Baca: A Poet Emerges from Prison of His Past

As success stories go, it’s a grisly one.

By his own account, Jimmy Santiago Baca’s parents divorced and abandoned him to a grandparent when he was 2. Later, his mother was murdered by her second husband and his father died of alcoholism.

By 5, the young mestizo (half Chicano/half “detribalized Apache”) was abandoned again, left at a New Mexico orphanage where he stayed until he was 11, running away the night before he was to be transferred to Boy’s Town.

He swiftly became a teen-age street urchin, alcoholic, drug addict and wanderer. At age 20, convicted of drug possession with intent to sell, he wound up, he said, doing 6 1/2 years (for incorrigibility, on a five-year sentence) in one of Arizona’s toughest maximum security prisons. Because he consistently got into fights with his cellmates, he spent four of those years in isolation, in “a dungeon,” with, Baca claims, no sunshine save for a single hour once each week.

Taught Himself to Read

But in the darkness, Baca was reborn. He taught himself to read and write, shouting to inmates, for instance, when he became dazzled by the difference between nouns and verbs, “Hey Flaco! Do you know what you are? Do you know, brother, that you are a noun ???!!!’ ”

“He found his inner light and he worked by it,” said Will Inman, the former publisher of New Kauri poetry magazine, who began encouraging and visiting Baca while he was still in prison.

Last year, for his fifth book of poems, “Martin & Meditations on the South Valley,” Baca won the prestigious American Book Award. And suddenly, the inmate who called himself “healing earthquake” is indeed shaking up the literary world.

Baca--whose semi-autobiographical work is noted for its intense, primal imagery and poignant lyricism--is now in demand for poetry readings throughout the world (one of which is scheduled at the Los Angeles Theatre Center on April 17).

PBS is preparing a documentary on his life. And he’s being courted by famous literary agents.

Numerous universities have offered him teaching jobs, all of which he said he’s turned down, preferring to stay close to his beloved Albuquerque barrio with his wife, Beatrice, a therapist about to begin doctoral studies, and their two young sons, Antonio and Gabriel.

But a major West Coast university (Baca said he can’t name it as the award hasn’t yet been officially announced) will lure him to its campus next fall for a monthlong guest lectureship.

Never Attended School

The poet, who never attended school in his life and received his high school diploma by taking the GED exam, is not even sure what will be required of him, but he knows the job pays extremely well. “I don’t know what you do,” he wondered aloud during a recent visit to Los Angeles. “You just stand there and make money.”

He had come here to talk with directors at the Los Angeles Theatre Center about the possibility of having one of his plays produced.

“I think I’m going to do a play for these people,” he said, sitting in one of the center’s offices, smoking a cigarette. “We’ll see if they can meet my criteria.”

Though the words were direct and tinged with challenge, Baca is hardly the tough homeboy you might expect from hearing his life story. At 37, he looks healthy and fit, the scars from his prison life invisible to the naked eye.

More handsome than his photographs, he is dressed colorfully this day, in a raspberry cotton shirt, blue pants and blue and white Mexican wool vest. But even more striking is his manner. Baca radiates a gentleness, serenity, and lack of anger.

“You really don’t have time to be angry,” he explained. “If you compare a life to daytime photography, my life has been more like nighttime photography. My life as a background has had darkness; the only way to survive the darkness is to have my soul flash. I’m too busy trying to capture the aspects of myself in the dark.”

By discovering language and capturing himself through it, Baca claimed, he totally transformed his life:

”. . . (In prison), I saw all these Chicanos going out to the fields and being treated like animals. I was tired of being treated like an animal. I wanted to learn how to read and to write and to understand. . . . I wanted to know how to function in this world. Why was I so ignorant and deprived?

“The only way of transcending was through language and understanding. Had I not found the language, I would have been a guerrilla in the mountains. It was language that saved my (posterior). I really didn’t know who I was before I was in prison.”

New Perceptions

While there, at Arizona State Prison in Florence, Baca said he began to work on new perceptions, “birthing a way out through the poetry. I began to decompose the walls. I saw the walls were not the enemy. The enemy was myself.”

But why did the enemy repeatedly choose punishment rather than perform the required prison work? Even now, Baca sees his refusal to work as a creative, positive act.

He maintains that he never committed the crime for which he was convicted. He had gone to visit a friend, he said, and wound up in the midst of a shoot-out in which an FBI agent was wounded.

“We just got caught in a situation we should never have been in,” he said. “I got caught in a net. . . .”

But he gives himself credit for being “that one Chicano who said, ‘This (treatment) is legally and morally wrong. I do not want to lift this arm to work.’ That’s a creative act. My whole life has been based on creating my own code of right and wrong.”

Not Bitter Today

Though he suffered as a result, Baca does not appear embittered. He speaks evenly of the fact that his incorrigibility resulted in the warden standing in his cell and tearing up his poems. (Baca responded by throwing a chair at him.) In addition, Baca said he received electric shock treatments in what he calls an attempt to coerce him into uniformity.

To a degree, they worked. “I forgot how to pronounce my own name,” he recalled.

But as a child, he had been trained by curanderas (Mexican folk healers) in herbalogy and folk religion. And he had learned to expect, even treasure, such suffering. “At a very young age, I became a young Chicano with a sense of destiny,” Baca said. “I had the idea I was intended for an incredible amount of suffering. I was taught that suffering would be our gift and we had to build from it and not let it destroy us.”

And so slowly, patiently, Baca endured, writing to retain his sanity. When he had composed a few poems, an inmate friend suggested he send them to Mother Jones magazine.

“I took a wild chance and sent Mother Jones three poems. I didn’t know how to put the stamp on the envelope and address it. A couple of weeks later, I got $300 (for the three poems) in the mail.”

Help From Famous Poet

Denise Levertov, who describes Baca as “an extraordinarily gifted poet,” was the magazine’s poetry editor at the time. An internationally known poet and professor of English at Stanford University, she began corresponding with him, ran his work in Mother Jones and found him a publisher for his first book, “Immigrants in Our Own Land” (Louisiana State University Press).

Levertov wrote the introduction for “Martin & Meditations on the South Valley” and in it she describes “Martin,” the first of the book’s two long poems, as “a Hero Tale, an archetypal journey.”

Asked how Baca’s work has evolved, she replied: “When he was writing in prison, he had a sketchy idea of punctuation and sometimes his usage was incorrect, but it didn’t take him very long to get past that stage.”

There was always the possibility, she admitted, that “he was someone with one theme and that once he was free, he wouldn’t continue. But that’s obviously not the case. He’s a naturally gifted poet. . . .”

Levertov also noted that “Martin” was published by New Directions, “a very, very fine publisher that’s published most of the major poets over this century.”

Now He Has Attention

Gary Soto, one of the world’s best-known Chicano poets and an associate professor of English at UC Berkeley, has similarly followed Baca’s work for more than a decade and suspects that publication by such a respected publisher helped bring the world to Baca’s doorstep.

“Jimmy’s always been a strong writer, he just never got the attention,” Soto observed. “It’s very pure, innocent, but not naive writing. He’s writing about his life. . . . He’s never been a careerist like so many other poets, with one eye on the publishing world and one eye on his subject. Jimmy has both eyes on his subject.”

Even though Soto was familiar with Baca’s work, he was somewhat shocked when the two met at the American Bookseller’s Assn. meeting last year in Anaheim.

“He was in cutoff pants,” Soto remembered. “Everyone else was dressed up and suave. He didn’t look like the cholo, the tough guy who comes up in his poems. He just looked like a guy happy to be there. . . . He has such character about him. It’s very genuine. . . . When I read his poems, I think, ‘This is what literature is about.’ ”

Appreciates Advice

While Baca clearly appreciates such comments, especially from distinguished friends in high places, he does not appear to need them.

“I have been hailed by some of the most severe critics in the country. It doesn’t mean anything,” he insisted. “I just try to stay within the rules of the earth, within the boundaries of dignity. I don’t do anything for money. . . . I live on a day-to-day basis. . . . In prison. I didn’t know if I was going to be alive from day to day.”

At the moment, daily existence involves considerable traveling. For the last three and a half months, Baca’s been on tour, reading his poems at universities and major poetry centers, with as many side trips to reform schools and his farm in Albuquerque as he can squeeze in along the way.

According to Manazar Gamboa, a Santa Monica poet who works with incarcerated youths throughout Los Angeles County, Baca visited three centers for juvenile offenders in the Los Angeles area during another recent visit here.

“They received him really well, especially at San Fernando Juvenile Hall,” Gamboa said. “Compared to other places, it’s pretty hard-core there. Some of the kids are facing very hard time. Without preaching, he stressed the value of learning. And when he finished his discussion with the kids, one of them said: ‘Can we have one of your books?’ He wrote in it and dedicated it to them and gave it to them. I could see he was really moved on an emotional level.”

But whatever his schedule, he said he finds time to write on a daily basis.

Roamed 10 Years

It wasn’t always so. After he left prison, he gave up writing and roamed the country for about 10 years. “I never fully accepted the fact that I was a writer until a year and a half ago (with the publication of ‘Martin’),” he said. “As many times as I chose the gift, I chose the curse. The trouble with scoffing at human life with indifference is that it’s terribly numbing.”

Even today, it appears Baca writes to stay fully alive.

“My work is the only thing I’ve ever had that I could hold onto. . . . I have to deal with changing diapers, washing dishes, changing doorknobs. I don’t believe this (excrement) about ‘I’m an artist, give me a little cottage at the beach and I’ll write,’ ” he said. “It all comes down to my act of sitting down in my little room and writing what’s in my heart.”

Lately, that’s been novels. Though a new book of poems is due out this fall, “The Black Mesa Poems,” Baca more recently completed the first novel in a trilogy about his life. “In the Way of the Sun” covers his early orphanage years, and once again, he offers an unexpected view.

“It was an incredible paradise of sorts,” he said of his orphanage experience. “For a child who’s isolated and only hears the sound of horses and cows and church bells ringing, it was an incredibly exhilarating playground. . . . Can you imagine the shoe room, with 70,000 pairs of shoes and you find one that fits and then try to find its mate?”

Suddenly, Jimmy Santiago Baca was a kid again, back in his marble shooting days, bartering Fizzies for marbles and marbles for firecrackers and firecrackers for chocolate. He remembered how he and his friends plotted ways to steal the glass eye of a man who visited the orphanage. They wanted to use the guy’s eye to win an upcoming marble tournament.

As Baca’s dark eyes widened, he flashed to the simple, childhood logic behind the quest for the glass eye: “We thought it could see!”