Reflecting on Jimmy Santiago Baca

Well, the book finally arrived!

As a reader, especially of academic and more efferent text, I tend to read all of the preceding material. I carefully read the Forward, Acknowledgements, Preface and Introduction in order to get perspective and establish a firm foundation in which to build on as I get into the meat of the text. Of course this was not always the way for me, in my younger years these were the parts of the book that were immediately dismissed followed of course by the rest of the the text that I would usually not retained due to my lack of engagement and interest. As I have matured I have learned that when dealing with what might be perceived as inconsiderate, efferent text, these are the parts of the book that are the most important. They enlighten me, the reader to the purpose and the reasoning behind the book; the why and how it came into being.

I chose the book "Reading Don't Fix No Chevys" Literacy in the Lives of Young Men by Michael Smith and Jeffery Welhelm because the title captured my attention. I have always been a nuts and bolts, mechanically inclined person and as a young person I had very similar feelings and opinions about reading. Actually, when I was getting out of high school I had little desire in attending college, my plan was to move to our famZen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig and Martin and Meditations on the South Vally by Jimmy Santiago Baca. That Professor and reading those two books changed my life. Learning about Jimmy Santiago Baca changed my perceptions about so many things, reading and writing being among them. 

ily ranch outside of Las Vegas, NM and build something, anything. My father suggested that I take a look at Highlands University and maybe give it a try.  I mention this because at that point in my life I did not believe that education was going to do anything to better my life, I felt that knowing how to build and fix things was the way to go. In the Preface of this book Welhelm and Smith  talk about the title of the book and where it came from. They wrote the book in hopes to understand and help the young men that they taught and the importance of focusing on individuals was solidified when they heard an interview that Bill Moyers did with Jimmy Santiago Baca, an native New Mexican, chicano poet. The title of the book came from an excerpt from that interview. That rocked me. In my first year of college at NMHU, I had an English Professor, Eddie Tafoya that had us read two books in our English Composition class. The first was

"The title of our book is an allusion to Baca's story because in it we see many of the themes we will be exploring. We see a young man at risk, in part because he cannot read. We see reading dismissed by other young men. We see those young men valuing immediate practical results that the do not see literacy providing. But we see also the potential power of reading and literacy to transform a life and to fight stereotypes and generalizations-- a kind of transformative work that Baca does now with his poetry. And we see a young man who defies easy generalizations, a young man whose potential was not tapped by school. He typifies in many ways our concern about the unactualized literate potential of boys across America" (Smith & Welhelm, 2002).

This book was born out of the notion that boys don't perform as well as girls when it comes to reading and writing, but through their research, they have come to believe that we cannot submit to these types of generalizations and that we as teachers need to approach teaching young men as individuals (and all students for that matter regardless of gender, race, economics or schooling) and engage them in their passions and interest. The authors also aim to tare down the belief that boy are subject to what William Pollack, author of Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myth of Boyhood calls the "boy code" which only generalizes young men. 

If you don't know the work of Jimmy Santiago Baca, check him out. His work is an inspiration, no matter what your background is or where you come from. www.jimmysantiagobaca.com