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.