City Southwest

KYLE PAOLETTA: In Ansel Adams’s famous 1941 photograph of the tiny town of Hernandez, New Mexico, a silver moon hangs in the sky above a few adobe houses behind a humble graveyard, its slapdash crosses shining white despite the twilight hour. In the distance, the snow-capped Sangre de Cristo Mountains cut a jagged horizon line. Between their peaks and the village runs mile after mile of bleakest desert, hosting little more than sagebrush and stone.

Eighty years later, the image remains a fair proxy for what most Americans imagine when they think about the Southwest. As far as many outsiders are concerned, the desert Southwest will forever seem an antidote to the quotidian troubles of coastal society; more a landscape than a region. Nevermind that the Southwest has spent more than a century and a half relentlessly urbanizing. Today, Phoenix is larger than Philadelphia and close to three quarters of Nevada’s population lives in metropolitan Las Vegas.  It is within the sphere of cities like Albuquerque, Tucson, and El Paso that the contemporary culture of the Southwest resides. 

Growing up in Albuquerque, it wasn’t until high school that I began to understand how the history of the Southwest has influenced the city’s present. I had never thought about that divide as particularly literary—that is, until I was 17, when I read the poet Jimmy Santiago Baca’s book, Martín and Meditations on the South Valley. It was the first time I understood my hometown not as the type of dangerous backwater where COPS was filmed, but instead as the backdrop to a work of bona fide literature. 

It’s been years since I first read Martín, but in the summer of 2019 I finally got to talk with Baca when I was back in New Mexico. We reached him again recently, at his house in Albuquerque.

JIMMY BACA: I'm Jimmy Santiago Baca, and I'm a poet. I've been a poet all my life.

PAOLETTA: Baca lived on his own in Albuquerque as a teenager in the 60’s, then was sent to prison in Arizona for 6 years in 1973. It was there that he learned to read and write. Since then, he’s published over a dozen books of poetry, in addition to memoirs, essays, stories, and a screenplay. 

When I first spoke with Baca, I wanted to know why he has stayed in Albuquerque, even after all the city put him through as a young man. He said he likes the Southwest because, ‘The voice of nature is so huge, I can feel its heart beating in every poem that I write.’ Of course, there are also less lyrical reasons.

BACA: I just happened to like Albuquerque because it's such a cool place. It hasn't yet been discovered by anybody. Except Willie Nelson and a few other people, but it's just a really cool place, man.

PAOLETTA: When we talked, Baca described the thriving Chicano scene he was welcomed into in Albuquerque’s South Valley after he got out of prison. Back in the ‘80s, the South Valley’s 300 year old adobe farmhouses were home to Native American activists, muralists, and other Chicano artists. 

BACA: It became the Chicano outlook, where you see your history and you say, okay, I'm not Spanish, but I'm not fully Native American, but I'm a mixture of the two.

I know my history. I know what they did to us. I know how we've always lived on this land. My grandma was Native American [and] my grandfather was a Mexican Indian. They call themselves Mexicans, but because of the political turmoil in which I grew up in, I call myself Chicano because of the things that were happening to us and how [Rodolfo] “Corky” Gonzales, Reies Tijerina, Cesar Chavez—all of those people came and they said, Chicanos are this—Rubén Salazar on the East LA walkouts and stuff. They defined what Chicano was for me. And I realized, I'm Chicano. And ever since then, my skin fits much better. 

PAOLETTA: Albuquerque was also one of the urban epicenters of the Native American Red Power movement. Today, Native American and Chicano artists and activists have continued that legacy.

BACA: We don't have conversations about Indigenous cultures and land. We don't have conversations. We don't sit around and talk and then publish poems about it at Yale or something like that—we don't do that. What we talk about is, we all know that we're poets or writers, and we all know that it's all that we can do is just to keep our confidence intact— that we don't let the outer cultures come in and make us doubt our word, because our word is not based upon being right or wrong. It's based upon the faith behind what we say.

So we have faith that mother earth will take care of us. And then we work our voices in our hearts to keep intact the confidence and the conviction and the love within that to write poems that are strong. And when people read them, they don't tell us this is right, or this is wrong—they tell us, holy shit, that's a good poem! I just felt something in my body, you know? And that's what we're from. So we believe that that only comes from—not from conversations, not from intellectual dialectics and stuff like that—that comes from a deep belief in something that's much greater than us, and that's community.

The United States is a well oiled slavery machine. And that slavery machine is to make sure that all rich white people can have free labor if they need it, can be at ease by putting the best of our youth in prisons.

PAOLETTA: Besides Albuquerque, Baca’s other base is north of Santa Fe, where he built a cabin for his family. He’s also established a retreat for writers there, and founded a nonprofit that hosts workshops and outreach programs for young people, prisoners, and ex-prisoners. 

BACA: We have retreat houses for ex-convicts to come finish their books. We have mentoring programs. We have internship programs. We have literacy programs on and on and on. So the work that I do is, I try to get them to understand how great they are and get these beautiful human beings that are in their mid thirties, early, late twenties—get them to meet language. 

My job is to tap that good intention faith. And get them to write great poems, amazing books. I think I've had at least 20 of them write books and get published. I've had some other alumni start bookstores, open up writing workshops, start acting workshops. You know, you just gotta go there and you just have to let them know that you're the walking, talking model for what's possible.

So we try to keep everything real modeled on real basic humble foundations. You know, you get up, you make the coffee, do your meditation, write, and then go out and work. The end of the more they get into the sanity of living, the stronger they become and the better they write.

All we're really doing is preparing to go into the city and destroy its mores. With our cedar morality, with our granite morality, with our field morality—all we're doing as writers is preparing ourselves to go in and destroy the literature of the cities and talk the truth to them. But we're not doing it glibly. We're not doing it artificially. We're doing it with a strong, strong, grounded base of where we come from. And that makes us going back into the urban cities that much more powerful. That much more empowered to speak. 

PAOLETTA: What’s remarkable is that, unlike artists like Georgia O’Keeffe, Donald Judd, James Turrell, or even Ana Castillo, Baca’s artistic practice has not prompted a retreat into the landscape, but instead an ever-deeper engagement with the city it enveloped. And distinct from transplants like Barbara Kingsolver or Dave Hickey, Baca’s having come of age in Albuquerque gives his work about the city a special intimacy.

BACA: That's where the great writers come from: community. Not this bootstrap, do it your own, individualism—stuff like that. But we also believe that you can write poems from an apartment in Manhattan, or you can write poems from an apartment in East LA or Seattle or Detroit or Chicago—you can write poems from there, but writing a poem from there and enjoying the notoriety that that gives you with all the writers in that city is quite different than going off by yourself and working really hard to buy 10 acres of land and then build a house and then build a guest house for someone younger than you to come and finish their work.

That's an entirely different type of poetics than what is urban poetics. It's a whole other world when you live in the mountains and you've worked really, really hard to establish a community that you know is going to nurture the writers to come for a hundred years.

And it's a beautiful feeling to know that you did that. Rather than pursue a national book award. When the water comes down from the mountain springs and you know that it's going into these two cabins and if the people are bathing in it right now, and they're making coffee right now, that's your national book award.

That to me is like, dude, what other award do you want? That's the award!

[gentle sounds of outdoors, birds chirping, cicada cries]

PAOLETTA: Rather than being considered as a poet of the city Southwest, Baca is mostly discussed in terms of his impact on Chicano literature. Similarly, the poetry of Joy Harjo, Ofelia Zepeda, Luci Tapahonso, and Layli Long Soldier is unjustly filed away with a diverse array of other Native writers; while the excellent Anglo storytellers of Nevada, like Claire Vaye Watkins and Charles Bock, are labeled Western, as if they wrote books about cattle-wrangling rather than the coercive violence and stunted ambition that lurks beneath the surface of contemporary life.

Although all of these authors have written about the city Southwest, the literary vision of the region is still dominated by the landscape-beholden work of Willa Cather, Edward Abbey, and Cormac McCarthy. 

BACA: The thing that Southwest literature has done is two things; they've taken a bunch of white writers and written about the cowboy lore and made assassins their heroes. There's nothing good about David Crockett, except he massacred a bunch of Indians. There's nothing good about Billy the Kid, except he went out and he killed everybody. But you put that in the hands of a white writer and all of a sudden, Billy the Kid becomes a hero.

For some reason, Americans are still in love with that myth of the cowboy being this individual who can tame the savages and get the land, to do what he wants to do with the land. But in reality, they were slave owners, they were slave traders and they were straight up serial killers. They could kill whoever they wanted when they wanted. 

And we still haven't turned that corner in our Southwest literature. If somebody was to criticize a book, like say All the Pretty Horses or all these other Western historians, they would come out by saying that you're being racist in your analysis and stuff. When in true fact, if we had a historian from the Chicano perspective, we would say like the Texas Rangers, they were just a gang of serial killers. 

We're hurting for real critical analysis of Southwestern literature. The thing that I find most disturbing about the Chicano literature is that we're so busy trying to please the colonial publishers in New York, we’re so busy trying to please the editors—almost 90% who are white. 

So a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot of writers, we’re trying to please them. I'm not here to please anyone, I'm not here to win anyone's approval. And that's really important because we have to teach our kids—you have to win the approval of your heart. When you go to bed at night, you know, you know, how you've lived that day. 

You don't need your mom and dad or a teacher or some editor in New York to say you've lived the day good. You know, in your heart. Now we have to transfer that into a literary form that's contributable to society so that other people can read it.

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JOSHUA WOLF SHENK: Find a link to Kyle Paoletta’s full essay, and hear Jimmy Santiago Baca’s poem “Poet’s Prayer” in its entirety at blackmountainradio.org