In spite of the remarkable breadth of poetry born of the Chicano Movement, I Am Joaquín by Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales is almost certainly the most famous and influential. One could argue, in fact, that it was the most important artistic and cultural statement of El Movimiento, treated of equal importance to the Plan Espiritual de Aztlán. It was hung in houses and on doors throughout Chicano neighborhoods in the late ‘60s, and acted as a catalyst for both political and artistic revolution. Why exactly this was, though, is worth consideration.
Part, certainly, stems from its date of publication: 1967 was ideally timed, as the Civil Rights Movement was at its most impossible to ignore, and Reies Lopes Tijerina’s Land Grant Movement in New Mexico was drawing the attention of Chicanos from everywhere within the Southwest. As well, part stems from the celebrity of the author: “Corky” Gonzales was a professional boxer, even then culturally well-regarded and considered a potential avenue financial escape among the Mexican American community, of reasonable success. Much as Muhammad Ali’s dominance within the boxing world made him an icon to the African-American civil rights movement and positioned him well for effective political motivation, so, too, was “Corky” Gonzales recognized within the Chicano community. This experience as a boxer is even touched on in I Am Joaquín, if tangentially: “I bleed as the vicious gloves of hunger/Cut my face and eyes/As I fight my way from stinking barrios/To the glamour of thing ring/And lights of fame/Or mutilated sorrow.”
The glancing nature of this reference to his personal experience is noteworthy, though, as it gets to the poem’s defining characteristic. Though the poem’s opening lines are devoted to being “lost in a world of gringo confusion,” “American social neurosis” and the “industrial giant called Progress and Anglo success,” this section is segmented apart by the line, in all caps, “MY OWN PEOPLE,” at which point the poem shifts away from a contemporary focus. The very next line says “I am Cuauhtémoc, proud and noble,” referencing an Aztec ruler in the 16th century. The next hundred lines recall figures from Mexican history, both before and after Spanish conquest, of legendary or infamous standing, repeatedly introduced with the declarative “I am,” or, increasingly as it progresses, “I was.” It does not, in fact, return to the United States until beyond the poem's half-way point, after traversing some four hundred years.
It might be wondered why a work, seemingly focused from the outset on Chicano peoples’ (the mestizo, mixed race, as Gonzales refers to them) experience in the “American social neurosis” would depart for so long from the present day and place. By contrast, one could look to a similarly famous poem from a different American racial divide, Langston Hughes’ “Theme for English B,” which has a similarly stated intent, but remains entirely in the present day, and within the narrator’s particular life experience, mentioning the place he lives, down to the apartment, the music he listens to, down to the singer and genre. One learns a great deal not just about the experience of the African American from “Theme from English B,” but also Hughes himself. This dissimilarity, though, is tied to the core difference between the African American and Chicano civil rights movements, the conflicts facing those cultures, and in turn the two works: even by the Harlem Renaissance, the African American community, though long oppressed, had a history in the United States that could not be ignored. The Chicano Movement, though, was as much an attempt to reclaim a historical identity as a place within the nation. As Gonzales says within I Am Joaquín: “I/of the same name/Joaquín/In a country that has wiped out/all my history…” As great threat to Mexican American unity as the cruelty of the fields and the welfare line was a loss of background. Whereas Hughes’ poem was to give voice to the inherent humanity, both difference and similarity, of a culture long established, if by nature and history made contradictory, Gonzales’ work is to unite, engage and remind a displaced multitude of a shared history in danger of being lost. To do that, though, required an entity all of those multitudes could live through: so here on the page lives Joaquín, of a million lives, but also none, as the necessity for a conduit, a cipher, an every-Mexican, means he himself cannot be in any way specific.
Discussion Question: Gonzales includes no line-breaks whatsoever in his long poem I am Joaquín. Is there a purpose behind this stylistic decision?
