Jimmy Santiago Baca's Black Mesa Poems

In Black Mesa Poems, Jimmy Santiago Baca explores the relationship between cultural history as it is rooted to place (in this case, the American Southwest.) Uniformally, the poems weave distinct imagery, and as the poems unravel, Baca reveals small and large universal truths about the life on an immigrant living in the southwest. The openings of many of his poems are single lines that frame a moment and place in time, evoking a particular action or scene. Then, the poem gains momentum, pulling the reader along for the journey. The poetry unwinds; themes of place, environment, and culture become clear. The poems largely identify people with ancestryand connect to the happenings of place and fit these struggles into larger societal contexts.

In "Black Mesa," the title poem of the book, all of these underlying motifs tie together. "Black Mesa" opens with a physical description of place and leads the speaker to open up about the undulating pull guiding him the mesa. The language drips with an entangment of desire and imagery:

"I want to visit
it
before winter comes,
and balance myself
across culvert that connects
my field
to Isleta Pueblo.
Strings of water trellis
from rusty holes
and bubble scum and black moss weed
below.
Branches barrage this passage,
and draw blood at my shoulder
as I crouch past,
then climb No Trespassing fence."

We establish condensed language and the images and the power the Black Mesa has over the speaker. Tight images and language driven by verbs pushes the reader with the speaker. The allure of the mesa takes on a deeper level:

"I don't know what this year has meant to me
but I've come here to find a clue."

The speaker and the Black Mesa are connected in some way. Place and culture merge. The importance of people to place is established with regard to social justice as the poem reveals its layers:

"Rito was murdered here
by sheriffs,
brown beret Chicano activist
who taught children in the barrio
our own history,
tried to stop
them blasting Black Mesa.
And now, under my hiking boots his blood
crossbeds minerals
and forms into red crystals,
ceremonial Chac-mool plate
on which Aztec warrior Rito
sacrificed his heart to the sun."

The moment in the poem becomes an Aztec sacrifice. The Black Mesa is a voice for a people, a protection of environmental place. Rito becomes a martyr for his people against the backdrop of the desert sun.

A re-imaging occurs and the speaker merges with the mesa's history as he learns to identify with place:

"In lava cracks,
I learn to read, smell, hear
the darkness again 'til black depths
lighten slowly to twilight
and the old man who lives
in stone
offers me a different view
of life and death."

Stone becomes a recurring image through the remainder of the poem. In a dream, the speaker is appraoched by a man who speaks to him:

"Thank you for the stone in my mind.
It sings to me and I listen to it."

The speaker eventually rises, "I bend ... of my ascent from stone." The Black Mesa and stone become metaphor for ancestral history and the lucrative ties to place. The poem ends on the universe and hope for justice in the next year.

Black Mesa does well to exemplify much of what Jimmy Santiago Baca captures throughout the poems in the book. The entire work speaks to place, but not just physical landscape (although there are fresh images pertaining to physical space thoughout). Place takes on a deeper meaning the way Baca renders it; place becomes preservation of ancestry and culture. Through the language of his poems, Baca forces the reader to question what significance place carries. For the writer, he demonstrates how to control the multiple layers that make a poem truly stand out.