Jose Hernandez Diaz, Bad Mexican, Bad American

 

MIRAGE

A man walked in a desert on a Sunday afternoon. It was his birthday. He’d spent the morning walking in the desert after his horse died. The man was starting to feel weaker by the minute. Then he began to see a mirage: it was his fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Cranford. Mrs. Cranford had died ten years ago. The mirage, or Mrs. Cranford, implored him to keep pushing, despite the oppressive heat of the desert. The man leaned toward the mirage, to give it a hug. It disappeared. The man looked up at the sky: the stars were beginning to shine.

I’ve been curious about the prose poems of Mexican American poet, editor and teacher Jose Hernandez Diaz for a while now, finally able through the publication of his full-length debut, Bad Mexican, Bad American (Cincinnati OH: Acre Books, 2024), a title that follows his chapbook debut, The Fire Eater (Texas Review Press, 2020), but leads up to his next collection, The Parachutist (Sundress Publications, 2025). From the very title, Bad Mexican, Bad American sets up a potential collision of two cultures, with one foot in each, but fully neither. “All my ancestors were poor and I / am like my ancestors. I don’t talk // about my personal life much. Why / complain? I had a loving family who // took care of me. A roof over my head. / Beans and tortillas on the stove.”

Constructed as a quartet of poem-sections, Diaz’s poems present a strong storytelling element, almost wistful, and surreal at times; gestural, as though performing a monologue in which things occur but nothing “happens,” offering recombinant threads of origins and beginnings, curious tales told and retold, and surreal bursts that lean into flash fictions. “My name is very plain,” he writes, to open the poem “MY NAME,” “Jose Hernandez. / I used to go by Joey Hernandez growing up. // I never asked anyone to call me that. / It was just a nickname. I always wrote Jose Hernandez // on my schoolwork.” Further down the page, he adds the caveat: “I always wanted an American name, growing up, // like my Poncho friends, Anthony, Jon, and Michael. / It’s not so much that I was a sellout. I just wanted // to fit in.” He speaks of culture and distances, of attempting to find his place amid what seem, at first, to be two separate poles. “I guess that’s part of the reason why I don’t feel comfortable // as a teacher.” he writes, as part of “I NEVER HAD A MEXICAN AMERICAN TEACHER GROWING UP,” “Never seen a Mexican male English teacher. / Also, however, I think I would find // any excuse not to stand in front of a group of strangers.”

While he does lean into the surreal, Diaz works a line comparably straighter than, say, Benjamin Niespodziany or Nate Logan, allowing the bends not through language per se but through the narrative arc, providing turns less sudden than the realization that the mirrored glass is actually liquid. There is also a curious cluster of poems across the third and fourth section of the collection, most of which begin with “A man with a” or variations thereof, offering a sequence of short narratives that manage to spark and twist, deflection expectation through deft turns and smart sentences. Throughout there are some lovely elements, amid such lovely images and sentences, of prose poem style throughout this collection, and I appreciate very much how Diaz is open about those same influences upon his writing, those poets that helped along the way, threading individual names throughout a variety of poems, culminating in the final poem, “AT THE CEMETERY OF DEAD POETS,” that writes:

I was trapped in a graveyard of dead poets. I was technically trapped but didn’t want to get out, anyway. First, I went to Rosario Castellanos’s grave and paid my respects. I addressed her as mother in Spanish. Madre de la Poesia. Then I went to Octavio Paz’s grave. I wrote a small poem on the grave for El Gigante of Mexican letters. It was a haiku and that’s all I’ll say about it. Next, I went to James Tate’s grave. I placed some white roses on the gravestone and shed a few tears. I glanced at the sunset. I said thank you, told him I owed him lunch. Then, I went to Russell Edson’s grave. I dropped off a comic book I’d written and illustrated for him. I poured out whiskey in the grass next to the grave. Lastly, I went to Marosa di Giorgio’s grave by the entrance. I immediately turned into a yellow jackal in the moonlight. The new moon had cast a spell on the city.

The poem “THE SKELETON AND THE PYRAMID,” as well, opens with a riff that could easily fit inside those surreal works of writers such as Gary Barwin, Niespodziany or Stuart Ross: “A skeleton with a sombrero sat on top of an Aztec pyramid.” Or the poem “MEETING JAMES TATE IN HEAVEN,” a poem that opens: “I met James Tate at a carnival in heaven. Tate was riding the bumper cars with his cat, Lucy. I was smoking a cigarette on the Ferris wheel with my dog, the incidentally named Carnival. We met in line to buy hot dogs. ‘My name is Jose,’ I said. ‘I’m James Tate. Nice to meet you,’ he said. We ate our hot dogs at a bench with graffiti scribbled by fallen angels.” For either poem, anyone would be a fool to not be curious as to what might happen next.