Precarity and the Practice of Chicana/o Poetry

Abstract

This essay intervenes in an ongoing debate within ethnic literary studies about the tension between identity-based, or more overtly political, forms of poetry and experimental poetry that treats language as art material. I show how Javier Huerta’s “American Copia” (2012) enlists poetic form to serve the oppositional acts of documenting the undocumented. I argue that Huerta’s innovations draw on existing traditions of Chicana/o poetry infl uenced by twenty-first-century conditions of precarity, specifically undocumented status. Huerta shows how an active practice of poetic innovation responds to an active process of un/documentation through forms of accumulation and affirmation (including code-switching, interlingual word play, collage, and juxtaposition), emplotted through a nonlinear temporal structure organized around the concept of documentation. “American Copia” articulates Chicana/o poetry to undocumented status to show how the literary practice of documenting can take on the weight of public discourse while simultaneously rendering into poetry the practices of social marginalization. Ultimately, Huerta’s practice of Chicana/o poetry offers language as an active site of resistance to forms of domination.