A Stab in the Dark. Facundo Bernal
beats — beats that, in 1926, would be taken over by La Opinión, still the largest Spanish-language paper in the country.
Bernal’s Los Angeles poems — written at the end of the Mexican Revolution and at the start of Prohibition — were mostly inspired by and addressed to the city’s growing Mexican population, fellow “foreigners / living in Yankee-landia.” His lines are populated by Mexican politicians, generals, and actors, by labor unions and corrupt landlords. Palos occupies multiple geographies at once — Los Angeles, Mexicali, Sonora — and Bernal explores just how much each place influences the others. He shows, for instance, how the Volstead Act’s drying up of California (and wetting up of Baja) impacted border tourist economies and U.S. stereotypes of Mexican culture. He imagines a “Letter Sent from Mexico to Los Angeles, Calif.” and a “Letter Sent from Los Angeles to Mexico.” In the former, a man in Jauja, Michoacán, learns about his L.A. bank going bankrupt by reading La Prensa; in the latter, his compadre reveals that his heart breaks with longing for Mexico. He is stuck in Los Angeles, “lurching in place.”
Bernal’s L.A. poems move across the city, riding streetcars to Venice Beach and other seaside resorts and dancehalls, but also up and down Broadway, Main, New High, and Alameda, the downtown avenues of Mexican business and culture, which were home to many film and vaudeville (or variedades) theaters, whose productions also find their way into his verse.8 He writes about the sunshine of “the beautiful Angelo-polis,” but also of its violent noir — including a “crimson wave of crime” against women that leaves a “gruesome tableau” in its wake: “dirty chunks” of flesh “slicked with blood,/ and splattered/ with brain matter.”
Bernal also castigates “Bad Mexicans,” who’ve assimilated too quickly the mores of Yankee-landia, and in so doing anticipates Octavio Paz’s now infamous critique of Mexicans in Los Angeles as orphans stuck in limbo between cultures and languages.9 Like Paz, Bernal sees the city’s potential to diminish Mexican identity and encourage the rise of the pocho, a deorgatory term for Mexicans in the U.S who are seen to have abandoned their native culture. In “Raking up the Past,” he dedicates “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.” He is particularly hard on Mexican women who he believes have fallen from grace under the spell of L.A.’s charms, donning short skirts, dancing the hula, chewing gum, and speaking only “in the language of Byron.” He takes more stabs in “Pochos,” targeting “those from back home/ who land here, observe things,/ and never imitate what’s good,/ but only what’s terrible.” He berates their bilingualisms but, ironically, does a great service by committing to the page some of the very first instances of Spanglish in Los Angeles writing: “sun-ah-va-gún,” “What su mara?,” “gud taim,” and “Cheeses Cries.” And so he becomes, despite himself, the forerunner of El Piporro, Cheech & Chong, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, and Don Cheto.
Bernal’s excoriations of Gringofied Mexicans were part of a larger battle to defend Mexican culture and Mexican people in “México de afuera” generally, and in the often especially hostile spaces of Southern California specifically. The first poem in the book aligns Bernal’s own exilic patriotism with that of La Prensa itself, lauding the paper’s pages for exuding “Mexicanismo” and always supporting “THE HOMELAND AND ITS PEOPLE!” Bernal was just one of many Mexican journalists, publishers, business owners, and civic leaders in the Los Angeles outpost working to invent, support, and market an authentic and uniform vision of conservative Mexican identity. His poems were consistently “on message” with the reporting and editorials of La Prensa and El Heraldo: don’t be tempted by Yankee-landia — stay Catholic, stay moral, and speak Spanish.10
Although he is critical of “Bad Mexicans,” Bernal’s allegiance to his homeland and his people mostly takes the form of protest poems “defending what’s rightly ours” and railing against injustices suffered by immigrants. In “Raking Up The Past,” he lifts his lance (as he puts it) against “Jewish grifters and/ wholesale jewelry merchants,” shady employment agencies and professional lodges, and anyone else with plans to “exploit our Raza.” Up and down the Mexican main drag in “Short Films,” Bernal meets only a rogue’s gallery of “merciless” anti-Mexican “swindlers:” lying tailors, wily watch salesmen, and deceitful haberdashers.
He dedicates one poem, “Let’s Save Our Brother from the Hangman,” to Aureliano (Aurelio) Pompa, an immigrant laborer from Bernal’s home state in Sonora, who came to Los Angeles “seeking work in/ this Babylon,” his head full of “pipe dreams.” What Pompa receives instead is constant physical abuse and harassment from his Anglo carpenter foreman. After shooting the foreman in self-defense, Pompa is arrested, tried, and sentenced to execution. Bernal uses his poem to raise funds and try to prevent the hanging: “LET US ALL HELP/ AURELIANO POMPA.” But the effort is in vain. Besides finding its way into Bernal’s poem, Pompa’s story became the plot of one of the very first commercially recorded corridos (Mexican border ballads) in the United States. Set in Los Angeles and recorded in New York in 1924, “Vida, Proceso, y Muerte de Aurelio Pompa” (“The Life, Trial, and Death of Aurelio Pompa”) was subsequently sold as a phonographic disc to Mexican laborers across the United States. “Tell my race not to come here,” the song went. “For here they will suffer/ There is no pity here.”
That suffering, that lack of pity, is one of the great themes of this collection. In one poem, “Mexico in Caricature,” Bernal reviews a play staged at a theater on Broadway that portrayed the border crossing from Mexicali into Calexico, a crossing that, by 1923, the poet knew all too well. Bernal was outraged by the play’s depictions of Mexicans as sombrero-wearing and rifle-toting bandits: “If I could have set off/ an explosion, both playwright/ and protagonist would have/ been blown to smithereens.” He calls for a boycott of the theater for “denigrat[ing] what is ours” and darkening “honor of a free people/ deserving all due respect/ from the largest, most cultured/ country in the Universe.”
Palos de Ciego ends on a more proactive and laudatory note. After a series of poems about Mexicali (baseball! heat!), Bernal returns to downtown Los Angeles for a June 1923 performance of a variety show titled “Mexico Auténtico.” The show ran for three weeks and featured an all-star lineup of singers and dancers from Mexico City’s national theater, including character actor Ernesto Finance, dancer Rafael Diaz, opera singer Isabel Zenteno (Bernal liked how she “makes us feel, to our cores,/ the national ballads”), and singer and dancer Nelly Fernández (“Nelly, graceful Nelly”). The review of the show in the Los Angeles Times focused on the auditorium’s empty seats (“the Mexican colony, even, is not turning out as it should”), but Bernal only saw a full-house success — a proud representation of a proud people in which his readers, in turn, should take pride. “Let these poor lines go forth,” he writes in the closing poem of his book, “as a humble homage,/ full of love and admiration/ for the great artists who work/ their hearts out ‘For the Raza,/ for the Homeland, and for Art.’” This, Bernal insists, is how Mexican Los Angeles should look and how it should be understood. This is how culture ought to flow back and forth across borders. This is what Los Angeles should admire.
1 For more on this campaign, see Ted Vincent, “Black Hopes in Baja California: Black American and Mexican Cooperation, 1917-1926,” Western Journal of Black Studies 21, no. 3 (Fall 1997), pp. 204-213. For a larger view of relations between Black Los Angeles and Baja California, see Josh Kun, “Tijuana and the Borders of Race,” in A Companion to Los Angeles, edited by William Deverell and Greg Hise (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), pp. 313-26.
2 “La ultima revolución en Sonora,” Los Angeles Times, 17 August 1913: 56.
3 Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz, Un Camino de hallazgos: poetas bajacalifornianos del siglo veinte (Mexicali: Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, 1992, 1992), p. 15.
4 Trujillo Muñoz has anthologized Bernal in the canon