As an English major in college in the 1980s, I studied the then-recognized masters of modern poetry: Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, T. S. Eliot. At first, I thrilled at learning the commandments of high art, but as I commenced reading the “greats” in earnest, I felt something unnatural happening to me—a rift between my life with my immigrant family, who had crossed the border in the 1960s, and these devotions to the aesthetics of white American men. Tomás Rivera was not in my curriculum, nor was Langston Hughes or Countee Cullen, Gloria Anzaldúa or Estela Portillo-Trambley. I had not yet heard of these authors, some of whom had been publishing in the United States for over a half century. I wrote my treatise on the mid-twentieth-century poetry canon in my bedroom, whose walls radiated with family photographs. I underlined the inchoate allusions in Eliot’s The Waste Land: “Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee/With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade.” I realized that I had no idea what I was doing, and I felt intellectually lonely.
I wandered the house, poking in our bookshelves at art and photography tomes to find any works that might reflect my life, but all I found were anthologies of masterpieces that venerated the likes of Édouard Manet and Ansel Adams. Returning to my bedroom, I looked at one of my favorite photographs, which I had hung in a plastic frame by my headboard. The image, taken in 1968, shows a beautiful woman with a bouffant hairdo and European Latina features standing by a seated, younger, and equally beautiful woman with Indigenous Latina looks and a chic pixie cut. The, like a bookmark. Whenever I opened Eliot’s literary monument, the image of my grandmother, mother, and baby me flashed between the pages. That photograph evidenced my family’s hard-won survival and anchored me while I set about my studies, reminding me that there are more classics in the world than just those found in college syllabi or other promotions of Western civilization that decline to list the achievements of women and people of color.
