Jimmy Santiago Baca

• Born: January 2, 1952
• Birthplace: Santa Fe, New Mexico

Author Profile

Jimmy Santiago Baca began to write poetry as an almost illiterate vato loco —Spanish street slang for a “crazy gangster.” He did this while serving a five-year term in federal prison. He was twenty years old, the son of Damacio Baca, of Apache and Yaqui lineage, and Cecilia Padilla, a Latina. Padilla left him with his grandparents when he was two years old. Baca stayed with them for three years, went into a Boys’ home, into detention centers, and re-emerged on the streets of Albuquerque’s barrio at thirteen. Although he “confirmed” his identity as a Chicano by leafing through a stolen picture book of Chicano history at seventeen, he felt himself “disintegrating” in prison. Speaking of his father, but alluding to his own situation when he was incarcerated, Baca observed: “He was everything that was bad in America. He was brown, he spoke Spanish, was from a Native American background, had no education.”

As a gesture of rebellion, Baca took a guard’s textbook and found that “sounds created music in me and happiness” as he slowly enunciated the lines of a poem by William Wordsworth. This led to a zealous effort at self-education, encouraged by the recollection of older men in detention centers who “made barrio life come alive . . . with their own Chicano language.” Progressing to the point where he was writing letters for fellow prisoners, he placed a few poems in a local magazine, New Kauri, and achieved his first major publication with Immigrants in Our Own Land (1979), a book whose title refers to the condition of inmates in a dehumanizing system and to his own feelings of estrangement in American society. This was a turning point for Baca, who realized that he could reclaim the community he was separated from and sing “the freedom song of our Chicano dream” now that poetry “had lifted me to my feet.”

With this foundation to build on, Baca started a family in the early 1980s. He lived in a restored adobe dwelling in Albuquerque’s South Valley. He wrote Martín & Meditations on the South Valley (1987) because “the entire Southwest needed a long poem that could describe what has happened here in the last twenty years.” The work would go on to win the American Book Award for poetry. Continuing to combine personal history and communal life, Baca followed this book with Black Mesa Poems (1989), which links the landscape of the South Valley to people he knows and admires. Writing with confidence and fluency in both Spanish and English, Baca used vernacular speech, poetic form, ancient Mexican lore, and contemporary popular culture. The same year he was awarded the Hispanic Heritage Award in Literature.

As Baca gained national recognition for his poetry he continued to write, while also attending to his family and becoming active in the Atrisco Land Rights Council, an organization aiding claims to Spanish land grants dating to the seventeenth century. His workshops and readings, often aimed at underprivileged audiences, became popular throughout the United States.

In 2001, Baca published his critically acclaimed memoir A Place to Stand which explores his life before, during, and immediately after his time in prison. The book won the 2001 International Prize from the Arizona Daily Star. The book was turned into a documentary under the same title. Baca’s memoir received praise not only for his tremendous story of survival and change, but also for his lyrical writing and emotionally compelling storytelling. Baca also continued his own education, and in 2003 received a PhD in literature from the University of New Mexico. His later works include Healing Earthquakes (2001), the novel A Glass of Water (2009), and Singing at the Gates (2014).

In 2019 Baca published a new book, which in actuality, was a single, long poem. The book was entitled When I Walk Through That Door, I Am: An Immigrant Mother’s Quest. The book focuses on immigration, an issue that has reached predominance in the Western Hemisphere in the last half-century. It has also become a centerpoint of modern politics in the United States. The poem is told from the perspective of a Salvadoran woman who must make a life-threatening journey to the United States, only to live as an outcast upon her arrival.

Bibliography

Coppola, Vincent. “The Moon in Jimmy Baca.” Esquire, June 1993, pp. 48–56.

Gish, Robert Franklin. Beyond Bounds: Cross-Cultural Essays on Anglo, American Indian, and Chicano Literature. U of New Mexico P, 1996.

Levertov, Denise. Introduction. Martín & Meditations on the South Valley, by Jimmy Santiago Baca, New Directions, 1987.

Linthicum, Leslie. "From Prison to Poet." Mirage Magazine, 2 May 2022, mirage.unm.edu/from-prison-to-poet. Accessed 30 Sep. 2024.

Rector, Liam. “The Documentary of What Is.” Hudson Review, vol. 41, summer 1989, pp. 393–400.

Schubnell, Mathias. “The Inner Landscape of the Self in Jimmy Santiago Baca’s Martín & Meditations on the South Valley.” Southwestern American Literature, vol. 21, 1995, pp. 167–73.

Toledo, Lucia Ortega. "When I Walk through That Door, I Am: An Immigrant Mother’s Quest by Jimmy Santiago Baca." Latin American Literature Today, May 2019, latinamericanliteraturetoday.org/book‗review/when-i-walk-through-door-i-am-immigrant-mothers-quest-jimmy-santiago-baca. Accessed 30 Sep. 2024.

Trujillo, Simón Ventura. "Mestizaje, Captivity, and Jimmy Santiago Baca’s Poetics of Escape." Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, vol. 46, no. 2, 2021, pp. 209-20.