5
My Old Man's Ballad:
José Montoya and the Power Beyond

No Mexican-American intellectual coming to political and cultural awareness in the mid-1960s could have missed the enormous significance of the appearance of El Grito: A Journal of Contemporary Mexican-American Thought , published in Berkeley in 1967. Edited by Octavio Romano and Nick Vaca in its initial phase, El Grito was the first major publication of the Chicano movement, and its effect on the emergent political and cultural consciousness of young Chicanos cannot be overestimated. The first political analyses of race and class domination, the first trenchant critiques of the social sciences, and the first contemporary creative writing by Chicanos appeared in that exciting journal. Two years later Romano published El Espejo (The Mirror), an important collection of writings from El Grito as well as new contributions.

In greater Mexican culture, a grito means a yell or cry in an everyday sense. In a more socially marked sense, however, it refers to a battle cry or a cry for political action such as that by Father Hidalgo for Mexican independence from Spain in 1810. It can also refer to a celebratory cry that men, usually, may make when they particularly like a cultural performance, a song such as a corrido. In all its denotations, a grito is usually a male-gendered performance, and the journal's title was well suited to the muscular critical character of the texts, almost exclusively by male authors, that its editors chose to print. For these reasons, José Montoya's "La Jefita," a female-centered poem, stood out among these early writings. (Jefita , "little chief," is a slang honorific for "mother.") The poem begins

When I remember the camps
     And the nights and the sounds
Of those nights in tents or
Carts I remember my jefita 's
     Rolling pin
     Clik-clok; clik-clak-clok

     And her small cough.
(I swear she never slept!)
(Montoya 1969a)^[1]

A painter and art teacher by profession, José Montoya has been and continues to be one of the premiere political cultural activists in the Chicano movement. Originally from New Mexico, now active in the Bay Area, he has worked in rural and urban community organizing, and with Chicano prisoners, has founded Chicano poetry and art groups and taught Chicano studies at California State University at Sacramento—all with a deep concern and love for his people and with a sense of barely muted outrage at their social mistreatment (Bruce-Novoa 1980:115–36).

A widely anthologized author and a prolific and engaging reader of his poetry in public settings, Montoya can be said to have launched his poetic career with the publication of "La Jefita," a depiction in verse of a documented Mexican-American farmworker's existence. At the center of this charming, well-wrought poem is a tender, sensitive rendering of the speaker's mother. She is at the heart and hearth of this dominated universe, mitigating its corrosive effects with her nurturing familial love. In contrast, the speaker's father occupies a "demanding and distant" role (Hernandez 1991:78) in this poetic world:

But by then it was time to get Up!
My old man had a little whistle
That initiated the world to
Wakefulness.
     Wheeeeeeeet! Wheeeeeeet!
Get up, you damn lazy kids!
(Montoya 1969a)

Here, social domination is countered principally by the critical transcendence of maternal self-sacrifice, and, as Guillermo Hernandez observes, "The poetic voice conveys a feeling of rebellion toward the father, a figure whose role the narrator-son is condemned to imitate in life" (1991:78).

We also note that "La Jefita," in its muted rebellion and pro-maternal stance, comes to us in a modernist idiom. Here, I refer to Montoya's acknowledged admiration for the poetry of Dylan Thomas (Montoya 1980b:50). For is there not in "La Jefita" a trace of the Welshman's rhythms and his rhetoric of remembrance of youthful innocence in the

face of change? (I think of Thomas's "Lament," "Fern Hill," "I see the boys of summer," and "Once it was the colour of saying," in particular.)

In "La Jefita" Montoya is a long way from the epic heroic world of the corrido and, for that matter, from any poetically, politically aggressive public stance. Yet it is important to begin here, with this modernist female-centered poem, because it is this sort of poetic world that suggests Montoya had available one possible alternative—one kind of counterpoetics—when he did encounter the power of the precursor. Yet rather than elaborate this alternative poetic world, rather than refuse the traditional male-centered terms of struggle posed by the precursor, Montoya accepts the latter, and ultimately loses poetically, in his long work of 1972, "El Sol y los de Abajo" (The Sun and the Downtrodden). This poetic loss also limits the poem's public political capacities, although at the moment of its writing, circa 1965 (Hernandez 1991:53), it captures well all of our alienation and incapacities.

The Argument of "El Sol Y Los De Abajo"

"El Sol y los de Abajo" opens with little to recommend it as a poem, at least in the first thirteen lines. What Montoya has to say is just that, said , with little poetic mediation. Prosaic language is arranged in the quadrangle shapes of a seeming poem to quite literally tell us that were it not for racism and class oppression, Mexicans might have made it as hacendados like one Don Ramon Hidalgo Salazar. Instead, we are, like the speaker's father, descendants of the underdogs who never reached our sun. Like him, we

compounded the grief by
abandoning his land for another
so foreign and at once so akin
as to be painful.
(Montoya 1972b)^[2]

In the third stanza things improve somewhat with the poet's better sense of prosody. He seems to allude to Yeats's "A Dialogue of Self and Soul" to tell us that, like his father, "I have dragged"

Myself and soul in some
Unconscious, instinctive

Search for the splendor
De los templos del sol.

This stanza also alerts us to the poetic-political direction that the poem eventually takes. However, the poet suffers an immediate relapse as the fourth stanza returns us to an unimaginative catalogue mode of presentation. Those who did not reach the "temples of the sun," los de abajo —are to be found in the gutters, battlefields, cotton rows, and barrios, and the listing continues into the next stanza.

Nevertheless, this prosaic listing is poetically relieved in two places. Between stanzas four and five, we find the interesting though undeveloped image of a man caught inside a societal telescope; more importantly, toward the end of stanza six, the speaker compares his memories of tradition to Goya etchings. The unmediated memories of oppression dominate here, but we soon learn that the speaker also has other memories—memories of "Times that were tiempos finos " (fine times). The recollection of these better times brings forth better art.

The next nine to ten stanzas are indeed far better poetry. They are an artistic delineation of these "fine times" and emerge as a poetic and moral counterweight to the earlier poetically unrelieved catalogue of oppression. At the heart of these better, middle stanzas is a Mexican folkloric world of curanderas (female folk healers) such as the poetically well-wrought Doña Chole "la ruquilla" (little old woman):

with the ugly
Hump on her back—
La curandera, bruja, life-giving
Jorobada que curó a Don Cheno
Del dolor de umbligo y la
Calentura en la cintura.

The same jorobada (bent-over) healing bruja (witch) who cured Don Cheno of his umbilical pain and his stomach fever can also dispense potions for lovers who prayed

to a remarkably reasonable
God that their wives and husbands
Wouldn't find out . . .

I question whether the poem as a whole is a satire, as Hernandez (1991) seems to suggest; these fine stanzas, however, certainly do employ satire. These are engaging people who, with folk wisdom, try to outwit

the Virgin Mary in contests of logic: "cause if my husband / Finds out, he will kill me and you / Wouldn't want him in heaven then, / Como asesino" (as a murderer). Contrary to the usual flat stereotypes, folk Mexicans treat the spiritual world, not with unrelieved reverence, but with a living, healthy, satirical skepticism, and this world is kept at a distance, "Until times of need, death/grief, / Despair y los otros tiempos pesados" (the other bad times). It is a folk-theological relationship of contradiction and paradox paralleling what Abraham Kaplan has called "the Jewish argument with God" (1980). Satirical contradiction and paradox also characterize these people's relationships to the more institutional and secular spheres of life. Here too we find a display of folk wit and wisdom, as in Montoya's stanza of reported folk speech where the mother takes ironical note of Father Kelly, whose wandering hands can also bless an escapulary.

The children eat and go out to play kick-the-can until this folkloric world of care, pain, and love is interrupted by them —the Americans—the social worker, probation officer, school counselor, and academic who come "to crucify me with germ-bearing / Labels more infectious than rusty / Nails . . .". We are no longer in the satirical mode. However, as if the reappearance of oppression threatens once again to overwhelm the poetic itself, our poet momentarily relapses into the prosaic, albeit the angry prosaic. But he soon recalls once again that his "dismal world was so / much brighter!" and begins to breathe new, creative rhythmic life into his poem by returning to the folk world, to

the old barn across the canal
that housed a lechusa that
screeched at night scaring
the children porque era la
anima de la comadre de mi grama.

¡Oigan! (Listen!), his abuelita —his "grama"—tells the children. Listen to the screeching owl, which in her Mexican folk perception is the soul of her children's godmother Chonita. The dreary world of oppression is socially negated as the children are taken into a realm of mystery and magic that both fascinates and causes fear, but fear of a different order.

This poem now returns to the father, as the children run to him in fear. Here, the poet exploits the opportunity to remind us of his father with his "field-scarred limbs," "también arrastrado"—also a victim of oppression. But, like the women, the father also possesses the folk

resources to negate the oppressiveness. "At least," the poet tells us, "his noble deeds / Are enriched in ballads," and with these words we enter the final stanzas of the poem:

Pursued by dogs,
The horseman
Rode through the hills
Well armed.

A warrior for his cause,
Noble were his deeds.
Nor for glory nor for verse
You rode to fight for your people.
(my translation)

Turning exclusively to a formal Spanish and a formal prosodic style, the poet renders a poetic homage to his father. The father is no longer the "field-scarred" victim but rather a "jinete" (a horseman) riding through the mountains pursued by los perros —literally "dogs," but metaphorically all institutional oppressors. Our horseman is well armed, however, and he is, like so many other Mexican ballad heroes, a fighter for a cause, and he defends his cause and his raza (his people) neither for personal glory nor for the poetic immortality of the ballads but because it is right. The son then attempts to transfer this formal poetic form and its social function to his own situation. He finds himself in the same situations, but under different conditions. But he interrupts his attempted self-comparison to the ballad world with an emphatic "¡Chale! " (a folk speech form meaning no! ) And, why not? The poet returns still one more time to the prosaic, not with anger but with sadness and despair, and he tells us quite literally,

My actions are not yet worthy
of the ballads . . . me faltan
los huevos de mi jefe and
the ability to throw off
the gava's llugo de
confución . . .

His actions are "not yet worthy of the ballads"; lacking his father's huevos (balls), he is unable to throw off the Anglo's (gava 's) yoke of confusion.

His confusion, however, is not total. He abruptly turns to Mayan prophecy. In the poet's time, "Chilam Balam's prophetic / Chant has

been realized—and the / Dust that darkened the air begins / To clear y se empiesa aver el Sol" (One can begin to see the sun). Evoking the famous prophecy of the ancient Mayan priest—that one day the Spaniards would disappear and the sun would reappear—the poet ends on a note of hope, but a hope not yet fully realized: "I am learning to see the sun."

Having explicated the poem's argument, I should now like to bring to bear on it a theoretical perspective that will elucidate the relationship between this poem and traditional Mexican folklore.

"El Sol Y Los De Abajo": Gender, Folklore, and Influence

In "El Sol y los de Abajo," Montoya draws on two formative, yet contradictory, traditions. One is the raw, hegemonic social experience of racism and class domination, which at times threatens to extend its hegemony to the poem itself. That is, his experience of domination so overpowers his poetic sensibility as to become the almost wholly artistically and politically unmediated subject matter of the poem. The poem itself tends to become a reactive and ill-formed cry of los de abajo , a raw cry untransformed by a creative, critical, intelligent poetics. For a moment, this poem reminds us of what Montoya himself has said about so much early movimiento poetry, namely, that it was "really terrible" (1980a:134).

Yet there are moments when this poem does achieve a critical emergent cultural artistry. It does so when, in the manner of "La Jefita," Montoya draws on folkloric elements of his residual Mexican culture to strengthen his art. Yet this return to the residual itself does not yield even poetic profit. Montoya is far more poetically successful when he turns to the domain of female folklore than when he chooses to encounter and draw on the precursory power of the Mexican corrido. That the precursor's influence proves too great, as it did for Paredes in "Guitarreros," results in an unsuccessful public political poem. Such strength as it has—inward-facing and private though it is—results from the poet's temporary turn not to the powerful father influence, but rather to the maternal succor of greater Mexican culture.

I also read this poem as the creative rendering of a partial series of Bloom's poetic defensive strategies, or revisions. These are presented by our young poet—our ephebe—as defenses against the dominating

influence of folk tradition, particularly the strong poetry of the Mexican ballad, which, of course, appears quite literally at the end of the poem, but whose influence, I maintain, is present throughout, including, paradoxically, in its very absence.

The poem opens with an explicit reference to the father, and just as the father is quite literally present in the poet's consciousness, the father's poem, the corrido, is also quite present in the poet's unconscious, to become manifest to consciousness later. But as a work of art, the poem in its first six stanzas is a near failure, almost no work of art at all, merely a prosaic catalogue, save for the "ocular tube" image. Clearly this is an artistically unrelieved catalogue of social domination, but its lack of poetic art is also the result of a too-felt paternal poetic domination. Only social domination and the father-figure appear prominently in these six stanzas in which the poem as compelling art has yet to begin. That is, we find no evidence—no poetic evidence—that this poet is yet an ephebe, a true poetic son engaged in a serious creative poetic struggle with his announced master. The father is too much.

Only in the final lines of stanza seven, in which the speaker carries his life experiences engraved "like the etching de Goya" do we begin to edge into a palpable poetry set off by remembrance, "I remember those times . . . / Times that were tiempos finos," which in this stanza occasion a fine sensibility to the folklore of Mexican women and a fine poetry, or at least, a better poetry. Had the poet wholly persisted in the poetic elaboration of this female-centered world, as he indeed does for some nine stanzas, we would have, perhaps, a fine companion piece to "La Jefita," this time written about curanderas, comadres , and abueliras in resistance to los americanos .

But the father of the first stanza lingers, and he reappears strongly in the final stanzas—a patriarchal framing that forces us to view the intervening "female poetic" stanzas as a salient deviation. Following the paternally focused stanzas of domination, this maternally centered section is not merely an extended occasion for learning more about the poet-speaker's sociocultural life, a general opportunity for, in Cordelia Candelaria's reading, "a total immersion in that life through flashbacks to scenes from the speaker/poet's past" after stanzas that she benignly misreads as an "introduction" (1986:15). Rather, it is the poet's matriarchally focused poetic reaction and attempted early subversion of his original poetical patriarchal beginning.

Lending thus a gendered implication to Bloom's theory, I read this intervening matriarchal section as a clinamen , or Swerve, wholly away from the father. This move, we may recall once more, is a revision

marked by dialectical images of absence and presence, images that are rhetorically conveyed by the trope of simple irony . . . and that as psychic defense assume the shape of what Freud called reaction-formation. . . . Just as rhetorical irony says one thing and means another, even the opposite thing, so a reaction-formation opposes itself to a repressed desire by manifesting the opposite of the desire. (1975a:97)

Stanzas eight through sixteen constitute just such a Swerve from the father poem's influence in another direction, one marked by irony, by images of absence and presence. And, although Bloom does not explicitly say so, the clinamen is a likely province for satire, as Hernandez (1991:72) notes of this section of the poem.

Part of what is wholly absent here is not so much images of absence as absent images that might have reasonably flowed from the first seven stanzas of oppressed men in society: images of active male heroic resistance, that is, the poet's acknowledgment and rewriting of the corrido. What is wholly present, instead, are rich images of women's everyday conversational life, replete with "contradictions and paradoxes," the essence of irony, an irony almost wholly absent from the world of the corrido, where the trope of high romance prevails (White 1973:1–42; 1978:1–23).

For the corrido is a world of unambiguous right and wrong, of heroism and cowardice, of men who issue challenges in laconic boasts, who confront each other, pistols in hand, across a clear moral-political space. In the corridos the encounter is articulated in the race/class ideologemes of "Mexicanos" versus "Americanos." In Montoya's female-centered world of the middle poem, this encounter is less clear, cross-cut by internal contradiction and articulated in a welter of ironies and concrete dialogical images, that, while also ideologemes of race and class relations, are so indirectly; more truly, perhaps, they are examples of Jameson's political unconscious at its second level.

We learn of Father Kelly, who is supposed to minister to the spiritual needs of the Catholic community but cannot keep his hands off its female members. Families—to be more precise, women and young girls—quickly clean up their houses because the social worker is coming

(or the school counselor, or census taker, or probation officer), and the social condition of such families becomes the stuff of a master's thesis by some "long haired / Lost lamb maric chick." A curandera , herself physically deformed, sustains life in this community—no doubt in dire need of medical resources—even as she provides customers with love potions for illicit love affairs. With more than a bit of ironic wit, she then prays to the Virgin Mary that her customers' husbands and wives not find out and that her own husband not discover the truth and kill her because the Virgin wouldn't want a murderer in heaven. And, with another brand of paradoxical logic, a mother refuses to open an official envelope because "it may be / from the war saying Toti is dead!"

This section swerves from the corrido's influence in other ways as well. Absent are the ballad's largely monological, third-person narrative style and the central male hero. While we do hear the speaker-poet's narrative voice throughout, it participates in a Bakhtinian dialogic narration in which the principal and more vibrantly active other voice is that of the mother, who, as in "La Jefita," conversationally addresses her family continuously, thereby weaving a sociolinguistic fabric of some security against the intrusion of the outside (Bakhtin 1981). Unlike the corridista or the corrido hero, she wields no pistol or boasting words to defend her family, only her woman-centered language of advice, exhortation, and counsel. And if she is unlike the men of the corrido in sociolinguistic style, the two other central female protagonists in this section are also an imagistic swerve from the corrido's world. The old hump-backed curandera , Doña Chole, and the grandmother "with wrinkled hands" and "gnarled finger" have almost nothing in common with the relatively youthful, virile male hero of the corrido, except that their control of the community's magical folklore—healing and folk beliefs concerning owls—represents a power nearly as potent as a pistol.

I say "nearly as potent" because this Swerve, this particular poetic rewriting of women's culture, while admirable and vibrant, does not become a fully developed contribution to a strong political poetics of resistance. It does not, in well-wrought powerful verse, rearticulate this women's culture into active cultural resistance, into a well-crafted, overtly counterhegemonic emergent cultural poetics based on the residual of women's folklore, of women's voices. As Montoya has rewritten this culture, it speaks to class and race relations but not in a deeply explored, inwardly contestative manner in which the subjects draw on this folklore to politically deconstruct the authority of the

hegemonic culture. As poetically rendered here, the women's culture is more an engaging form of passive resistance. Montoya's is a culturalist rather than a political poetics, a poetics that demonstrates the "values of the dispossessed" and offers only "an implicit commendation" of those who oppress it (Hernandez 1991:53). It is not a sufficiently deep or extended female-centered response to the corrido, or to domination, but it is a beginning.

That such a rendering of women's culture as passive resistance has its critical uses is not in question. But it marks only the beginning of a more active, deeper poetic transformation of a residual culture into a more clearly counterhegemonic construct, one articulated on principles wholly different from those of the patriarchal corrido.^[3] This poem stops short of such a move, however, as the poet oscillates too quickly between both gender worlds, like a child running back and forth between two parents. Indeed, this is precisely what the child in this poem does, as the poet swerves from the father toward the maternal but then returns to the precursory father. This return begins in stanza sixteen, when the speaker and his playmates flee from the grandmother's world of scary owls and "run unashamedly / and hug our Jefito's field- / scarred limbs." As he comes to his father, the speaker asks, "¿ . . . y mi Jefito?" (... and my daddy?). Posed almost as a kind of afterthought, this question, together with the father's socially diminished "fieldscarred" status, initiates a brief movement of tessera , or Accommodation, which is carried over into the next stanza.

Unlike the Swerve, Accommodation is not a move of negation, but one of acceptance and limitation, or in Bloom's words: "the tessera represents any later poet's attempt to persuade himself (and us) that the precursor's Word would be worn out if not redeemed as a newly fulfilled and enlarged Word of the ephebe" (1973:67). As Montoya attempts to forge this precise relationship of limitation and enlargement, he reminds us of the father's diminished, "worn out" status but then quickly tells us that "at least his noble deeds are enriched in ballads." To make the latter point, he provides us with four lines of such a "ballad," beginning with "A caballo iba el jinete." However, as Hernandez (1991:74) correctly notes, this is, of course, not a traditional ballad but rather a literary rendition, or what Bloom calls "a newly fulfilled and enlarged Word of the ephebe."

But the truly creative poetic son cannot rest here. He cannot merely renew the precursor's Word, even as his own "newly fulfilled and en-

larged Word." If he is to mature poetically, he must fully escape the precursor's influence and sustain the wonderful illusion that he is fashioning his own truly independent poem. This movement, however, also requires that he begin to unconsciously fully negate the corrido's power and right to speak for him at all, even as he appears to continue to acknowledge it. We then enter the revisionary ratio of the kenosis , or Withdrawal, when the younger poet seems to accept the precursor's poetics as the only way to speak, even as he wholly denies it and himself. In this movement the ephebe "seems to humble himself as though he were ceasing to be a poet, but this ebbing is so performed . . . that the precursor is emptied out also, and so the later poem of deflation is not as absolute as it seems" (1973:14–15). That is, in the Accommodation, the full strength of the precursory poem is wholly acknowledged, as Montoya does when he pays a formal homage to his father as hero and to his father's poetry. But then, in Withdrawal, the ephebe humbles himself by negating his own comparable poetic possibilities. Again, Montoya is wholly literal: "¡Chale! / My actions are not yet worthy / of the ballads," also implying that he, as a poet, is not worthy of the ballad form. But there is yet a further implication: Is the ballad form worthy at all in our time?

To more fully understand Montoya's use of this revisionary ratio, we need to momentarily turn to two other, though weaker, examples of his struggle with his strong precursor: "Los Vatos" (The Guys), published in 1969, and "El Louie," Montoya's most famous poem, published in 1972.^[4] Both poems are concerned with the world of the pachucos —the Mexican-American urban youth street society and culture of the 1940s and 50s and its association with gang violence. Both also represent extended examples of the revisionary ratio of kenosis , poems written wholly in Withdrawal.

José David Saldívar (1986) describes "Los Vatos" as a quite conscious transformation of the corrido, formally and thematically, into a new poem for its own time. He is certainly correct to note the corrido's omnipresence in Montoya's poetic consciousness: "Chicano and Border history are announced in the very rhythms and structure of his running lines—namely, in the corrido -like form he employs." But the corrido's influence is even more thorough, as Saldívar notes:

"Los Vatos" in this light is an exemplar unalien Chicano paradigm. It is realist and observationist in its rhetoric, as though the singer-poet were telling us what he had seen and experienced during the pachuco epoch, guitar and pen in hand . . . an observer of concrete actualities of Fresno,

Fowler, Sanger, and Sacramento, California . . . [Montoya] conducts not only a reading of the pachuco consciousness and its effects on a Chicano family, but he also investigates and transforms the model of narration implicit in the corrido . (1986:11)

Much the same could be said of Montoya's other corrido-like poem "El Louie," although the protagonist, Louie Rodriguez, is not as engaged with his family as is Benny.

One of my two general interpretive differences with Saldívar is that in a way he is only too right about the powerful presence of the corrido in this ephebe's consciousness and in "Los Vatos." Indeed, so powerful is that presence that both "Los Vatos" and "El Louie" are not strong poems relative to their precursor, are, paradoxically, too close to actually being corridos. At first glance, both poems almost seem to be wholly in the revision of Accommodation, where the precursor's form is redeemed fully in the words of the ephebe and the corrido in its full majesty is omnipresent, if contained. But, on further reflection, both poems seem examples of Withdrawal, where both poetic son and precursor are emptied out, reduced in what they might mean or say to us, as if the precursory form had come to end and its continuation were in serious doubt. In saying this, I broach my second area of disagreement with Saldívar.

Saldívar seems to want "Los Vatos" to be as politically and socially affirmative as the Border corrido, a poem as aware of and critically responsive to the politically dominant Other as, let us say, "The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez." "Los Vatos," he explains,

through its corrido -like form recapitulates the pachuco experience in its relation to a racist society and reduces both experience and vision to a paradigm. That is, Montoya's self-conscious reference to the corrido as a social and historical form evokes in Chicano readers the sense of Border and Southwest life-struggle inherent in the corrido and all but compels belief in the sociopoetic vision of reality implicit in it. . . . It draws on an historically and ideologically specific Chicano Border form and on the content of individual and collective experience, structures it and develops from it imperatives for social resistance. (1986:12)

My position is quite the opposite: that both "Los Vatos" and "El Louie" are diminished as sociopolitical statements in comparison to their precursor, and that in this diminishment Montoya is signaling an end to, or at least a severe reduction in, the corrido's ability to be transformed for our time, at least in his hands. For little is said or even implied in either poem about a political "life-struggle" against a racist society; nor

do I hear any "imperatives for social resistance." Rather, the poems depict a world of intracommunity violence, which, while socially conditioned, is nonetheless also self-generated and certainly self-inflicted. Nor is it even a cathartic violence, of the kind that takes place when two mature Mexican men stand face-to-face, pistols in hand, on a matter of honor. Instead, we are witness to the mindless violence of a gang of adolescents, first cutting Benny across the belly and then stabbing him, again and again, in the back ("here?" Benny says before he dies); or we see Louis Rodriguez dying in a cheap hotel room "from too much booze."^[5]

"My actions are not yet worthy of the ballads," the ephebe concludes in "El Sol y los de Abajo," as in recognition that in "Los Vatos" and "El Louie" he used and diminished the corrido form to demonstrate to us unworthy actions. His "not yet" hints of future worthy actions to which a creatively transformed ballad might speak. For the moment, however, the ephebe is conscious only of his failure and that of the ballad to speak for his time. He and his precursor are both empty.

In Withdrawal, the poetic son fully acknowledges the power of the precursor even while emptying out that power by denying it any continuing force in the contemporary world. It is to say, "yes, you were my strong father, but you are old and weary and mortal." Unlike Accommodation, the grudging acceptance of tradition, Withdrawal comprises both full acknowledgment and full rejection. Montoya says ¡Chale! to himself as poet but also to the continuing poetic viability of his father's ballad.

The paradoxical result is a self-created sense of freedom—illusory though it may be—as the influence of the precursor is bracketed and negated, even if it means a sense of fragmentation and loss for the ephebe. We can quite clearly see this relationship if we compare the formal rigid strength of the composition before ¡Chale! to the lines that follow, where the poet suffers the fragmenting effects of the gava's —the Anglo's—yoke of confusion. The gava is not entirely to blame; this poet is also suffering the dizzying fragmented feeling of freedom, the freedom from the precursor.

For Bloom, the negative freedom of the kenosis dialectically sets up the next movement. Kenosis prepares "the ruined way for the overrestituting movement of daemonization , the repression or hyperbole that becomes a belated or counter-Sublime" (1975a:99). In this movement "the later poet opens himself to what he believes to be a power

in the parent poem that does not belong to the parent proper, but to a range of being just beyond the precursor" (1973:15). By locating this expressive resource, this range of power, the ephebe believes he can override the precursor and go directly to the Muse and thereby craft an original and more powerful poem. "Turning against the precursor's Sublime," Bloom tells us, "the newly strong poet undergoes daemonization , a Counter-Sublime whose function suggests the precursor's relative weakness " (1973:100).

"El Sol y los de Abajo" ends short of this revision. In the final stanza the ancient Mayan prophecy becomes this power just beyond the range of the precursor as well. At the opening of the poem the father failed to find the sun; now, with the knowledge of ancient wisdom, our young ephebe thinks that he has found the original source of power that will enable him to see the Sun—to learn the source of ultimate poetic and political power. What is missing is the actualization of this newfound power—the production of a new poem of the Counter-Sublime, a poem to match or exceed the formal thematic strength of his father's deeds and ballads. In this trial of influence, the precursor's poem remains supreme, impulsing but at the same time overwhelming our young poet's ability to craft a poem worthy of both the precursor's model and his own political moment. At this poetic juncture—¡Chale! —wearied and exasperated by his struggle with a too strong father, the ephebe cannot continue. He is "learning to see the Sun," but he cannot fully appropriate and begin to render poetically this power beyond.^[6]

Poetics, Politics, and Other precursors: the Paradoxical Power Beyond

This promise of a stronger political poetics as a result of "learning to see the Sun" would be more assuring were it not already a hint that the ephebe is about to travel the wrong road to reach his goal. If we take him seriously, as Hernandez suggests we must, this poem closes with the possibility of a turn to a pre-Conquest indigenous poetics as a source of strength for a new poetry.

Fortunately this is a promise that Montoya does not keep. Other poets, however, principally Alurista, have followed this pre-Conquest indigenous path, defining for themselves different precursors. The result, in my opinion, has been a dense, richly allusive, but ultimately opaque

and politically limited poetics keyed not on social engagement, but on inwardness, indigenous purity, and metaphysical transcendence (BruceNovoa 1982:69–95). All these spiritualist stances are, paradoxically, based on two indigenous societies—Aztec and Mayan—that practiced no small amount of social domination. This particular set of alternative "precursors," if precursors they really are, has not well served Chicano movement poetry in its struggles with past and present.

There are better traditions on which to draw in these struggles, powers "beyond" the precursory corrido. Here I am thinking of a womancentered poetics and its close relation, the Anglo-American modernist poetic tradition, and how both may be integrated with the influence of the precursor and rendered political. It is relative absence of any tradition beyond the corrido that renders "El Sol y los de Abajo" weak before society and its strong precursor. Let us consider this case within the Marxist cultural theoretical framework set out earlier.

First, while "El Sol y los de Abajo" may be read as an artistic structure of ideologemes speaking of class and race relations, the poem does not fully and adequately speak to these relations. In a sense we appeal here to Marx's distinction between a class in itself and a class for itself . It is the former, rather than the latter, that dominates Montoya's poem. In the first six stanzas we have an almost totally passive, markedly unpoetic recording of such relations, surpassed, in the poem's middle section, by a better poetics and a politics of resistance, if somewhat turned inward. However, we do not hear an active, contestative voice and stance in the poem against the day-to-day social domination that is so much a part of the poem's record, its "political history" in Jameson's first-level analytical terms.

Toward the end of the poem, our poet-speaker begins such an effort, immediately inspired by his precursor. Yet, his voice falters in Withdrawal, and he is unable to offer a political poetics that is contestative to his time and toward his precursor. At best, he can only feebly imitate the precursor and reproduce him in the present, in the movement of Accommodation, but he cannot go beyond him to construct his own poem of active class and race ideologemes. In large part, this limitation flows from another in this poem: In the final section, the strong presence of the corrido—associated with an early-capitalist, agriculturally keyed mode of production—mires the poem's ideology of form in the now too-static reproduction of the past. In Williams's terms, the poem remains too wholly residual. If this poem is to be politically vital for

its moment, it must join to a corrido aesthetic other sources of counterinfluence.

Earlier we noted Montoya's comparatively greater success in writing the poetics of women's culture, but also his failure to fully explore this poetic direction and his patriarchally destined return to the fatherprecursor. Like "La Jefita," the woman-centered section of "El Sol y los de Abajo" is a poetic achievement remarkable, perhaps, for a man. Had Montoya's patriarchally dominant Muse not pulled him back toward the male precursor, here, in this world of women, he might have found and exploited an additional voice on which to build a better poem. Such a poem would not have abandoned the oppositional poetic mission of the corrido but would have added to it the repressed, excluded voice of woman. Such an addition, however, can occur only in a far better-integrated, more subtle text than Montoya achieves in his overly gender-bifurcated poem.^[7]

Here the poet might have listened to himself, to the scene of instruction in poetry and politics that he offers in "Los Vatos." As Benny leaves his family's home to face those who would kill him, he passes his mother:

He walked past her without seeing her and in his thoughts
Illusive like a moth, the incredible notion
To crawl into her and the chance to be born again
Passed before him.

There is yet a second potential source of counterinfluence. The ephebe could establish some degree of control over this precursory form by joining it to a new modernist aesthetic form so that the poem might more adequately speak to the present. Elsewhere Montoya demonstrates a firm knowledge of such sources of emergent poetic authority—with Whitman in "Pobre Viejo Wait Whitman" (Poor Old Walt Whitman), with e.e. cummings in "In a Pink Bubble Gum World," with Dylan Thomas, again, in "Resonant Valley," and with Yeats in "El Sol y los de Abajo." In a later interview, Montoya describes his discovery of Anglo-American modernist poetics:

I also got exposed to the poets that were being read at the colleges at that time. The only poetry I had remembered before that time were those horrible, long Longfellow-type things que nos hacían leer in high school [that they made us read in high school]. So I was turned off. But . . . one vato [guy] that I read was doing something that was exciting to me because

he seemed to do it with a facility that I could relate to somehow . . . that was Walt Whitman. Me caiba su poesía [I dug his poetry] so I went with his trip for a long time. By then I was also starting to read T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and the Welshman Dylan Thomas. Y me fui prendiendo con esos vatos [and I got attached to those guys]. And the other vato that I really dug a lot around that same time was William Carlos Williams. I also thought he was getting away with something. And I thought all these guys were getting away with something I was being told not to do. Por eso los veía como rebels a ellos . [That's why I saw them as rebels.] How could they get away with it and I get put down for trying it. (1980b:50)

Perhaps because of the overwhelming demand of a Chicano cultural nationalism in the political moment in which he is writing, Montoya seems not to draw fully on this Anglo-American modernist tradition in his long poem as he had done in "La Jefita." Yet here would seem to lie a better source of counterinfluence, itself critically revised, to draw upon in the poetically and politically effective transformation of the precursor for the contemporary Chicano intelligentsia. Indeed, Montoya himself has urged young Chicanos to read these modernists (1980b:49).

Ultimately, the failure to overcome a continuing gender contradiction and the failure to write a distinctively modernist poem become one issue. Together they make "El Sol y los de Abajo" an inadequate response to its present moment; they render it incapable of acting as a poetic charter to guide us through this moment in which all manner of social contradictions need to be overcome. As a poetic document, as a moment in political history, however, "El Sol y los de Abajo" speaks richly to our collective yoke of confusion in the early days of the Chicano movement.

The child has to make a choice between love of self and love of the other . . . the boy's self-love or narcissism turns him away from his mother. But the self so loved is fraudulent: self-love replaces parental love, but . . . only at the cost of splitting the ego into parent and child. . . . man finally succeeds in becoming father of himself, but at the cost of becoming his own child and keeping his ego infantile.
Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death

Much like a new resemblance of the sun,
Down-pouring, up-springing and inevitable,
A larger poem for a larger audience
Wallace Stevens, "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven"