SOURCE: Moore, George. “Beyond Cultural Dialogues: Identities in the Interstices of Culture in Jimmy Santiago Baca's Martín and Meditations on the South Valley.” Western American Literature 33, no. 2 (summer 1998): 153-77.

In the following essay, Moore analyzes Martín and Meditations on the South Valley in terms of Baca's struggle to define Chicano identity amid a “dynamic of cultural forces”—Aztec mythology, Spanish colonialism, and Indo-Mejicano history among them.

Jimmy Santiago Baca has established himself as one of the leading Chicano poets of the American Southwest, in part, perhaps, by his willingness to continue the dialogue between the Spanish and Indian cultures that make up Chicano identity. “I dreamed my spirit was straw and mud,” he writes in an epic poem that captures the struggle of these voices,

a pit dug down below my flesh to pray in, and I prayed on beads of blue corn kernels, slipped from...