189-190).
As Lee’s account indicates, Soto’s early models for poetry were often counter-culture poets, and poets who were unafraid to experiment with language. Lee writes, “Instinctively, he [Soto] knew that the more personal he was in his work, concentrating solely on his individual experiences, the more universality he could attain. If anything, Soto turned more and more inward as the years went by” (190-191). Soto learned early on in his poetry how to use a confessional mode, writing about his personal experiences, but he also combined his ability to be confessional with the ability to represent community. Hence, we find the “individual” experiences and the “universal” experiences conveyed in Soto’s poetry; this is true whether we read the early poetry, like The Elements of San Joaquin, or the recent poetry, such as Human Nature.
Returning to the Modernism of The Element of San Joaquin
Aesthetically and stylistically, The Elements of San Joaquin incorporate Soto’s rich literary understanding of American realism. Soto’s version of American realism is rooted in writers such as Steinbeck; yet, his version also relies on Latin American authors, who were not realists, such as Neruda. In many ways, Soto’s early authorial models represent a study in contrasts, as Steinbeck and Neruda appear aesthetically as opposites. The Elements of San Joaquin performs the literary task of deconstructing the relationship between industrial labor forces and modernity’s industrialization of American land, and in particular the region of the Fresno Valley. Soto is adept in The Elements of San Joaquin at helping his readers to ‘see’ and understand the relationship between the lives of workers, their families, and how the human spirit can become crushed and bruised as a result of the dehumanization of labor through modern industry.
Raymund A. Paredes’s argument that Chicano writers have used literature as a means of wrestling with the question of the American Dream is unquestionably applicable to Soto’s use of poetry to tackle the question of the immigrant experience in America. Paredes writes, “For Chicano writers, the so-called American Dream of affluence, respectability, and happiness has held little attraction, seeming at turns an essentially harmless illusion and a cruel and insidious hoax” (71). As Parades goes on to assert, “The Mexican Americans who inhabit the poems of Gary Soto are similarly estranged from the American Dream. Soto’s characters are not only migrant workers but also the urban poor who go about their unprofitable business unnoticed by the affluent and the powerful” (77.) Parades is also correct in pointing out the ways in which “Soto’s images evoke the squalidness of his characters’ lives: dirty toilets, broken glass, and cupboards empty but for ‘an unstrung necklace of dead flies’” (77).
The imagery in The Elements of San Joaquin is highly reminiscent of Jose Orozco’s mural, The Epic of American Civilization (1932-34). Each time I read The Elements of San Joaquin, I am reminded of Orozco’s murals and art work. Orozco’s mural is comprised of twenty-three panels, and as a whole visually depicts an epic narrative of the birth of “American civilization.” Orozco’s narrative, as cast through the vision of his mural, positions the origins of “America” as firmly rooted within indigenous Mexican culture. Orozco’s mural calls into question whether the term “America” belongs to Anglos or to Mexican indigenous cultures? To whom does “America” belong—Anglos or indigenous people? To whom does the name or term “America” apply—again, Anglos or indigenous cultures? These are questions that are implied or evoked by Orozco’s visual narrative. Below is an image of one of the panels from Orozco’s expansive mural.
Modern Migration of the Spirit (Panel 21)
Orozco’s mural ‘tells’ the ‘story’ of how education, family, and religion each exist as positive social institutions that belong to all of humanity and not merely to one faction of the western world. Orozco’s mural provides a framework for explaining how historically these social institutions have been broken down, fragmented into cultural shrapnel, and in many instances eventually lost altogether by the insidious encroachment of western rationalism—rationalism in the forms of technology, industry, and the dominance of science in lieu of the mythical. Orozco’s mural presents the assertion, through the visual and plastic arts, that technology, industry, and the rationalism of western ‘science,’ when used as forces of oppression against indigenous cultures, leads to death, a metaphoric and symbolic death of the mind and spirit and even literal death in the form of historic wars. Orozco’s mural further condemns the western hemisphere’s progression toward the terrifying unleashing of a death-instinct, or of a psychological thantos and its twin psychological state of necrophilia, to terrifyingly wipe out humanity’s innate creativity by propagating artificial machine-age cultures.
Certain poems in Soto’s The Elements of San Joaquin evoke the gothic and the modern, just as Orozco’s American Civilization expresses both the gothic and the modern. In the fourteenth panel of Orozco’s mural, he paints an image of a machine, and so the panel is aptly named The Machine. Orozco’s fifteenth panel is titled Anglo-America, the sixteenth panel is titled Hispano-America, the seventh panel is titled The Gods of the Modern World, the eighteenth panel is Modern Human Sacrifice, and the twentieth panel is titled Chains of the Spirit. Orozco’s mural ends with a movement through nationalism, migration, and what he terms “ideal” constructions of the modern world. Although I am not suggesting that Soto had Orozco’s panels (or the mural as a whole) in mind, as I do not believe he did; nonetheless, The Elements of San Joaquin uncannily brings to light, through poetry, a similar vision to what Orozco’s themes/panels of The Machine, Anglo-America, Hispano-America, The Gods of the Modern World, Modern Human Sacrifice, and Chains of the Spirit, each depict through the realm of art. Below is an image of two of the panels mentioned here, that of the twentieth panel, Chains of the Spirit and that of the sixteenth panel, Hispano-America. By viewing at least a couple of the panels, it helps to get a sense of how the Cubist expressionist style used in Orozco’s art provides an analogy to describe Soto’s modernism (the modernism of Soto’s early poetry).
Chains of the Spirit (Panel 20)
Hispano-America (Panel 16)
The Elements of San Joaquin, like Orozoc’s mural, reminds Chicano communities of the crucial need for sustaining “cultural memory.” Without a cultural memory, and a living tradition of that memory, the encroachment of the machine age wins and a form of cultural genocide has been enacted upon Chicanos. Orozoc’s American Civilization deconstructs the concept of what constitutes a “civilization,” while prophesying the possibilities of cultural genocide at the hands of industrial economies.
Comparatively, Soto’s The Elements of San Joaquin delivers the message of a poetic vision of the universe as a violent cosmos, though not necessarily a random or chaotic cosmos. The natural violence of the cosmos is transcendent, while the social and economic violence faced by Chicanos is existential. Soto links the transcendent state of nature with the existential condition of man and woman. For example, consider the poem, “Wind,” where Soto writes,
A dry wind over the valley
Peeled mountains, grain by grain,
To small slopes, loose dirt
Where read ants tunnel.
The wind strokes
The skulls and spines of cattle
To white dust, to nothing, (16)
This is the early Soto, a poet who shows us a world where both the inhabited and uninhabited spaces alike can carry the potential to negate everything to a position of oblivion, “to white dust, to nothing” (16). The “whiteness” of annihilation is not accidental to the language of the poem; the whiteness associated with being physically wiped out connotes the ability of Anglo-American economies and hegemonies of modern capitalism, technology, and industry to scatter people; for, literally immigrant and migrant and industrial farm laborers and industrial machine workers all carry the potential, due to economic forces, to become scattered or displaced, from the larger contexts of their homelands, all in an effort, ironically, to sustain their homelands and families. In “History,” we find images of Mexico scattered through the poem the way that we would expect to find shards of glass scattered as remnants of a broken tablet. The broken tablet is history.
Grandma lit the stove.
Morning sunlight
Lengthened in spears
Across the linoleum floor.
Wrapped in a shawl,
Her eyes small,
With sleep,
She sliced papas,
Pounded chiles
With a stone
Brought from Guadalajara.
As the poem indicates, it is important that the homeland is not lost; it is equally important that work or labor and the indelible traces it can leave upon the body are not forgotten. “History” is different from many of the other poems comprising The Elements of San Joaquin because it breaks with Soto’s style of creating fictitious characters in the poems as a way of representing Chicano communities. Instead of fictitious characters, “History,” moves into the confessional mode, as it gives an autobiographical account of Soto’s recollections of his grandmother. The grandmother is shown in the poem to have preserved a piece of her homeland, literally—the poem describes how Soto’s grandmother brought to a stone from Guadalajara to America. HThe grandmother’s daily activities of cooking potatoes or papas and chilies—activities that nurture, comfort, and sustain her family’s survival—are completed each day on a stone transported from the homeland. As the poem continues, Soto writes,
That was the ‘50’s
Grandma in her ‘50’s,
A face streaked
From cutting grapes
And boxing plums.
“History,” recounts Soto’s Chicano origins. Soto’s memory of his grandmother is filled with tenderness, as he fondly recalls her face stained from the physical labor of picking grapes in Fresno. Thus, land and people are connected in the poem. The land of Mexico, the land of Fresno, and the origins of Soto’s roots as a Chicano, are joined together in the poem as a way of constructing a narrative conveying Soto’s self-identity.
I do not know why
Her face shines
Or what goes beyond this shine,
Only the stories that pulled her
From Taxco to San Joaquin,
Delano to Westside,
The places
In which we all begin.
As readers we can infer that Soto puzzles over his own inability to know his grandmother’s feelings. What did she think of her life in America? Did she miss the land of her birth? He is unable to penetrate to a place of identifying her real subjectivity. And while he recognizes (and the poem recognizes) that her subjectivity remains veiled, he does reach the conclusion that he can still know “The places/In which we all begin.” While he cannot always know the subjectivity of his ancestors and their emotional experiences in America, he can know the family narratives that get passed down to him; thus, relying on the transmission of cultural memory to establish self-identity and self-awareness. Region and place, the names of the towns that populate and flesh out the family stories, become another way that Soto is able to formulate his self-awareness of being Chicano.
Another example of the importance of cultural memory and of the mind itself to preserve images of the homeland is to be found in the poem, “Emilio.” Here, in “Emilio,” Soto moves back to his familiar technique of using fictitious characters and the narrative mode. Emilio’s mind holds the images of Mexico in place, much like a photograph captures one, singular moment in time and space. The room itself is filled out with remnants and personal souvenirs of Mexico.
A finger of moon points across his bed
And onto the wall, seeking the oval
Wedding portrait of Emilio and Ursula--
Their cheeks penciled pink in ’39.
June bugs at the window and a gnat
Spins through the room.
He does not turn to these sounds
Nor stir from the heat
Beginning to lift like fog. He lies
Thinking of Mexico—a woman sweeping,
Farmland that suddenly rises
Into small hills of grass--
While the moon starts down
In a darkness that will not repeat itself.
One of the primary concerns presented in The Elements of San Joaquin is the viciousness of the modern society, but with particular sensitivity given to the physical pain inflicted against the bodies of immigrant workers. This is apparent in the poem that opens The Elements of San Joaquin, “San Fernando Road” (3). The poem begins by sketching an image of a road leading to rows of factories, as Soto asks us to imagine the by-product of the factories, the smog and pollution, and the grayness of the color that lines the horizon. Against this backdrop of the dismal environmental effects produced on the region, Soto gives us the character of “Leonard,” a factory worker whose body has born the effects, the burden, of the industrial life and the industrial economy. Leonard’s arms reveal circles of burns, of the scars from working in the gruesome factories. Soto also makes it clear the reason why Leonard, or anyone, would sacrifice the body to such toil—the sacrifice is made to support the immigrant families.
On this road of factories
Gray as the clouds
That drifted
Above them,
Leonard was among men
Whose arms
Were bracelets
Of burns
And whose families
Were a pain
They could not
Shrug off.
“San Fernando Road” goes on to depict other grizzly dimensions of working in factories. Leonard’s relationship to his environment—economic, social, and physical—exposes modernity’s negative capability to devalue human life. As Leonard performs his one primary social function, as American society itself has defined this for him, that of physical labor, his body becomes the target of the insidiousness of the environment surrounding him. His arms are disfigured with scathing burns, his nostrils assaulted with burning rubber and the filth of toilets. Likewise Leonard’s masculinity is reduced to a form of labor that does not produce for him any economic profit. As Leonard is increasingly placed on a dehumanized level of survival, he begins to sink into a condition of oblivion, into a state of an emotional numbness.
He handled grinders,
Swept the dust
Of rubber
The wind peeled
Into the air
And into the his nostrils,
Scrubbed the circles
From toilets
No one flushed.
The images that Soto gives us depict the haunting scene of a modern inferno, but that also allude to Dante’s Inferno. The machines, described in the poem, “San Fernando Road,” have replaced the pre-Columbian gods of an indigenous society, and the sacrifice demanded by the machines is nothing other the young men of the Chicano communities. If the sacrifice is continuously met, the poem infers that the men will be rendered unable to protect their communities; and thus, the men will turn themselves toward violent acts, in an effort to seek an emotional catharsis and to simply feel alive once more.
Young Mexicans
Went into ovens
Squint-eyed
And pulled out the pipes
Smeared black
With tar.
Though Leonard works, he is homeless. In an effort to merely survive, he turns a blind eye away from the suffering of his family, of his community.
Far from home,
He had no place
To go. Nights
He slept in cars
Or behind warehouses,
Shivering
Like the machinery
That went on and on.
As “San Fernando Road” progresses, the movement of the poem turns to increasingly express aesthetics of violence. But this is a not a gratuitous violence; rather it holds a specific intent. Leonard’s life is tied to an industrial economy; thus, he is chained to the machines, metaphorically. This destroys the magnitude of his spirit. And with the destruction of the beauty of the human spirit, there arises the destructive consequence of violent responses, as an emotional paralysis occurs. As Parades tells us, “Soto’s characters sometimes escape their miseries by creating extraordinary fantasies, but these flights are temporary and serve only to make life barely sufferable” (77). Caught in a deterministic web of physical pain, of a tenement existence, the immigrant youth, as depicted in “San Fernando Road,” act out their pain by turning on one another. “San Fernando Road” tells of how one type of human subjugation (first, economic) leads to the creation of other forms of subjugation, such as self-harm, self-mutilation, and physical abuse. It is the desperation of the human condition in an industrial America that Soto’s poem addresses with remarkable concern. Soto’s Leonard, impoverished, hungry and alone, becomes unresponsive to the suffering of others. Thus, the destruction of not just Leonard, but of a whole community, is described in “San Fernando Road.”
And once,
While watching
The stars
And what might
Have been a cloud,
He did not think
Of the cousin
Spooning coke
Nor the woman
Opening
In her first rape,
But his body,
His weakening body,
And dawn only hours away.
One of the outcomes of an industrial economy (and the rise of an industrial culture) is that it suffocates the psyche. There is a psychological claustrophobia that results from industrialization’s dehumanization of its human capital, of its human labor. As Paredes argues, “Soto’s harshest truth is that we live in a zero-sum world, that the rich are rich only because others are poor and that while some have realized the American Dream, others are invisibly living the American Nightmare” (77). Paredes goes on to assert, “Those people who insulate themselves in affluence away from poverty and suffering, Soto regards with searing contempt” (77). This sense of psychological claustrophobia is evident in the poem, “The Underground Parking.” The poem is complex to analyze because of the fact that the images are so blatantly violent. A woman, someone’s wife, we are told, is physically violated. The details are sharp and cruel. Soto contextualizes the portrait of violence enacted against a woman—she is shown to be the victim of the pent-up frustrations of the economically disenfranchised Chicano male.
A man who holds fear
Like the lung a spot of cancer,
Waits for your wife.
He is already listening for her whimper
To stop echoing and to break
Against concrete, listening
For the final fist at her ear,
For morning to arrive
Without the door tearing from its hinges.
The poem speaks of the lack of protection of women and the displacement of the aggression of men. Arguably, Soto’s reason for using graphic violence is to inform readers of how cycles of social violence arise out of social oppression. Soto’s point is also that social oppression affects everyone, and attacks, like the spot on the lung, entire communities, often in unseen and invisible ways.
The woman who gets it in a car
Or on the hard earth of a vacant lot,
Is under the heaviness of a toilet not flushing,
Or Out of a job and Why change
Bedsheets? She is under arms of tattoos,
Kick in the mouth, shitted shorts,
An ice pick at the throat.
She faces No rent money, Alice,
And not a single tear or a multitude could pull him off.
The Elements of San Joaquin discusses lunacy too, as an outcome of social oppression. In “Telephoning God,” Soto gives us a bit of humor to help take the edge off of the otherwise heavy thematic content.
Drunk in the kitchen, I ring God
And get Wichita,
Agatha drunk and on the bed’s edge, undoing
Her bra.
Dial again, and Topeka comes through like snoring,
Though no one sleeps. Not little Jennifer
Yelling “But Mommy,”
nor Ernie kissing
The inside of his wrist, whispering
“This is a Gorgeous Evening.”
The drunkenness Soto’s characters exhibit are witty, but if we look more closely at the poem, we see that the drunkenness is harmful. An array of abuses, including child abuse and rape, are masked in the poem beneath the dark humor. “Telephoning God,” is a tragi-comedy.
Dial again and only the sound of spoons crashing
In a cafeteria in Idaho,
A little silence, then a gnat circling the ear
Of Angela beaten and naked in the vineyard,
Her white legs glowing.
While the first section of The Elements of San Joaquin addresses the human situation, the second section moves toward the discussion of themes of nature, the environment, and the physical world. Soto’s analytic dissection of environmental elements at times conveys tranquility; but in other instances, the tranquility is disrupted by further sketches of anxiety, fear, oppression, and abuse. An example of the tranquility is to be had in the simple poetic sketch, “Stars.” The poem celebrates the regional beauty of Fresno Valley.
At dusk the first stars appear.
Not one eager finger points toward them.
A little later the stars spread with the night
And an orange moon rises
To lead them, like a shepherd, toward dawn.
However, in the poetic sketch, “Field,” Soto manages to merge the indifference of nature with that of the failure of the region to produce economic growth for immigrants. Instead of an abundance, those working the grape fields find that it “produces nothing” for them. Here, Soto moves away from depicting the problems associated with an industrial economy. Stylistically, instead of the narrative mode, he shifts in “Field” to a lyrical mode. Soto’s use of the lyrical “I” in “Field” allows him to merge the depiction of an existentially autonomous self into the natural elements of the region. Self-identity fuses the elements of wind, dirt, grapes, and the valley.
The wind sprays pale dirt into my mouth
The small, almost invisible scars
On my hands.
The pores in my throat and elbows
Have taken in a seed of dirt of their own.
After a day in the grape fields near Rolinda
A fine silt, washed by sweat,
Has settled into the lines
Of my wrists and palms.
Already I am becoming the valley,
A soil that sprouts nothing
For any of us.
Soto also wants his readers to connect to the vast grandeur of the land and respect what the environment has to offer. In “Sun,” Soto presents the magnificence and splendor of a something as simple as a summer sunrise in Fresno. “Sun” depicts the wildlife of Fresno—foxes, fish, locusts. All of these elements could easily be overlooked or taken for granted, but Soto wants to call attention to these natural features.
At Piedra,
A couple fish on the river’s edge,
Their shadows deep against the water.
Above, in the stubbled slopes,
Cows climb down
As the heat rises
In a mist of blond locusts,
Returning to the valley.
Human Nature
I return to Soto’s Human Nature. Soto’s recollections in Human Nature range from describing childhood to the wonderment of first love to the humor of aging. Writing entirely in the confessional mode, Soto offers his readers an endearing glimpse into his private life. Instead of creating poetic characters (like Leonard and Emilio as he does in The Elements of San Joaquin), Soto relies on autobiographical content in Human Nature. The effect of using autobiographical fragments in Human Nature is that it produces the sense that readers are privy to the poet’s subjectivity, as readers are taken inside the everyday world of the poet’s life. This subjectivity may in actuality be an aesthetic illusion; but, nonetheless, it is a pleasant illusion that seems necessary when a poet writes from the vantage point of the autobiographical.
Human Nature weaves in and out of stories about both community and family. The poem, “Some History about Raisins,” is anecdote that combines two events from Soto’s childhood—his family’s employment as factory workers at Sunmaid Raisins and the illness of an uncle. The two events are shown to intersect in the mind of the boy Soto, but told from the advantage of Soto the adult.
Uncle turned to the mirror
And touched a mole,
While I touched a smudge of dirt
On my wingless shoulders.
It was 1957, summer always,
The big rigs swinging their cargo
Or raisins, hauling their sweetness
To mean cities. I couldn’t help
But think of a raisin as a mole,
A beauty mark, a thing to pick at.
At Sun Maid Raisin, family clocked in at 6:00,
Not surprised to wake with raisins
Pressed to our back like moles--
In sleep we rolled like the heavens,
And rolled over raisins that our fists
Had released. They were everywhere,
These raisins, and now one
Was attacked to Uncle’s shoulder,
Red and cancerous.
As Lee describes, Soto’s family worked in Fresno in the factories and in the large commercial fields. Lee’s account of Soto’s family’s economic hardships and the effect this had on Soto’s self-identity as a child describes the traumas of immigrant life in Fresno.
Soto was born in 1952 in Fresno, California, the center of the San Joaquin Valley’s agricultural industry, and everyone in his family was a field or factory worker. His father packed boxes at the Sunmaid Raisin company, and his mother peeled potatoes at Redi-Spuds. Soto himself picked grapes and oranges, collected aluminum, hoed cotton and beets—anything he could do to help out. Red-lining was still legal then, and they were confined to Chicano neighborhoods. When Soto was five, his father was killed in an industrial accident. His mother eventually remarried and moved the family to a mostly Anglo area of Fresno, but nonetheless, Soto could never envision a future absent of borderline poverty and violence (2-3).
Soto’s poem, “The Gritty House,” describes the world that Soto grew up seeing, at least the world prior to his father’s death. Emotionally, the poem conveys the sadness of Soto as a young boy, as well as his childhood fears. The portrait of Soto’s father is less than flattering, as it captures the father’s anger as witnessed by Soto.
Wind whipped sand and sent a spray
Onto the just-painted wood siding.
My father, an angry man, dipped his brush,
Into the ground, stirred it, and howled, “Why not more!”
Soto describes how each corner of the house, from the exterior to the interior of the kitchen, seemed to harbor the anger of his father. For any of us who have lived through a childhood where a parent was angry, we know Soto’s experience—and it is true that even a small action, like the slamming of a door, becomes a “coded slap” indicating the harshness of such a life and the potential for further explosions of anger.
The paint dried on this plain-faced house.
The kitchen light was turned on, then off,
A desperate signal for help.
There was distress in every banged pot,
In the coded slap of the screen door,
In the nails rising like tombstones from our ancient floor.
Smoke unraveled from a lopsided chimney.
Soto reaches the conclusion that everyone in the family was unhappy and that love was absent. He narrates his sense of apprehension, and as readers we can imagine Soto, as a boy, sitting on the stoop of a back porch eating alone.
None of us was happy, none of us knew love.
Scared of the inside, I ate mostly on the back porch.
After playing with the paint bucket’s lid,
Like my angry father I cursed the wind and sand--
Flecks of paint staining my knuckles.
I raked them across the gritty wood siding,
A sort of sandpaper, to smooth things out.
The influence of fathers, whether in their presence or their absence, continues as a theme in the poem, “Dancing in the Street.” Here, the poem, “Dancing in the Street,” is not about Soto’s father, but it is, instead, about a community that needs fathers, and that may be growing up without fathers.
The crying started early for the vato,
With his father locked down
And wearing the striped shadows of prison bars
In Corcoran.
In “Dancing in the Street,” Soto writes about the problem of youth violence, of gangs, imprisonment, and dying in the streets. But the image of the street itself is not to be overlooked. The image of the street connects Soto’s Human Nature with The Elements of San Joaquin. The streets represent being out in the open and the repositioning of the Chicano male outside the safety and outside the security of the home, the family, and into the dangers of street life. The literary critic Julian Olivares addresses the theme of the streets in Soto’s poetry.
Although a street or road implies movement, literally through time and space, and allegorically as life's journey, in Soto's poetry the image of the street is also used as a structural component and unifying principle of his poetic vision. The street provides the realistic background for the speaker, his personae and the Chicano minority. Metaphorically, it represents their state of mind; and, allegorically, it depicts a human condition subjected by socio-economic and cosmic force to an oppressive existence. Here, then, are Gary Soto’s “mean streets” (35).
“Dancing in the Street,” unlike, “The Gritty House,” is not autobiographical; yet, the poem carries in it the weight of a community’s problem of losing so many young men to gangs. The poem also seeks to offer a psychological reason for street violence—a generational violence created out of witnessing the destruction of Chicano fathers. Both poems, “Dancing in the Street” and the “Gritty House,” from Human Nature, locate Chicano male violence within a context of the disenfranchisement of the Chicano male. However, the language is softer in “Dancing in the Street,” the mask of determinism has crumbled, and the language of the lines are less terse. The images in “Dancing in the Street” point toward the teenager boy’s decision to join a gang—the blue tear tattoo, the knuckle with the row of skulls, the red bandana—each functions as the signifiers of gang life.
Now at sixteen,
A blue tear tattooed on his cheek,
A row of skulls on his knuckles,
He’s standing in the middle of the street.
A red bandana hangs from his hip pocket.
As the boy is signaled out by other gang members, perhaps by a rival gang, his body will perform the dance, but a lurid dance of death. The images are not grotesque or overtly brutal as are the violent images in “Underground Parking.” Instead, the images are muted, but the outcome is just as fierce.
A long car pulls up,
The hubcaps spinning like roulette wheels.
That’s what his body will do—hip-hop
When gangsters fire on his skinny ass.
How do you figure?
Both shoes will fly off his feet.
When they come down,
They will sound like halfhearted applause.
“Dancing in the Street” asks readers a question—“How do you figure?” There is an underlying tone of shared responsibility in the poem. Soto wants us to at least understand that the Chicano presence in America deserves a whole lot more than “halfhearted applause.” Chicano presence deserves sincere attention and positive valuation.
Works Cited:
Lee, Don. “About Gary Soto.” Ploughshares. 21.1 (1995): 188-192. Print.
Olivares, Julian. “The Streets of Gary Soto.” Latin American Literary Review. 18.35 (1990): 32-
49. Print.
Orzco, Joseph. José Clemente Orozco: The Epic of American Civilization. 2012. Hood Museum
of Art Web. 5 Dec 2012.
Paredes, Raymund A. “Mexican American Authors and the American Dream.” MELUS. 8.4
(1981): 71-80. Print.
Soto, Gary. Human Nature. North Adams: Tupelo Press, 2010. Print.
Soto, Gary. The Elements of San Joaquin. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977.
1977. Print.
by Paula Hayes
The skin of my belly will tighten like a belt
And there will be no reason for pockets.
Gary Soto, “Rain,” The Elements of San Joaquin
It was winter, another cold night, another rejection.
The stars were the mangled tiaras
Of every beauty that waved from a float
But had to come down in time…
Gary Soto, “Phone Call,” Human Nature
When I think of the poet, Gary Soto, my mind inevitably goes back in time to Soto’s first published work, The Elements of San Joaquin (1977). While The Elements of San Joaquin was published before my time, it was one of the first works of poetry that I read where I really stopped to ask, “What is the poet doing here?” and “How is the poet doing, whatever it is that he is doing?” This is a set of questions that I continue to ask when I read any poet, but certainly the questions apply to the work of Soto. For, Soto’s writing is rich in telling the stories of the lives of Chicano experiences, and as such adds to the American fabric of stories of what it means to grow up as the child of immigrants. The Elements of San Joaquin established a Chicano voice in literature and poetry. Soto’s poetry raises questions about the meaning of immigrant experience in America. While Soto has never actually used the term immigrant in his poetry, his images are still filled, nonetheless, with a vision of what it means to belong to a communal space carved out by immigrants. In a more recent collection of poems, Human Nature (2010), Soto asks how identity in America gets defined.
Take as an example the poem, “Being Difficult on ‘Voice of America,’” which recounts how on the public talk show he decides to dodge the interviewer’s questions about his identity as a Mexican-American. The interviewer’s questions are ironized in the poem, as she probes Soto’s perception of his ethnic identity. Soto’s answers fail to meet the interviewer’s conventional expectations about “old Mexico.”
Old Mexico? I think
Of a campesino with a burro
And fat bags of coffee beans
Listing with each step,
Plus the portly mariachis singing
With their mouths full of gold?
I remember the serape over my grandfather’s shoulder,
My grandmother on her knees
Before La Virgin de Guadalupe,
Incense wrapped around her face--
Grandmother praying for the winning ticket
In the Super Jumbo lottery?
The lines from the poem recount what Soto thinks in response to the interviewer’s question about “Old Mexico,” but he shares none of these aspects of his heritage with the female interviewer. His memory of “Old Mexico” is populated with family stories, and with contradictions. The interviewer is unable to penetrate to Soto’s real childhood memories or to reach his subjective, inner world of experience. Soto presents the interviewer with a mystified and curt reply to her question about “Old Mexico.” But, wrapped inside his curt reply are cultural signifiers, though the interviewer is unable to decode these cultural signifiers because she is an outsider to Chicano communities.
“I once fell off my bike,
And a cactus martyred me,”
I answer.
Silence. Then the interviewer asks,
“What was that about a cactus?”
The interviewer does not understand the proverb about the cactus and so cannot unravel the proverb’s cultural significance, its relevance, or importance to the childhood memory Soto shares. The interviewer tries again, asking a banal question about singing—“In your family, there must have been singing?” Once more Soto’s reply goes against the grain of the interviewer’s expectations about Mexican-Americans.
Here I crack my knuckles
And tell her about the snapping melody of a belt
Across my legs—did that count?
Was that singing?
The interviewer crumples a piece of paper.
The engineer switches to Mozart.
I’m shown the door,
My tongue deserving a paddling
From an old Mexico cactus.
The poem’s ending, of Soto being shown the door and the radio station’s swift return to the insulation of its European signifiers (such as Mozart), is amusing. The buoyancy of the poem’s tone could make it easy for readers to miss the larger problem that the poem reveals—and, this is the question of how does cultural identity, really, get shaped and formed? The poem reveals the dichotomous existence of Chicanos, of a double-consciousness, that originates in living somewhere between the mental borderlands of a Europeanized culture and a Mexican culture. Who can locate or pin down the psychological barrios of Chicano experience? Who has the right to claim identity for another? These questions, though left unsaid, are what the poem is mostly about.
As I read Human Nature, I cannot help but notice that what Soto presents as constituting ‘human nature’ (or the essence of human character or the human spirit) has dramatically shifted away from the philosophical and literary determinism of his early poetry. While some might disagree with the assertion that his early poetry was deterministic, I maintain that indeed it was, but that his use of determinism is not be taken as a negative characteristic of his early poetry. Rather, the determinism of his early poetry was a deliberate technique Soto adopted—a technique that made it possible to examine the social alienation produced by living in a capitalist, industrial economy. The determinism of his early poetry likewise made it possible to explore the dehumanizing effects of modernity, especially as related to the lives of Mexican immigrants in America. I should also point out, here, that the term determinism, sometimes, is used in connection with literary realism when used in contexts discussing literature.
In place of determinism, what the reader will find in many of the poems in Human Nature is a jocular, even optimistic appraisal of life. To be sure, this optimism has been evolving and bubbling to the surface for some time in each of the genres that Soto has mastered—fiction, non-fiction/memoir, and poetry. With this said, buried between the pages of the poems in Human Nature that are lighter in content, such as “Indecision” and “Romance at the River Bend Called Three Rocks,” there are other poems that narrate episodes from Soto’s family history.
As I noted, I believe, though again some disagree with this assessment that Soto’s poetry has shifted in some ways over the decades. This is not unusual that a writer’s work may change over time. There are several reasons for the shift in Soto’s style after The Elements of San Joaquin. I will point out a few of the most important reasons, at least within the broader context of the alteration in poetics from modernist poetry to contemporary poetry. One reason is that the landscape of poetry drastically changed from the late 1950s through the 1970s—there arose, during the brevity of two and a half decades, the preference for poets to adopt a confessional mode in their writing. The confessional mode offered poets the freedom to write about their personal experiences, as opposed to hiding autobiographical experiences behind poetic masks or poetic personae. For Chicano poets, the confessional mode became a way of describing to readers intimately personal memories of a homeland.
During the 1970s, Soto’s poetry absorbed some of the influences of the era. The literary scholar, Don Lee, describes how Soto began to immerse himself in reading other poets, from the Beats to the Confessional school of poets. As Lee writes,
At a library, he [Soto] picked up an anthology, The New American Poetry, edited by Donald Allen. The poems—by Edward Field, Gregory Corso, Kenneth Koch, Allen Ginsberg, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti—were lively, irrelevant, and audacious, and Soto was hooked. ‘I thought, Wow, wow, wow. I wanted to do this thing.’ He transferred to California State University, took workshops with Philip Levine, and fell in with a group of poets that would eventually be known as the Fresno School of poets, which included Leonard Adame, Omar Salinas, Ernesto Trejo, and Jon Veinberg (189-190).
As Lee’s account indicates, Soto’s early models for poetry were often counter-culture poets, and poets who were unafraid to experiment with language. Lee writes, “Instinctively, he [Soto] knew that the more personal he was in his work, concentrating solely on his individual experiences, the more universality he could attain. If anything, Soto turned more and more inward as the years went by” (190-191). Soto learned early on in his poetry how to use a confessional mode, writing about his personal experiences, but he also combined his ability to be confessional with the ability to represent community. Hence, we find the “individual” experiences and the “universal” experiences conveyed in Soto’s poetry; this is true whether we read the early poetry, like The Elements of San Joaquin, or the recent poetry, such as Human Nature.
Returning to the Modernism of The Element of San Joaquin
Aesthetically and stylistically, The Elements of San Joaquin incorporate Soto’s rich literary understanding of American realism. Soto’s version of American realism is rooted in writers such as Steinbeck; yet, his version also relies on Latin American authors, who were not realists, such as Neruda. In many ways, Soto’s early authorial models represent a study in contrasts, as Steinbeck and Neruda appear aesthetically as opposites. The Elements of San Joaquin performs the literary task of deconstructing the relationship between industrial labor forces and modernity’s industrialization of American land, and in particular the region of the Fresno Valley. Soto is adept in The Elements of San Joaquin at helping his readers to ‘see’ and understand the relationship between the lives of workers, their families, and how the human spirit can become crushed and bruised as a result of the dehumanization of labor through modern industry.
Raymund A. Paredes’s argument that Chicano writers have used literature as a means of wrestling with the question of the American Dream is unquestionably applicable to Soto’s use of poetry to tackle the question of the immigrant experience in America. Paredes writes, “For Chicano writers, the so-called American Dream of affluence, respectability, and happiness has held little attraction, seeming at turns an essentially harmless illusion and a cruel and insidious hoax” (71). As Parades goes on to assert, “The Mexican Americans who inhabit the poems of Gary Soto are similarly estranged from the American Dream. Soto’s characters are not only migrant workers but also the urban poor who go about their unprofitable business unnoticed by the affluent and the powerful” (77.) Parades is also correct in pointing out the ways in which “Soto’s images evoke the squalidness of his characters’ lives: dirty toilets, broken glass, and cupboards empty but for ‘an unstrung necklace of dead flies’” (77).
The imagery in The Elements of San Joaquin is highly reminiscent of Jose Orozco’s mural, The Epic of American Civilization (1932-34). Each time I read The Elements of San Joaquin, I am reminded of Orozco’s murals and art work. Orozco’s mural is comprised of twenty-three panels, and as a whole visually depicts an epic narrative of the birth of “American civilization.” Orozco’s narrative, as cast through the vision of his mural, positions the origins of “America” as firmly rooted within indigenous Mexican culture. Orozco’s mural calls into question whether the term “America” belongs to Anglos or to Mexican indigenous cultures? To whom does “America” belong—Anglos or indigenous people? To whom does the name or term “America” apply—again, Anglos or indigenous cultures? These are questions that are implied or evoked by Orozco’s visual narrative. Below is an image of one of the panels from Orozco’s expansive mural.
Modern Migration of the Spirit (Panel 21)
Orozco’s mural ‘tells’ the ‘story’ of how education, family, and religion each exist as positive social institutions that belong to all of humanity and not merely to one faction of the western world. Orozco’s mural provides a framework for explaining how historically these social institutions have been broken down, fragmented into cultural shrapnel, and in many instances eventually lost altogether by the insidious encroachment of western rationalism—rationalism in the forms of technology, industry, and the dominance of science in lieu of the mythical. Orozco’s mural presents the assertion, through the visual and plastic arts, that technology, industry, and the rationalism of western ‘science,’ when used as forces of oppression against indigenous cultures, leads to death, a metaphoric and symbolic death of the mind and spirit and even literal death in the form of historic wars. Orozco’s mural further condemns the western hemisphere’s progression toward the terrifying unleashing of a death-instinct, or of a psychological thantos and its twin psychological state of necrophilia, to terrifyingly wipe out humanity’s innate creativity by propagating artificial machine-age cultures.
Certain poems in Soto’s The Elements of San Joaquin evoke the gothic and the modern, just as Orozco’s American Civilization expresses both the gothic and the modern. In the fourteenth panel of Orozco’s mural, he paints an image of a machine, and so the panel is aptly named The Machine. Orozco’s fifteenth panel is titled Anglo-America, the sixteenth panel is titled Hispano-America, the seventh panel is titled The Gods of the Modern World, the eighteenth panel is Modern Human Sacrifice, and the twentieth panel is titled Chains of the Spirit. Orozco’s mural ends with a movement through nationalism, migration, and what he terms “ideal” constructions of the modern world. Although I am not suggesting that Soto had Orozco’s panels (or the mural as a whole) in mind, as I do not believe he did; nonetheless, The Elements of San Joaquin uncannily brings to light, through poetry, a similar vision to what Orozco’s themes/panels of The Machine, Anglo-America, Hispano-America, The Gods of the Modern World, Modern Human Sacrifice, and Chains of the Spirit, each depict through the realm of art. Below is an image of two of the panels mentioned here, that of the twentieth panel, Chains of the Spirit and that of the sixteenth panel, Hispano-America. By viewing at least a couple of the panels, it helps to get a sense of how the Cubist expressionist style used in Orozco’s art provides an analogy to describe Soto’s modernism (the modernism of Soto’s early poetry).
Chains of the Spirit (Panel 20)
Hispano-America (Panel 16)
The Elements of San Joaquin, like Orozoc’s mural, reminds Chicano communities of the crucial need for sustaining “cultural memory.” Without a cultural memory, and a living tradition of that memory, the encroachment of the machine age wins and a form of cultural genocide has been enacted upon Chicanos. Orozoc’s American Civilization deconstructs the concept of what constitutes a “civilization,” while prophesying the possibilities of cultural genocide at the hands of industrial economies.
Comparatively, Soto’s The Elements of San Joaquin delivers the message of a poetic vision of the universe as a violent cosmos, though not necessarily a random or chaotic cosmos. The natural violence of the cosmos is transcendent, while the social and economic violence faced by Chicanos is existential. Soto links the transcendent state of nature with the existential condition of man and woman. For example, consider the poem, “Wind,” where Soto writes,
A dry wind over the valley
Peeled mountains, grain by grain,
To small slopes, loose dirt
Where read ants tunnel.
The wind strokes
The skulls and spines of cattle
To white dust, to nothing, (16)
This is the early Soto, a poet who shows us a world where both the inhabited and uninhabited spaces alike can carry the potential to negate everything to a position of oblivion, “to white dust, to nothing” (16). The “whiteness” of annihilation is not accidental to the language of the poem; the whiteness associated with being physically wiped out connotes the ability of Anglo-American economies and hegemonies of modern capitalism, technology, and industry to scatter people; for, literally immigrant and migrant and industrial farm laborers and industrial machine workers all carry the potential, due to economic forces, to become scattered or displaced, from the larger contexts of their homelands, all in an effort, ironically, to sustain their homelands and families. In “History,” we find images of Mexico scattered through the poem the way that we would expect to find shards of glass scattered as remnants of a broken tablet. The broken tablet is history.
Grandma lit the stove.
Morning sunlight
Lengthened in spears
Across the linoleum floor.
Wrapped in a shawl,
Her eyes small,
With sleep,
She sliced papas,
Pounded chiles
With a stone
Brought from Guadalajara.
As the poem indicates, it is important that the homeland is not lost; it is equally important that work or labor and the indelible traces it can leave upon the body are not forgotten. “History” is different from many of the other poems comprising The Elements of San Joaquin because it breaks with Soto’s style of creating fictitious characters in the poems as a way of representing Chicano communities. Instead of fictitious characters, “History,” moves into the confessional mode, as it gives an autobiographical account of Soto’s recollections of his grandmother. The grandmother is shown in the poem to have preserved a piece of her homeland, literally—the poem describes how Soto’s grandmother brought to a stone from Guadalajara to America. HThe grandmother’s daily activities of cooking potatoes or papas and chilies—activities that nurture, comfort, and sustain her family’s survival—are completed each day on a stone transported from the homeland. As the poem continues, Soto writes,
That was the ‘50’s
Grandma in her ‘50’s,
A face streaked
From cutting grapes
And boxing plums.
“History,” recounts Soto’s Chicano origins. Soto’s memory of his grandmother is filled with tenderness, as he fondly recalls her face stained from the physical labor of picking grapes in Fresno. Thus, land and people are connected in the poem. The land of Mexico, the land of Fresno, and the origins of Soto’s roots as a Chicano, are joined together in the poem as a way of constructing a narrative conveying Soto’s self-identity.
I do not know why
Her face shines
Or what goes beyond this shine,
Only the stories that pulled her
From Taxco to San Joaquin,
Delano to Westside,
The places
In which we all begin.
As readers we can infer that Soto puzzles over his own inability to know his grandmother’s feelings. What did she think of her life in America? Did she miss the land of her birth? He is unable to penetrate to a place of identifying her real subjectivity. And while he recognizes (and the poem recognizes) that her subjectivity remains veiled, he does reach the conclusion that he can still know “The places/In which we all begin.” While he cannot always know the subjectivity of his ancestors and their emotional experiences in America, he can know the family narratives that get passed down to him; thus, relying on the transmission of cultural memory to establish self-identity and self-awareness. Region and place, the names of the towns that populate and flesh out the family stories, become another way that Soto is able to formulate his self-awareness of being Chicano.
Another example of the importance of cultural memory and of the mind itself to preserve images of the homeland is to be found in the poem, “Emilio.” Here, in “Emilio,” Soto moves back to his familiar technique of using fictitious characters and the narrative mode. Emilio’s mind holds the images of Mexico in place, much like a photograph captures one, singular moment in time and space. The room itself is filled out with remnants and personal souvenirs of Mexico.
A finger of moon points across his bed
And onto the wall, seeking the oval
Wedding portrait of Emilio and Ursula--
Their cheeks penciled pink in ’39.
June bugs at the window and a gnat
Spins through the room.
He does not turn to these sounds
Nor stir from the heat
Beginning to lift like fog. He lies
Thinking of Mexico—a woman sweeping,
Farmland that suddenly rises
Into small hills of grass--
While the moon starts down
In a darkness that will not repeat itself.
One of the primary concerns presented in The Elements of San Joaquin is the viciousness of the modern society, but with particular sensitivity given to the physical pain inflicted against the bodies of immigrant workers. This is apparent in the poem that opens The Elements of San Joaquin, “San Fernando Road” (3). The poem begins by sketching an image of a road leading to rows of factories, as Soto asks us to imagine the by-product of the factories, the smog and pollution, and the grayness of the color that lines the horizon. Against this backdrop of the dismal environmental effects produced on the region, Soto gives us the character of “Leonard,” a factory worker whose body has born the effects, the burden, of the industrial life and the industrial economy. Leonard’s arms reveal circles of burns, of the scars from working in the gruesome factories. Soto also makes it clear the reason why Leonard, or anyone, would sacrifice the body to such toil—the sacrifice is made to support the immigrant families.
On this road of factories
Gray as the clouds
That drifted
Above them,
Leonard was among men
Whose arms
Were bracelets
Of burns
And whose families
Were a pain
They could not
Shrug off.
“San Fernando Road” goes on to depict other grizzly dimensions of working in factories. Leonard’s relationship to his environment—economic, social, and physical—exposes modernity’s negative capability to devalue human life. As Leonard performs his one primary social function, as American society itself has defined this for him, that of physical labor, his body becomes the target of the insidiousness of the environment surrounding him. His arms are disfigured with scathing burns, his nostrils assaulted with burning rubber and the filth of toilets. Likewise Leonard’s masculinity is reduced to a form of labor that does not produce for him any economic profit. As Leonard is increasingly placed on a dehumanized level of survival, he begins to sink into a condition of oblivion, into a state of an emotional numbness.
He handled grinders,
Swept the dust
Of rubber
The wind peeled
Into the air
And into the his nostrils,
Scrubbed the circles
From toilets
No one flushed.
The images that Soto gives us depict the haunting scene of a modern inferno, but that also allude to Dante’s Inferno. The machines, described in the poem, “San Fernando Road,” have replaced the pre-Columbian gods of an indigenous society, and the sacrifice demanded by the machines is nothing other the young men of the Chicano communities. If the sacrifice is continuously met, the poem infers that the men will be rendered unable to protect their communities; and thus, the men will turn themselves toward violent acts, in an effort to seek an emotional catharsis and to simply feel alive once more.
Young Mexicans
Went into ovens
Squint-eyed
And pulled out the pipes
Smeared black
With tar.
Though Leonard works, he is homeless. In an effort to merely survive, he turns a blind eye away from the suffering of his family, of his community.
Far from home,
He had no place
To go. Nights
He slept in cars
Or behind warehouses,
Shivering
Like the machinery
That went on and on.
As “San Fernando Road” progresses, the movement of the poem turns to increasingly express aesthetics of violence. But this is a not a gratuitous violence; rather it holds a specific intent. Leonard’s life is tied to an industrial economy; thus, he is chained to the machines, metaphorically. This destroys the magnitude of his spirit. And with the destruction of the beauty of the human spirit, there arises the destructive consequence of violent responses, as an emotional paralysis occurs. As Parades tells us, “Soto’s characters sometimes escape their miseries by creating extraordinary fantasies, but these flights are temporary and serve only to make life barely sufferable” (77). Caught in a deterministic web of physical pain, of a tenement existence, the immigrant youth, as depicted in “San Fernando Road,” act out their pain by turning on one another. “San Fernando Road” tells of how one type of human subjugation (first, economic) leads to the creation of other forms of subjugation, such as self-harm, self-mutilation, and physical abuse. It is the desperation of the human condition in an industrial America that Soto’s poem addresses with remarkable concern. Soto’s Leonard, impoverished, hungry and alone, becomes unresponsive to the suffering of others. Thus, the destruction of not just Leonard, but of a whole community, is described in “San Fernando Road.”
And once,
While watching
The stars
And what might
Have been a cloud,
He did not think
Of the cousin
Spooning coke
Nor the woman
Opening
In her first rape,
But his body,
His weakening body,
And dawn only hours away.
One of the outcomes of an industrial economy (and the rise of an industrial culture) is that it suffocates the psyche. There is a psychological claustrophobia that results from industrialization’s dehumanization of its human capital, of its human labor. As Paredes argues, “Soto’s harshest truth is that we live in a zero-sum world, that the rich are rich only because others are poor and that while some have realized the American Dream, others are invisibly living the American Nightmare” (77). Paredes goes on to assert, “Those people who insulate themselves in affluence away from poverty and suffering, Soto regards with searing contempt” (77). This sense of psychological claustrophobia is evident in the poem, “The Underground Parking.” The poem is complex to analyze because of the fact that the images are so blatantly violent. A woman, someone’s wife, we are told, is physically violated. The details are sharp and cruel. Soto contextualizes the portrait of violence enacted against a woman—she is shown to be the victim of the pent-up frustrations of the economically disenfranchised Chicano male.
A man who holds fear
Like the lung a spot of cancer,
Waits for your wife.
He is already listening for her whimper
To stop echoing and to break
Against concrete, listening
For the final fist at her ear,
For morning to arrive
Without the door tearing from its hinges.
The poem speaks of the lack of protection of women and the displacement of the aggression of men. Arguably, Soto’s reason for using graphic violence is to inform readers of how cycles of social violence arise out of social oppression. Soto’s point is also that social oppression affects everyone, and attacks, like the spot on the lung, entire communities, often in unseen and invisible ways.
The woman who gets it in a car
Or on the hard earth of a vacant lot,
Is under the heaviness of a toilet not flushing,
Or Out of a job and Why change
Bedsheets? She is under arms of tattoos,
Kick in the mouth, shitted shorts,
An ice pick at the throat.
She faces No rent money, Alice,
And not a single tear or a multitude could pull him off.
The Elements of San Joaquin discusses lunacy too, as an outcome of social oppression. In “Telephoning God,” Soto gives us a bit of humor to help take the edge off of the otherwise heavy thematic content.
Drunk in the kitchen, I ring God
And get Wichita,
Agatha drunk and on the bed’s edge, undoing
Her bra.
Dial again, and Topeka comes through like snoring,
Though no one sleeps. Not little Jennifer
Yelling “But Mommy,”
nor Ernie kissing
The inside of his wrist, whispering
“This is a Gorgeous Evening.”
The drunkenness Soto’s characters exhibit are witty, but if we look more closely at the poem, we see that the drunkenness is harmful. An array of abuses, including child abuse and rape, are masked in the poem beneath the dark humor. “Telephoning God,” is a tragi-comedy.
Dial again and only the sound of spoons crashing
In a cafeteria in Idaho,
A little silence, then a gnat circling the ear
Of Angela beaten and naked in the vineyard,
Her white legs glowing.
While the first section of The Elements of San Joaquin addresses the human situation, the second section moves toward the discussion of themes of nature, the environment, and the physical world. Soto’s analytic dissection of environmental elements at times conveys tranquility; but in other instances, the tranquility is disrupted by further sketches of anxiety, fear, oppression, and abuse. An example of the tranquility is to be had in the simple poetic sketch, “Stars.” The poem celebrates the regional beauty of Fresno Valley.
At dusk the first stars appear.
Not one eager finger points toward them.
A little later the stars spread with the night
And an orange moon rises
To lead them, like a shepherd, toward dawn.
However, in the poetic sketch, “Field,” Soto manages to merge the indifference of nature with that of the failure of the region to produce economic growth for immigrants. Instead of an abundance, those working the grape fields find that it “produces nothing” for them. Here, Soto moves away from depicting the problems associated with an industrial economy. Stylistically, instead of the narrative mode, he shifts in “Field” to a lyrical mode. Soto’s use of the lyrical “I” in “Field” allows him to merge the depiction of an existentially autonomous self into the natural elements of the region. Self-identity fuses the elements of wind, dirt, grapes, and the valley.
The wind sprays pale dirt into my mouth
The small, almost invisible scars
On my hands.
The pores in my throat and elbows
Have taken in a seed of dirt of their own.
After a day in the grape fields near Rolinda
A fine silt, washed by sweat,
Has settled into the lines
Of my wrists and palms.
Already I am becoming the valley,
A soil that sprouts nothing
For any of us.
Soto also wants his readers to connect to the vast grandeur of the land and respect what the environment has to offer. In “Sun,” Soto presents the magnificence and splendor of a something as simple as a summer sunrise in Fresno. “Sun” depicts the wildlife of Fresno—foxes, fish, locusts. All of these elements could easily be overlooked or taken for granted, but Soto wants to call attention to these natural features.
At Piedra,
A couple fish on the river’s edge,
Their shadows deep against the water.
Above, in the stubbled slopes,
Cows climb down
As the heat rises
In a mist of blond locusts,
Returning to the valley.
Human Nature
I return to Soto’s Human Nature. Soto’s recollections in Human Nature range from describing childhood to the wonderment of first love to the humor of aging. Writing entirely in the confessional mode, Soto offers his readers an endearing glimpse into his private life. Instead of creating poetic characters (like Leonard and Emilio as he does in The Elements of San Joaquin), Soto relies on autobiographical content in Human Nature. The effect of using autobiographical fragments in Human Nature is that it produces the sense that readers are privy to the poet’s subjectivity, as readers are taken inside the everyday world of the poet’s life. This subjectivity may in actuality be an aesthetic illusion; but, nonetheless, it is a pleasant illusion that seems necessary when a poet writes from the vantage point of the autobiographical.
Human Nature weaves in and out of stories about both community and family. The poem, “Some History about Raisins,” is anecdote that combines two events from Soto’s childhood—his family’s employment as factory workers at Sunmaid Raisins and the illness of an uncle. The two events are shown to intersect in the mind of the boy Soto, but told from the advantage of Soto the adult.
Uncle turned to the mirror
And touched a mole,
While I touched a smudge of dirt
On my wingless shoulders.
It was 1957, summer always,
The big rigs swinging their cargo
Or raisins, hauling their sweetness
To mean cities. I couldn’t help
But think of a raisin as a mole,
A beauty mark, a thing to pick at.
At Sun Maid Raisin, family clocked in at 6:00,
Not surprised to wake with raisins
Pressed to our back like moles--
In sleep we rolled like the heavens,
And rolled over raisins that our fists
Had released. They were everywhere,
These raisins, and now one
Was attacked to Uncle’s shoulder,
Red and cancerous.
As Lee describes, Soto’s family worked in Fresno in the factories and in the large commercial fields. Lee’s account of Soto’s family’s economic hardships and the effect this had on Soto’s self-identity as a child describes the traumas of immigrant life in Fresno.
Soto was born in 1952 in Fresno, California, the center of the San Joaquin Valley’s agricultural industry, and everyone in his family was a field or factory worker. His father packed boxes at the Sunmaid Raisin company, and his mother peeled potatoes at Redi-Spuds. Soto himself picked grapes and oranges, collected aluminum, hoed cotton and beets—anything he could do to help out. Red-lining was still legal then, and they were confined to Chicano neighborhoods. When Soto was five, his father was killed in an industrial accident. His mother eventually remarried and moved the family to a mostly Anglo area of Fresno, but nonetheless, Soto could never envision a future absent of borderline poverty and violence (2-3).
Soto’s poem, “The Gritty House,” describes the world that Soto grew up seeing, at least the world prior to his father’s death. Emotionally, the poem conveys the sadness of Soto as a young boy, as well as his childhood fears. The portrait of Soto’s father is less than flattering, as it captures the father’s anger as witnessed by Soto.
Wind whipped sand and sent a spray
Onto the just-painted wood siding.
My father, an angry man, dipped his brush,
Into the ground, stirred it, and howled, “Why not more!”
Soto describes how each corner of the house, from the exterior to the interior of the kitchen, seemed to harbor the anger of his father. For any of us who have lived through a childhood where a parent was angry, we know Soto’s experience—and it is true that even a small action, like the slamming of a door, becomes a “coded slap” indicating the harshness of such a life and the potential for further explosions of anger.
The paint dried on this plain-faced house.
The kitchen light was turned on, then off,
A desperate signal for help.
There was distress in every banged pot,
In the coded slap of the screen door,
In the nails rising like tombstones from our ancient floor.
Smoke unraveled from a lopsided chimney.
Soto reaches the conclusion that everyone in the family was unhappy and that love was absent. He narrates his sense of apprehension, and as readers we can imagine Soto, as a boy, sitting on the stoop of a back porch eating alone.
None of us was happy, none of us knew love.
Scared of the inside, I ate mostly on the back porch.
After playing with the paint bucket’s lid,
Like my angry father I cursed the wind and sand--
Flecks of paint staining my knuckles.
I raked them across the gritty wood siding,
A sort of sandpaper, to smooth things out.
The influence of fathers, whether in their presence or their absence, continues as a theme in the poem, “Dancing in the Street.” Here, the poem, “Dancing in the Street,” is not about Soto’s father, but it is, instead, about a community that needs fathers, and that may be growing up without fathers.
The crying started early for the vato,
With his father locked down
And wearing the striped shadows of prison bars
In Corcoran.
In “Dancing in the Street,” Soto writes about the problem of youth violence, of gangs, imprisonment, and dying in the streets. But the image of the street itself is not to be overlooked. The image of the street connects Soto’s Human Nature with The Elements of San Joaquin. The streets represent being out in the open and the repositioning of the Chicano male outside the safety and outside the security of the home, the family, and into the dangers of street life. The literary critic Julian Olivares addresses the theme of the streets in Soto’s poetry.
Although a street or road implies movement, literally through time and space, and allegorically as life's journey, in Soto's poetry the image of the street is also used as a structural component and unifying principle of his poetic vision. The street provides the realistic background for the speaker, his personae and the Chicano minority. Metaphorically, it represents their state of mind; and, allegorically, it depicts a human condition subjected by socio-economic and cosmic force to an oppressive existence. Here, then, are Gary Soto’s “mean streets” (35).
“Dancing in the Street,” unlike, “The Gritty House,” is not autobiographical; yet, the poem carries in it the weight of a community’s problem of losing so many young men to gangs. The poem also seeks to offer a psychological reason for street violence—a generational violence created out of witnessing the destruction of Chicano fathers. Both poems, “Dancing in the Street” and the “Gritty House,” from Human Nature, locate Chicano male violence within a context of the disenfranchisement of the Chicano male. However, the language is softer in “Dancing in the Street,” the mask of determinism has crumbled, and the language of the lines are less terse. The images in “Dancing in the Street” point toward the teenager boy’s decision to join a gang—the blue tear tattoo, the knuckle with the row of skulls, the red bandana—each functions as the signifiers of gang life.
Now at sixteen,
A blue tear tattooed on his cheek,
A row of skulls on his knuckles,
He’s standing in the middle of the street.
A red bandana hangs from his hip pocket.
As the boy is signaled out by other gang members, perhaps by a rival gang, his body will perform the dance, but a lurid dance of death. The images are not grotesque or overtly brutal as are the violent images in “Underground Parking.” Instead, the images are muted, but the outcome is just as fierce.
A long car pulls up,
The hubcaps spinning like roulette wheels.
That’s what his body will do—hip-hop
When gangsters fire on his skinny ass.
How do you figure?
Both shoes will fly off his feet.
When they come down,
They will sound like halfhearted applause.
“Dancing in the Street” asks readers a question—“How do you figure?” There is an underlying tone of shared responsibility in the poem. Soto wants us to at least understand that the Chicano presence in America deserves a whole lot more than “halfhearted applause.” Chicano presence deserves sincere attention and positive valuation.
Works Cited:
Lee, Don. “About Gary Soto.” Ploughshares. 21.1 (1995): 188-192. Print.
Olivares, Julian. “The Streets of Gary Soto.” Latin American Literary Review. 18.35 (1990): 32-
49. Print.
Orzco, Joseph. José Clemente Orozco: The Epic of American Civilization. 2012. Hood Museum
of Art Web. 5 Dec 2012.
Paredes, Raymund A. “Mexican American Authors and the American Dream.” MELUS. 8.4
(1981): 71-80. Print.
Soto, Gary. Human Nature. North Adams: Tupelo Press, 2010. Print.
Soto, Gary. The Elements of San Joaquin. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977.
1977. Print.
