When There Were Ghosts
20 pages • 40-minute read
Alberto RíosWhen There Were Ghosts
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Themes
Blended Identity
“When There Were Ghosts” presents a description of how identity is formed through blending various elements. These elements include the past and the present as well as national identities. The past is represented in that the theme begins with specific dates in the past: “the 1950s and ‘60s” (Line 1). The speaker is haunted by the past, and it is a familiar story he tells the reader. The movie theater audience shares a small part of this sensation of familiarity because they—like the speaker—know the story in advance. They “knew what would happen next / Before it did” happen (Lines 11-12). This foreknowledge is presented by the projection of the movie hitting cigarette smoke before the screen and creating “ghosts” (Line 10).
The audience of the movie theater, like the speaker, is haunted. However, the ghosts in the theater tell the audience about the future (or have a divinatory quality). Their future is the past for the poet and his audience from the 2010s. Time is blended, and this blending is part of identity formation, because what the speaker experienced in the past influences their perspective and development as a person.
The pattern of pronouns used throughout the poem further emphasizes this blending. The singular personal pronouns of I/my are surrounded by multiple instances of the collective pronouns we/our. The pronoun “we” appears in Lines 11, 13, 19, 22, and 24. These repetitions of the collective, or blended, pronoun surround the singular pronouns “[m]y” and “I,” which only appear in Lines 18 and 20. This emphasizes how the “I”—or self-identity—is formed by being a member of a larger group. The pronouns you/your are never used, demonstrating how to avoid excluding someone—there is no person outside of the “we” in the poem.
Overall, the poem creates a sense of “people” (3) as a collective, or blended, identity. Rather than have in-groups and out-groups, people—humans—are all part of the same group. This is an important idea in regard to the border between the United States and Mexico.
Living in Borderlands
The poem is located in a town that spans two countries: the United States and Mexico. Nogales—the poet’s hometown—sits on the border of the two nations. “When There Were Ghosts” focuses on “the Mexico side” (Line 1). This geographical doubling is mirrored by the doubling of the images from the movie projector. Just as the towns are doubled across the border, the movie theater audience is in a borderland between the cigarette smoke and the screen.
The smoke’s effect of doubling means that “every story was two stories” (Line 9). This description of the movie could also be applied to films in translation and the experience of living in two cultures, since Ríos himself spoke Spanish at home and English in school. He can tell the stories of his life in two different languages, and his experiences are colored by two different cultures. Movies are subtitled or dubbed in other languages to reach wider audiences, particularly audiences living in borderlands.
Ríos repeats the word “dream” in Lines 12, 15, and 24. It is the final word of the poem, thus it is given weight and importance. While the projection of the movie onto the smoke made it look “as if the movie itself were dreaming” (Line 12) before it appeared on the screen proper, the moviegoers are caught up in another dream where the stars in the movie resemble regular people, showing the children what could be possible. This mentioning of dreaming in a borderland town could be alluding to the Dream Act, where the acronym DREAM stands for Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors. This US immigration legislation is about protecting people living in borderlands who want to cross the border. Dreamers, people affected by the legislation, are children.
Additionally, dream can refer to the concept of the American Dream. This concept includes upward mobility for children, which relates back to the legislative reading. Ríos talks about his childhood throughout the poem, and though the DREAM Act was not introduced until Ríos was an adult in 2001, he recalls how he and the other moviegoers on the Mexican side of the border dreamed of better futures for themselves and their families decades before.
Finally, the idea of dreaming also suggests the borderland between unconscious fantasy and the waking world. The movie itself was much like a dream in that there were real people playing imaginary roles with imaginary outcomes. Ríos builds up the layers of this juxtaposition of the real world and the dream world by suggesting the movie itself was dreaming as the images flashed first onto the ethereally thick air full of cigarette smoke before they reached the screen.
Movies, Music, and Poetry
While poetry has been connected with the visual arts, such as painting, for centuries, Ríos connects narrative poems with movies and music. The poem refers to the movie Enamorada (1946) by its stars “María Félix and Pedro Armendáriz” (Line 17), the only film the two starred in together. The poet reflects the visual medium of film with descriptions using visual language, creating a dual experience of metaphorical images of literal images. In this way, Ríos illustrates the commonalities of the written narrative and the visual storytelling of films.
Further, this award-winning movie was immensely popular in Mexico and inspired hundreds of covers of its main song, “Malagueña Salerosa” (aka “La Malagueña”), connecting the power of music to the storytelling of movies. Poetry and music have also always been intimately connected, with the rhythms of lyrical poems likened to the rhythms of music, the lyrics of songs, and the librettos of longer pieces often described as poetry. In fact, many poetic works, such as those of Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and even Ríos himself, have been set to music by other artists or in collaboration with the poet. Other poets use music as inspiration or even compose with musical accompaniment in mind, such as former US Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky's work that included a jazz ensemble as part of his poetry performances. This intimate relationship between movies, music, and poetry stems from the fact that all art forms tell stories.
Storytelling is a central concern of “When There Were Ghosts.” In addition to the poet telling the reader the story about his childhood (a metatextual reading), the word “story” comes up three times. Two of these three instances appear in Line 9: “In this way, every story was two stories.” Stories are doubled in the line and the poem. Initially, the speaker describes how the movie’s projected image appears on both the smoke and the screen, doubling the experience for the moviegoers. “Story” also appears in the penultimate (second-to-last) line of the poem: “Those Saturday nights, we ourselves / were the story and the stuff and the stars” (Lines 22-23). By the end of the poem, stories and storytelling take on a universal quality. They do not belong to one person, or two people, but belong to all people. This is an important quality of art for many artists across a variety of mediums.
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