Book Review: “American Orphan”
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We feel pain and indignation for the mounting evidence of unmarked graves near former residential schools for Indigenous children in Canada, and the abuse and disdain perpetrated against these innocents and their native communities. It was nothing more than the latest example of unjust and criminal treatment that native communities have received for millennia, this time execrable in its deepest dimension.
At a time when news reports are filled with the suffering of minors unaccompanied by—or stolen away from—loving parents, Jimmy Santiago Baca’s latest novel, “American Orphan,” is a powerful denunciation of orphanages and the U.S. juvenile justice system that manages the lives of countless children and youth in this country—many of them Latinos.
Fast paced and filled with irony and dark humor, “American Orphan” tells the story of Orlando Lucero, nicknamed ghost boy. Orlando is the product of a vicious mother and a drunken father who abandons him and his brother. Both children end up in a Catholic orphanage run by a pedophile priest and nuns who assist the priest in his child abuse. Orlando’s brother is raped repeatedly by the priest, who makes him his favorite among the hundreds of children. Later the brothers are separated and sent to different houses. Orlando is temporarily adopted and later sent back to the orphanage.
With a mischievous and conversational style, Santiago Baca tells the story of this child who spends half his early years in an orphanage and later, until he is 20-years-old, in a juvenile correctional facility, where he was sent after being convicted of a minor crime without the benefit of a defense attorney, a trial, or witnesses. Orlando eventually survives not only the pedophile priests, the abusive nuns, and the bullies who always abound; he escapes to live free of a system based on repression, beatings, punishment, and rape. Orlando’s brother, however, ends up despising himself and becoming a drug addict.
“There are only two things I’am afraid in this world. One is the court system, specially as a Chicano. The second is being forgotten in the correctional system, like some of the immigrant kids…”
At one point during his stay with the Denver Youth Authority for smuggling marijuana, Orlando engages in conversation through letters with Lila, a slightly older woman who motivates him to read and write more. Soon Orlando begins to write about his sexual fantasies, which turn into poems. He falls in love, a feeling that is new to him. When he gets out of jail, he gets together with Lila and turns into another person, though it is difficult for him after a life of alienation and confinement. For the first time he knows what it’s like to have pajamas, a kitchen where you can sit down to eat, and a private bathroom, where you can close the door and bathe without prying eyes and perpetual vigilance. At times with crude descriptions but also sublime and poetic ones, Jimmy Santiago Baca suggests that love and poetry can save a person.
Orlando becomes a writer, publishes his first book of poetry that allows him to transcend the loneliness, depression, and horror of being an orphan. The book explores the harshness of orphanhood, the great existential crisis that knowing oneself entails, the effects of child abuse, but also the power of writing.
Jimmy Santiago Baca is an award-winning writer and author of more than 30 books that have been translated into different languages, some of his texts have even been made into movies.
“American Orphan” by Jimmy Santiago Baca. Ed. Arte Público Press, 2021
—Octavio Lasañe
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