Book review of "Mowing Leaves of Grass"

In 1977 Juan Gómez-Quiñones (QEPD), a Chicano Mexicano intellectual and civil and human rights activist, in an essay titled “On Culture” asked, “What culture and identity is needed for economic and political revival and liberation?" My answer to this question is Mowing Leaves of Grass by Matt Sedillo.

Sedillo has produced another masterful book connecting poetry making to the liberatory pedagogies of the people, namely struggle, survival, and resistance. Social movements, revolutionary ideologies, and utopian visions are the silver linings of this critical collection of poems that illuminate the awful truths of U.S. history and the bold-faced lies of its hegemonic discourses. Truth telling involves shining light on the machinations of genocide and violence aimed at people of color in the U.S. This is not a light book to fancy your illusions of freedom.

Anyone familiar with Sedillo’s rhetorical renderings knows he will say it as it is -without a pardon or gesture to respectability politics or posturing assimilationists. In poems like “Pilgrims,” “Stolen Lives, Stolen Land,” “Pedagogy of the Oppressor,” “Wagons Thread,” and “Once upon a Go Back to Mexico,” Sedillo aims his spear directly at capitalism and its associated “American” mythologizing - democratizing pilgrims, founding fathers, yeoman farmers, civil war constructionists, liberating jingoists, entrepreneurial expansionists and captains of industry. These artificial cultural archetypes undergird racist, sexist, classist, homophobic, and xenophobic tropes supporting policies and actions that reduce the life chances of Indigenous, African, Asian, Middle Eastern descent peoples, women and LGBTQI folks. Assimilation and integration are also a dead end.

Sedillo ties together the wrecking balls of settler colonialism, the miseducation of communities of color, and the making of the prison and immigrant industrial complexes. Read “Ernie,” “Here is a Nation,” and “Kingdom of Cages” for condemnations of brutal state violence. Beautiful lives and souls are stolen, stamped out, and lost in the long stretched out line of settler colonialism. Mowing’s critical narratives are what our youth and communities of color need not the pandering stories of American dreaming and multicultural fantasizing. The poet urges us to do something about it.

Without a doubt, love is an undercurrent throughout the book. Sedillo proclaims his love of community and people in “Defend the Eastside,” “El Sereno,” and “La Reina.” The heightened language throughout the collection emphasizes anger and injustice but the love of people is the driving spirit of the book. The brilliant soulful soliloquies for justice and liberation align with the critical imperatives of Ethnic Studies. Sedillo offers an ode to the survival of peoples intended to be exterminated, silenced, marginalized or locked away in the prisons of modern progress. This is a wake up call for radical revolutionary politics where oppressed and working class communities are recognized, heralded, and liberated from the burdens and authorial dictates of global capitalism.

In the summer of 2020, Dr. Juan Gómez-Quiñones and I set out to write a book review of Mowing Leaves of Grass. He believed the book should be widely adopted in educational classrooms because of the poet’s ability to deliver sharp and compelling cadences and content. How do we synthesize over 500 years of history to explain why Chicanas and Chicanos identify as such and what lessons do their conflictive cultural moorings say to them.

I conclude where I left off with the farsighted words of cultural theorist Juan Gómez-Quiñones. “Culture is historically derived, fluid, composed of positive and negative aspects, and is malleable to conscious action. In domination and resistance to domination, culture is of salient importance. It is inseparably interrelated to the life of a people and their struggle.” Accordingly, Sedillo does not stop at cultural theorizing. Each poem ends with a declaration, a real declaration of freedom and justice, one people can believe in--a new day rising!