“My American friends think I’m too Mexican. / My Mexican friends think I’m too American.” So opens Jose Hernandez Diaz’s fittingly titled collection of poetry, Bad Mexican, Bad American. Part memoir, part speculative, always imaginative and engrossing, Diaz’s newest poetry collection traverses culture, identity, and time, all the while treating the reader to masterfully crafted free verse and prose poetry, encounters with long-since-passed artistic giants (such as Paz and Kahlo), and the merging of the ancient and the contemporary (e.g., the imagined introduction of Quetzalcoatl to urban America).
Mostly plain-spoken in register but complex in theme and arrangement, Bad Mexican, Bad American not only meditates on what it means to be a Mexican-American but, by extension, any reader whose national identity or loyalties have ever been called into question on the basis of language, family/community, or racial markers (whether actual or perceived). More than just a reflection on marginalization or exclusion, though, Diaz’s collection effectively and thankfully eludes simple categorization, refusing both assimilation and accommodation (choosing, for example, not to translate every instance of Spanish for a reader who, apart from context clues, might not otherwise understand the non-English text). Instead, Bad Mexican, Bad American carves out an inclusive and validating space for not only Diaz but all those who too often find themselves torn between the various and seemingly oppositional commitments of the cultures with which they identify and from which they may well trace their ancestry, but which they nonetheless and frequently struggle to claim.
In Bad Mexican, Bad American, seemingly self-explanatory titles abound: “My Father Never Ate until Everyone Had Eaten,” “Bildungsroman of a Disadvantaged Brown Kid,” and “I Never Had a Mexican American Teacher Growing Up.” Yet even in the poems these titles preface, there is more to the pieces than simple elaboration or description. In “I Never Had a Mexican American Teacher Growing Up,” for example, the speaker does not just acknowledge the dearth of ethnic/racial representation in the field of education, however important that is; the speaker also makes implicit the association of whiteness with goodness. Even when the speaker suggests their teachers were great in spite of their whiteness (“my teachers were wonderful, white / as they were”), the sonic similarity between the “w” sound and the digraph “wh” implies a positive relationship between the teachers’ whiteness and their wonderfulness. Though not an example of formal verse (let alone a traditional sonnet), the poem, though arranged in couplets, runs exactly fourteen lines, suggesting the piece should be properly understood as an ars poetica of sorts. The speaker’s aspirational identity as a literary educator (“That Brown teacher talking about poetry”), which mirrors the author’s own professional trajectory, argues for such an interpretation.
In the prose poems, too, which comprise the majority of the poetic forms in Bad Mexican, Bad American, more happens in the pieces than even the most liberal interpretations of the narratives might indicate. For example, in “Quetzalcoatl in the City,” a prose poem in which the ancient is blended with the contemporary, the religious with the secular, the speaker encounters the Aztec god at a Panda Express. Though an obvious social commentary on the challenges of multiracial identity in the United States and the expectations that attend such a reality (“I assumed he would strictly / visit Mexican joints”), Diaz’s poem may also (and rightly) be interpreted as a critique of capitalism (specifically, mass production and consumerism), even of racial/ethnic identity. For example, to what degree, if any, should such identity be exported and introduced? Reproduced? Consumed? How, if at all, does racial/ethnic identity resemble food? In what ways, if any, can it be called traditional? Authentic? To whom does the right to judge it by such measures belong? Needless to say, the brown rice, a staple of Asian cuisine, takes on greater symbolic significance in this narrative meditation on multiracial identity and expectation.
Though not to quite the same extent as “Quetzalcoatl in the City,” “Broken,” a free verse poem arranged in quatrains, poses equally provocative questions. From a service-level interpretation of “Broken,” the reader might well conclude not much more than the following: language serves as a wedge between the speaker’s relationship with his father, a figure whose broken English (implied rather than explicit) is the titular referent. Though such an interpretation is arguably valid, the revelation of the speaker’s mental illness (bipolar disorder) early on lends the piece to a more figurative interpretation: like the paternal relationship in which language oscillates from English to Spanish (neither of which is produced with fluency), so, too, presumably does the speaker’s mood. Despite the father’s insistence to the contrary (“I tell my dad his English isn’t perfect, either. Better than your Spanish, / he says”), the father’s English and the speaker’s Spanish are respectively but equally broken (an interesting paternal inversion of the idea of a “mother tongue”). However, there also exists in “Broken” a critique of both assimilation and the American healthcare system. In the case of the former, the father claims that a doctor attributed the speaker’s mental health challenges to the family’s failure to assimilate: “He says a doctor told the problem with my bipolar / is due to the fact that English-only was not enforced in our home.” Though the speaker questions such an empirically absurd charge (“I know my dad. No doctor told him that”), Diaz’s social commentary still applies: the ways in which members of the Latinx community are treated (or, in some cases, not treated or even mistreated) reveals a history and prevalence of structurally racial discrimination and implicit bias, as evidenced in studies too numerous to recount here. Like the father’s English and the speaker’s Spanish, as well as the ways in which their relationship functions (and, in some cases, proves dysfunctional), the American healthcare system, more so than any language or home (“He wants stability, not broken languages, which lead to broken homes”) can consequently and rightly be diagnosed as “broken.”
In summary, if you don’t want a collection of poetry that grabs and transports you, effectively, creatively straddles time and place, and unapologetically but inventively confronts you with questions that artfully speak to issues of race, class, and identity, then skip Jose Hernandez Diaz’s Bad Mexican, Bad American. If, however, you welcome such a challenge and a literary treat, then pick up this revelation of a book. You won’t regret it.
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