Identity as Performance

The speaker’s cultural background and identity is deeply important to her. One of the preoccupations of the collection is the ways this identity is performed through symbols and clichés, as well as lived through specific experiences. This theme is present in the first poem, “When My Brother Was an Aztec,” but it does not become explicit until the third poem of the collection, “Hand-Me-Down Halloween.” In the poem, the speaker and her family move off of the reservation for the first time in her life, and a neighbor gives her family a bag of hand-me-downs for the speaker to wear. One of these is an Tonto costume, which the speaker wears for Halloween. “My mother’s boyfriend laughed // said now I was a / fake / Indian” (9-10) she says, and recounts getting into a fight with the white boy from down the street...