A Place to Stand

Jimmy Santiago Baca, born in 1952, is an American poet and author of A Place to Stand. Poems by Baca include “Immigrants in Our Own Land” (1979) and “Who Understands Me but Me” (1979). This memoir begins with Baca’s early years at home with his drunken, abusive father and his unhappy mother. Baca loves his father, who is continually in and out of jail, but Baca’s mother abandons her three children to marry a man who can provide her a more stable life.

Baca, his brother, and his sister live with their grandparents following their mother’s desertion, but the two boys are sent to an orphanage when their grandfather dies. Baca has vivid, pleasing memories of the time with his grandparents, a period that will be the last time he lives with his family until he marries and has a wife and children of his own. At thirteen, Baca runs away from the orphanage.

After he leaves the orphanage, Baca attempts to replace the family he has lost with friends and lovers. He finds it easy to meet women as he drifts from place to place in the early 1970s.