Place to Stand (Baca)

A Place to Stand 
Jimmy Santiago Baca, 2001
Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780802139085


Summary
Jimmy Santiago Baca's harrowing, brilliant memoir of his life before, during, and immediately after the years he spent in a maximum-security prison garnered tremendous critical acclaim and went on to win the prestigious 2001 International Prize. Long considered one of the best poets in America today, Baca was illiterate at the age of twenty-one and facing five to ten years behind bars for selling drugs.

A Place to Stand is the remarkable tale of how he emerged after his years in the penitentiary—much of it spent in isolation—with the ability to read and a passion for writing poetry. A vivid portrait of life inside a maximum-security prison and an affirmation of one man's spirit in overcoming the most brutal adversity, A Place to Stand offers proof that hope exists even in the most desperate of lives. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio
• Birth—January 2, 1952
• Where—Sante Fe, New Mexico, USA
• Education—B.A., Ph.D., University of New Mexico
• Awards—American Book Award, Pushcart Prize, International
   Hispanic Heritage Award, International Award.
• Currently—lives in southwestern USA

Born in New Mexico of Indio-Mexican descent, Jimmy Santiago Baca was raised first by his grandmother and later sent to an orphanage. A runaway at age 13, it was after Baca was sentenced to five years in a maximum security prison that he began to turn his life around: he learned to read and write and unearthed a voracious passion for poetry.

During a fateful conflict with another inmate, Jimmy was shaken by the voices of poets Pablo Neruda and Federico Garcia Lorca, and made a choice that would alter his destiny. Instead of becoming a hardened criminal, he emerged from prison a writer. Baca sent three of his poems to Denise Levertov, the poetry editor of Mother Jones. The poems were published and became part of Immigrants in Our Own Land, published in 1979, the year he was released from prison.

He earned his GED later that same year. He is the winner of the Pushcart Prize, the American Book Award, the International Hispanic Heritage Award and for his memoir, A Place to Stand, the prestigious International Award. In 2006 he won the Cornelius P. Turner Award. The national award recognizes one GED graduate a year who has made outstanding contributions to society in education, justice, health, public service and social welfare.

Baca has devoted his post-prison life to writing and teaching others who are overcoming hardship. His themes include American Southwest barrios, addiction, injustice, education, community, love and beyond. He has conducted hundreds of writing workshops in prisons, community centers, libraries, and universities throughout the country.

In 2005 he created Cedar Tree Inc., a nonprofit foundation that works to give people of all walks of life the opportunity to become educated and improve their lives. Cedar Tree provides free instruction, books, writing material and scholarships. Cedar Tree has an ongoing writing workshop in the Albuquerque Women's Prison and at the South Valley Community Center. Cedar Tree also has an Internship program that provides live-in writing scholarships at Wind River Ranch, and in the south valley of Albuquerque. The program allows students, writers and poets the opportunity to write, attend poetry readings, conduct writing workshops, and work on documentary film production.

Radio/TV Appearances
National Public Radio, Good Morning America, National Discovery Channel, PBS Language of Life with Bill Moyers, CBS Sunday Morning with Charles Osgood.

Special Projects
Founded Black Mesa Enterprises, a grassroots entertainment cooperative that modeled constructive patterns of living to troubled and at-risk teenagers and focused on respect of self and others. Members abided by strict rules regarding responsible behavior and avoidance of drugs, alcohol and violence, while participating in the business by writing, performing and recording rap and poetry, designing and selling T-shirts, promoting literacy with free books.

Facilitated an intensive writing workshop for unemployed steelworkers in Chicago, and the compilation of In the Heat, an anthology of their poetry, which was published by Cedar Hill Publications to acclaim.

Provided free readings and workshops at countless elementary, junior high and high schools, colleges, universities, reservations, barrio community centers, white ghettos and housing projects from coast to coast. Tutored many kids in reading and writing, arranged readings for them at local bookstores, mentored and motivated children and young adults in writing, publishing and constructive living. (From the publisher.)

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Book Reviews 
Elegant and gripping.... The velocity of Baca's transformation through literature is breathtaking.
Los Angeles Times

A wild ride through poverty and alcoholism, abandonment, and orphanage scenes from Dickens.... A Place to Stand is a hell of a book, quite literally. You won't soon forget it.
San Diego Union-Tribune

A Place to Stand is an astonishing narrative that affirms the triumph of the human spirit.... A benchmark of Southwestern prose.
Arizona Daily Star

At once brave and heartbreaking.... A thunderous artifact...by a poet whose voice, brutal and tender, is unique in America.
Nation

Worth reading from both a literary and a social perspective, this book is recommended for all public and academic libraries. —Donna Seaman
Booklist

While readers may find Baca's poetry more dazzling than this prose memoir about how he became a poet, the author still manages to capture both the reader's interest and sympathies. Baca traverses his life, starting with his childhood in rural New Mexico where both parents essentially abandoned him his adolescence in "juvee" halls and his days as a drug dealer. The story leads up to an account of five years in a maximum-security prison in Arizona, and the unusual personal transformation that occurs there through his learning to read and write; eventually, he discovers his poetic voice. The text is structured like a conversion narrative in which Baca's past symbolizes all that is unhealthy and his poetry-oriented future is filled with the hope and optimism that come from discovering something divine in the midst of darkness. The darkness is often literal, as when Baca is describing his lengthy solitary confinements. He also recounts the intricacies of prison politics, in which failure to gain respect and alliances forged with the wrong people can mean death. Oddly, certain story lines are simply dropped along the way, such as his charge that the prison was lacing his food with strong psychoactive drugs. It is too bad that Baca's prose is frequently flat ("Poetry enhanced my self-respect. It provided me with a path for exploring possibilities for life's enrichment that I follow to this day"), especially when reflecting upon abstract topics, since the content of his story is so interesting and his poetry simply shines. Forecast: Baca has won a Pushcart Prize, among other awards, including his title as a one-time champion of the International Poetry Slam.
Publishers Weekly

Poetry seems antithetical to the poverty, racism, and violence that wracked Baca's tragic youth, but the power of language is what kept him alive and sane while he served hard time in a hellish federal prison. Now a prizewinning poet and screenwriter, Baca, born in New Mexico in 1952, was abandoned by his parents and put in an orphanage at age seven. He learned to fight but not to read and, in spite of good intentions, ran into nothing but trouble. Baca chronicles his brutal experiences with riveting exactitude and remarkable evenhandedness. An unwilling participant in the horrific warfare that rages within prison walls and a rebel who refused to be broken by a vicious and corrupt system, Baca taught himself to read and write, awoke to the voice of the soul, and converted "doing time" into a profoundly spiritual pursuit. Poetry became a lifeline, and Baca's harrowing story will stand among the world's most moving testimonies to the profound value of literature.
Library Journal

A mercifully brief memoir of the Pushcart Prize—and American Book Award-winning Hispanic poet's criminal past, and his agonizingly slow discovery of the redemptive power of writing while serving a prison term. Born in New Mexico as the third child of an alcoholic father and philandering mother, Baca (Black Mesa Poems) was handed off at seven to his grandparents when his father disappeared and his mother ran off with another man-only to find himself in an orphanage when his grandfather died shortly thereafter. Early efforts at schooling failed, and the marginally literate Baca ran away and experimented with criminal behavior. Without any strong role models, fruitful employment, or defenses against anti-Hispanic bigotry, Baca, unusually strong for his youth, developed a vicious proficiency at streetfighting and deliberately resisted attempts by occasional benefactors to set him straight. When he discovered that his first lover was unfaithful to him, Baca drifted to California, where he was fired from his job as an unlicensed plumber after he refused the sexual advances of a housewife. In Arizona, a life as a drug dealer soon landed him a five-year sentence in Florence State Prison—an overcrowded, maximum-security facility where Baca turned to books as an escape and began writing angry, bitterly ironic poetry to purge himself of emotional turmoil. "I am Healing Earthquakes," he writes in one of his early poems, "a man awakening to the day with a place to stand / And ground to defend." After he was released, his attempts at reaching a reconciliation with surviving family members ended in horror when a brother died from alcoholism and his stepfather murdered his mother and then killed himself. Baca finally married, clinging to the love of his wife and his poetry "to give voice to the voiceless and hope to the hopeless, of which I am one." A brutally unflinching look back at a dead-end youth that became a crucible for vivid and vital art.
Kirkus Reviews

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Discussion Questions 
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for A Place to Stand:

1. To what extent was Jimmy Santiago Baca's youth and young adulthood a result of a broken family? What kind of example does Jimmy's story offer for the nurture vs. nature argument?

2. How did the childcare and legal system fail Jimmy? To what degree was he...or was he not...responsible for his actions?

3. When he headed to prison at the age of 21, was there any reason to think he would become anything other than a hardened criminal? Were there hints that there might be another outcome for Jimmy?

4. Talk about Jimmy's steps toward redemption? What was the turning point or points? Who helped him along the way? What kind of qualities within Jimmy himself made the difference?

5. Jimmy pulls himself back from killing an inmate when he hears "the voices of Neruda and Lorca...praising life as sacred and challenging me: How can you kill and still be a poet?" Comment on that passage.

5. In what way did reading literature help Jimmy begin to heal? Same question for Jimmy's writing—how did it help him?

6. Talk about one of Jimmy's early poems: "I am Healing Earthquakes," in which he writes, "a man awakening to the day with a place to stand / And ground to defend." What is the significance of those lines?

6. In a larger sense, how does the written word have the power to remake the personal world? In your own experience, have you ever been moved deeply by reading poetry or prose—or by the process of your own writing—to rethink the way you live your life?

7. To what extent has this memoir opened your eyes to life in prison? What kind of life do prisoners endure? Is there a better system? If so, what would it be?

8. After his release, Jimmy attempted to reconcile with his family, only to witness more horror. How much can one individual endure? (This may or may not be a rhetorical question...it's up to you.)

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)


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