17 pages • 34 minutes read
Lorna Dee CervantesEmplumada
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1981A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Social Context: Poet as Chicanx, as Feminist, as Political
Although Lorna Dee Cervantes had completed a book-length collection of poetry while still in her teens, she truly became a public poet when she read her poem, “Refugee Ship,” as part of the guerilla theater group, Theater of the People of San Jose, at the Quinto Festival de los Teatros Chicanos in Mexico City in 1974. That poem addresses a theme prominent in Cervantes first collection, Emplumada—that of the difficulties and complications of belonging to, while feeling estranged from, two cultures. Cervantes identifies as Chicana, born to parents of Mexican and Chumash (Native American) lineage. The poems in Emplumada, including the titular poem, use poetic imagery and form to illuminate issues of poverty, racism, and oppression while celebrating language.
Cervantes built a career in academics, teaching and lecturing from 1985 to the present. Her second collection, From the Cables of Genocide: Poems on Love and Hunger (1991) was published nine years after the murder of her mother and uses surreal images, stream of consciousness, and a mix of languages to grapple with feminist issues and the continued marginalization of Black and Brown people.
In 2012, Cervantes took part in the Librotraficante Movement, which sought to smuggle books that had been banned from classrooms for what was deemed racially charged content back into Arizona schools. In 2013, the American Library Associated bestowed the Robert B. Downs Intellectual Freedom Award to the movement. The Librotraficante Movement is thought by many to be the seed for the inclusion of ethnic studies courses in Arizona, California, and Texas high schools.
Through her teaching, performances, and writing, Cervantes continues to integrate her art with her personal history and her politics. In her poetry and through community outreach, social media engagement, and in her academic career, Cervantes embodies the poet as Chicanx, as feminist, and as a political voice.
Literary Context: Poet as Publisher
Before Lorna Dee Cervantes published a collection of poetry, and before she earned a university degree, she was a publisher. She founded MANGO Publications—then known as a little magazine, now identified as a Xicana literary arts press—on the occasion of the US Bicentennial: July 4, 1976. Cervantes has stated often that one of her goals as a publisher was to connect readers to the authors she was looking for as a child—women authors and writers with Spanish surnames, writers in whom she could see herself. MANGO was the first journal to publish Sandra Cisneros, author of the iconic novel, The House On Mango Street (1983). Cervantes applied for and received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts to support her publishing ventures while she developed her own work. After attending graduate school at the University of California at Santa Cruz, Cervantes became editor of Red Dirt, a cross-cultural literary journal.
The strands of Cervantes literary career—in publishing, in education, and as a poet—cannot be neatly untangled form one another. Cervantes was a respected publisher who invested in the writers and poets she wanted to support in the literary world, even before she had a published collection herself. She had established a literary presence by the time Emplumada rolled off the presses. In her promotion of poets and writers such as Ana Castillo, Ray Gonzalez, and Orlando Ramirez, Cervantes helped to open opportunities for more diverse work, as well as expand the readership of that work. Cervantes is a model for poet as publisher, and publisher as activist.
