46 pages • 1-hour read
Citizen Illegal
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Background
Sociopolitical Context: Mexican Immigrants in the United States
Olivarez’s parents were undocumented immigrants when they arrived in the United States in 1987, later becoming US citizens. They came at a time when Mexican immigration was on the rise. In the 1980s, it nearly doubled, reaching a total of 4,298,000 Mexican-born immigrants in the US by 1990. The figure almost doubled again in the 1990s, and peaked in 2010 at 11,711,000. After that there was a decline to 10,918,000 by 2023, according to the Migration Policy Institute (MPI). According to the MPI, an estimated 45% of Mexican immigrants were in the country illegally in 2022. The number had been steadily falling since 2007, from 7.7 million people to 5.1 million in 2022, a decline of 34%.
Chicago, where the Olivarez family settled, became an increasingly popular destination for Mexican immigrants during this time. In the 1990s, the number of Mexican immigrants to Chicago rose by 117,000, contributing to the city’s population growth. Many of them worked in steel mills (like Olivarez’s father), meatpacking plants, and on the railroad. According to the 2000 census, there were more than 530,000 Mexicans in the city of Chicago, and more than 1.1 million in the larger metropolitan area.
During the 1990s, there was a rise in anti-immigrant sentiment in the US, which continued into the 21st century. After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the US government stepped up efforts to secure the porous US-Mexico border to prevent terrorists from entering the country. There was also a renewed focus on reducing the number of undocumented immigrants already in the country. Immigrants from Mexico were subjected to greater scrutiny, and were often scapegoated for allegedly exacerbating social problems like crime and drugs.
This trend continued into the 2010s and beyond. In 2015, Donald Trump entered national politics by denouncing Mexican immigrants for bringing crime and drugs, while also accusing them of being rapists. His rhetoric fueled popular suspicion of Mexican immigrants and made life harder for them. As a Mexican American immigrant, José Olivarez was concerned about the situation. In a conversation with Nate Marshall of The Rumpus, he says:
I know that I am very fair-skinned and that the danger I face on a day-to-day basis and in different parts of the country is theoretically low. Yet, I’m not white. I’ve never identified as white […] So when I travel through the country, I don’t feel particularly safe because of the name I carry, because Donald Trump is on TV calling Mexicans rapists and there are many people in the country who like Donald Trump, you know, and I can’t feel 100% safe given those realities (Marshall, Nate. “The Conversation: José Olivarez and Nate Marshall.” The Rumpus, 1 Apr. 2016).
As of the mid-2020s, anti-immigrant rhetoric has only increased in the US, and the second Trump administration has increased the number of deportations, not only of undocumented Mexican immigrants but also of those from other Latin American countries, notably Venezuela.
Literary Context: Olivarez’s Literary Influences
Olivarez has been very open in his appreciation of other poets who have mentored or influenced him. He even mentions two of them in his poems. In “Gentefication,” Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000) comes to visit el barrio (the neighborhood) and stays to write. Lucille Clifton is mentioned in “Summer Love”: “[Y]ou read Lucille Clifton in bed” (53). Both were African American poets. In an interview, Olivarez said of Brooks: “Her work is so filled with lush imagery, and gorgeous turns of phrases, and a precision that still inspires me to this day” (“José Olivarez’s New Book ‘Citizen Illegal’ Is An Economic Crisis Book Of Poems.” Chicago Creatives, 2017). He mentioned Brooks’s “Read A Song in the Front Yard,” among other poems.
Of Clifton (1936-2010), Olivarez said, “Her poems teach me about the great distances that poems can travel in a short amount of time. Her poems are usually pretty short, but there’s not a mightier poet. Funny too. I return to her work pretty frequently.” He cited Clifton’s poem “won’t you celebrate with me” as one of his “favorite poems of all time. It’s an anthem to hold on to” (“José Olivarez’s New Book ‘Citizen Illegal’ Is An Economic Crisis Book Of Poems”). He also mentioned that his work would not have been possible without Sandra Cisneros (b. 1954), the renowned novelist and poet from Chicago who is of Mexican heritage. Olivarez had high praise also for Erika L. Sánchez (b. 1983), an American poet—the daughter of Mexican immigrants—and Jacob Saenz, a poet from the Chicago area, whose first collection was Throwing the Crown (2018).
Olivarez also told Brooklyn Poets that he had been studying the work of African American poet Idris Goodwin: “Idris was one of my first teachers” (“Jose Olivarez.” Brooklyn Poets, 2020). It was Goodwin’s poem “A Preface,” about the different nuances of the word “Black” when used to describe race, that inspired Olivarez’s poem “Mexican American Disambiguation” (41). Under the title of that poem, Olivarez placed a note, “after Idris Goodwin.” He put similar notes under the titles of other poems, mentioning the name of a poet whose style or subject he was indebted to in that poem. For example, under “Interview,” he writes, “after Safia Elhillo” (46), who is a Sudanese American poet. “Poem in Which I Become Wolverine” (37) is “after” African American poet Tim Seibles, while “Mexican American Obituary” (32) is “after” Puerto Rican poet, Pedro Pietri (1944-2004).
Thus, Olivarez shows not only the range of his reading and his eagerness to acknowledge poets who have influenced him, he also reveals that his primary interest is in poetry by people of color, in particular contemporary Latinx and African American poets.
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