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American anti-immigrant environment, “Mexican Heaven” by José Olivarez, Citizen Illegal Poetry Collection by José Olivarez, Mexican American Poet, Young Chicago Authors (YCA)
Front Cover: Poetry Collection, Citizen Illegal by José Olivarez
My Poetry Corner September 2019 features the poem “Mexican Heaven” from the poetry collection Citizen Illegal (Haymarket Books, 2018) by José Olivarez, a poet, teacher, and poetry slam performer. Born in Calumet City on the south side of Chicago, Illinois, he is the son of Mexican immigrants. Despite all the odds, he earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from Harvard University.
Olivarez’s first contact with poetry occurred through his high school’s poetry slam team. Their poetry had a profound impact on him. In a conversation with Jessica Hopper in July 2018, Olivarez said, “It made me feel like I could question more.” For the first time, he saw a way of becoming his true self, other than the reserved person everyone wanted him to be.
In his poem, “I Tried to Be a Good Mexican Son,” he shares his parents’ disappointment that he didn’t become a doctor, lawyer, or businessman.
I even went to college. But i studied African American studies which is not
The Law or The Medicine or The Business. my mom still loved me.
[…]
i tried to be a good Mexican son. Went to a good college & learned depression isn’t just for white people…
Olivarez speaks of rejections when looking for work and in his relationships. With the help of therapy, he learned to be more compassionate with himself, to revel in his imperfections, and to write bad poems without hating himself. He recalls in his poem, “My Therapist Says Make Friends with Your Monsters”:
my therapist says i can’t
make the monsters disappear
no matter how much i pay her.
all she can do is bring them
into the room, so i can get
to know them, so i can learn
their names, so i can see
clearly their toothless mouths,
their empty hands, their pleading eyes.
Mexican American Poet José Olivarez
Photo Credit: Chicago Creatives
After living in Boston and New York, Olivarez returned to Chicago in 2017, where he soon joined the teaching staff of Young Chicago Authors (YCA), and completed his debut poetry collection, Citizen Illegal.
“Coming back [to Chicago] kind of opened the doors to particular memories and pulled some things up from deep inside me,” he said in an interview with the Chicago Tribune in September 2018.
“[T]he work I’m most proud of are the poems where Mexicans break the rules and drink beer and live,” he said in a previous interview with Habitat Literary Magazine in December 2017. “I knew I didn’t want to write a sad book of poems for white people to read and cast pity on, so there’s lots of Mexicans just chilling.”
Olivarez breaks down the complexity of Mexican American identity in his poem, “Mexican American Disambiguation”:
my parents are Mexican who are not
to be confused with Mexicans still living
in México. those Mexicans call themselves
mexicanos. white folks at parties call them
pobrecitos. American colleges call them
international students & diverse. my mom
was white in México & my dad was mestizo
& after they crossed the border they became
diverse. & minorities. & ethnic. & exotic.
Divided into stanzas throughout the collection, the featured poem, “Mexican Heaven,” sets the tone for each segment, making it cohesive. The poem touches themes of religion, migration, and who is allowed to pursue the American Dream.
“There has to be more possibilities to what it means to be Mexican, what it means to be Latinx than [European colonization, the Mexican-American War, and the current era of immigration],” he explained in his interview with Chicago Tribune. “I was trying to strive to do more than just recreate those violences, recreate those traumas.”
From the first stanza, while the poet uses a lively tone to depict the Mexican American’s experience, the cruel reality is evident, given our current anti-immigrant environment.
all of the Mexicans sneak into heaven.
St. Peter has their names on the list,
but the Mexicans haven’t trusted a list
since Ronald Reagan was president.
As described in the following two stanzas, they needn’t have worried. St. Peter is a Mexican named Pedro / but he’s not a saint. He gets drunk on tequila and lets all the Mexicans into heaven, even our no-good cousins who only / go to church for baptisms & funerals. The Mexican women’s refusal to cook, clean, raise kids, and pay bills leave heaven in a mess and starve the men to death.
The fourth stanza captures well, with vivid imagery, the Mexican American’s struggle to achieve the American Dream.
Saint Peter lets Mexicans into heaven
but only to work in the kitchens.
a Mexican dishwasher polishes the crystal,
smells the meals, & hears the music.
they dream of another heaven,
one they might be allowed in
if they work hard enough.
At a time when I, too, am under attack as a minority, non-white immigrant from the Caribbean, Olivarez’s poetry collection resonates with precision. What response can one give when our current administration refuses to grant refuge to our fellow Bahamians, fleeing the devastation caused by Hurricane Dorian?
As the poet observes in his penultimate stanza of “Mexican Heaven”: turns out [Jesus] gets reincarnated / every day & no one on earth cares all that much.
To read the complete featured poem and learn more about the work of José Olivarez, go to my Poetry Corner September 2019.
NOTE: Excerpts from Olivarez’s poems are sourced from his poetry collection, Citizen Illegal, published by Haymarket Books, Chicago, Illinois, 2018.
Three Worlds One Vision 
The secret would be to send the US Navy to help the Bahamians with repairing the basic infrastructure of their country.
In Britain, we just give the poor countries money, instead of knowledge and skills, because that’s the easy thing to do. The best thing to do is to help them!
I still remain convinced that if the big countries helped the little ones, then the refugee problem is much reduced, if not stopped.
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Thanks for sharing your thoughts, John. With the intensity of storms, due to our global climate crisis, the small Caribbean island-nations, like the Bahamas, face a bleak future in which rebuilding basic infrastructure could become inviable and relocation the best solution for survival.
In California, where we now face increasingly frequent and destructive wildfires–yet another symptom of our global climate crisis–insurance companies have dropped almost 350,000 homeowners in high-fire risk areas. Homeowners in Florida in high-risk flood zones will face a similar fate.
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My daughter and her adoptive mom reside in Cali and lost their home to a wildfire. I was so worried for them, but they are okay now. This is a widespread problem!
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Gayle, it’s great that they’re okay. Not everything can recover after losing their home.
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Rosaliene I’m sorry to read that final paragraph and realise that you are under attack in the country you consider your home – I don’t know what to say about these things it is all so utterly crazy to me. I appreciate being introduced to another interesting young poet -it’s the voices of the young people that must now be listened to. And, in my opinion, the more ‘exotic’ the better!
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Thanks for dropping by, Pauline 🙂 We live in dangerous times here in the USA. Fortunately, I live among a diverse group of neighbors in the apartment complex where I live. Our neighborhood also reflects the same diversity–Asians, Blacks, Indians, Latinx, and Whites. To date, while we have our share of criminal activity, we haven’t experienced any mass shooting.
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Now that sounds like a melting pot neighbourhood. I like the way traditions and cultures and foods and catch phrases get shared around in such eclectic places. It’s been a sad fact of life that since the mass shooting occurred here six months ago many of our immigrant families have gone to ground feeling unsafe. Last week while returning home from our morning walk, a little girl on her way to school asked if she could pat my dog and while she did and we spoke a few words her anxious and irate (Syrian) father was leaning out of the car scooting her away from me. He never once looked at me, but idled his car alongside until he had convinced his daughter to cross the road. I felt really sad and sorry for us all. It never used to be like that here.
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Pauline, I can understand the reaction of the girl’s father. He will probably warn her about trusting strangers different from her Syrian family and relatives. Given the current anti-immigrant fears being spread by our president, I’m now always on the alert when moving about in public areas.
It serves those in power to have us live in fear of each other. We’ve got to do everything within our power not to fall into their trap. Smiles cost nothing. I share those freely with everyone I meet 🙂
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As do I 🙂
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Thank you for sharing this! His poetry touched my heart – especially the part where the word “trauma” is included. Indeed, structural violence, historical traumas, microaggressions, and discrimination are traumatic experiences that segregate, belittle, emotionally abuse, and psychologically harm. In Carter’s work at Columbia University, race-based traumatic stress is an injury that harms many persons of color, though its studies looked through more binary (black-and-white) lenses than including other minorites such as Mexicans. The pain he depicts in his poetry reflect the pervasive effects that such historical race-based traumas have inflicted on Mexicans. And he seems to allude to the heterogeneity of trauma when he differentiates national statuses, national origins, and resulting labels that diminish the strengths and undermine the intelligence of Mexicans. I am not sure what Latinx means or represents, but terms like “diverse” and “exotic” appear to be benevolent microaggressions and insulting labels. The research on microaggressions among Asians reveals the overuse of the term “exotic” as well. Such terms undermine the equal opportunities that humans should have, regardless of race or ethnicity.
Questioning spiritual beliefs such as invisioning a different heaven that is governed by different rules depicts the negative spiritual sequelae that follows after race-based trauma. At the core of a person’s identity is a person’s culture, including spiritual beliefs. Integrating society’s poor value attachments for those they consider “less than” with one’s own hope for achieving maximum potential when all odds are against him is a challenging and emotionally taxing feat. His struggles are emphasized in his poetry.
I am saddened by how our country continues to discriminate and harm minorities. As a mixed-raced minority, I have only experienced a fraction of what my counterparts have dealt with. I love poetry like his because it helps me to not feel so alone. His strength and perseverance are inspirational!
It appears that heaven symbolizes defeat mixed with hope for an afterlife, since this life is so cruel. The American Dream is hopeless for some, it would seem. This reminds me of Policar’s work on shame and class assention among those with low socioeconomic statuses. She admitted her own struggles with shame when she earned her PhD in psychology, after having first studied English. She stated that she felt ashamed for herself at first, and later felt ashamed toward her parents, who did not earn any college degrees. She explained how her struggles were representative of the schemas we attach to minorities, and how the journey toward the American Dream is different for minorities. Her works comprised peer-reviewed publications, but her testimony felt poetic to me. I cried many times after reading her work, and I feel the tears come after reading your post. We are more than a social stigma, labels, statuses, and what others think about our potentials. We are human like the rest, but we minorities hurt more. We hope for a new heaven, a new world that does not undermine our potentials or imprison our dreams. We hope that this world will change before we even see the likes of heaven’s gates.
If Jesus were alive today, he would probably be institutionalized in a mental health facility, a correctional facility, a torture chamber, or a concentration camp. He would be persecuted again, as well as post-traumatically growing through historical traumas our society repeats again and again in different but similar forms.
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Gayle, thanks for sharing your profound and elucidating analysis of Olivarez’s poetry. I would recommend that you read his entire collection.
I agree with your closing remarks about Jesus. He was a radical socialist/communist–take your pick–who told the rich man, seeking eternal life, to sell all of his possessions and give the money to the poor.
“Latinx,” as I’ve recently learned, is the gender-neutral alternative to the use of Latino(s) or Latina(s). In using “Latinx,” we avoid giving preference to the masculine form (Latino) when referring to both male and female, a general practice among Latin American speakers.
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Thanl you for clarifying what Latinx means. I think I will use that term instead from now on, though I wonder if that term is offensive to their culture, insofar as their language (Spanish), as I had learned and understood it years ago, comprises masculine and feminine attachments, such as with la casa or el radio, a feminine word and a masciline word, respectively.
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According to Wikipedia, the word is used mainly in the USA. It’s use hasn’t been adopted by Latin American countries nor Spain.
Check it out at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latinx
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Each line you selected is an aphorism on reality. Interesting read.
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Thanks for dropping by, Jim. So glad you’ve found Olivarez’s poetry of interest. Understanding our diverse, cultural identities is complicated. I believe in assimilation into my adopted country, but assimilation isn’t enough as American-born Olivarez has discovered. In “River Oaks Mall,” he writes: my family trying so hard to be American / it was transparent.
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Thanks, Rosaliene. The mention of Jesus and immigration policy made me think that if Jesus wanted to immigrate to the USA today, the gov’t would problem look at him (according to historians a short, dark-skinned, dark-haired man typically Middle Eastern in appearance), identify his activities as possible terrorism, and either reject his application or put him behind barbed wire.
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I couldn’t agree more, Dr. Stein. Gayle raises a similar point. Some of our devout Christian leaders and lawmakers either ignore or subvert aspects of Jesus’ teachings that don’t suit their designs.
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Over 50 years ago another poet wrote and sang his song: For the Times they are a-changing, and pointed out the kinds of choices that had to be made during that one window of opportunity. At that time some good choices were made and battles fought to implement a new way in America. These revolutionaries did not understand the forces they were up against and how easily they were sidetracked, bought and paid for. Some were martyred, some became rich and famous but all failed to achieve what they were so sure they couldn’t help but bring about. It only took fifty years for the System to reset itself with a vengeance and to marginalize the would-be change agents. As a child of immigrants I experienced many of the rejection and condescension Jose Olivarez writes about. I wrote about mine too, if only to have a picture of my adoptive society to look at. That’s when I chose to dissociate myself from my imported culture, my national, racial and religious identity and forcefully blend in. I was tired of the slurs, the mocking and the beatings. Make no mistake, racism and bigotry are global problems. I would “pass” and I did, never looking back. I was lucky in this, that my skin tone could not betray me and I admit that. Earthians are easily fooled and as I dropped all connections to my own race to adapt I became what I adapted to. I called myself a chameleon. I was a Canadian, of either French or English descent depending on who asked. I was either Catholic or some sort of Protestant as the situation demanded. I was politically “normal” or should I say, remaining within that wonderfully flexible Canadian political middle ground. Then it became a simple matter of moving out of our dirt-grubbing, dirt poor Canadian beginnings into the then still opening middle class. Hating all aspects of the capitalist system yet playing by its rules. Hating the values of the society I had adapted to yet blending in, compromising when necessary, making “deals” with myself on how far I was willing to go to achieve my personal goals. These are the words of one immigrant who chose adaptation instead of self pity or helpless servitude. There is no virtue in being different and endlessly advertising it. There is no difference between Caucasians, whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asians or any other races except as we believe in and feed those differences. As members of immigrant minorities we can feel sorry for ourselves, choosing to believe in insurmountable problems or we can choose to engage that very uncomfortable ride in the social blender. America was to be a melting pot, everyone blended in to make the best of it. It was races, first the Christian whites, then each other group who chose to stick with their old ways and create exclusive communities. In Europe the Jews had a thousand years to give up their (idiotic) beliefs and traditions to blend into the normal traffic. Had they done so Hitler would have had nothing to “tweet” about in that regard. If we insist on believing we are different (and worse, foisting it on others) we will be treated as different. I know it’s not that simple when skin colour comes into it but I still maintain that a great part of the problem is immigrants and minorities wanting the “heaven” they struggled to get to but unwilling to become a fully integrated part of it, thus giving the others an easy target against which to vent their own frustrations, fear, anger. “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves, that we are underlings.” (Julius Caesar, Shakespeare) That has never changed.
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Sha’Tara, thanks for sharing your experience as a white European immigrant in assimilating into Canadian society. Olivarez makes it clear in an interview that he’s not seeking pity from white Americans with his debut poetry collection. American-born, he followed all the rules to become a true American. Like you, he distanced himself from his Mexican-born parents and relatives. In his 2014 interview with Creative Kin, he shares his experience of studying at Harvard University:
“So for me, a lot of Harvard, especially early on was really experiencing a lot of micro-aggressions—a lot of things that made it very clear that I was from a world outside of that world. That I was different, that people went out of their way to make me feel lucky like I got in because of affirmative action or something. I don’t think it was anything intentional, but the whole environment felt unwelcome to me. As time went on I found a community of people there that I really loved. I would say that Harvard isn’t really white, in fact it’s really diverse.“
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Powerful poetry. Thanks for introducing me to José Olivarez’ work! -Rebecca
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Thanks for reading, Rebecca. It was an unexpected discovery when Haymarket Books sent me an e-mail of poetry collections on sale at the time.
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The fourth stanza of “Mexican Heaven” is so beautiful to me, I can relate to it as a first generation immigrant, it makes me think of my parent’s struggle especially. The labels of exotic always bothered me too, it’s sad that some people think it’s a compliment to be objectified.
“Saint Peter lets Mexicans into heaven but only to work in the kitchens. a Mexican dishwasher polishes the crystal, smells the meals, & hears the music. they dream of another heaven, one they might be allowed in if they work hard enough.”
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Thanks for sharing, Judy. I’ve also been told “How exotic!” by a white, American male, after replying to his question about my country of origin.
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Thank you for sharing!.. I am sorry that you have had the misfortune of crossing paths with those closed minded individuals… unfortunately technology has given them a voice.. irregardless of race, gender, thought, etc everyone who follows their dream while being different is threatened in some manner…
“Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.” Helen Keller
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Dutch, I wish I could share Helen Keller’s vision about our personal security. There are too many traps in this world that we need to be wary of and to avoid, especially as a woman.
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Sharing! ❤
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Thanks, Bette. Much appreciated ❤
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Thanks for an introduction to Olivarez’s poetry. I’m very happy that he’s found his voice and sharing his message with American readers who have much to gain through his poignant insights.
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Thanks for dropping by, Henry 🙂 I’m also happy that he found a publisher for his work, since it’s a big challenge for new poetic voices within our society.
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Very interesting post. Great poet! He could do a one man comedy show! Loved the poem.
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Thanks for dropping by, Dwight 🙂 So glad that you love the featured poem and could appreciate the humor in his work.
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I’ve never read anything like this view of heaven – sad, yet with a sense of humor that I find appealing in it’s stretching the status quo. It’s like opening a door to a whole new perspective and new possibilities. Seeing his monsters with “their empty hands, their pleading eyes,” is also touching revelation. I’m still processing the depth of these writings by José Olivarez. Thank you for sharing his work and life with us.
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JoAnna, I’m glad that you appreciate Olivarez’s work. I also found his sense of humor in “Mexican Heaven” very appealing. Throughout his collection, he raises the issue of what it means to be a first-generation-born American and not lose connections with one’s foreign roots.
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Cool and poignant. I’m going to read more of his work. 😊🙏
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Glad you like his work, Mark. You won’t be disappointed.
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What a remarkable poem by Olivarez – thanks for the link to the Poetry Corner where we can read the entire poem – punchy and spitting honest as it is along with what I think is a wink from his humour (or dark comedy) as Pedro gets drunk and forgets the “list.” It is both lament and resiliency in action. With heaven envisioned like this, who needs either a god like that (“turns out he’s a religious Mexican”), or the place of arbitrary exclusion.
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Rusty, I’m so glad that you enjoyed Olivarez’s poetry. There is lots of humor in his collection, but, as you mention, there is also dark comedy.
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Thank you for sharing this. This poet is someone I will read more of. as well. The work you choose to share and the back stories your provide are very powerful and needed at this time.
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Thank you very much, LaDonna 🙂 I’m glad that you like Olivarez’s poetry.
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