Jimmy Santiago Baca's A Place To Stand

More often than not, one can gauge whether resistance is present through the reactions of one’s oppressors. In A Place to Stand, Baca is sure to portray plenty of ways his formation of language was either impeded or partially destroyed by authority figures around him, his ability to express himself through language actively stifled from the start of his incarceration to its end. By attempting to keep Baca from achieving literacy, these structures are directly investing a great amount of power in language. This is emphasized when Baca is pulled astray again and again throughout the text. Near the start of his incarceration, Baca was quite literally denied the opportunity of education, the “committee [responsible claiming they could not] in good

faith recommend school [for him] at the present time” (163). On the following page, Baca states that he “knew in [his] soul that if [he] had gone along with their classifying [him] as they wished, simply ignoring [his] request for school, that [he] would still be in prison today” (164). Through these series of passages, Baca assumes that the prison system actively withheld an education from him to stifle his ability to recognize himself as human. By denying him an education, all the positive effects previously outlined, such as a rise in self-esteem or a connection to the outside world, are nearly impossible to achieve. Luckily for Baca, he found other routes for education, ultimately guiding himself down a path of literacy. That being said, with our narrator’s furthered understanding only came much more specifically targeted attempts to shut down his access to language.
By specifically targeting modes of language, the prison guards are pointing to its potential use as a mode of power and resistance. For instance, “the guards tore up all [of Baca’s] journals and confiscated [his] books” in an attempt to stop his self-education (193). Baca inevitably manages to work around this, describing his methods of memorization in the same paragraph, but his peers “began to send him good books” to read nonetheless (193). Despite gaining little to nothing from their transaction, Baca’s fellow inmates are working in opposition to the system around them by partaking in his love for language. At various points in the text, Baca attempts to circumvent the obstacles placed in his path, but one of the most jarring instances through which Baca’s ties to language are directly severed is during his time at Nut Run. Defiantly spending all his time reading, Baca specifically recounts a conversation with a prison guard, Mad Dog Madrill, when the latter repeated the phrase “in time” twice, “the threat lingering palpably in his words” (213). Baca soon reveals that the guards “[put] medication in [his] food to make [him] lethargic” and to force him to cooperate with their orders (216). In this instance, Baca’s ability to read, to write, and to speak are actively being targeted as undesirable behavior by the oppressive figures around him. It is this specific act of retaliation that makes the resistant aspect of Baca’s ties to language evident. “Unable to think clearly, had they continued, I probably would have gone along with anything they wanted,” Baca writes, “I would have been a good prisoner, had it not been for my need to speak” (216). Thus, in this specific instance, both Baca and the prison guards have managed to imbue language with a revolutionary purpose, the mere act of speaking out and connecting with others through conversation beginning to take on a form of resistance on its own.
In summary, the core of Jimmy Santiago Baca’s autobiography, A Place to Stand, is steeped in the potential for liberation.

His audience can see, from his initial introduction to language, to his cultural education, to his superiors’ reaction to his literacy, that Baca’s willingness to speak out, to write poetry, and to communicate are inherent acts of resistance and revolution, no matter how inconsequential they may seem at face value. As his memoir is a depiction of a real life, whether liberation is or is not achieved is up for debate (if liberation is achievable at all), but, through the use of language, Baca establishes the beginning of his resistance to many of the vicious cycles which marginalization can perpetuate, a form of resistance that will hopefully continue on to aid the generations that may follow in his footsteps. Through language, Baca finds his self-worth and is able to acknowledge the systematic injustices that have plagued and destroyed facets of himself, as well as most of his family. Though language does not provide the opportunity to entirely reconstruct what has been lost, it can act as a safeguard against the possibility of even more devastation. Thus, the existence of A Place to Stand is a form of resistance in itself. Just like other texts by incarcerated figures, such as Wall Tappings and Mother California, Jimmy Santiago Baca’s memoir is a staunch reminder that incarcerated men and women desperately and unequivocally believe they need to be

heard.