Jimmy Santiago Baca
(1952– )
At one time in his life, Jimmy Santiago Baca thought that poetry didn’t matter and that books were useless. Yet books and writing—and especially poetry—turned Jimmy Santiago Baca’s life around.
After his parents abandoned him at the age of two, Baca lived with relatives, was sent to an orphanage, and wound up living on the streets by the time he was ten. Drifting from state to state and in and out of trouble, he landed in prison on drug charges at the age of twenty-one. Baca’s story might have ended there, in the cell of a maximum-security prison in Arizona. But it did not. He had taught himself to read and write, and he was determined to have his voice heard.
In poetry, Baca found a way to tell his story. The poems are about what he knows firsthand—prison life, the people and places of the American Southwest, and his own struggle with anger and rage. Jimmy Santiago Baca is completely present in his poems. You do not have to read his biography to know that he was in prison; he tells you so in "It Started." You feel that he has lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico, when you read "Bells." You can hear his heritage in his mixed use of Spanish and English and in the details of his poems.
Some people would classify Baca as a "prison writer," and some would label him as a Chicano or Latino or Mexican American poet. He has a lot to say about prison, of course, and yes, his Hispanic and Indian heritage is important in his poetry. But Jimmy Santiago Baca is able to take specific, personal experiences and observations and give them universal meaning.
In Baca’s poems, you can hear the emotional pain and struggle of his life, but you will also find an exuberant celebration of the human spirit. For Jimmy Santiago Baca, the most powerful tool human beings have is language, and he knows that poetry matters—after all, poetry saved his life.
