46 pages • 1-hour read
Citizen Illegal
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Symbols & Motifs
Mexican Food
Mexican food is a key motif that emphasizes the speaker’s affection for Mexican cuisine and confirms his identification with Mexican culture. One of the “Mexican Heaven” poems (in section IV) consists solely of a list of 11 Mexican foods, including tamales, tacos, sopes (a kind of corn cake), and menudo (a traditional soup), plus agua (water). In “Mexican Heaven” (section IV) Pedro, the Mexican St. Peter, gives all the Mexicans a shot of tequila to welcome them to heaven. Tequila is considered to be Mexico’s national drink.
Frijoles (beans), a staple of Mexican cuisine, have a cultural significance that the young immigrant boy in school is only too aware of. In “River Oaks Mall” he does not want to admit that he brought beans to school for lunch as that would brand him as Mexican, and he is ashamed of his ethnicity. Other types of Mexican foods mentioned in the poems include carne asada—grilled meat—which the speaker loves; he says he cannot “contain my happiness” (59) when he gets a whiff of it cooking (“I Loved the World So I Married It”). His grandmother makes masa, a popular Mexican corn dough, and the whole immigrant neighborhood comes to share it (“Gentefication”). The same is true of nopales, another staple of Mexican cuisine, made from the pads of the prickly pear cactus.
In contrast are the foods (and drinks) that are part of American life, such as French fries and cheese fries, “fried everything” (15) (“Ode to Cheese Fries”), which the young Olivarez loves, as well as hamburgers and Mountain Dew. The narrator consumes these foods too, but he certainly understands them as being on the other side of the culinary (and cultural) divide between America and Mexico. His experience alternating between both types of food speaks to The Complexities of Assimilation and Cultural Identity.
Poverty and Economic Struggles
Poverty and the economic struggles of the family make up a recurring motif, speaking to the hardships of the immigrant experience. Olivarez was raised in a poor household, which was further challenged when the steel mill where his father worked closed. Their house was also foreclosed upon, as mentioned in three poems, including “foreclosure came like a cold wind” (“I Tried to Be a Good Mexican Son,” 30) and the statement that he came from “a city of foreclosure” (“Ode to Cheese Fries,” 15). These economic difficulties may have arisen due to the national economic recession of 1990-91 and the subsequent slow recovery, in which unemployment continued to rise through June 1992.
Much later, when Olivarez was an adult, he experienced bad credit and the bill collectors started calling. He was also unemployed at the time (“When the Bill Collector Calls & I Do Not Have the Heart to Answer”). Olivarez’s younger brother is “broke and unemployed” (29) at the time he gets accepted into graduate school; he cannot even afford a “happy meal,” a children’s meal at McDonald’s (“The Day My Little Brother Gets Accepted into Grad School,” 29). The emphasis on poverty in the poems shows how the family faced two different types of disadvantage and exclusion: the racial exclusion borne of anti-immigrant and racist sentiment, and the social exclusion associated with being low-income.
Place
Olivarez writes a lot about his relationship to place, and this is a recurring motif in this collection. He writes fondly of Chicago, and especially Calumet City, a working-class south Chicago suburb, where the family lived when they first came to the United States. Calumet is where he used to go for cheese fries (“Ode to Cheese Fries”) and the city is the setting for the entire poem. He calls it home and says he would miss it. He is also a fan of the Chicago Bulls (“Ode to Scottie Pippen”). As he delves into his memories, he fondly recalls the parties that he and his friends had in their home basements in Cal City (“Ode to Cal City Basement Parties”).
Notably, all three of these celebratory poems titled “Ode” are set in Chicago. Chicago is part of his identity, as he states in “Mexican American Disambiguation”: “[I] am a Chicano from Chicago” (41). He has also lived elsewhere: In “Interview” he gives a little window into how he felt about living in the Bronx, New York City. It took him three years to hang artwork on the walls, but only three days to take it down when the time came to leave.
Ultimately, the collection suggests that Olivarez’s struggles to feel a more permanent sense of home are rooted in something inherent to the immigrant experience: A sense of being caught between two places, but not belonging fully to either one. He writes, “[I]t’s hard for one body to contain two countries,” and as a result, “mostly you belong to the river that divides your countries” (“If Anything Is Missing, Then It’s Nothing Big Enough to Remember,” 49). His sense of rootlessness and ambivalence thus reflect the issues of assimilation and identity explored throughout the poems.
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