18 pages • 36-minute read
In Colorado My Father Scoured and Stacked Dishes
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Background
Literary Context: Translingual Poetry
In Corral’s poem, lines move freely between Spanish and English. The poet does not use italics to separate the Spanish phrases or provide helpful context to facilitate translating those Spanish words into English. The poem references Mexican locations, Mexican adages, and even Mexican history, all without accompanying endnotes. To understand the poem, Corral shows, the English-language reader must learn something about Mexico itself and, to recite the poem, must learn at least a little Spanish.
Emerging in the late 1990s in the wake of digital communication and the then-radical concept of a globalized United States, translingual poetry represented a bold movement into creating a national poetry that reflected a diverse multicultural United States. Poets, many first-generation immigrants to the US, designed their poetry to enhance their own sense of multicultural identity by freely fusing their English-language poetry with phrases and words that drew on their native language.
In fusing the English language with other languages, the poetry transcended the limits of any one language and created a vibrant and engaged poetry that defied the racist biases and cultural stereotypes that impacted immigrant communities perceived as “alien.”
Translingual poetry encourages empathy. Poets from a variety of cultural backgrounds—most notably Latino, Asian, North African, Caribbean, and Indigenous peoples—use translingual poetry to create verse that encourages acceptance of cultural diversity, especially on behalf of people who are immigrants.
Historical Context: The Emerging Border Crisis
Few dilemmas better define the US following the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, than the unfolding crisis over the rise in unauthorized immigration along the open, nearly 2,000-mile border between the United States and Mexico.
When Corral composed the poem in the early 2010s, the growing clamor for the US government to seal off the border from the steady stream of unauthorized immigrants crossing at various points had become a political hot button issue. Politicians, often with questionable, even manipulated data, stereotyped immigrants and demonized them as the root cause of the rise in violent crimes, the decline of jobs for American workers, and problems in housing, education, and healthcare. The Department of Homeland Security estimated that in 2010 there were as many as 8 million unauthorized immigrants living and working in the US.
There is no evidence that the poem’s story of the emotional distance between a Mexican father and his grown son is autobiographical. Rather, Corral defines the work of the poet as creating characters that are drawn from real-life and real-time experiences without making poetry self-confessional. Thus, Corral explores the impact of unauthorized immigration at a time (2010s) when the US was beginning to distance itself from compassionate empathy for those who came into the country unauthorized, as the speaker’s father does, and who worked low-paying, menial jobs while staying one step ahead of immigration authorities.
Corral reveals the psychological impact of a father’s efforts to provide for his child while understanding his position as “an illegal” (Line 11). Because of a childhood marked by transience and discrimination, the son still feels like he is unwelcome in the US, even as an adult: “I’m an Illegal-American” (Line 12) captures a feeling of exclusion and uncertainty associated with his national and cultural identity.
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