[April showers
bring May flowers, and May flowers bring, besides
Pilgrims, the end of another semester. So this week I’ll share a few
reflections from my Spring
2019 semester, leading up to a special weekend post on what’s ahead for the
summer and beyond. I’d love to hear your Spring reflections in comments!]
On two distinct
but complementary ways to challenge exclusionary propaganda.
In the preview
post for my Ethnic American Literature course, I wrote about the incredibly
complex and crucial task of teaching such topics and themes in 2019. Well, the
first few months of 2019 didn’t disappoint (or rather they did in so, so many
ways, but not in living up to such predictions): the semester opened in the
midst of a government shutdown over false, xenophobic, white supremacist
narratives of a border and immigration “crisis”; and it featured in its early
weeks a presidential “emergency” declaration over that same “crisis,” with all
the subsequent and ongoing debate and fallout. While I wrote
a lot about those issues
and themes, especially for my Saturday
Evening Post gig, I didn’t
necessarily bring them into my classes as often as I might have (no doubt in
part because I felt that both I and we needed spaces where we weren’t bombarded
by those horrific unfolding histories). But certainly we connected to such
contemporary issues at multiple moments in the course of the Ethnic American Lit
class, and never more so than in Unit 3, a pairing of various late 20th
and early 21st century poems by Puerto
Rican poet Martín Espada with the opening couple dozen stories from Sandra
Cisneros’s short story cycle The House on
Mango Street (1984).
Many of Espada’s
poems directly challenge both border/immigration policies and practices and the
kinds of exclusionary and bigoted attitudes that underlie anti-immigrant sentiments.
That’s particularly true of a poem like “Federico’s
Ghost” (1990), which uses the life and death (and afterlife) of a migrant
laborer to expose a variety of destructive social and historical forces. But in
its own more subtle and funny way, a poem like “Jorge
the Church Janitor Finally Quits” (1999) is just as activist, as it forces its
non-Latino, non-immigrant American readers (indeed, all of its readers, but
perhaps those with particular force) to think about both the lives and stories
of those around them and the way their attitudes and actions might affect those
fellow Americans. Reading these poems helped us talk about questions of culture
and language, of heritage and identity, of what links figures like Federico and
Jorge to those in other class texts (like Richard Wright in Black
Boy or Michael Patrick MacDonald in All Souls, to name
two) as well as what distinguishes their American experiences. All discussions that
help challenge the propaganda underlying white supremacist exclusions.
Espada’s poems
and protagonists tend to offer such challenges overtly and purposefully, while Esperanza,
the youthful narrator of Cisneros’s stories, tends to focus far more consistently
and understandably on childhood concerns of family and friends, bicycles and
boys, and other such topics. As that hyperlinked story illustrates, those
concerns themselves often connect to cultural, social, and historical issues,
even if Esperanza herself isn’t always aware of the broader contexts (she is in
that particular story, to be sure). But even when the stories remain focused on
simpler or more universal experiences of childhood and growing up, they
nonetheless offer a potent challenge to propagandistic fears of immigrants.
Esperanza, after all, is (like
Cisneros) the daughter of Mexican immigrants to the U.S. (and possibly
undocumented ones; we’re not told their immigration status, but they are at
least in a similar socioeconomic status to many undocumented arrivals, as the
book’s titular
first story reflects), an embodiment of the American future that seems to
so terrify those who offer dire warnings about “migrant caravans” and the like.
Reading Cisneros’s stories thus helps us engage with the specific realities
(rather than the fears) of such lives and families and communities, and at the
same time to recognize that their stories are very much like all of ours.
Next reflection
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Spring reflections you’d share?
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