In Colorado My Father Scoured and Stacked Dishes

Content Warning: This section of the guide contains references to racism.

The premise of the poem appears straightforward: A grown son reflects on his father, who came to the United States from Mexico without authorization in search of the American Dream. The grown son wants to understand his father’s life, piecing together fragmented memories of a man who was reserved and stoic, keeping his deepest emotions reined in. Through painful and honest recollections, the son learns lessons about life as an outsider in a foreign and often hostile land.

The poem’s structure mirrors the fluid and fragmented nature of memory. Written in a free-flowing, stream-of-consciousness style, it blends Spanish and English to reflect the son’s bilingual upbringing. The memories are presented without a clear chronological order, unfolding as spare and vivid images. The movement of one memory to the next reflects the nomadic life the son experienced as the child of a migrant worker. The structure also breaks traditional poetic conventions; for example, the title serves as the poem’s opening line, and couplets occasionally flow into one another, suggesting instability and movement. 

The poem opens with an image of the father cleaning stacks of dishes at a Tex-Mex restaurant in Colorado—a monotonous and unrewarding job. His coworkers do not care enough about his humanity to learn his name and opt rather to give him a degrading nickname, “Jalapeño” (Line 2), highlighting the racism he faced. 

That image moves then to a moment when the son asked his father for a goldfish, a simple request that, as an adult, the son recognizes as impossible. Pets symbolize home and stability—luxuries his father’s transient life could not provide. The father’s sarcastic response—suggesting he spit phlegm into a glass of water (Line 4)—reflects his bitterness about not being able to offer his son even this modest request. 

The next memory recalls the father, drunk at dinner, cryptically saying, “Jesus wasn’t a snowman” (Line 6). In mocking the Nativity narrative—Jesus was not born in December, he was no snowman—the father rejects the Christianity imposed on Mexican culture during colonization, which the father associates with the oppressive American culture that dehumanizes him. As the word “Sangrón” (Line 5) on his belt suggests, he feels like an outcast, an annoyance, in a country that reduces him to the racist stereotypes of “Beaner” (Line 25) and “Greaser” (Line 25). In the poem and in the US, the father is nameless. 

The man then recalls a night when, sleeping with his father in an Arizona cactus grove, he awoke to find his father’s thumb in his mouth, suggesting the imposition of silence, how his father has endured a life of indignity knowing he cannot complain. The father whispers a Mexican adage: “¿No qué no tronobas, pistolita?” (Lines 14-15), which translates to “Little pistol, you are not thunder.” The adage suggests stoic surrender: There is no point, the father tells his son, to resist what you will ultimately have to do. 

A more sentimental yet ironic memory follows: the father, then picking apples in Oregon, playing his guitar and singing Mexican ballads around a campfire with fellow migrant workers. Despite being far from his homeland and working in a country rife with xenophobia, the music reflects his enduring connection to his roots. The speaker juxtaposes this image with the memory of his father being smuggled into the US in the trunk of a car, a painful reminder of his dehumanizing experiences as an unauthorized immigrant.

The father’s admission, while drunk, that “[t]he heart can only be broken / once, like a window” (Lines 26-27), reveals the father’s own broken spirit, never to be restored. It is wisdom that tells the young boy not to live in expectation of hope or to anticipate emotional recovery. Yet, the father’s belt buckle, depicting the eagle and snake emblem from the Mexican flag, serves as a reminder of resilience and heritage, symbolizing the strength of the Aztec empire and the resistance of Mexican culture. 

The father’s years of flight, tolerating racist slurs, working menial jobs to provide for his son, left him old before his time, suggested by his trembling hands (Line 29) and by his gallows humor. He jokes bitterly that everyone, from Bugs Bunny to César Chávez, wanted him deported.

In the end, the speaker acknowledges that despite all the emotional distance he feels from his father, he is his father’s son. Declaring, “I am an Illegal-American” (Line 12), he acknowledges his identity as shaped by his father’s legacy. That connection is suggested in the closing lines when the son has finally grown into his father’s old work shirt. As a child, the shirt hung awkwardly on him, earning him the nickname “Scarecrow” (Line 19). Now grown, he finds himself caught between two worlds: the homeland he does not know and the adopted country where he does not feel at home.