‘A Portrait of Jacinto (Or Rather a Portrait of His Parents)’
— Reneé Bibby
As a writing teacher, I have the privilege of perspective on students’ material. I see them circle the same material again and again, diving like gannets from different heights and angles to pull a shining fish from the shoal of their own experiences. I do this, too, as a writer (with perhaps less perspective than teaching affords). This makes sense: we write what we care about. The corollary of that is that we read what we care about. I understood this abstractly as a life-long reader but writing for the Wilds has brought my preferences into focus quite sharply—refining what types of narratives I circle again and again to find new and interesting angles.
Claudia Delfina Cardona’s poem, ‘A Portrait of Jacinto (Or Rather a Portrait of His Parents),’ is one of my favorite stories; a theme I return to time and again: a story about the people who inhabit the transitional generations of cultures. To understand Jacinto, the highly educated man, you must also understand his parents, the illiterate mother, the late-shift working father. Jacinto could be me, with my own first-generation American experience, even if the bridge between me and my parents may not yawn quite as wide. Cardona finds my own experiences, “took him by the hand / into a school with one little, two little, three little boys with brown skin like / Jacinto’s.” I may have been one of only a few kids of color in my school, but Cardona’s poem reminds me, I wasn’t alone in my experience—that across the world Jacintos make forays into a world where parents cannot follow. As an adult, I love nothing more than finding poems like Cardona’s. Touching, precise writing about the experience of child and parent, the cultural immigrant, the child becoming an adult. I love how a poem like this can make me feel so less alone.