Laughing in the Light

By Jimmy Santiago Baca

Jimmy Santiago Baca’s newest collection of essays picks up where his earlier acclaimed book, Working in the Dark, left off. Laughing in the Light is the writer’s first attempt to revisit his past, launching into the past twenty years with a renewed heart and wizened spirit as he shares his experiences, what he has learned along the way, and how his views have changed. Baca delves deeper into contemporary issues as he explores themes ranging from arts, culture, education, and justice reform.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Museum of New Mexico Press
• Release date: Mar 9, 2020
• ISBN: 9780890136461

Book preview

Preface

LOTS HAS CHANGED SINCE I WROTE MY COLLECTION OF ESSAYS Working in the Dark in 1994, and in the following essays I’ll share with you the changes in perspective, spiritual shifts, life now, literary and personal. My journey has more ups and downs, successes and failures, certainties and doubts, false starts and headstrong triumphs, than a Wall Street broker’s prediction sitting at a bar getting drunk.

But the presence that underlies these pages is an unwavering optimism that one day I’ll get the basics right, like how to take better care of myself, quit eating all that great greasy (yummy) food and drinking too much, and taking my spiritual practice more seriously.

I’ve been writing poetry a long time, fifty years, give or take a few, and I’ve never belonged to any literary school, never suffered from the herding mentality that has you a card-carrying member of a literary gang where you amble down the polished marble hallways of elite academic schools, where you learn to use your power against others, parade your privilege, and dominate. The only society, if you wish to call it that, I ever belonged to was my family. Never a believer in capitalism (no amount of money could ever measure up to the value of a good poem). Rarely part of a movement—no trend, no fashion fox, and I’ve never had an interest in proving myself a better writer than the next person, never been an issue writer when issues came up only as a popular fad to write about.

Never used my ethnicity or gender in a manner that pits me in an us/against/you clique—for advantage—no, never been one of the social literary birds, and not because I feel I’m better or above others, although I’ll admit, I detest pretension for the sake of winning approval; the tax that it takes to be constantly on call is too much. The desire to increase your stature or gain some entitlement that comes from flattery is not worth it.

I’ll admit it was a much different world back in 1994 when Working in the Dark was published. Since I wrote those essays people feel more comfortable airing their grievances and hatred of each other. I think it boils down to some wanting everything their way, spoiled brats, and others wanting their fair share. Though I don’t watch TV, I see clips of those rabid Fox commentators, and they seem like a bunch of whacked-out freaks in a trench holding out to the last man, screaming for more entitlement and more privilege, using every last bullet to try and kill every constitutional right of common citizens. It won’t work, you can see it in their desperate eyes, hear it in their shrieking voices—their greed and racism is done. Se acabó, my grandma would say, se acabó, it is finished.

For the most part, we generally get along okay, Latinos, blacks, Asians, and whites, but there are always those who love to incite separations and divisions and create chaos and enmity among us. The hate-media carry those few voices and make it sound like they’re everywhere when it’s only a few madmen, screaming for white privilege, usually white powerful billionaires who own the airwaves. But I find that, talking to my neighbors, we all generally get along.

In 1994, when I wrote the essays in Working in the Dark, I hinted at racism, at gentrification, at ethnic pride, prison and educational reform, and now those issues are openly debated and discussed nationally as commonplace.

That’s good, even though I find myself morose these days, in the midst of a daily barrage of bad news and in the center of all this national resentment and intimidation of white supremacists terrorizing and traumatizing us Latino citizens. And I guess more out of desperation, out of needing a break from the minute to minute crises, I find myself in the only refuge I know, writing and reading and being a father and husband.

I’ve been lucky in all these departments, literary, parenting, social friends who are not so much elites as much as they are just ordinary folks living paycheck to paycheck. They’re the best, they work hard, they’re fair-minded, they’re always ready to serve for a worthy cause, volunteering for bird counts, bosque cleanups, donating a little money for educational start-ups, really decent people. And that’s the America I love and know and will fight for.

But this book is also about exclusion, about being left out of the promise that America offers (to whities mostly)—decent education, respect for your ethnicity and history and people, justice, fair education, environmental and wealth equity. Most of these are out of reach to any Chicano you ask, though you would expect that being an ancestor of the first indigenous people of the Southwest, that we, the mestizos, would at least have the crumbs but no, not even that—we are the forgotten ones. The disappeared. And in a great and sad way, due to our colonial oppression, many of us have given up, victims of our own apathy and hopelessness. And when after a long life of daily desperation it just becomes too much, too long without having anything, too long yearning for a justice that never comes, for the good education the kids deserve that never materializes, and one finally gives up, I don’t blame them. I feel hurt by what they have to go through, and I feel guilty, partly because I feel that I didn’t give enough attention to them.

It seems absolutely absurd that one old white billionaire can have enough money to control national policy by buying off politicians—and through his money direct how our judicial and educational and environmental system runs. He destroys. He captures and imprisons and murders the future of our kids just so he can have more power, more money, more privilege.

When I wrote Working in the Dark, in 1994, wrote how I learned so much working in Hollywood, about power and money and influence, how actors are terrified of speaking up, how the industry operates on who you support—Israel? Palestine? How politics of Jewish support and Palestinian support play so much in who is blacklisted and who got the jobs. Go Jewish and you get the job, voice your concerns over Palestinian occupation by Israeli military, you get expelled from Hollywood, marked as one of those who dared to speak against the powerful.

But it’s all coming to light now: sexual scandals, the racism and gender inequity, the deplorable white-only roles, and it’s a good thing that it’s finally coming out in the open.

But change is slow to come; the white billionaire who turns everything he touches into a disease, who destroys with every step, who spews venom on everything he sees—you know him, you see him as owners of golf courses and hotels, owners of hate radio stations and hate newspapers and shareholders in private prisons and political lobbyists for petroleum and pharmaceuticals. He’s the Pinche Gringo. Destroyer of worlds, imprisoner of babies, separator of families, wall builder, liar, thief, tax evader, lethal-tongued Tweeter. The Pinche Gringo infects every social system with his greed and lies. (And as I write this, yet another atrocity has been committed at an El Paso Walmart, and if that wasn’t enough, ICE agents stormed chicken-processing plants in Mississippi and detained close to 680 human beings, all Mexican or Central Americans. The raid was carried out on the first day of school and the children were left to themselves, without parents, stranded in the streets or hiding out in closets or fields, terrified of the Pinche Gringo lurking about trying to capture them.)

Surprised as I am by the relative success of Working in the Dark, which is still in print, I’m covering a lot more poetry and literature and ethnic and justice issues here and to that end, consider that this book is simply about a poet and his quizzical look back at things that have changed or improved or gotten worse.

It’s a far cry from a tell-all mea culpa, more of a mischievous look back at the lessons I was lucky enough to learn from personal experience and see from the silly and mean things people do to themselves and each other, what I do to myself, marveling at my journey as I fall short of the 14-karat standards I set for myself, which, time after time, I fail to achieve and retreat into my silence to try again. And therein lies the riddle, my reader, in the inexhaustible attempts to reach what I know is the best in me and never quite able to plant my heart at the summit of that ever-growing mountain.

And even as I write this, just look out the window and you can see evidence of our deception everywhere, the sterilization of our senses, the bleak non-living existence much admired and advertised by publicity agencies, bleating that money is the answer to our woes, to our misery, to our loneliness. Our feeling of inadequacy, bloating our bellies each night before sleep, is not gas but a moral cancer created from our timid acceptance of things as they are and our emotional paralysis to want to do something but not knowing what—I get it, and I’m with you on this, right now, a voice in my head says I should be out there protesting in the streets and fields and prisons and schools, fighting for my children’s future, for the right of Mother Earth to be respected, demanding a halt to all that corruption by corporations needlessly gutting our sacred Mother Earth for minerals scientists and engineers turn into weapons of mass destruction.

I think that amongst ourselves we can straighten this mess out. I have met amazing individuals on my journey, committed, sincere, compassionate, smart as the dickens, who solve problems, and there are many of us and if we work together we can do this. But it has to be us, we can’t depend on our politicians anymore, we have to take back our democratic power and responsibility for our lives and future and do this. That’s what this book is about, unveiling to you who I am, what I struggle with daily, what I dream, what are my hopes, and you’ll see, what joins us together is far more stronger and relevant than what divides us.

I admit, in the period of time between my last book of essays and this one, I have become the unwitting dunce of a sit-com of errors in my even crazier and painful fall from grace. While some recover, others, in their self-appointed acclaim go on to transform into hideous creatures, bloated with resentful rancor. And I will share a few of those with you (after all, which of us, from time to time, doesn’t enjoy a little scandal), but on the whole, though, I tell you, poets are the most creative, imaginative, amazing, and generous people on the earth, and what we don’t need at this point in our struggle to develop democracy toward a kinder and fairer system for all is the parade of look-alikes all jabbering away with cultural soundbites intended to distract rather than