By
Jimmy Santiago Baca
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The speaker is Jimmy Baca when he was a child
Baca emphasizes alcohol abuse multiple times
in the poem as a concrete way to show the
“main character's” impairment
Baca uses uses the drunken Indian as a
concrete detail to show a lager abstract idea
such as the exploitation of the Native American
people by the settlers that inhabited the west.
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The Indian getting angry and being thrown out
of the theatre creates a tension early in the
poem that is never really resolved
Baca uses visual imagery to describe the “main
character’s” breakdown
He uses the same visual imagery to describe
how alcohol contributed to the “winning of the
west
The intoxicated Native American becomes a
symbolic expression of the exploitation of the
native American people and the feelings of
contempt for the romantic portrayal of old west
mythology
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The poem is broken into five parts
The first part is about the experience in the theatre
itself
The second part is about the Indian's drunken
protest
The third part is about the Indians removal from
the theatre placing him back in the definite
location of the theatre
The the fourth part is when Baca connects the
drunkenness of the Indian to how the alcohol
given to the Native Americans by the settlers
resulted in the breakdown of the Native American
culture to complement the loss of their home
The fifth and last part of the poem is about how
Baca went looking for the drunken man after the
movie feeling like the movie was really about how
he lost his home and culture to European ways
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Jimmy Santiago Baca was born in 1952 in Sante
Fe, New Mexico
He is of Apache and Mexican decent
He was alone for most of his child hood being
raised in an orphanage
When he was 21 he was arrested for drug
possession and served 6 years in prison
He wanted to go to school but was still
considered to dangerous by the prison guards
so he was place in death row isolation so he
could receive schooling
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Baca taught himself to read and write in prison
and a fellow inmate convinced him to try and
publish his poetry
Baca was picked uo by a publisher and his
poetic career is a success
Baca has published several books and won an
American Book award and the Hispanic
Heritage Award for Literature
One of Baca’s novels was turned into the movie
“Blood In Blood Out” in 1993