A Place to Stand

“I remember him being two men. When sober, he looked boyish in pressed trousers, dress jacket, and white shirt, his appearance giving no trace of alcoholism. When he was drunk, he became vulgar and abrasive, reducing himself to a pitiful phantom of the man he was when sober.”

In this passage, Jimmy Baca describes his father, who changes completely when he drinks. Damacio Baca works with politicians and is adept at hiding his darker nature when he is with them. When he drinks, however, he becomes abusive to his family. The two sides of the man mirror Baca’s conflicting feelings about his father. Baca loves his father and longs for a relationship with him, but he fears his father when his father descends into drunkenness and violence.

“Little did I know that my mother had eloped to San Francisco with Richard, fleeing into a white world as ‘Sheila,’ where she could deny her past, hide her identity, and lie about her cultural heritage. I was also ignorant of my father’s alcoholic oblivion, in which he pawned every last possession to get a bus ticket to San Francisco to try and find her.”

Baca is unaware of his mother’s plans to abandon him when she leaves him with his grandparents. Baca also does not know that his father will never return from his alcohol-fueled quest to reunite with his wife after she runs away with Richard. Baca’s grandparents shield him from the truth, allowing him to believe that his parents will return for him.

“After being stripped of everything, all these kids had left was pride—a pride that was distorted, maimed, twisted, and turned against them, a defiant pride that did not allow them to admit that they were human beings and had been hurt.”

Here, Baca remembers the children he knew at St. Anthony’s Orphanage. These children had nothing left except pride, and pride becomes a defense mechanism they use against further hurt. Ironically, this passage could also describe many of the prisoners that Baca encounters. The inmates will go to any length to avoid being disrespected because pride is the only thing they have left.

“I don’t know when the process of criminalization began for any one of the kids I hung out with or woke up with in a prison cell. For me, it was when my mother first dropped my brother and sister and me off in Estancia; it was reinforced when Mieyo and I were driven through the gates of Saint Anthony’s, and it started to take on a more antisocial reality at the detention center.”

Here, Baca defines his progression from childhood to imprisonment. The process begins when his mother leaves her children with their grandparents. After Baca’s grandfather dies, the two boys are taken to an orphanage. No one visits Baca at the orphanage, and no one will provide the home that would release him from the detention center. These three events cause Baca to feel that no one wants him. He believes that he begins to become a criminal when he is cast aside by his family.

“But I didn’t trust myself, nor did I tell them that I was searching for something to make me feel more a part of the world, and while they helped me in that search, I couldn’t share with anyone the pain that still drove my exploration to find a place to stand comfortably in my skin.”

Baca’s lover Lonnie and his friend Marco trust Baca to make decisions because they see him as strong and level-headed. Baca, however, is less confident of his abilities in this regard. Lonnie and Marco are like family to him, yet he knows that he will have to find his own way out of the alienation he has experienced all his life. Baca first uses the phrase “a place to stand” in this passage.

“Now everybody could point and say, I knew it. I told you. He’s no good. He’s nothing but a criminal. It hurt to admit they were right. Still, I wanted to explain to someone that it was all a mistake. All I ever wanted was to have what others had.” 

When Baca is on the run before his arrest, he believes that he is finally fulfilling society’s expectations of him. His arrest actually was a mistake, as he says, because he was not involved in the heroin deal that was the focus of the raid. Baca has spent years wishing for a family, home, and friends, but he has not been able to obtain the things many people take for granted.

“I hadn’t forgotten, though, that I took it to hurt her for laughing at the man who could’ve been my father. To my way of thinking, books had always been used to hurt and inflict pain. Books separated me from people like her and those two detectives, who used lawbooks to perpetrate wanton violence against poor people, and from greedy lawyers, who used lawbooks to twist the truth.” 

Baca has been flirting with a booking clerk named Tara at the prison, when he witnesses an incident that changes his opinion of her. One night, he sees her laugh at the poor treatment a Chicano prisoner receives from two detectives. Baca already equates books with hurt because law books have been used to place him in prison. When he sees Tara laugh at the prisoner’s humiliation, he takes one of her college textbooks as revenge. Later, he discovers the book contains poems by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

“My eyes would water from the cigarette smoke as I’d gaze at the moon, wishing we could catch up to it. It always seemed so close, only to settle just beyond my reach, in a pasture over the next hill.”

As a child, Baca would often accompany his drunken father on night rides through the countryside. Baca remembers thinking that the moon was close enough to touch. Like many of Baca’s other desires—family, friends, love, and acceptance—the moon always eludes him.

“It was a world within a world, the difference being that you lived in a cage with a thousand other caged men.”

Here, Baca points out that prison is a world of its own, completely separate from the outside world. The prison bars form a literal cage, but the passage also evokes the image of the men as animals, housed in cages because they are no longer viewed as human by society.

“Remember, it’s not the size of your muscles or your mouth—here, the heart is all that matters. The mind can’t accept being a six-by-nine cell for years, but the heart understands it has to be done. The mind says, There’s no way I can live in prison for years, but the heart says, Deal with it and shut the fuck up. The mind senses your growing brutality, but the heart ignores it. Forget freedom, the heart commands.” 

When officials thwart Baca’s dream of getting a GED, he seeks advice from his friend Macaron. Macaron counsels him, explaining that a brave heart is needed to survive prison. He also tells Baca to do whatever is necessary to survive, even if he must respond to others with violence and even if doing so will lengthen his prison sentence. He instructs Baca to forget freedom; instead, he should be ready to do whatever is required to survive. Macaron’s words in this passage foreshadow events later in the memoir, when Baca’s release from prison is delayed.

“I did think about the future sometimes, but more and more it was the past my mind began to turn to, especially during those first days and nights in solitary.”

Finding respite in memories, Baca spends significant time reliving past events. He thinks of his childhood in Estancia, a time when his family was still intact. As he spends more and more time meditating, he begins to recall vivid details about the people and places in his memories. The time Baca spends in these reveries lays the foundation for his writing. He uses the memories to exercise his imagination, a skill he has never before attempted to develop.

“I felt all my people, felt them deep in the hard work they did, in faint and delicate red-weed prairie flowers, in the arguments over right and wrong, in my people’s irascible desire to live, which was mine as well. I felt their will was growing inside me and would ultimately let me be free as the wind.” 

Baca finds hope when he thinks of the way his family has persevered through hard times. He believes he has inherited their will to survive, and this ability to endure will see him through his prison sentence. 

“Outside, going across the yard, I knew that, despite this loathing, by standing up for myself I had done something completely new. I might have lost the respect of my peers, but I was feeling a sense of my own worth that I had never felt before. I knew I was no longer a twenty-two-year-old illiterate brown man, not just another con with a number who was going to submit to degradation.” 

After his counsellor fails to support Baca’s request to attend GED classes, he stops working in the prison kitchen. When Baca refuses to work, his fellow inmates do not understand. Any change represents chaos to the other prisoners, and they begin to openly resent Baca. Baca, on the other hand, is beginning to experience self-actualization for the first time in his life. He knows that he can be more than others expect, and he experiences pride in striking back at authority.

“I pictured myself as a man in those black-and-white movies, an important man writing letters with business to do, plans to fulfill. Writing letters added an exciting dimension to my lackluster days and gave me a sense of self-esteem.”

Once again, Baca uses his imagination to motivate himself to improve as he places himself in the role of a businessman writing letters. Before Baca begins to enjoy writing, he never mentions any desire for a professional career. The letters he writes to Harry provide relief from the tedium of prison life and are a source of pride for Baca. 

“I would have liked to preach and believe in a doctrine of peace, but I knew prison wouldn’t allow that. Harry’s world had nothing to do with me. But neither did Bonafide’s. At the time, I didn’t believe in anything or anyone. I drifted between choices, between hoping for freedom and resigning myself to being a convict.” 

In this passage, Baca refers to the convict’s need to avoid the appearance of weakness. A prisoner who allows himself to be beaten or taken advantage of appears weak, and stronger prisoners will move relentlessly against the victim. Baca would prefer not to fight, but he will do so if required. He sees himself as different from Harry, who is meek and timid; he is also different from Bonafide, who Baca sees as a hardened gangster. Baca realizes that he will have to continue to fight as long as he is in prison, and doing so may add additional time to his sentence. 

“At heart, Mieyo and I were both decent men, famished for affection and eager to live in a decent manner. And while I was slowly rebuilding my life with books and writing, Mieyo, on the other hand, was casting himself out into deeper and deeper isolation, into a place where I could not help him as I once did as a kid brother.” 

Baca thinks of his brother Mieyo, who has always worked hard. Jimmy and Mieyo are both damaged by their father’s alcoholism and by their mother’s desertion. Despite these similarities, the brothers travel different paths, with Mieyo turning to alcohol while Jimmy tries to educate himself. Jimmy regrets that he is unable to help his brother, just as he has been unable to help his father halt his descent into addiction.

“He was down and I towered over him like an animal with a survival instinct to kill. In that one jeweled moment I felt I was God, deciding whether he would live or die. That feeling of power nearly compensated for everything that had gone wrong in my life. But as intoxicating as it was, something stopped my hand, poised above his heart, prepared to drive the shank in his chest.” 

Baca has attacked Boxer, the inmate who moved into Baca’s cell and immediately started to disrespect him. Baca speaks of the exhilaration of having complete power over another human, as he contemplates stabbing Boxer. The feeling is so pleasurable that Baca says it almost blots out all of his past pain. Still, he allows Boxer to live.

“He told me one day that to outsiders his tattoos symbolized criminality and rebellion. But it was not so, he said. ‘I wear my culture on my skin. They want to make me forget who I am, the beauty of my people and my heritage, but to do it they got to peel my skin off. And if they ever do that, they’ll kill me doing it—and that’s good, because once they make you forget the language and history, they’ve killed you anyway.’” 

Chelo has become a cultural mentor to Baca, and he ignites in Baca a desire to know more about Chicano language and history. Chelo, Baca’s fellow inmate, discusses the importance of his tattoos in this passage. His flesh depicts many important symbols, including the sacred quetzal bird. Chelo says that others see him as a dangerous man because of the tattoos. Since they reflect his culture, Chelo sees any affront or judgment of his tattoos as an attempt to obscure his cultural identity. 

“A lesser man by all the lawbooks/A man awakening to the day with a place to stand/And ground to defend.” 

These lines from Baca’s poem, “Healing Earthquakes,” contain the second allusion to the narrative’s title. The first time Baca refers to “a place to stand”, he is searching for an identity. By the time he composes this poem, he is discovering where he fits in society, thanks in part to his talks with Chelo. These final lines in the poem contrast society’s view of Baca as “a lesser man” with his own understanding of his self-worth.

“My writing became the receptacle for my sorrow. I wrote even when I didn’t want to, because I knew that, if I didn’t, my sorrow would come out in violence. I wasn’t able to express my grief. It felt as if my heart was bound like a kidnapped hostage.” 

Baca recognizes the therapeutic value of writing. He has become accustomed to hiding his emotions, so he turns to his journals to express his feelings. When Baca’s father Damacio dies, the warden tells him that his family does not want him to attend the funeral. Writing is the only outlet Baca has for his grief. Baca has long yearned to reconnect with his father, and he realizes that will never happen. Baca’s emotions have been numbed by his experiences, a condition he describes with a simile, comparing his heart to a hostage.

“But the moving box was troublesome—packed boxes had haunted me since childhood. Everywhere I went, I arrived and left with a box; it reminded me that I had no place in this world, that no one wanted me.” 

For Baca, boxes are associated with abandonment. Baca has been forced to move repeatedly throughout his childhood, beginning with the move to his grandparents’ house when his mother leaves him, and he recalls sad children carrying boxes in and out at the orphanage, where he lives following his grandfather’s death. Baca has always felt discarded. The boxes serve as a reminder that he can be uprooted or cast aside at any moment.

“Outside, under the night sky, I felt myself solidly placed. In many respects I was not ready for freedom; I didn’t know what to expect, how to live in the world. But as far as having changed, and being proud of what I had accomplished here, I was okay with it. I felt like a star in the sky, glowing, with darkness all around me.” 

Baca considers his growth as he leaves the prison’s gates for the last time. He is a bit frightened by freedom, but he is proud of the changes he has made. Baca uses a simile, comparing himself to a glowing star, to describe his achievements in the dark world of prison.

“And suddenly I began to forgive them for what they had done or not done. I forgave myself for all my mistakes and for all I had done to hurt others. I forgave the world for how it had treated us.” 

After Baca is freed from prison, he wanders into Saint Francis Cathedral in Santa Fe. He sees a quiet celebration occurring inside, and someone tells him that the pope had officially apologized for the Catholic Church’s treatment of indigenous people. Baca suddenly feels a sense of forgiveness for others. He also forgives himself for the poor decisions he has made.