The Contract Says: We’d Like the Conversation to Be Bilingual

“Scene from the Movie GIANT” by Tino Villanueva (1993)

The titular poem from Tino Villanueva’s collection, Scene from the Movie GIANT (1993) critiques Hollywood’s depiction of Mexican Americans, exposing the deeply racist stereotypes lobbied against the Latinx community within popular media. The poem depicts a 14-year-old boy watching the 1956 blockbuster film Giant, an American western film starring Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor. On the surface, the film portrays the rise of the newly rich oil barons and subsequent fall of the cattle aristocracy in the American West. However, it is also a film riddled with racist stereotypes. Villanueva uses the image of the boy, and his Mexican American identity, to expose how damaging racist portrayals are to minority communities. Villanueva’s poetry grapples with the same representational and identity politics found within Ada Limón’s “The Contract Says: We’d Like the Conversation to be Bilingual,” exposing that racial tokenism is not merely a contemporary issue but rather a deep-rooted problem in American history.

“My Spanish” by Melissa Lozada-Oliva (2017)

Guatemalan-Colombian American poet Melissa Lozada-Oliva published the poem, “My Spanish,” in her debut collection of poetry, Peluda (2017). “My Spanish” expresses the struggle of being Latinx and not being able to speak Spanish.