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    A Study Guide for Jimmy Santiago Baca's "Who Understands Me But Me"
    A Study Guide for Jimmy Santiago Baca's "Who Understands Me But Me"
    A Study Guide for Jimmy Santiago Baca's "Who Understands Me But Me"
    Ebook33 pages23 minutes

    A Study Guide for Jimmy Santiago Baca's "Who Understands Me But Me"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Jimmy Santiago Baca's "Who Understands Me But Me," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateSep 28, 2016
    ISBN9781535842938
    A Study Guide for Jimmy Santiago Baca's "Who Understands Me But Me"

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      A Study Guide for Jimmy Santiago Baca's "Who Understands Me But Me" - Gale

      12

      Who Understands Me but Me

      Jimmy Santiago Baca

      1990

      Introduction

      Chicano author Jimmy Santiago Baca's prodigious literary career began in a most unlikely place: an American prison. Having dropped out of high school in the ninth grade, Baca remained functionally illiterate throughout his troubled teenage years, but a few chance encounters with the magic of such poets as Pablo Neruda and William Wordsworth led him to forge his own education and become a versifying master of the English language—all while serving time.

      Who Understands Me But Me appears as the penultimate poem in his 1990 collection Immigrants in Our Own Land and Selected Early Poems, which was issued eleven years after the original publication of Immigrants in Our Own Land. That volume was published in 1979, the same year that Baca was released from his six-year stay in prison on drug-distribution charges. Presumably written during his time in prison, Who Understands Me But Me records with bitter resignation the psychological hardships and emotional wounds suffered by the poet in prison—and then transforms into a Whitmanesque tribute to the ineffable beauty and joy to be found within oneself, whatever the circumstances, if one can only train one's eyes and mind to perceive them.

      Author Biography

      Baca was born on January 2, 1952, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His mother was Chicana (of Mexican heritage), and his father was Apache. Their circumstances were difficult; they divorced when Baca was two. He was eventually left with his grandparents, as his mother escaped to California and his father struggled with alcoholism. Both parents met with tragic deaths. When Baca's grandfather died, the seven-year-old Baca, along with his older brother Mieyo, was deposited in an orphanage in Albuquerque. Remaining there for years, Baca ended up serving time in detention centers and dropping out of high school in the ninth grade, to assimilate into street life in the urban barrios. He wandered through the Southeast for a couple of years and then

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