At first, I won't lie, I didn't know really what I was reading and I wasn't sure how I felt about it and I defiantly didn't know how I was going to turn what I was reading into a journal. But now I do.
I feel like 'I Am Joaquin' was an anthem for the downtrodden indigenous; it was something that I can imagine being read at a Mexican-American culture festival. Throughout the poem the speaker seemed to rally the members of his culture and tell them that everything was going to be okay, and that since they have survived so much already, they can survive their ongoing and upcoming battles. I loved how he starts of at the early points of Mexican history and names people and how those people, as well as the rest of them, have endured through the tyranny and the revolution and all of the crap; how they stayed together even though things weren't looking too good. I love how he made a slight reference to the battles America has fought and how through those, he is a part of the American culture too. He then kind of glides off of the history of his people and into what feels like the war-cry part where he addresses all of the indigenous who have been screwed over in one way or another and how they endured, and how they will endure. Here is where I find my favorite passage.
It starts at the beginning of the sixth page with, "Here I stand," and ends a few lines before the end of the page with "by their greed and avarice". This whole section he is talking about how much stuff him and his people have had to go through and how many promises they've been cheated out on. He talks about how he has been treated for being a different minority. While, in other literature, you could expect this section to be sad and melancholy, but in this it is like a cry to arms. From the beginning he had been building intensity and then (once he got out of all those tricky historical references) the intensity is brought to a boil and he’s screaming out the injustices; and he’s angry. He’s basically saying that they didn’t deserve what had been handed to them, but in a way, they still win because they (unlike other less fortunate cultures) still have what makes them, them: their “art,” “literature”, and “music”, which the conquers didn’t touch because they thought it not worthy. Because they have still managed to retain these things, they win, and as long as they continue to retain these things, they will always win no matter what happens.
The strength and heart in this poem gets to me, which is why I find a really strong connection to it, which I feel like everyone can related to. Just because you’ve been beaten and bruised and pushed around, as long as you have onto the things that make you, you; you’ll win.
