2

The poetry of both Villanueva and Cervantes emerges from an experience of alienation, but, whereas Villanueva assumes alienation and responds to it primarily as a woman in search of her poetic voice, Cervantes makes the experience of alienation the subject of her poems. Two of her discursive poems, "Poem for the Young White Man" and "Visions of Mexico While at a Writing Symposium in Port Townsend, Washington," dramatize the dual conflict between a historical and an utopian vision and between community and poetry. In each poem Cervantes, as scribe, translates the experience of a Chicana's alienation from both history and utopia to a larger audience. Whereas her Chicana speaker explains in the first poem what it means to exist between a Chicano community and a white society, in the second she reflects on her relationship to Mexico and the United States. Cervantes chooses to embody the paradoxical nature of her conflict between community and poetry in several concrete oppositions: Chicano-Anglo, South-North, Mexico–United States, and oral-written.

POEM FOR THE YOUNG WHITE MAN
WHO ASKED ME HOW I, AN INTELLIGENT
WELL-READ PERSON COULD BELIEVE
IN THE WAR BETWEEN RACES

In my land there are no distinctions.
The barbed wire politics of oppression
have been torn down long ago. The only reminder
of past battles, lost or won, is a slight
rutting in the fertile fields.

In my land
people write poems about love,
full of nothing but contented childlike syllables.
Everyone reads Russian short stories and weeps.
There are no boundaries.                                                        10  
There is no hunger, no
complicated famine or greed.

I am not a revolutionary.
I don't even like political poems.
Do you think I can believe in a war between races?

I can deny it. I can forget about it
when I'm safe,
living on my own continent of harmony
and home, but I am not
there.                                                                                   20

I believe in revolution
because everywhere the crosses are burning,
sharp-shooting goose-steppers round every corner,
there are snipers in the schools . . .
(I know you don't believe this.
You think this is nothing
but faddish exaggeration. But they
are not shooting at you.)
I'm marked by the color of my skin.
The bullets are discrete and designed to kill slowly.                  30
They are aiming at my children.
These are facts.
Let me show you my wounds: my stumbling mind, my
"excuse me" tongue, and this
nagging preoccupation
with the feeling of not being good enough.

These bullets bury deeper than logic.
Racism is not intellectual.
I cannot reason these scars away.

Outside my door                                                                    40
there is a real enemy
who hates me.
I am a poet
who yearns to dance on rooftops,
to whisper delicate lines about joy
and the blessings of human understanding.
I try. I go to my land, my tower of words and
bolt the door, but the typewriter doesn't fade out
the sounds of blasting and muffled outrage.
My own days bring me slaps on the face.                                50
Every day I am deluged with reminders
that this is not
my land

and this is my land.

I do not believe in the war between races

but in this country
there is war.

In designating a white man (and by extension, the dominant society) as the addressee, the title suggests that the "I"-speaker is different in race and gender from the addressee. This expectation is borne out by lines 29 and 31—"I'm marked by the color of my skin" and "They are aiming at my children"—from which we learn that the speaker is a woman of color. The intelligent, well-read person of whom the white male has asked a question is female and belongs to a racial minority. At the beginning the poem seems to be the response of the woman implied by the title, an assumption reinforced by the possessive adjective "my" in the first line, which must refer back to the first-person pronoun in the title. There is one small problem, however. The title suggests that the "I" believes in the existence of racial conflict. Yet the "I" implicit in the first sentence states, "In my land there are no distinctions"—racial distinctions, that is. The title leads the reader to expect one thing but the poem seems to deliver another.

The speaker of the first two stanzas describes a fairy-tale place, a land where racial tensions, it seems, have been overcome. The only visible sign of any past conflict is a "slight/rutting in the fertile fields." The title encourages the reader to think that the young white man does not believe in racial strife, for if he asks the "intelligent" and "well-read" woman how she can believe in the war between races, it must be because he, an intelligent and well-read man, does not believe in it. For him, intelligence is incompatible with a belief that racial discrimination exists. The content of these two stanzas would seem to point to him as the speaker. Yet the "I" who believes that racial conflict exists is speaking.

The lines opening the third stanza—"I am not a revolutionary. / I don't even like political poems"—are consistent with the views of the first two stanzas which sound more like a fairy tale. The rhetorical question of line 15, "Do you think I can believe in a war between races?" would make perfect sense if the young man were the speaker. But the next phrase, "I can deny it," assures us that he does not speak these words, for why would he deny racial war if he does not believe in it in the first place? The "I" speaking drops her assumed mask in the phrase, "but I am not / there."

This "I" partly identifies with the young white man's land of harmony, for to say "I am not there" implies some knowl-

edge of his land and an admission of having been there. Within the same sentence the "I" shifts from "my own continent of harmony / and home" to a negation of this land. The pronoun "my" reinforces the woman's identification with her interlocutor's fairy-tale land. The shifting intimates that the "I" of "but I am not there" is the same "I" that is supposedly in the white man's land. As soon as the "I" establishes an identification with his land, however, she begins to dissociate herself from it, triggering the retreat from a dreamland into a fragmented world. This is one of Cervantes' favorite stylistic strategies. She describes the dream and establishes her identification with it; she then inserts a conjunction—"but" in this instance—which initiates the shift away from the desired dream toward the reality. She uses the same technique in the poem's final three lines, where the "but" separates racial harmony and racial war.

Stanza 4 puts into motion the antagonist-realist voice that challenges the utopian voice of the earlier stanzas. The "I" now speaks like someone who believes in the war between races. After line 4 the speaker interrupts her narrative with an aside to her interlocutor. The preceding ellipsis may suggest that, although he has listened attentively so far, he now makes a disapproving gesture to indicate that the speaker's discourse about social violence is a cliché or a "faddish exaggeration." The fact that the speaker's statement to him is placed within parentheses heightens the conflict between them. The woman cannot speak to him from her place in this real land in the same way she did from her place in the utopian land of the preceding three stanzas. Her perspective has shifted from inside to outside his land.

She and her "children," that is, her racial community, are marked by ethnic color and bullets are aimed at them. Because the white man is not so marked, the "goose-steppers" do not shoot at him. The woman's words are definite, sharp, and direct: "These are facts." Real, physical violence produces psychological and spiritual "wounds": a "stumbling mind," an "'excuse me' tongue," and the classic feeling of inferiority shared by oppressed peoples. By her "'excuse me' tongue" the speaker means several things, all pointing to the ambiguities of her social position. For one thing, she means the English language, because as a Chicana she sees Spanish as her authentic language. She must use English, however, to express her Chicana self to a white audience that, in most instances, would not understand her if she used her own language. English is her "'excuse me' tongue" because she must

use it to apologize for her situation (in the sense of explain and defend). Second, the "'excuse me' tongue" refers to her situation as a woman. She ironically supposes that a woman does not have the right to speak, that to speak is to intrude into the conversation. Third, the phrase also suggests that Cervantes as a poet must use a discursive kind of language to communicate to an audience that has different expectations about the nature of poetic language. She expects her general audience, like the young white man, to disapprove of her direct, factual expression. In any of these meanings the phrase accentuates the speaker's, and by extension Cervantes', subordinate place in society as Chicana, as woman, and as poet.

The question posed in the poem's title implies that a person of intelligence, culture, and literacy should not entertain ideas about racial struggle. Cervantes' response inverts what we might expect to be the roles of rational argumentation and lyrical expression. For example, in the lines, "bullets bury deeper than logic" and "Racism is not intellectual," her discursive, factual argument is guided by the heart's voice rather than by the mind's. The "wounds" she feels are impervious to reasoned discourse that would deny them. The vision of harmony which the young man believes to be reasonable is in her poetic universe the expression of lyrical, counterfactual longing.

The final stanza reiterates the speaker's conflict between desire and knowledge. Associating poetry with the "inside," or the personal and subjective, she desires to write poems that might blot out the angry muffled sounds on the "outside," or the real world. Ironically, to communicate lofty gestures and sublime thoughts, she has to "bolt the door." She seeks isolation with her typewriter in a room away from the world's noise. It is the conventional notion of the poet composing the text alone in an ivory tower ("tower of words"), insulated from direct interaction but ostensibly communicating with everyone. The outside world of action and commitment is associated with sublinguistic phenomena: loud sounds and noises, "muffled outrage." The conflict between poetry and community remains present to the end:

Every day I am deluged with reminders
that this is not
my land

and this is my land.

The deictic "this" is ambiguous. In the poem it has only the immediate context of "land" in line 47—"I go to my land, my tower of words"—to provide a referent. In this sense her land is the metaphorical territory of poetry because she is a poet. Yet it is an illusion to believe that she inhabits only the world of poetic creation because insistent reminders tell her she cannot write solely about sublime thoughts and gestures: "to dance on roof-tops" and "to whisper delicate lines about joy." The word "land," however, also means a real country in the context of the poem. Yet even in this sense "land" is ambiguous because it refers to a territory that, though now part of the United States, formerly belonged to Mexico. The young man of the title assumes that he and the speaker are citizens of the same land. She, in contrast, does not share the same sense of certainty about belonging to this country. These lines thus also express the historical dilemma of identifying with a homeland that itself treats Chicanos ambiguously.

The final three lines realistically incorporate the unresolved logical paradox between the visionary ideal ("I do not believe in the war between races") and the material reality ("in this country / there is war"). Her inner utopian "I" wants to believe that poetry can reconcile racial hostilities, but her outer social "I" knows that the battle must be fought in the historical world. It is obvious that Cervantes finds it difficult to compromise on matters of race. The pulls between her lyric "I" and her discursive "I" remain conflictual to the end. On reading "Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway," however, we will see that she finds it easier to compromise on matters of gender. Her scribe voice in "Beneath the Shadow," responding as a woman within the boundaries of her barrio, mediates, or compromises, the two incompatible views about men bequeathed to her by her mother and her grandmother. Her scribe voice in "Poem for the Young White Man" does not mediate; rather it explains the incompatibility between the desire to write the way she thinks a poet is expected to write and the reality that defines her community's relationship with the outside world. Or, to put it another way, Cervantes expresses the dilemma of wanting to be an American poet without compromising her identity with and her loyalties to the Chicano community.

"Visions of Mexico," divided into two parts, shows that Cervantes understands that her identity as a Chicana is defined by

an ambiguous relationship not only to the dominant society in the United States (the young white man) and to written poetry (her "tower of words"), but also to Mexico and to an oral poetry. "Visions of Mexico," in defining the conflict between oral and written poetry more sharply than does "Poem for the Young White Man," highlights Cervantes' role as an intermediary between two cultures and two literary traditions.

VISIONS OF MEXICO WHILE
AT A WRITING SYMPOSIUM IN
PORT TOWNSEND, WASHINGTON

Mexico

When I'm that far south, the old words
molt off my skin, the feathers
of all my nervousness.
My own words somersault naturally as my name,
joyous among all those meadows: Michoacan,
Vera Cruz, Tenochtitlán, Oaxaca . . .
Pueblos green on the low hills
where men slap handballs below acres of maiz.
I watch and understand.
My frail body has never packed mud                                       10
or gathered in the full weight of the harvest.
Alone with the women in the adobe, I watch men,
their taut faces holding in all their youth.
This far south we are governed by the law
of the next whole meal.
We work and watch seabirds elbow their wings
in migratory ways, those mispronouncing gulls
coming south
to refuge or gameland.

I don't want to pretend I know more                                   20
and can speak all the names. I can't.
My sense of this land can only ripple through my veins
like the chant of an epic corrido.
I come from a long line of eloquent illiterates
whose history reveals what words don't say.
Our anger is our way of speaking,
the gesture is an utterance more pure than word.
We are not animals
but our senses are keen and our reflexes,
accurate punctuation.
All the knifings in a single night, low-voiced
scufflings, sirens, gunnings . . .
We hear them                                                                          30
and the poet within us bays.

Washington

I don't belong this far north.
The uncomfortable birds gawk at me.
They hem and haw from their borders in the sky.
I heard them say: Mexico is a stumbling comedy.
A loose-legged Cantinflas woman
acting with Pancho Villa drunkenness.
Last night at the tavern
this was all confirmed
in a painting of a woman: her glowing
silk skin, a halo                                                                      10
extending from her golden coiffure
while around her, dark-skinned men with Jap slant eyes
were drooling in a caricature of machismo.
Below it, at the bar, two Chicanas
hung at their beers. They had painted black
birds that dipped beneath their eyelids.
They were still as foam while the men
fiddled with their asses, absently;
the bubbles of their teased hair snapped
open in the forced wind of the beating fan.                             20

there are songs in my head I could sing you
songs that could drone away
all the Mariachi bands you thought you ever heard
songs that could tell you what I know
or have learned from my people
but for that        I need words
simple black nymphs between white sheets of paper
obedient words     obligatory words       words I steal
in the dark when no one can hear me.

as pain sends seabirds south from the cold                                30
I come north
to gather my feathers
for quills

The major structural device of this poem is the theme of migration, and the central image is the migrating bird that is always in transit between one home and another. The theme of migration has strong implications for a Mexican-Chicano community whose history has been shaped by patterns of migration, both internal (within Mexico and within the United States) and external (between Mexico and the United States). Like the migrating bird, the speaker hovers between two homelands, Mexico and the state of Washington, identifying with each place but also

alienated from each. In another poem entitled "Como lo siento," the speaker, witnessing the image of a crow spiraling and drifting, reflects: "I thought of the circle / my own life made, and how / at heart I'm a hoverer." The speaker in "Visions" hovers between two extreme points of the circle in the migratory cycle, desiring to find the harmonizing midpoint. The image of the hovering bird, like the image of scribe, connotes transition, uncertainty, and suspension between one home and another. Cervantes' real homeland, California, is the geographical midpoint between the two extremes of Mexico and Washington. Again in this poem, as in "Poem for the Young White Man," the "I" fluctuates between the desire for a utopian land and the knowledge of a real land of conflict and struggle.

Although nothing explicitly indicates that the speaker in "Visions" is a woman, the reader infers that the speaker is the female persona of Lorna Cervantes. At a writing symposium in Washington State, she looks south, thinking about her relationship to Mexico. The words of the first stanza correspond to her lyrical, inner "I" which desires to see Mexico as more utopian than it is. She immediately sees herself in a harmonious relationship with Mexico, implicitly comparing herself with birds and reptiles that shed their feathers and skins for new growth. These images of reptiles, birds, and feathers suggest Quetzalcoatl, the plumed serpent-god of pre-Columbian Mexico, an association reinforced by three of the names defining the historical landscape. Michoacan, Oaxaca, and Tenochtitlán, the Aztec name for Mexico City, are specific sites of the pre-Columbian empire. The pre-Columbian association is further buttressed by the image of men playing handball, recalling the ancient ball courts of an indigenous era.

When the speaker says in the opening lines, "old words / molt off my skin, the feathers / of all my nervousness," the "old words" represent the English language, which she imagines herself casting off as naturally as reptiles and birds shed their skins and feathers. They give way to her "own words" which "somersault" as effortlessly as her name. Since her name is Spanish, we assume she sees herself speaking Spanish, pronouncing the pre-Columbian names with ease. The English language is like a hard exterior, a "shell," to use one of Cervantes' favorite images, which covers the soft part underneath, her own language, Spanish. In her vision of Mexico her nervousness about speaking Spanish

leaves her, as she is able to speak it gracefully when she is that far south.

The image of speaking Spanish with grace and facility clashes with the one Cervantes gives us in "Oaxaca, 1974" and in "Refugee Ship," two poems in which she wrestles with that very issue. In the former poem she says, "My name hangs about me like a loose tooth," and in the latter, "I'm orphaned from my Spanish name. / The words are foreign, stumbling on my tongue." In these two poems Cervantes presents a more realistic portrait of her relationship with Mexico in the speaking and understanding of Spanish. In "Refugee Ship," she confides, "Mama raised me without language," meaning her mother chose to teach her English (which she views as the absence of language) but not Spanish (the presence of language).

In "Visions of Mexico," then, Cervantes' vision of herself speaking Spanish gracefully has an ironic dimension. The irony is compounded when we note that not only does she speak Spanish with facility, but she also pronounces the indigenous names with ease. The presence of the Spanish name, Veracruz,^[4] among other pre-Columbian names contributes to her ambiguous relationship as a Chicana to Mexico. Veracruz is a city-port founded by the Spaniards. Cervantes' speaking Spanish and yet pronouncing the pre-Columbian names with grace recalls ironically at once both conqueror and conquered. Although, for the Chicano, the Spanish language is the language of an oppressed group in relation to United States history, in relation to Mexican history it represents the language of the oppressor.

Mexico is presented as an agrarian society, with meadows, green pueblos, acres of maíz , and adobe homes. Proof that Cervantes romanticizes Mexico is found in the lines following line 9: "I watch and understand." Her speaker is too frail to perform the heavy physical labor of the village. She remains inside the adobe house with the village women, watching the men doing the harvesting and packing mud. From the line, "Alone with the women in the adobe," the reader may infer that the native women are also frail. One of Cervantes' blind spots in these lines is that she overlooks the sexual inequalities in this society. Her speaker appears content to sit inside with the women watching the men. This portrayal of the village women suggests a sexual inequality which would surely trouble Cervantes in her own context. In

"Crow," for example, she says that the women of her community taught her self-reliance:

Before men came they whispered,
Know good polished oak .
Learn hammer and Phillips
Learn socket and rivet .

In a more realistic vision of a rural Mexico, the village women would be performing hard physical labor along with the men.^[5]

A second blind spot is that her speaker's attitude rationalizes the hard, physical aspects of primitive life. Even though she perceives the men with "taut faces" and recognizes that life in this village means a severely limited existence ("we are governed by the law / of the next whole meal"), she refrains from taking issue, directly or indirectly, with a social structure implied by inequalities such as poverty. Again, Cervantes' romanticized view of a rural existence is incompatible with her view of an urban existence in, say, "Cannery Town in August," where the situation, tone, and images convey an awareness of hard, physical struggle for survival.^[6]

The speaker's relationship to Mexican history and culture is clarified by the word corrido in line 23. The corrido , an oral ballad, a pristine spoken form, was cultivated in the late nineteenth century by Mexican communities with limited access to the printed word for purposes of disseminating information about events that were important to preserving their history.^[7] The corrido as a literary form has characterized the experiences of the Mexican population in the Southwest, especially along the United States—Mexican border. It usually tells a story that is either unarticulated or presented in negative form by traditional United States history.^[8] Originating as a spoken attempt to capture the events and actions of a community, it remains an oral form for a long time before it is put into print. As a literary form it is discursive and narrative rather than lyrical and suggestive.

Like any Chicana who writes, Cervantes is alienated from the corrido , with its gestural elements and other aspects, such as acoustic and sound qualities, which cannot be expressed by written discourse. The speaker recognizes her alienation from the oral world of her ancestors ("My sense of this land can only ripple through my veins / like the chant of an epic corrido") at the same

time that she accepts her connection with it ("I come from a long line of eloquent illiterates"). Cervantes, like the historical scribe, is in a middle position between an identification with and an estrangement from an oral world. Because she sees herself as a scribe, her image as poet is closer to a corridista (someone who recites or sings the corrido ) whose primary intent is to translate experiences to an audience, than it is to a poet who creates meaning. Like the corridista , she too is more a vehicle for the experiences of others than a composer-creator of personal experience.

Because of the proximity of the sentence, "I come from a long line of eloquent illiterates," to the word corrido , the eloquent illiterates are her own Mexican-Chicano ancestors who depended upon gestures, actions, and the spoken word to communicate their history. The words "eloquent illiterates" also echo the pre-Columbian references in the first stanza and hence include, though more remotely, the rich culture of an indigenous Mexican population which the Spanish conquerors reduced to a mute gesture. Cervantes' image of herself as a scribe is appropriate here too: as a scribe she extracts texts from different historical eras—both ancient and modern—and makes them part of contemporary culture.

Stanza 2 contains a mixing of voices from two planes of expression: language (written and spoken) and paralinguistic forms of communication (gestures, emotions, reflexes). The chant and the epic corrido , primarily spoken and sung forms, are juxtaposed with the poet-speaker's own written form, the poem itself. The mixing of linguistic with paralinguistic forms occurs specifically in the line, "the gesture is an utterance more pure than word." Gestures are precisely the paralinguistic signs of communication which escape written discourse. They are not usually designated as utterances, a classification reserved for denoting spoken and, less commonly, written discourse. Yet in this line the verb "is" syntactically links "gesture" with "utterance," with the comparative "more pure" separating them. The speaker's reference to "reflexes," or gestures, as "accurate punctuation" is another example of mixing. Punctuation is a specific convention of printed language. Yet the speaker equates this feature of writing with precisely those expressions, "reflexes," which escape it. As in "Poem for the Young White Man," Cervantes here links the world of her community with loud, violent noises and sounds: "All the knifings in a single night, low-voiced / scuf-

flings, sirens, gunnings." On hearing these noises the poet, a person of words, "bays" in empathy with the community.

The loud noises suggest an urban setting. The disjuncture between the urban image and the rural images of stanza l accentuates the poem's theme of migration from a rural to an urban context. The interplay of the two images also suggests an ambiguous quality in the poet's relationship with her community. It invites comparison with the scribe who in a medieval context marked a transitional moment in history when European society moved from an oral to a print culture.^[9] In an analogous way the disjuncture between rural and urban suggests a transitional moment in the modern history of Chicanos, as they move from a culture that has used oral forms of expression in a modern context—and still does, to some extent—to a culture that begins to express itself in literary forms (novels, poems, short stories).

The second part of "Visions of Mexico" shifts to the Washington scene and continues the theme of migration. In the south, migrating seabirds from the north reminded her of "mispronouncing gulls / coming south / to refuge or gameland." The image of "mispronouncing gulls" is probably a reference to American tourists who descend upon Mexico, mispronouncing Spanish as they move toward their vacation resorts, seeking "refuge" and "gameland" from their tax obligations. The speaker is like the migrating bird who leaves the warm southern climate to come north to build its nest. More inclined toward the south, however, she feels herself in alien territory among the "uncomfortable birds" of the north ("I don't belong this far north") where nothing appears natural. She is a strange bird in a strange land whose presence makes the other inhabitants uncomfortable. They show their discomfort by gawking and by hemming and hawing at her. She is neither seen nor heard by them.

In the north she hears only negative depictions of Mexico: "a stumbling comedy. / A loose-legged Cantinflas woman / acting with Pancho Villa drunkenness." The reference to the characters of Cantinflas and Pancho Villa suggests that Mexico is known through the images reflected in the media, a technological extension of print culture. The speaker offers a specific example as proof: a painting portraying Mexico as a blond-haired woman with dark-skinned men "drooling" after her.

The penultimate stanza states the poem's central paradox. To erase the sounds of the touristic mariachi bands, the speaker

wants to sing authentic songs about her people, who knew only the oral word, to an audience that relates only to words on the page, the "you" in the first line of this stanza. This "you" includes all those, Chicanos as well as Anglos, who do not know her ancestors' history as she would like them to know it. The paradox is that in order to sing those songs she needs "words / simple black nymphs between white sheets of paper." The sexual innuendos in the references to "nymphs" and "sheets" reinforce the theme of a desire to give birth to the poet's songs. Although the content here necessitates the presence of "simple" and "black" nymphs, nymphs are traditionally white and Greek. As such they echo a schema that belongs to the symbolist tradition of Anglo-American modern poetry, a tradition that, according to Charles Altieri, contemporary poets have attempted to challenge.^[10] And although the thrust of Cervantes' poetry shares in this attempt to find an alternative to the symbolist model that valorized the mythological modes of a Judeo-Christian order, the presence of these mythical nature goddesses in this poem only deepens the implication of a Chicana poet in two literary traditions: an oral, Mexican-Chicano tradition and a written, Anglo-American tradition.

As mediator between an oral people and an audience that reads, this poet steals "words  . . . / in the dark" when no one hears her. The synesthesia of mixing visual and auditory modalities heightens the paradoxical relationship between oral and written. The implication of her stealing words is that these words are not hers. She furtively steals the words of others to employ them in a way they are not employed by those who own the words. To obtain these words she comes north, "to gather my feathers / for quills." Whereas birds travel south to escape the pain of cold, she comes north toward the pain. In order to write, she must accept the pain of reality associated with the north rather than the nostalgia of romance associated with the south because the north is a print culture. She comes north to gather her "feathers" to build her nest—words she needs to write poems. The repetition of "songs" in lines 21–24 and of "words" in lines 26–28 stresses the urgency the speaker feels about fulfilling her objectives as a mediator between an oral people and a reading audience. Small but important deviations in the writing of these lines create rhetorical effects of urgency and immediacy: multilevel, run-on

sentences, the absence of grammatical punctuation, and spacing to separate syntactic units:

but for that           I need words
simple black nymphs between white sheets of paper
obedient words     obligatory words     words I steal
in the dark when no one can hear me.

The final stanza once again echoes a pre-Columbian civilization. Feathers, plumage, and quill are images relating to the theme of writing in Cervantes' poetry. The name of the volume, Emplumada , is a feminine adjective meaning "feathered in plumage." The word pluma in Spanish means "pen." Because of its associations with birds and flight, emplumada connotes the image of someone who sees herself singing beautiful songs with graceful ease. The image of feathers in Emplumada , as in "Visions," is also tied to Quetzalcoatl, a pre-Columbian god who represented the union of quetzal or "bird" (feathers) and coatl or "snake" (earth), a union joining flight and land. The unifying of two extremes in the mythic bird suggests that Cervantes wants to resolve tensions between poetry and community, oral and written, high and low, north and south. "Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway" offers the geographical midpoint of California between the two poles of north and south, which circumscribe Cervantes' cultural identities.