Martín Espada

Martín Espada is a very successful Latino poet that expresses his thoughts about Hispanics rights in his poetry. He is fighting for Latino rights and Hispanic social justice in the United States. But Espada also includes a different idea in some of his famous work. He gives the idea that someone has power in his poems. Sometimes it someone else, a different character, but other times it is him himself.

            In Espada’s poem “The New Bathroom Policy at English High School,” the power gets switched over from the students to the principal. The Spanish students have power over the principal because they can speak Spanish, which the principal cannot. The power is then transitioned when the principal bans Spanish in the bathrooms because he is not comfortable. “…The only word he recognizes/is his own name/and this constipates him…” The principal abuses his power by taking away the students language, which is part of their culture. So the principal is taking away these students culture, and that is definitely abuse of power.

            Another poem called “Two Mexicanos lynched in Santa Cruz, California, May 3, 1877,” Espada shows that the white people had the power. They lynched two innocent Mexicans because of their race, just like they did to African-Americans. The problem was that they didn’t even think about what they had done. He shows this in the last stanza, “…a few stunned/in the blur of execution… all/crowding into the photograph.” The white ‘vigilantes’ as Martín Espada called them, abused their power also. They abused it by taking away people’s lives because of their own wrong beliefs.

            In “Revolutionary Spanish Lesson,” by Martín Espada, he is the one that holds the power! When his name is mispronounced, he says he want to dress up like a criminal. He then gets irrational and says he wants to hijack a tourist bus with white republicans inside, and use them against their will. He says in his poem “…wait/for the bilingual SWAT team/to helicopter overhead/begging me/to be reasonable.” Espada is not using this power he has for good or even reasonable issues. Mispronunciation of a name should not be taken to such great lengths.

            These poems all have a sense of power, but just like in the poems, power in the real world is abused just the same; for example, the government and taxes. Just because they are the government they will raise tax prices, and we can’t really do anything about it except demonstrate. And what about gas prices; they are 4 dollars and on the rise, and we don’t say anything to the government, we just survive. So power is not only a problem in Espada’s poems but in our world too. We just have to live the best we could and ignore it.