MAIN CHARACTERBy

Jimmy Santiago Baca

The West

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hYV-JSjpyU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RQbcUP8PO0

How it works 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.

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

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

Jimmy Santiago Baca 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

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