“Transmuting the Barbwire Thorns”

Abstract

Jimmy Santiago Baca opens his memoir, A Place to Stand (2001), with the following description of the presence of prison in his life: “I was five years old the first time I ever set foot in prison” (1). He goes on to chronicle the multiple times his father spent nights in prison for drunk and disorderly conduct. Throughout his prologue Baca links his alienation during his prison term with the alienation between father and son culminating in the rupture of the family. The need to write his prison experience and contextualize it within the rest of his life stems from Baca’s role as a father who seeks to break the cycle of alienation he fears will hurt his own sons: “I never told the full story of my transformation, a story I now believe is important, especially for my sons, playing in their rooms” (2001, 5). As a man of color, Baca is well aware that he must intervene in his sons’ lives in order to prevent them from experiencing the same type of racially motivated hostility inherent in the justice system that reproduces the criminality of people of color in disproportional rates to those racialized as white.¹ Thus A Place to Stand becomes a bridge between men, from Baca’s relationship with his father to his relationship with his own children. The memoir chronicles the racial and social factors that lead to incarceration of the poor, as Baca uses his story of poverty and racism growing up in New Mexico to foreground uneven uses of punishment in the United States.

Everything here had weight and substance, intended to silence, imprison, destroy. Yet somehow, I had transmuted the barb-wire thorns’ hostile glint into a linguistic light that illuminated a new me. In a very real way, words had broken through the walls and set me free.

—Jimmy Santiago Baca, A Place to Stand