Emplumada

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.

“...remembering that voice

like his dead baby sister’s,

remembering his father’s drunken

kicking that had pushed her into birth” [3]

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” [3]

The poem "Meeting Mescalito at Oak Hill Cemetery" alludes to abuse. The poem describes the life of a sixteen-year-old girl trying to escape an abusive household. She refers to an abusive stepfather in the lines

"...locked my bedroom

door against the stepfather".[5]

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”.[1] 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.” [1]

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”.[1] 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”.[2]

Language becomes a source of both vigor and fragility, in that it grants her the ability to communicate, but it also connects her to her Chicana identity. This duality of language finds its crest in the poems “Barco de refugiados” and “Refugee Ship” which exist side by side in the work. Some critics find strength for the protagonist in her use of language. Seator writes, “Language is the linear progression of her history giving her more than a possibility of being. Language is a way of becoming."[1] While other critics find it to be a subjugator, “The worst tool of oppression, in Emplumada, appears to be language,” writes Scheidegger. She attributes language to “traumatic memories” and cites the protagonist's lack of words, manifested in intralinear spaces.[4]