ABSTRACT

Winner of the American Book Award and the University of California, Irvine Chicano/ Latino Literary Prize, The Ice Worker Sings and Other Poems by Andrés Montoya (1968-99) gives students a unique opportunity to consider the limitations of notions of beauty, greed, and poetry. I teach The Ice Worker Sings and Other Poems in Introduction to US Latin@ Literature, an upper-division class taught in Spanish in a Languages, Literature, and Linguistics Department of a research university in Central New York. My classes count toward a degree in Spanish but because I ground our study of literature by analyzing intersectional relations of ethnicity, class, race, gender and sexual orientation, legal status, and able-bodiedness, my classes are often cross-listed in Latino/Latin American Studies, and Women and Gender Studies, counting toward those degrees. My students tend to be disproportionately female but generally split between affluent,

East Coast, Anglo-Euro students, and working-class East Coast Latin@s in a costly private university. These populations approach the course material for Introduction to US Latin@ Literature from significantly different life experiences. Anglo-Euro students tend to be somewhat less aware of the cultural perception they have of themselves or of students from different backgrounds. Latin@ students, however, are quite aware of how they are perceived by non-Latin@s which in turn rails against how they know themselves. Latin@ students readily and capably express occasions when they have experienced oppression, while Anglo-Euro students seldom feel they have been subject to or have subjected others to discrimination. Interestingly, most urban, downstate Latin@ students do not necessarily understand their experience with oppression as similar to that of struggling local Latin@ and African American communities, and only occasionally do any of my students consider themselves in relation to Anglo-Euro city residents who range considerably in economic class. We read Montoya’s poetry mid-semester after laying the ground work with essay

selections from Gloria Anzaldúa, chapters from Juan González’s Harvest of Empire, texts like José Antonio Villarreal’s Pocho, Piri Thomas’s Down These Mean Streets, Sandra Cisnero’s The House on Mango Street, and poetry selections from Carolina Hospital, Carmen Tafolla, and Ana Castillo. When we turn to the poetry of Andrés Montoya, we are familiar with the valence and durability of racialization, class, and gender, as well as the particularity of ethnicity and histories of migration to various locations across the United States over a period of five decades. When we look at Montoya’s poetry, we gain insight into what we as readers consider worthy of poetic address. We engage this question in Montoya’s poetry when we access an intimate level of disclosure regarding what it feels like to grow up rejecting the very society to which one is bound; while the

loathsome by Surprisingly, intimacy develops from this telluric tension. The poetic I throughout the

collection’s four parts does not shy away from describing his illegal activities and precarious behaviors to which he concedes moral impropriety. Latin@ students often vocally affirm the reality of such behaviors in the environments from which they originate, grounding the poems in a social reality that opens their classmates’ eyes to the social circumstance with which their Latin@ classmates have had to contend. It is at this point when the class starts to act as a whole. Anglo-Euro students begin to see their Latin@ classmates with understanding and admiration, and recognize Latin@ classmates as cultural authorities; Latin@ students begin to feel comfortable with the collective support of their stories and lives, opening up further in class discussions and small group interactions. As the students’ relationships build, I guide the students to notice the aesthetic context

Montoya creates even in the midst of brutal events continuing in parts II through IV. I ask the class to pause and reflect on Montoya’s use of language, its rhythm, the accessibility of his word selection, and Montoya’s poetic diversion of grammar intensifying his experience without exaggeration or falling into the obtuse. Montoya’s is a poetry that impels the reader with unflattering personal disclosure but that compels with accessible beauty. However, the appreciation for lyrical beauty arises piecemeal. My students-Latin@

and Anglo-Euro-must acclimate to Montoya’s unbecoming behavior by first acknowledging their initial aversion and discomfort. For, at first glance, as the Latin@ students react to stereotypes they have grown tired of, Anglo-Euro students might initially read confirmation of their assumptive stance. This aversion brings the issue of judgment to the fore, leading me to ask, what does to judge mean? The question is technically not difficult to answer, however, when considering how judging differs from observing (frequently mistaken as a synonym) students quickly produce words to differentiate between the two like the adjudication of right or wrong to an action. Students are sophisticated enough to recognize a degree of positionality to these judgments, and a certain uncomfortable stasis arises. They speak to the difference between what an action can mean depending on the conditions of one’s life: we ask, what kinds of opportunities are available to the poetic I? To us? What constitutes sameness and difference of opportunities between the poetic voice and us in class? Students are surprised by similarities of individual struggles in relation to family and community but even more so by the strident social conditions rendering the poetic I’s opportunities so dim. Expressed in single words or phrases, the students substantively arrive at critical

terms like class, race (which we contextualize to its more appropriate understanding of racialization), gender, and nonhegemonic forms of sexuality. We appreciate the value of location (Central California and the powerful agribusiness industry there) presenting particular kinds of living and suffering that nevertheless build an understanding of multiple sites of oppression of Latin@s across the United States but with comparable degrees of intensity. Most students have seldom had contact with Chican@s on or off campus and soon begin to appreciate the strife of Chican@s and Mexicans, the majority Latin@ group, but in journal entries they begin to voice feelings of complicity and critique minimizing or disregarding the situation of Latin@s across the United States. The discussions in class and in journals help students understand the personal effect of broad social forces to which we are all subjected. At the same time, awareness grows of the ways that each of us may be subjecting others to such forces.