2

The fixed point of Zamora's poetic voice in the poems discussed in this section is its identity as female. Her poetic voice slips in and out of two different cultural contexts, responding as a woman either to a Mexican-Chicano tradition or to the dominant English-American tradition. In my analysis of "Notes from a Chicana 'COED'" and "When We Are Able" I argue that when Zamora responds to a Mexican-Chicano tradition, her woman identity is never one with her Chicana identity, as she desires in "Gata Poem." My analysis of "Sonnet, Freely Adapted" shows that when she responds to an English-American tradition she does so in a literary and academic context. These poems are developed around the single continuum of dialogue, one of the dominant modes of "Gata Poem." The two extreme points of this continuum are oral and literary. Whether Zamora grounds the poems in the socially based context of "Notes" and "When We Are Able," or in the literary, learned context of "Sonnet, Freely Adapted," her language always creates ironic effects.

The female speakers of these poems respond directly to prior utterances or actions by males. Since the intent of the speakers is to convince their male addressees to alter their behavior and discourse, their rhetorical strategies are argumentative and persuasive rather than descriptive or meditative, as are the rhetorical strategies of the poems structured around the continuum of narrative, discussed in the next section. In each of these poems

Zamora employs different kinds of diction and syntax—from direct and explicit to flowery and elaborate—to persuade the male to change. The directly implied addressees of "Notes from a Chicana 'COED'" and "When We Are Able" are Chicano males; the male addressee of "Sonnet" is racially unspecified.

"Notes from a Chicana 'COED'"^[9] is a powerhouse poem revealing Zamora's perspectives on the Chicano male and on poetry which are found in many of her other poems. Unlike the more tightly organized, more lyrical poems in Restless Serpents , "Notes from a Chicana 'COED'" expresses its message directly and explicitly, though not without producing ironic effects. Its lack of control allows some of Zamora's main concerns to surface. Although the poem does not appear in Restless Serpents , I include it here because it clarifies Zamora's relationship to the male in Chicano culture.

NOTES FROM A CHICANA "COED"

To cry that the  gabacho
is our oppressor is to shout
in abstraction, carnal .
He no more oppresses us
than you do now as you tell me
"It's the gringo who oppresses you, Babe."
You cry "The gringo is our oppressor!"
to the tune of $20,000 to $30,000
a year, brother, and I wake up
alone each morning and ask,                                                     10
"Can I feed my children today?"

To make the day easier
I write poems about
pájaros, mariposas ,
and the fragrance
of perfume I
smell on your collar;
you're quick to point out
that I must write
about social reality,                                                               20
about "the gringo who
oppresses you, Babe."
And so I write about
how I worked in beet fields
as a child, about how I
worked as a waitress
eight hours at night to

get through high school,
about working as a
seamstress, typist, and field clerk                                             30
to get through college, and
about how, in graduate school
I held two jobs, seven days
a week, still alone, still asking,
"Can I feed my children today?"

To give meaning to my life
you make love to me in alleys,
in back seats of borrowed Vegas,
in six-dollar motel rooms
after which you talk about                                                      40
your five children and your wife
who writes poems at home
about pájaros , mariposas ,
and the fragrance of perfume
she  smells on your collar.
Then you tell me how you
bear the brunt of the
gringo's oppression for me,
and how you would go
to prison for me, because                                                      50
"The gringo is oppressing you, Babe!"

And when I mention
your G.I. Bill, your
Ford Fellowship, your
working wife, your
three gabacha guisas
then you ask me to
write your thesis,
you're quick to shout,
"Don't give that                                                                          60
Women's Lib trip, mujer,
that only divides us,
and we have to work
together for the movimiento
the gabacho  is oppressing us!"

Oye carnal , you may as well
tell me that moon water
cures constipation, that
penguin soup prevents crudas ,
or that the Arctic Ocean is  menudo ,                                        70
because we both learned in the  barrios ,
man, that pigeon shit slides easier.

Still, because of the gabacho ,
I must write poems about
pájaros , mariposas , and the fragrance
of oppressing perfume I smell somewhere.

The speaker and her addressee, a mistress and her lover, are academic Chicanos: she is a coed and he is a recipient of a Ford Fellowship who is supposed to write a thesis. The male text is the political slogan the Chicano lover continually repeats to his Chicana mistress: "It's the gringo who oppresses you, Babe." In attempting to answer, the woman has to decide whether to engage in a struggle against the gringo, her racial oppressor, or against the Chicano, her sexual oppressor. As he puts it, her choice is between "women's lib" and the movimiento (ll. 60–65). If she chooses the former, she asserts her womanhood but presumably betrays the movement in the eyes of her Chicano addressee. If she chooses the movement, she embraces the Chicano's racial struggle, but she incurs the liability of sexual inequalities imposed on Chicanas by Chicano men. Zamora's speaker exposes the contradictions of the Chicano's simplistic slogan. The real struggle is too complex, she argues, to be reduced to an opposition between herself and the gringo.

The Chicano's slogan impresses the speaker as a vague abstraction (ll. 1–3). In contrast, the hardships she endures, especially when compared with the privileges he enjoys, constitute the reality of her everyday existence. To escape this reality she writes romantic poetry: birds, butterflies, and the fragrance of perfume on the Chicano's collar. The Chicano disapproves of her poetry and urges her to write about social reality, or the white man's oppression of Chicanos, male and female (ll. 18–22). The effect of the so in her response—"And so I write about / how I worked  . . . "—gives the reader or listener the impression that the Chicana agrees to write what he wants her to write. The lines that follow (23–25), however, are not those of a Chicana raging against her gringo oppressor. Rather, they provide concrete testimony of her own social reality: a woman who must work as a waitress and a seamstress ("two jobs, seven days / a week") in order to change the condition of her children starving to a condition of her children eating. The Chicano, in contrast, enjoys the comforts and security of his GI bill and his Ford Fellowship.

Since the Chicano's wife also writes romantic poems about

birds and butterflies and smells the "fragrance of perfume" on his collar, wife and mistress are bound together. Rather than attribute to the speaker the emotions of jealousy and hatred for the wife, responses that might be expected of her, Zamora links wife and mistress in a common identity. Whereas he talks about his wife and children to his mistress, Zamora transforms his response into the mistress's sympathy for the other woman. Both are poets; both are frustrated. We recall that in "Gata Poem" Zamora uses this technique of establishing an identity between the traditional woman and the woman who is aware of contradictions. In Zamora's poetic world, the second kind of woman seems to presuppose the first kind.

Stanza 3, "To give meaning to my life  . . . ," is a parody whose effects depend on the technique of attributing to the Chicano actions that undermine the seriousness of his slogan. He makes love to the Chicana in alleys (this image conjures up the gatas in "Gata Poem"); he talks about his wife and children; and then he boasts of his sacrifices for the Chicana. The presentation of these actions one right after the other produces a satiric effect because it highlights the contradictions in the Chicano's behavior which seem to escape him so conveniently. A similar parodic effect is produced in stanza 4, where the Chicana amasses evidence to show him his contradictions: his privileges, his "working wife," and his gabacha guisas , or Anglo "chicks." His sexual activity with Anglo women is behavior that is hardly suitable to a Chicano who makes so much of the racial issue. Instead of confronting the inconsistencies in his behavior, he adds injury to insult: "then you ask me to / write your thesis," and so forth and so forth. The joke is on the Chicano, for the poem's audience can hardly ignore these contradictions. The effect of the Oye carnal ("Listen brother") (ll. 66 ff.) causes the audience that can capture the elocutionary force of these and following words (crudas ["hangovers"]; menudo ["tripe"]) to ready itself for the punch line. The series of hyperboles accompanied by the climactic line about "pigeon shit sliding easier" is the final criticism of the Chicano's hypocritical behavior and discourse. In essence, she puts him in his place, telling him to restrain his useless, absurd rhetoric because they both know the hard, crude life of the barrio.

The effect of Still (meaning "in spite of everything I've said") in the final stanza suggests that the Chicana now apparently retreats from her criticism and succumbs to an acceptance of the

Chicano's philosophy. These last lines, however, express the poem's neat rhetorical reversal. They contain a double irony: (1) it is not "because of the gabacho " that she writes, as she claims, but because of the Chicano; and (2) she does not write poems about what she claims she must write about—birds, butterflies, and perfume—but about concrete social existence. The fragrance recedes into an ambiguous location of "somewhere " instead of the specific location of "your collar," for the first time becoming "oppressing." The woman's resolution is to phrase her words so that she may criticize the Chicano. The kind of poem she says she writes is not the kind of poem she has written. She projects an image of a passive, submissive woman whom the Chicano thinks he deludes, and of a poet who says she must write about pájaros and mariposas . The reality is that she is not a naive woman but a strong Chicana capable of exposing the contradictions of her compañero . Also, she is not a poet who espouses the lyricism of perfume and butterflies but a poet who uses these romantic images to speak about the lives of people in a specific context.

In "When We Are Able" Zamora uses a more subtle form of irony, saying less and implying more. The speaker's use of querido as her form of address implies that her interlocutor is a Chicano. Depending on the context, querido may designate, as it does in this poem, the male in the amorous relationship.

WHEN WE ARE ABLE

When we move from this colony
of charred huts that surround
our grey, wooden, one-room house,
we will marry, querido ,
we will marry.

When the stranger ceases to
come in the night to sleep in
our bed and ravish what is yours,
we will marry, querido ,
we will marry.                                                                          10

When you are able to walk
without trembling, smile
without crying, and eat without fear,
we will marry, querido ,
we will marry.

In responding to the implied question asked by the querido , "When will we marry?" the querida , or the mistress, lays down a series of conditions that must be fulfilled before the marriage can take place. Each stanza states one condition and each condition is followed by the refrain, "we will marry, querido , / we will marry." Each condition incriminates the Chicano more and more deeply. The argument moves from an implication of mutual responsibility between querida and querido in the first stanza to an attribution of blame to the querido in the third.

The second stanza raises the poem's central question: Is the querido powerless to prevent the stranger's intrusion into their "one-room house," or does he simply look the other way? The poem's ironic tone suggests that the answer is the second alternative. The ironic effect is created by two unexpected deviations. The first shift occurs when the focus changes from "our bed" to "ravish what is yours" (l. 8). The reader or listener expects something different, for example, "ravish what is ours." The shift to "yours" marks a logical paradox because "yours" contradicts what "our bed" affirms.^[10] "Yours" implies that what the stranger "ravishes" is "not mine." The shift into second person contradicts what "our bed" and the four preceding uses of "we," including the one in the title, suggest. This shift indicates a divided consciousness. On the one hand, the consciousness accepts the terms of the traditional contract with the male, making her his possession and, on the other hand, it also sees itself as outside this situation, questioning and resisting the terms of the contract. Here again, we see a linkage in identity between the traditional woman who simply accepts and a modern woman who questions.

In the second rhetorical deviation, the speaker changes from the "we" of stanzas 1 and 2 to the emphatic "you" in line 11. This shift reinforces the suspicion that the speaker sees herself as outside the boundaries implied by the traditional contract; its effect is to transfer the weight of the burden from "we" to "you," the querido . The irony is intensified when we read the poem's refrain for the third time in the context of these two shifts. The conflict between the two parties is heightened. We are reasonably certain that the woman is critical of the Chicano's position and that she hardly means, "we will marry, querido / we will marry." The speaker seemingly assures the querido that there is hope for future harmony between them, as long as certain conditions are

fulfilled. She says "we will marry" six times, as though marriage could represent the fairy-tale ending to their present situation of misery. In reality, however, she is implying that she and the querido will never marry. Even if the poem continued for several more stanzas, each repeating the refrain, the less we would believe her.

The Chicano betrays his sexual contract with the woman by allowing an alien force to use her as his sexual possession. Hence the woman is doubly oppressed in a sexual way. The woman's point is that the Chicano only pretends to include the Chicana in his endeavors, a pretension implied by his desire to marry her, while he himself cooperates with dominant society, further intensifying her oppression.

Although the relationship among the three parties—woman, Chicano, and stranger—is conveyed in a sexual metaphor, the poem's implied message also has a racial context, for two reasons. First, the word "colony" in the first line denotes economic subordination of one group by another. The details of "charred huts" and "grey, wooden, one-room house" suggest economic impoverishment. Second, the threefold design of a Chicano, a Chicana, and "the stranger," especially when considered in relation to the implications of "colony," intimates that the stranger is probably a white male. The woman may say "stranger" to indicate his relationship to the ethnic community: "he is not one of us," in other words. The first two stanzas, in fact, echo the behavior of the white masters in the early American South when they not only exploited black men and women socially and economically, but further abused their power by sexually exploiting black women.^[11] In Zamora's poem, even if the Chicano willingly allows the stranger to enter, his behavior implies that the stranger is his superior or his master and that the Chicano is the inferior or the subject.

The classic double standard permitting the man to engage in sexual relations without incurring negative social consequences is an active principle in Zamora's poetry, but in a sexual context it is not the emotional focus of either this poem or of "Notes." The separate characters of wife and mistress in "Notes" are conflated into the single character of the speaker in "When We Are Able." This fusion is once again a variation of Zamora's technique of establishing a connection with the traditional woman. The emotional focus of the poem is the speaker's awareness of the

Chicano's double standard in a racial context. Pretending to be her friend, her brother, he really exploits her. The contradiction is conveyed by the speaker's identification with the traditional woman whose first concern might be loyalty to la raza , regardless of the Chicano's behavior, and her own awareness of the Chicano's duplicitous conduct. This second feature of the poetic consciousness leads Zamora to assume the pose of the traditional querida , an object of male desire, in order to criticize and ironically to deflate the Chicano's claim to male superiority. In refusing to confront the stranger, the sign of the dominant society, the querido refuses to be strong.

Although both these poems are addressed to Chicano males, they are open to anyone who reads English, Chicanos as well as Anglos, because they are written almost entirely in English. Zamora's female identity is connected to the English-speaking dominant tradition. Her poetic voice occupies a liminal space in Mexican-Chicano culture, positioning itself both outside and inside this culture: outside because she writes in English; inside because she writes to the Chicano male. Her use of the word querido grounds the poem in a Chicano social context. "Notes from a Chicana 'COED'" presupposes a consciousness that is inside Chicano culture because it contains specialized words whose meanings and implications are understandable only to those familiar with Chicano culture and language. Words such as gabacho , guisas , carnal , menudo exclude both an English and a Spanish monolingual audience unfamiliar with the caló dialect of Chicano culture. While these audiences may overhear the conversation, they remain outside the communication situation. Words like pájaros and mariposas , however, include the general Spanish audience, and words like "gringo" and "barrio" are familiar to an Anglo audience. "When We Are Able" uses only one Spanish word, but it is an important one. The endearing tone of querido in Spanish serves to heighten and intensify the speaker's ironic tone. The themes and the rhetorical strategies of these poems, then, show that Zamora's poetic consciousness as a woman is both inside and outside, alienated from, as well as part of, a Mexican-Chicano tradition.

Zamora uses a similar reversal strategy to gain ironic effects in "Sonnet, Freely Adapted." The sexual relationship in "Sonnet" is male heterosexuality versus male homosexuality. The first two lines suggest a heterosexual male who inquires of the woman

speaker why she persists in keeping company with gay men. The male may even have made a pass at her and been rebuffed. Irked, he then inquires why she prefers gays to real machos, like himself. The poem is a direct reply to the man's inquiry.

SONNET, FREELY ADAPTED
FOR J. R. S.

Do not ask, sir, why this weary woman
Wears well the compass of gay boys and men.
Masculinity is not manhood's realm
Which falters when ground passions overwhelm.
O, no! It is a gentle, dovelet's wing
That rides the storm and is never broken.
It is whispered, secret words that bring
To breath more hallowed sounds left unspoken.
Men, sir, are not bell hammers between rounds
Within the rings of bloody gloves and games.                            10
Men, sir, aught not rend the mind round square's round,
Spent, rebuked, and trembling in fitted frames.
    So, I return, sir, worn, rebuked, and spent
    To gentle femininity content.

The woman speaker is "weary," either tired of defending herself against the advances of heterosexual men or tired of being asked by heterosexual men to justify her preference for gay men. In turn, she replies that she is more comfortable in the presence of gays: ("Wears well the compass" (ll. 1–2). She argues for an unconventional masculinity which encompasses the opposing qualities of gentleness and strength: "dovelet's wing / That rides the storm" (ll. 5–6). This masculinity, she continues, brings "to breath" or gives voice to sounds "more hallowed" than those actually spoken by traditional men. The homosexual male is closer to her ideal than the heterosexual male, who aims to fit himself into typically masculine roles: "bell hammers between rounds" (l. 9). The woman is implying that men like her addressee think they are masculine only if they are violent, combative machos. But because the "sir" does not share her view of life, she withdraws to "gentle femininity content." Her resolution of the sexual conflict is to retreat into relationships with male homosexuals or with women. She accepts her femininity, supposedly, "content" with its gentleness.

Zamora gains critical ironic effects by attributing archaic language and syntax to her speaker ("Do not ask, sir"; "manhood's

realm"; "gentle, dovelet's wing"). Throughout the first eight lines Zamora knowingly fails to fulfill the "maxim of manner"^[12] which governs how a modern woman in a similar situation, and, with motives similar to those of Zamora's speaker, responds to a male making such an inquiry or wishing to flirt. Zamora intentionally flouts the maxim of manner by having her speaker assume an elevated vocabulary and tone, a strategy that creates ambiguity and achieves distancing effects between her speaker and the addressee.

The polite and emotionally subdued tone of the archaic language allows the speaker to say what she wants to say without saying it too directly. Too blunt an answer would only anger the male and prevent him from listening to her argument. Instead, she assumes a tone of mock submissiveness and polite deference. Although the speaker's archaic diction and syntax probably sound prissy and effeminate to her male addressee, a modern audience will catch the latent humor and sarcasm. The repeated use of "sir" is ironic for it does not mean to the female speaker what we assume it means to the male addressee—rank, respect, and manhood. The speaker adopts the pose of a woman who suffers a rebuke whereas she really intends her words to serve as a rebuke to him.

In lines 9–10—"Men, sir, are not bell hammers between rounds / Within the rings of bloody gloves and games"—the woman shifts from her archaic, formal language to a modern, colloquial, oral word usage. At a first-level meaning, these lines say that men are not agents of physical conquest. The second-level meaning is subliminal because "hammer," in colloquial speech, is a synecdoche for men, as it designates the male organ. These lines also say, then, that men are not agents of sexual conquest making the "rounds" among women. The woman shifts into an oral language that her modern macho addressee understands and uses. By employing his language ("hammer," "rounds") the speaker ironically establishes her own identification with male discourse, showing her addressee that she can use his language to undermine his masculine image. These lines are ironical because they capture an implicit contradiction between what the images connote—blood, violence, brutality—and the apparently innocent tone employed to express them. The audience observes the marked contrast between the male's image of himself and what the woman is demonstrating about him. These

oral, popular references presuppose a modern audience that catches the wit of the puns, their humor and irony.

At the intertexual level "Sonnet, Freely Adapted" is Zamora's quarrel with the conventions of the traditional Elizabethan sonnet. As other women have done before her,^[13] Zamora invades the sanctuary of the sonnet as a literary form used by males in the dominant tradition. The fact that she makes her interlocutor feminine and her addressee masculine in a poetic form traditionally employed to express a man's love for a woman is in itself a deviation from the reader's expectations. By so doing she challenges the basic feature of Renaissance love poetry: a man speaking to gain a woman's love. The reversal produces irony, for here a woman is addressing a man, not to idealize him, but to chide him. Tension and contradiction also emerge when Zamora puts unconventional content into a conventional frame. She argues against the rigidity of conventional roles for men and women, yet she casts her ideas within the tight and closed form of the sonnet ("fitted frames").

The syntax of Zamora's sonnet links it with Shakespeare's Sonnet 116 on love as a direct literary inspiration.^[14]

SONNET 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments; Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O, no, it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;                                 10
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
     If this be error and upon me proved,
     I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Lines 3–6 of Zamora's poem are strikingly similar to lines 2–5 of Shakespeare's. Shakespeare's sonnet states what love is not (ll. 2–4), and then follows with an exclamation and an emphatic statement about what love is (ll. 5–6). Zamora's rhetorical argument on masculinity follows the same pattern, except that she introduces her negation at the beginning of line 3 and ends it in

line 4. She then gives the exclamation and follows it with a definition of what masculinity is.

Another deviation is the rhyme scheme. Although it has seven rhymes, the traditional number for a Shakespearean sonnet (aa, bb; cdcd; efef; gg), Zamora's poem begins with two pairs of rhyming couplets instead of a quatrain. The next eight lines adhere to the Shakespearean rhyme scheme (cdcd; efef) but deviate in stanzaic form since they are a series of four unrhymed distichs rather than two symmetrical quatrains. Zamora ends her sonnet with a rhymed couplet that summarizes her resolution.

Zamora's couplet does not have the tight relation to the thematic content of its preceding twelve lines which Shakespeare's couplet does to his. Certain elements, such as the "So," the repetition of "spent" and "rebuked," and the epigrammatic force resulting from the couplet's rhyme, convey a sense of closure, but the thought remains loosely connected to the logical argument presented in the preceding lines. The reader is left to supply the missing information: it is precisely because the speaker knows that her addressee will probably continue his macho behavior that she retreats—though not really "content"—to "gentle femininity." Because of these formal similarities between Zamora's and Shakespeare's sonnets, the "sir" may implicitly allude to Shakespeare. Zamora is really saying: "Women, sir, not only men, can use this form, and for the purpose not of praising men, but of rebuking them."

Zamora's sonnet thus contains enough similarity to and enough deviation from the Shakespearean model to suggest that she is freely adapting the form, as her title states. My earlier comment about the intrusion of the oral and popular language is also pertinent here. This intrusion, as I have suggested, may indicate the desire of Zamora's speaker to show her addressee that she can master his language. Similarly, I now propose that it may also indicate Zamora's desire to assert her power with respect to the literary tradition of the sonnet. Zamora is playing with the form, conforming to it but also deviating from it as she pleases. This shifting indicates a desire to gain power and a refusal to be dominated by the form.

Ironically, however, Zamora's shifting into the modern, oral language undermines her attempt to subvert the tradition. The discontinuity in language choice ruptures the dialectical tension in her intertextual argument with the sonnet form that she has

thus far sustained. The technique that is her claim to power and autonomy is the very technique testifying to its loss. She gains her freedom at the expense of losing control of the form. One possible reason for this breakdown may be the sexual ambiguity surrounding the figure of Shakespeare, who is well known for taking the position of the opposite sex to create ironic tension in his address. A second reason may be that Shakespeare, the universal and sensual poet, is ultimately regional to Zamora. Whatever the reason, something in the tradition resists her attempts to subvert it. In section 4 of this chapter I show that Zamora has a richer response to her other main precursor poet, Robinson Jeffers.

In contrast with "Notes" and "When We Are Able," which are linked to an oral tradition, "Sonnet, Freely Adapted" is written in the dominant poetic language. Hence it presupposes a different audience from those of "Notes" and "When We Are Able." Whereas "Notes" and "When We Are Able" presuppose racially mixed audiences, the archaic, lexical language and the poetic mode of "Sonnet, Freely Adapted" suggest a literary and academic audience; its thematic content suggests a gay audience. "Notes" and "When We Are Able" contain elements that imply an oral tradition. The repetition of the slogan, the specific parallelisms—"in alleys, / in back seats . . .  / in six-dollar motel rooms" (ll. 37–39); "that moon water / . . . that / penguin soup . . .  / or that the Arctic Ocean" (ll. 67–70)—and the loose stanzaic structure of "Notes," for example, are all features suggesting an oral tradition. "Sonnet, Freely Adapted" implies a Chicano readership only insofar as Chicanos are represented as members of literary and gay groups and not as members of a specific racial community.

"Sonnet" and "When We Are Able" are both founded on logical arguments. "When We Are Able" is presented in the form of three three-line propositions, each stating a condition and each beginning with "When." Each proposition is followed by a two-line statement beginning with "we" and expressing the result when the preceding condition is satisfied. The syntactic sequence, "When . . . we," is comparable to "If . . . then," a form that implies a logical relationship between the two parts. The first part leads us to expect the second part.

Zamora's sonnet follows the conventional Elizabethan form: the first twelve lines state the argument and the last two lines present the conclusion. Whereas "Sonnet" is cast in a highly conventionalized form, "When We Are Able" is not. The length

of "Sonnet" is predetermined, as the sonnet form cannot exceed fourteen lines. No prescribed rules limit the structure of "When We Are Able" to a set number of stanzas. As the refrain is a device common to ballads, folk songs, and nursery rhymes,^[15] its repetition in "When We Are Able" is a stylistic feature connecting the poem to oral rather than to written literature. "When We Are Able" and "Notes from a Chicana 'COED,'" then, presuppose a relationship to oral sources, whereas "Sonnet" is definitely connected to literary and academic discourse.

Regardless of the tradition chosen, two distinct codes intersect in the poetry: an oral, popular code and a written, literate code. The rhetorical and linguistic resources Zamora relies upon to develop and expand her poetic universe come either from the dominant English-speaking cultural heritage or from the language of a social group that derives its poetic vitality from oral and popular culture.