Reclaiming my Poetry from Identity Politics

The poet, in a reading he gave at an American college where, perhaps, I was the only person in the audience who was born and raised in Mexico, said that authentically Mexican poets write about chanclas and crossing the border whereas Mexican poets who have “whitened” themselves write about croissants and architecture. I then knew I couldn't take anything he said seriously.

In fact, I completely stopped paying attention to his poems and my mind wandered back to my senior year of highschool, in Michigan, when I started to get trained in poetry. That year, I wrote three poems that I thought showed my full potential as a poet: one was about having to go by a nickname in the U.S. because my real name was too hard to pronounce; another was about religious guilt being a third partner in the relationship between two men; and the third was about the day my brother was born. I was certain the third poem was the best. Every time I read it out loud, I teared up. It was my most heartfelt poem, the most complex in terms of concept and craft, and all my teachers and classmates seemed to love it as well.

I don't know where that poem is anymore. A word document somewhere in the depths of my computer. I can easily find the other two. My name poem is being displayed in a glass case back in Michigan reserved for “outstanding work” of former students. My religious guilt poem was published a few years ago; I have received reminders of its existence in the form of DMs from strangers saying they have it hung up on their wall. Every time one of my poems has won a prize or received recognition from an American institution, they have been about my life in Mexico or about navigating the world as an immigrant or a gay man. My poems about friendship, family, love, mysticism, existentialism, nature or even language go into Submittable as word documents and they always return and stay the same.

It is not that I don't feel pleasure about my work being recognized, nor that I don't enjoy writing about my identity, but I do feel frustration that in a non-verbalized way, I feel pressure from publishers and literary institutions to limit myself to only write about it. And then, there was the poet, giving a definition of my identity and giving examples of what I can write about to fit authentically into that definition.

What if I told him that in all my life living in Mexico I've only eaten chanclas twice and it wasn't an experience I feel particularly drawn to write about? What if I told him my migration story was not as traumatic as his own? I am aware this was only possible because of privilege: I went to boarding school, college, then grad school. But does that make me less Mexican? Does that strip me of the garden full of poinsettias and bougainvilleas my grandfather planted, or of putting up altars in school for day of the dead? Did I not attend posadas every year during advent, stuffed myself with buñuelos while sitting on the branch of a jacaranda?

I don’t mean to say that the way this poet experiences and writes about his identity isn’t valid, but why must I link my identity to trauma? Why, in order to be an authentic Mexican poet must I fit into a narrative I never lived?

I think of Mexican contemporary poets writing in Spanish such as Coral Bracho and Estela Diaz Castelo; their work explores death, illness, love, and ecstasy without ever explicitly describing their Mexican subjecthood or how it affects their experience in regards to the themes of the poem. Still, their work has a sensibility that is undeniably Mexican, despite never referencing chanclas. To me, their work is much more interesting, and more authentically Mexican than anything that attempts to actively define Mexican identity.

Notably, these poets write in Spanish. They work with Mexican publishers, and though their work has been translated into English, they´re not nearly as widely read in the United States as they are in Latin America. The translations are excellently done (Bracho has been translated by Pulitzer Prize winner poet Forrest Gander), yet, it is rare to find a Bracho reader in the U.S.

There is a lack of identity politics in these works— is it not only American publishing but also American readership that expects, or craves, poets to define their “foreign identity” on the page? I find this ironic; Readers of poetry, and poets themselves, are usually quite “politically correct” and are outspoken about the treatment of minorities in America, representation in media and the wrongful exoticization of other cultures. However, is it not a bit exoticizing when we only read work that tries to define an identity? The intentions behind doing this might not be at all bad— to learn about other cultures’ aesthetics, support minority poets— but to me it becomes somewhat questionable when there is a world of aesthetics and sensibilities waiting to be read and we stick to identity poetics and the narratives of what we expect poets from certain backgrounds to write about.

I am not against identity poetics. I myself have written, and will continue to write, poems about my country, my experience living in the United States, my struggles with language and culture, but I refuse to be pinned to that wall. I refuse to be limited to write only about my subjecthood as Mexican, as immigrant, as gay. Poetry is all about breaking boundaries with language, breaking language’s boundaries—this limitation, however subversive the work tries to be, feels almost against poetry itself. If a poet is only allowed to write within a specific register, and within a specific definition of who they should be, they´re forced to write lines to meet the expectations of a demanding audience, and that, personally, reads like the opposite of poetry.