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“For the Raza, for the Homeland,

and for Art”

Yxta Maya Murray

With his grouchy, thrumming poems, Facundo Bernal reminds us that “assimilation” is a myth. Writing in the 1920s while living between Los Angeles and Mexicali, the Sonoran-born Bernal complains relentlessly, and often hilariously, about how bad it is “here” and how great it is “back home.” In so doing, he records the early days of a century-long Latinx resistance and adaptation to the exhausting, grotesque, and often boring dynamics of colonialism.

L.A., the land of film stars and millionaires, is violent, he bemoans in “The Crime Wave.” For Bernal, the city is no new Xanadu that offers a fresh start from the traumas of the 1910 Revolution. Its distracting scenic beauty only masks horrible dangers: while the city has “parks brimming with lush lakesides” and “is covered/ by a cloak of fog/ as white as a bull’s eye,” it is also teeming with Charles Manson-like villains avant la lettre: “and now the victim’s a lady/ shot dead by some punks/ for no clear motive,/ but according/ to their statement,/ they were instructed by Spirit X/ or perhaps the Devil himself.”

Bernal struggles to understand how the Latinos who have moved to L.A. in the hopes of a better life can not only stand it in this strange city, but adapt its mores to their own. In “Pochos” (the name of this poem, of course, referring to the old insult to Anglo-acting Mexican-Americans), he “focus[es] on/ those from back home/ who land here, observe things,/ and never imitate what’s good,/ but only what’s terrible.” “What’s terrible’” is affecting the “gringo” habits of gum-chewing and tobacco-spitting, not to mention a man’s parading his half-dressed Chicana girlfriend around town: her “angelic face/ (and I use that adjective in quotes)/ has been buried beneath/ makeup and rouge; her skirt/ allows me to glimpse/ the exact position of her garters,/ which move farther and farther,/ like ‘seabirds (sorry to wax/ poetic!) in steady flight.’”

In “Raking up the Past,” Bernal continues this screed by “dedicat[ing] a few ‘stabs’/ to the people of my Raza/ who leave Mexico, and when they’ve/ barely set foot in Yankee-landia,/ forget their Spanish/ and disown their Homeland.” The most alarming of these Raza are the women “who wear extra-short skirts,/ and dance the ‘Hula-Hula,’” only to then “express themselves/ in the language of Byron,/ because they no hablan ‘Spanish.’”

As this recitation demonstrates, Bernal often exorcises his angry nostalgia on misbehaving women, who buy into a deracinated U.S. culture that is agog with technology and parlous to love and family. In “The Radio,” he offers the tale of a wayward wife who would rather listen to her favorite singer than cook her husband dinner: “‘Woman,/ it’s already eight o’clock,/ and I haven’t had a bite to eat / …/ and instead of cooking me/ some supper — dammit! —/ you’re listening to gossip,/ to music and jingles!” “Quiet!” the wife hisses. “Don’t make noise,/ Lázaro is singing…”

But even within Bernal’s colorful complaints about distaff cultural disobedience, he also sketches portraits of Mexican-American women who aren’t so much assimilating to the decadence of U.S. society as busting out on their own. If they’re not wearing visible garters, dancing the hula, or dreaming in their kitchens, he explains mock-seriously in “A Sermon,” then they are “swimming in public places,/ where modesty is shipwrecked/ while sin sails forth.”

Actually, Bernal insinuates, he’d like to dip a toe into that pool himself — except that it’s deadly dull in the U.S., with its false piety, typified by laws prohibiting the sale of alcohol on Sundays. Though the California Supreme Court struck down the state’s blue law in 1858, repressive customs hung on into the 1920s. As Bernal laments in “Blue Sunday”: “If anyone’s eyes/ should focus/ on certain ladies’/ curves, they’re guilty/ (for that’s the age-/ old law), and that gaze/ will be fined/ 20 smackeroos.”

Still, when seeking consolation, Bernal knows where to go. He exits from the confusions and corruptions of Californian modernity and returns to his macho roots. In “The Bullfight,” he recounts a spectacle in Mexicali. Here, the toreador “flutters his cape, regaling us/ with the best of the best./ The enemy is enshrouded/ in the folds of the cape, and Torquito caresses/ his horns. Reveilles shower down upon him/ as he walks through the flower-fall,/ among trumpet blasts, shouts, ovations…”

Sometimes perfection can surface even in L.A., during those rare moments of grace when “home” and “here” can co-exist without harming each other. In A Stab in the Dark’s final poem, “México Auténtico,” Bernal recounts a concert in the now-defunct Philharmonic Auditorium. In July 1923, this venue hosted the radiant Nelly Fernández and her all-Mexican troupe of singers and dancers. Bernal was enchanted by the indigenous performers, who brought to Southern California all of the magic it ordinarily lacked. On that charmed evening, “Four little Mexican women/ dancing gracefully … small of foot, vast of soul,/ eyes black as obsidian,/ and lips like coral [made] up the chorus:/ almost a choir of angels…” Like Bernal in these poems, the performers worked “their hearts out ‘For the Raza,/ for the Homeland, and for Art.”