Emplumada

Emplumada is the first collection of poetry authored by Lorna Dee Cervantes. It was published in 1981 by University of Pittsburgh Press.

Cervantes’ first full collection of poetry illustrates the unique experience of a Chicana as she is coming of age. As Lynette Seator writes in her analysis of the work, “The poems of Emplumada tell the story of Cervantes' life, her life as it was given to her and as she learned to live it, taking into herself what was good and turning the bad into a comprehension of social context”.

The work is split into three sections, with the first moving through the protagonist’s childhood, the second and third moving through the protagonist’s young adulthood and adulthood in the Mexican barrio of San Jose, California. The subject of the work, a 27-year-old Latina woman seems to appear consistently throughout the thirty-nine poems. Sometimes, she appears in the first person, while still other times she appears through an omniscient narrator Seator describes the structure of the poetry as, “an episodic progression through time”.

In the very first poem, “Uncle’s First Rabbit,” Cervantes introduces the image of the Uncle, at around ten years old, seeing his father kick his pregnant mother, until his baby sister is born dead.

The cycle of abuse continues, as the Uncle adopts similar behavior. Cervantes writes that the Uncle "finds himself slugging the bloodied face of his wife”

In the poems “Lots: I” and “Lots: II”, Cervantes directly addresses the topic of rape. “In ‘Lots: I’ [the protagonist] fights off a rapist…in the succeeding poem, ‘Lots: II’ she is the victim of rape”. Seator attributes the sequential arrangement to Cervantes’ desire to overturn the typical trajectory for a Chicana woman in Chicano/a literature, allowing for the protagonist to assume the place and course of action of a male character in Chicano literature. Seator writes, “her loss of virginity and so of innocence is not the end of her as a viable human being. The author does not, as so many authors before her, do away with the female victim. The poet is determined that she as protagonist live. Loss of innocence is for her, as it has always been for the young male coming of age, a beginning.”

A source of tension for Cervantes’ protagonist emanates from her Chicana identity. “These are poems about the experience of growing up Chicana, poems that break away from old stereotypes rooted in the Mexican tradition and wrapped in the myths and the realities of both the Spanish and the Indian heritage”. The protagonist finds herself rooted by her up upbringing as a Chicana, but it is the way in which Cervantes presents this upbringing that reconstructs the identity of a Chicana protagonist. She adopts a strength typically associated with masculine characters. Reviewer Thelma T. Renya speaks of this strength in discussing the poem, “For Virginia Chavez,” when the protagonist’s childhood friend has been beaten by her husband. Renya notes that is femininity and female relationships that emit strength. She writes, “it is the inner strength and solidarity of women that help them prevail”.

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