such that it’s still very recent. Let me give you an example. Black folks had a system of
slavery that was imposed upon them. Now we have lots of scholars who have studied all of
this extensively. One of the strange things about our history as the Chicano people is
that we still live under a slave system that nobody wants to recognize, and it’s very
strange that during the hearings for the Attorney General, a lot of those people were
saying, well you can’t come in and be a judge since you have these two people working for
you that you haven’t paid taxes on. And it’s strange that that’s multiplied about 10
million times across the country; there’s an awful lot of us who are being paid $8 a
day.
KEENE: But is that slavery?
BACA: Nobody wants to call it a system of slavery. Many of these $8-a-day workers are
people who have lived here for many hundreds of years. But it’s like, I mean, I can go out
on the street right now and pick up four Chicanos and pay them, tell them I’ll give all of
you guys five bucks each if you work all day. And chances are they’re going to say okay
because they don’t have any food and they have to pay the bills. They’re completely at the
mercy of these employers. So the whole system is still very much part of our contemporary
reality. The interesting thing about your question is that the answer is yes, I do need
to, we all need to re-educate our children to the indigenous values that we hold as a
people, that have made our heritage what it is and sustained us up to today. The good
thing is this: as I said before, this history has been fairly recent, because it was in
the 1950’s and 1960’s that we made these mass migrations from what we call the
"campos," the villages, the pueblos. We all came in from the villages and
pueblos about 1950 and onward, so our urbanization has been rather recent, and so when I
go to schools to talk to young kids and I begin to speak about the indigenous values,
almost all of them shake their heads because they instinctively feel that it’s real, it’s
that close to them.
KEENE: So you’re saying that much of this empowering, sustaining knowledge still
remains?
BACA: The basic threshold, the cornerstone, is in all the people. We simply have to
reaffirm that by telling the people that it’s okay to come home now, you can return
because we really miss you. You don’t have to give away your identity, your culture, your
language, your dances, your songs, your poetry, your paintings to become an
"assimilated" white Anglo male. You don’t have to do that anymore. You can come
back home and be successful in this society and still offer it all the resources that come
from your culture.
KEENE: You write of having wanted to remake yourself as " the blondest hair,
bluest eyed" Chicano out there and of how you felt when the people in the barrio had
begun to mock you, how you could not understand why you were trying to do this, how they
saw right through you. But the flip side is that there was only one other world left to
you, the world that led you to prison and leads so many of our young people to crime and
imprisonment. I know you are now working with organizations like the Puente Foundation.
How have you been able to enrich the lives of these young people so that they do not
experience such powerful self-loathing?
BACA: When I’m working here on my farm by myself, I become privy to the most
extraordinary beauty that’s provoked through language, and I’m left many times just
weeping and thinking, how can I carry this ephemeral substance and place it in another
child’s hands? One of the wonderful things about the Puente Project is that when all the
kids come together, hundreds and hundreds of them, I get to share all of this with them.
And instead of reflecting back to them what mainstream society has done for 500 years,
which is to say, "You’re a lazy Mexican who sleeps under a cactus with a mule,"
I reflect back to them the extraordinary beauty that they are. There’s no feeling like it
in the world! It’s a very palpable feeling that begins to come out of their stories; say
there’s a thousand of them, and I’m standing down on this podium below, in this big, huge
lecture hall, and there’s no experience quite like it when all those thousand kids begin
to just have this love for themselves flow down.
KEENE: You are teaching them to be reborn, to be reborn in love of themselves.
BACA: Right, and for the first time in your life you realize what it must feel like to
be born as a child and have a society built around your values–an extraordinary feeling
of being very close to God at that moment. And I never had that feeling before, ever. As
I stood there speaking for the first time for an hour on the tremendous beauty that they
represented, on their inheritance of all of this, on what they embodied, I’ d begin to
feel an extraordinary sense of belonging to this society. Experiencing this, remember this
is a very invigorating experience that keeps me writing more and more. The first time, the
minute I walked out of the hall, the feeling left me. I was again this anonymous person
without a face or without a culture.
KEENE: I remember your anecdote in which you talk about being on a panel with the
daughters of Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and you mention how not a single
Chicano student stood up to ask a question, even though they outnumbered the black and
white students thirty-to-one.
BACA: True. You see, the thing that we’ve been taught as a culture is that it is much
better to keep your silence and not try to overreach yourself because when a people have
had everything taken from them–we had our land taken from us and our culture and our
language, and there’s not much else left to take except our pride–so in order to keep
your pride you don’t overreach yourself. You should become a plumber and not a doctor,
become an electrician and not a lawyer. Because if you don’t make it, you’re going to
shame the family, and we can’t live with that kind of shame. All we have is our pride, so
what I’m basically asking the young Chicano people today is to please break the silence
and you will see that your feelings are reaffirmed a million times throughout the day by
other people who feel the same way. We’ve been taught that silence is best, because
language was one of the primal enemies, and if we could just keep quiet, we would be able
to protect ourselves. And so, the great call of the day in the square, the town-crier, was
"Do not say anything." So consequently when anybody came to the door, most of
the people would run to the back room and would not say anything. They wouldn’t even
answer the door.
KEENE: Which is not so very different from other cultures like African-American
culture, where a tradition of "speaking out," affirming one’s name, identity,
and humanity, was always considered very dangerous, yet people bravely did so.
BACA: But we’ve also been taught that to speak our feelings is something that verges on
arrogance. And since our culture has a really strong strain of humility in it, very few of
us stand up to speak when called upon.
KEENE: But you continue to speak, through your poems, your work with students, through
other means. You worked on a film not too long ago and you describe the experience of
returning to one jail where you’d been incarcerated, and of how, as you drove up, you were
physically revolted by seeing one of the guards who used to inflict these unspeakable
cruelties against you and the other convicts, but then you also describe how, as you were
making this film, you went through whole series of feelings, and how at the end you really
began to be able to deal with the men who were there, imprisoned. What was the toll of
making this movie? How had you worked through all those conflicts of having once been part
of that society where you were now seen as completely different?
BACA: Quite frankly I was stunned by how extensive the system had become! You have to
understand that the prison system alone in California has a budget greater than
three-quarters of the nations on the face of earth.
KEENE: Really?
BACA: The budget of California prison systems alone is larger than that of
three-quarters of the nations on the earth. Think about it. It’s just one state out of
fifty in the United States. Also, on any given day, we have more people in prison than we
have in the school systems in America, and it’s mounting daily. The funny thing is that
this year so many people went to prison, but what we have to understand as a nation is
that we have trained millions upon millions upon millions of convicts and spit them out of
the prison system. We’re not changing or improving things! Out in society, we never want
to think about this. We are going through the same thing that we went through with the
nuclear plants; there were people traveling the country to tell of what might happen if a
nuclear plant did malfunction. But people did not want to listen. Unfortunately, what
makes matters worse here is that there’s nobody in this country walking around talking
about what’s happening when the prison systems malfunction. Yet we have all of this
plutonium that we’ve stored in the sense that every man who comes out of prison is capable
of tremendous chaos and carnage.
KEENE: But am I wrong in stating that if you criticize the prison system, the penal
system, if you call for reforms, if you aim toward dealing with this complex of issues and
talk seriously about rehabilitation, about improving every aspect of our educational
system and about instilling esteem and self-knowledge in the minds of these young people
that you’ll be accused of being soft on crime, of being the stereotypical knee-jerk
liberal? How can you frame this question without appearing to be "soft on
crime"?
BACA: Well, I think it’s an indignation to the sensibilities of a civilized human being
to walk into a place like I walked into in California and see fifteen thousand kids–and
they’re kids–who are not in prison yet but on their way, fifteen thousand kids who’ve
been given one foot of airspace around their bunks, and to top it off, the washing
machines and the dryers for these fifteen thousand are made and manufactured by the same
people who made and manufactured the death camps in Germany.
KEENE: Oh my! [whispers]
BACA: At that prison, you can look across the street and see Exxon, and you start to
think about what happened in Alaska, about how we will never really be told about the
tremendous loss of wildlife, the destruction of nature there. At that same prison, you can
look across the other street and see this amusement park which has the biggest
rollarcoaster in the world. Then you realize then and there that the rollercoaster is set
for thrills; you see, we put our kids on it and they get a thrill out of life. Look either
way and you realize that it’s all about money. Exxon will take the entire country if it
has to. And then you look into the prison system and see that 85% of the children are
black and brown, and then something horrible begins to turn in your stomach: you realize
that instead of anything changing, the evils that beset the society have become so
sophisticated at camouflaging themselves that you begin to sense this terrible doom about
it all, that things won’t change, that there is no going back. I could only say to those
people who would ask for more prisons to be built that at no time in the history of this
country has anyone ever been able to point to any study or circumstance which affirms that
prisons have helped better society’s problems or reduce crime. And we have never ever
tried any other alternative for the very reason that there’s so much money in the penal
system, it’s a business. To give you an illustration: when I was in prison, the
legislature would set aside money for a $250,000 conditioning system, right?
KEENE: Right.
BACA: And I would see the trucks from my cell window arrive with the air-conditioning
unit, and the next day the air-conditioning unit was gone. It was GONE, never to return.
Neither the Federal Government nor the state nor civilians could hold those prison
officials accountable for anything that they did and do. It’s in the contracts! For
instance, half of the food that was brought to prison–like, let’s say, a truckload of
chickens–would be sold on the black market! And this happens everywhere! Half of the
guards were bringing in guns and selling them to the inmates, bringing in half of the
drugs in prison, half-kilos of cocaine and heroine every week! Everybody knew who they
were; this was just the way the system worked. You asked "how do you frame this
idea," and systems work the same way: how do you frame a system where it works, where
it’s able to give you the kind of picture that you can live with, and yet it doesn’t
confront you, so what’s wrong with it? It becomes okay.
KEENE: Accepting things as they are is always easier; it requires nothing from
us.
BACA: Look at Bush’s son. At the Republican convention, they asked him if he was going
to return that $6 million to the taxpayers, and he smirked into the camera and said,
"Are you kidding me?"
KEENE: [Laughs] You end up having to ask who the criminals are, what behavior is
criminal? You do come to see how power and money frame all questions and issues.
BACA: Exactly.
KEENE: I want now to explore another idea that informs your experience and your poetry,
which is "Chicanismo." One of your charges to yourself is "to remain true
to my reality that in doing so I may honor my people and pay full homage to their
spirit." All your books of poetry seem to carry this as their unspoken theme. Would
you just talk about "Chicanismo" and what it might mean for younger people?
BACA: Chicanismo…is a state of being, which has to do with compassion and humility
and patience and love. For example, I’m writing this novel which takes place in an
orphanage, and in one of the scenes this Chicano boy is pushing this Indian kid into the
shower, so that he has to wash. The Indian kid refuses to wash, however. And when little
Daniel, the Chicano boy, pushes him into the shower and realizes that there’s blood on the
boy’s body, on his buttocks, he realizes that the Indian boy has been raped.
KEENE: Raped?
BACA: Yes. And what Daniel does is take the sponge and the soap and begin to wash the
boy, because the boy refused to wash for some weeks. So Daniel begins to wash him, and
there’s a point in the description of the paragraph of these two characters where Daniel
gets on his knees and begins to wash the boy’s feet.
KEENE: How incredible!
BACA: What I’m saying through this symbol–for the Chicano and the Indian are both
Indians–is that the little Chicano kid is washing the body, the feet of the Indian boy
who has been raped, and I think as a society–I’m only speaking of the Chicano
people–what we have to do now in order to get back to the idea of Chicanismo, of who we
are as a people and what we can become, I think we first have to go through the grieving
stages of what happened to us as a people; that in fact many, many members of our families
have assimilated and are ashamed of where they come from. This is true, too, of the black
experience; there may be many black folks who are ashamed of their skin…
KEENE: The skin, the past…
BACA: The Chicanos are ashamed of their black culture by which I mean that we wear this
despised aspect of ourselves around our culture; and what I’m saying is, we must grieve
first then go through an act of contrition, in the sense that Daniel washed the Indian
boy’s body. It’s not good enough just to simply grieve. You have to act, because when you
act on grief, grief becomes forgiveness of oneself. You then begin to stand up, and you
become immensely stronger then to go on your journey to decide who and what you’re going
to be.
KEENE: This is such both a powerful image and statement. also, the washing of the body,
of the feet alludes to Scripture.
BACA: The Bible.
KEENE: Another area of our heritage. So one could say that through Chicanismo you begin
to resolve the problematic dichotomy between what you received from Spain and Spanish
culture, from Europe, and what you inherited from these Indian cultures that have been