Baca’s ‘A Glass of Water’ the work of blistering passion

A Glass of Water

by Jimmy Santiago Baca

Grove Press; First Edition edition (October 1, 2009)

240 pages

Review by Benjamin Whitmer

I’ll admit that it’s more than likely impossible for me to give an objective review of Jimmy Santiago Baca’s debut novel, A Glass of Water.  I have been a devoted fan of his poetry for almost a decade, ever since I first read Immigrants in Our Own Land on the recommendation of a family member.  Baca’s poems are both refreshingly direct and grimly lyrical, constructed of the kind of startling concrete images which you can, as a poet friend of mine once put it, almost walk on.  Recently, while reading Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, I kept thinking of Baca’s work as an example of the “visceral realist” poetic movement which The Savage Detectives chronicles but never provides examples of – something which, I’m pretty sure, is fair to neither Bolaño nor Baca.

Nearly as remarkable as Baca’s poetry are the conditions under which his career was launched.  It was in prison, where he served six and a half years in his twenties, a portion of that on death row, that Baca began his literary career, trading poems to fellow inmates for cigarettes.  A Glass of Water reflects Baca’s rough origins, at least in his choice of subject matter.  There is not even a pretense of interest in middle-class life to be found in the novel.  Instead, A Glass of Water is the story of two Chicano brothers living and working in New Mexico.  Lorenzo works the same farm his father did, and sells marijuana smuggled across the border, enough of it to substantially better the lives of the migrant workers he works with; Vito is exiled to the city after beating up the white farm owner’s son, and begins a boxing career that looks as promising as his brother’s future in drug-dealing.  Between them is Carmine, a college student who arrives at the farm to study migrant workers, and ends up falling in love with Lorenzo – and who is also the inspiration for Vito’s thrashing of the farm owner’s son.  Their father, Casamiro, still lives on the farm, but no longer works, having been struck down by a stroke, while their mother, Nopal, was murdered while they were still children.

There are times when the narrative seems rushed, when that which would be perhaps better rendered dramatically is summarized.  Likewise, there are times the multitude of voices can work to dilute the force of the slender narrative.  Still, it would be nearly impossible to determine which of these narrators should be cut, especially when given the dazzling and unique contributions of each, such as in the following passage, where Nopal laments from beyond the grave the failure of America to equal her husband’s dreams:

Ah, my man Casimiro, all those people you loved as a boy and had faith in that they could deliver you from poverty.  They told you keep your spirits high and described the wonders of America and how life could be if you worked hard and trusted in the American dream.  It will never let you down, they said, and you rose early and went to bed knowing the words were true as the ten commandments and that you had a life waiting for you beyond the border.

All you had to do was cross miles of desert, hide from Blackwater assassins and Blackwater mercenaries and keep moving north along sandy ravines, burying yourself in dirt to sleep, because you believed what they said.

But over the years you became a man without hope, without a single wish that came true, and that hurts more than anything in the world and it can never be erased because that was all you talked about, the promised land under stars.  Believing what they told you opened your heart and you would have done anything for them and you did, you gave it all up to follow them, and the lies broke you.  It was not as they said, you were no longer who you were.  Despair and darkness poured out of your eyes and there was nothing you could do about it.  You were completely powerless to even whisper a complaint and you carried this dark need to avenge the betrayal, to devour people and destroy, to make people pay for what they had said, make them suffer, and that was what you hated most, because you are a good man, and became not much of anything.

Though such passages may not move the plot in ways that would best satisfy James Patterson’s readers, it’s pretty hard to argue with the resulting prose.  A Glass of Water may not be seamless, and may not be as polished as your average assembly-line thriller, but it is as powerful, tough, and beautiful as anything that has been written about immigrants in America, and given the lineage of that genre, that’s a mouthful.