“i am joaquín / yo soy joaquín” (1967) by rodolfo “corky ... · “i am joaquín / yo soy...
TRANSCRIPT
“I am Joaquín / Yo soy Joaquín” (1967) by Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales.
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Cenk YAY
A preliminary remark on the text...
With a profound intention of politicizing and raising the consciousness of a whole generation of Chicano activist-students, the charismatic civil rights champion Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzáles wrote “I am Joaquín” in the mid-1960s to be distributed (like a political palimpsest) by his urban organization, Crusade for Justice, as mimeographed leaflets. The poem was released in book format in 1967 as I am Joaquín/Yo Soy Joaquín by La Causa Publications in Oakland, California. Soon, “I am Joaquín” became a symbolic text learned by heart by almost all Chicanos, and recited like an anthem in huelgas and caucuses between 1965 and 1975. In 1972, the poem was republished by a mainstream press, Bantam Books, as an extended study under the title, I am Joaquín/Yo Soy Joaquín: An Epic Poem. Since then, the poem has been a foundational and prerequisite text in various Chicano Studies courses within Anglo-American academia as well as other transnational university syllabi. In his Youth, Identity, Power: The Chicano Movement (1989), Chicano historian Carlos Muñoz, Jr. sees the text as more than a poem but as “an ambitious essay that attempted to dramatize key events and personalities from important moments of Mexican and Mexican American history” (61). In the one page introduction to the 1972 Bantam edition, Gonzáles himself describes his poem as “a social statement, a conclusion of our mestizaje, a welding of the oppressor (Spaniard) and the oppressed (Indian)” (1). After all, “I am Joaquín” attempts to stand, in the poet’s own words, as “a call to action as a total people, emerging from a glorious history, traveling through social pain and conflicts, confessing our weaknesses while we shout about our strength […]” (ibid.) Recited in a straightforward style and from the perspective of a first-person persona, throughout the poem the persona, Joaquín (an everyman Chicano figure), embarks on a mythical as well as a historical odyssey that antedates to the indigenous origins of la raza, and then proceeds to the contemporary social circumstances to resume almost six centuries of Mexican, and by extension Chicano history. Therefore, Gonzáles' account, far from being a partial one, is an all-encompassing epical survey that commences in 1521 with the conquest of the Aztecs by the Spanish Conquistadores; successively moving onto the independence of Mexico in 1821, the 1848 annexation of Mexico by the Yankee; and lastly, extending that series of exploitations and conquests to Chicanos in the U.S. during the heyday of the Civil Rights Movement (ca. 1965-1975). The poem was reproduced in 1969 by Luis Valdez’s independent troupe, El Teatro Campesino, into a 19 minute, 16mm, color motion picture. Occasionally tinged with indigenous flute tunes and at times with the mariachi music and other popular genres of the time, the film might rather be called a pictorial collage of an ample number of still snapshots, murals, and paintings of various crucial moments and personages from Mexican and Chicano histories - with Valdez reading the whole poem (with some deviations from the original text) in his overwhelming tenor. The present text is reproduced by cutting-pasting from the original 1972 Bantam edition which covers 94 pages. Cenk YAY. Works Cited: Gonzáles, Rodolfo “Corky”. I Am Joaquín / Yo Soy Joaquín: An Epic Poem. New York: Bantam Books, 1972. Muñoz, Carlos, Jr. Youth, Identity, Power: The Chicano Movement. London: Verso, 1989.
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Source: Gonzales, Rodolfo “Corky.” I am Joaquín/Yo soy Joaquín: An Epic Poem, (New York: Bantam Books, 1972), 6-100.
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