"Singing at the Gates” from "Rita and Julia" by Jimmy Santiago Baca
The Best of San Diego City Works Press
Next year will be the twentieth anniversary of San Diego City Works Press. In the lead-up to this and the publication of Sunshine/Noir III: Writing from San Diego and Tijuana (in 2025), The Jumping-Off Place will be featuring some of the highlights from City Works Press’s many publications.
“Singing at the Gates” is from Jimmy Santiago Baca’s poetry collection Rita and Julia, which can be purchased here.
Singing At The Gates
No Pope nor Priest could more enhance my life
than Mechica smiles and Inca eyes,
those startled sparrow eyes peering over papa’s nesting-shoulder,
entering the Santuario, her father’s back to me,
the brown baby girl hugging his neck,
her face pressed against his white shirt collar,
as it has been for a thousand years,
from Mayans, Incans, Aztecas, Mexicans, Chicanos,
Cholos y Homies,
we’ve carried and carry
our infants through government massacres, forced marches
off our lands,
to the present in fiestas, low-rider gatherings, our children
clinging to our arms and bodies for safety,
a continuous unseen line from the beginning of our Mestizo birth,
walking across America,
long before white men arrived,
our arms circle our loved ones,
imperfect and beautiful,
in NY baseball shirt, chain and crucifix down our chest, La Ruca
wearing Brown Pride workout t-top,
black net-gloves wrist to elbow, tandito hat with feather,
tight black shorts, bobby socks, platform spike heels,
low-riding mamacita down for the dream cruise.
Y pues, look around and see the pensive
sombrero’d rancheros con palos en los fieles,
scooping shovel after shovel of dirt
cleaning la acequia--
soil-scent fills your nostrils aging veterano,
and I wonder what palabras are whispered to you by the rain
y el viento,
sage, yierba, alfafa, calabacitas,
boots and jeans worn down and faded by day-long plowing.
In cities along the Rio Grande,
Burque, Santa, Espa, Taos y Cruces,
locos scrawl graffiti duels, branching on adobe walls predicting
a cold and deadly winter,
y mujeres gather at la cantina for a wedding, clap and sing,
close eyes, open mouths, faces `pa la musica,
so much erotic sensuality in their waists and legs y nalgas!
Backpack Chicano students roam plaza crowds
where senoritas flick Spanish fans over heavy lidded eyelashes,
las ninas tie roses in their hair,
madrecitas clutch home-spun woolen shawls,
crowds tip-toe to see the singer and musicians,
while the woman in the wedding dress leans
toward the photographer,
rosary weaving through her fingers,
silver crown on her turreted hair,
white of her teeth whiter
than her wedding dress.
I sing at the gates about the beauty of my people,
while police arrest a boy for wearing his baseball cap
cocked to the side,
stigmatized thug for wearing a goatee and mustache,
tattoo of the archangel Gabriel
on his arm,
chain around his neck,
NIKE hoop shirt,
leaning against a `45 coupe door, hood muraled with Tonantzin,
sunglassed jainas with long black hair chilling inside,
I praise them for never having forgotten their cultura
or ancestral roots, wearing papa’s hand-me-down khakis,
warmed by a woodstove, surrounded with pious paintings
y mama’s weaving loom,
some eventually lose their land to casino slots,
some mourned at roadside altars senselessly murdered,
where I kiss the wreathes on barbwire fences
and sign myself in prayer, march behind three priests
bearing crucifixes in procession,
and after solemn benedictions,
sit my woman on my knee and fondle her breasts in their memory.
I praise cowboys swinging their ropes, soft leather saddle rubbing
with the horse’s clip-clop,
take my youngest son to the Matachines dances
in the sacred Chicano pueblo,
pass the Mayan turquoise jaguar mask
three thousand years old around and fast for days,
pray and sing pray and sing pray and sing,
for the five year old girls in Flamenco dancer’s hoop skirts
ruffling hems high as they kick and give the rooster’s yelp,
serape adults clap and hats fly,
while old men kneel before the rebel priest wearing a well-used cowboy hat,
flanked by two stout men
holding candle staffs aloft praising the cottonwood tree.
I amble past barrio yards
where vandals hammered statues to smithereens,
beheaded Jesus,
trampled fencing as they fled,
and I recall
I started my learning from tio Solis,
his small adobe home displaying more religious statues than a church,
the special one-- El Nino de Atocha, had his own small alcove and altar,
mat for shoes, tiny pictures of our familia y la plebe on the walls,
carvings of La Malinche, Cortez’ puta, who rather than let him
send her kids to Spain for an education,
drowned them
in Rio Grande.
I learned dancing with gypsies, old men in suits, ribbons,
wooden swords and tin mirrors, and I danced
past crumbling adobes, rusting truck hulls y el campo santo,
in knee-high weeds,
wearing my feathered bishop’s bonnet,
scrolled with paper, I scuffed
my cheap black shoes in dust and gravel singing
ha-he-ho-na-no
all the way down to the twilight river-trails,
following the young girl in white crinoline first-communion dress,
asking Spirits to bless her journey.
No mountain hawk has more courage or fierce truth
than the Vatos who come from north and south and east and west
tattooed lowriders dressed in swaying cloths like Mayan healers,
who’ve walked beside mothers to a hundred burials
for young locos shot by police or rival gangs,
who kneel to take rocks from the dirt to make crosses
for fallen brothers and sisters, rock crosses all over Aztlan,
symbolizing union, faith, identity.
Generation after generation--
La Raza’s people-priest wears a bandanna
stations himself among la gente, rattling our tambourines,
wearing our Matachine mask,
from ancient ninety-year old abuelitas
who make who we are burn bright, unfold and rumble deep,
deep rumble to the young altar boy
peering through the crowd for his cousin,
deep rumble to the Chicana nun kissing Christ’s feet,
deep rumble as we unfurl banners of San Martin
and San Ysidro Labrador, who gives our fields abundant harvest,
to the Penitentes in moradas chanting ancient Moorish/Indio scriptures
by candlelight, to La Palomia in a hundred small churches
kneeling in pews
appealing to Christ for mercy, murmuring
the deep rumble of our love.
We stand together great and small,
mentally ill next to the lesbian aunt,
pinto next to the school teacher,
twelve year old tecato’s daughter next to the community center fighter,
mother with a hundred lovers next to ese who vows never to retreat, proud
Santero with his retablos, firme bato,
I lose myself in all of you,
in the tiniest capilla in the furthest reach of el llano
for an infant who never survived the harsh winter
because there was no medicine,
I am the sand beneath its head,
the bonfire log that flames in a man’s backyard
as he stands with stick in hand, thinking of his life,
the widow who proudly shows off her mother’s photograph
framed in wood she whittled and shaved herself.
I celebrate you, the virtues and customs you have defended
despite colonialists rampaging to kill every one of you--
you survived, madre clinging to babes in arms
and kneeling before crosses,
you survived hefe hoisting your sons on your shoulders and riding
them around the yard,
you survived amante waiting outside church for your novia,
you survived ninos playing in church yards, on steps, rails,
you survived vato loco
with hat and tank-top t-shirt, polished shoes,
leaning on haunches,
an arm on crooked leg,
very cool, beside your chromed out
low-rider,
you survived abuelita smiling under the apple tree,
so grand and open and happy a smile it’s like a wheat field on fire,
singing our skill with mud and rock in building adobes,
our carving the finest figures of wood,
our cultivating fields to offer huge crops.
Intact is the older brother’s love for the younger,
intact is love proving we are men and dying foolishly,
pistiando with our compas and fighting each other,
sometimes killing one another,
our cultural past and heritage runs though the boys
wrapped in thick coats and beanie caps riding their horses,
in the cowboy strumming his electric guitar
and the young fat apple-cheeked boy in a hooded sweatshirt,
in the brother and sister picking pinons in the mountains,
in the kids
burning rubber on their bicycles in the church parking lot,
in the two elderly women dressed in black
with iron strong hearts and hummingbird soulwings,
old and new merge, expand and spread,
riding tractors and lowriders and Harleys, t-shirt and leathers,
lost in fiesta crowds or alone on a porch,
still using woodstoves and suspenders, still working at the railroad yards,
in greasy and smoke-charred overalls, capped and stubbled,
decaying hundred year old ranch houses crack and splinter on the prairie,
while grandchildren of farmers who lived there
march in urban streets chanting no war no war,
and newborns scream their arrivals,
and fathers with wrist chains and tattoos
cling to their little loves at parks,
and the circle widens and expands and ripples
toward every closed gate, with tribal drums beating,
gourds blowing and rattles rattling
we are here, we are here, we are here,
hue hue te otl, hue hue te otl, hue hue te otl,
that we have always been here.
Unfolding my lips to sing your beauty and resilience
an agave giant petals
holding you all like desert raindrops,
moistening your thirst for freedom and respect,
quenching your hearts to bloom at every entrance
gate and door
in every city.