History in the Poetry of próspero saíz: A Reading of “document”

I. History, Poetry, and prospero saiz It may generally be true that as poets become concerned with ethnicity, they also grow frustrated with historiography. Certainly their resistance to the way history is produced and circulated is visible in the competing accounts one finds in their writings, an authoritative but false one often sitting side by side with a corrective. "Equality," writes Alurista in his famous Floricanto en Aztlan, "is a meaningless concept, here, in the stolen land (remember: the one that our forefathers tilled)" and readers cannot help but see two versions of history: the smug Anglo one that speaks of freedom and the more truthful but less popular Chicano one that speaks of a stolen land (58). In fact, with poets like Alurista in mind, one might change generalizations and say that when poetic projects involve reclaiming suppressed cultures, they also depend upon historical analysis. This would seem to be especially true of poets who are politically engaged or who seek to express contemporary formations of ethnic identity. Some analysis is virtually always provided--in the poetry itself, the critical apparatus, interviews with the author, etc.--to explain or critique the origins of today's situation. Thus it is unsurprising that Native American, Chicana/o, and other minority poets and scholars have carefully questioned the quality and utility of the knowledge produced and transmitted by historical writing. Jose Aranda, for example, has described the way Chicanas/os have worked to construct a "usable past" from history, creating an "alternative nationalism" through a "nostalgic and celebratory vision of the multiracial pasts of indigenous, Spanish, and Mexican peoples" (86). He stresses that their constructions have "invoked a progressive sense of history" having "much in common with many other narratives of immigration to North America since 1620" (86). Similarly, Robin Riley Fast has drawn attention to the way contemporary Native American writers like Simon Ortiz, Wendy Rose, Louise Erdrich, Paula Gunn Allen, and Maurice Kenny have used historical materials to reclaim or redirect received history and, as she puts it, "move readers to reconsider and respond, and thereby to contribute to the survival of Native peoples" (183). In Red Matters, Arnold Krupat argues that the gap between Native American and Euro-American forms of historiography may not be as wide as was once thought. He points out that native people "began to translate Europe as a necessity and an opportunity from the first moments of contact" (66) and rejects the idea that cultural and linguistic differences between natives and Europeans were or are mutually unintelligible. Despite these many recent voices emphasizing the progressive and usable nature of history, deep suspicion still exists among some Native American, Chicana/o, and other minority poets and critics. Some argue, for a variety of reasons, that certain truths of history will simply never emerge; others that there is no divorcing historical reality from the institutional powers that produce it, and no divorcing those from a racist, blinkered outlook. Still others regret that postmodern historiographical practices arrived and relativized history precisely when minorities started to gain some institutional control over their own history (Womack 3); for such poets and critics, it can actually be counterproductive to try to write over or against existing historical accounts since one may merely exacerbate an unwelcome relativizing tendency. The possibility always remains that certain past events cannot be coherently, meaningfully narrated, with facts assembled and agency attributed, under the aegis of truth. In such a circumstance, what are most painfully irrecuperable are past moments of great cruelty, injustice, and hypocrisy, especially when they seem to emerge from such identifiable historical forces as individual decisions, socio-cultural formations, and government policies. …