Take the Tortillas Out of Your Poetry

“Take the Tortillas Out of Your Poetry” is a standard argumentative essay attempting to persuade readers that censorship, specifically of diverse voices, hinders the growth of both a reader and the United States as a nation full of multicultural communities. In addition to the personal anecdotes he weaves into his arguments, Anaya relies on binaries and symbolism to make an abstract concept like censorship more tangible.

To draw the reader into his argument, Anaya starts his essay by reflecting on his childhood experiences of feeling enchanted by his local library’s array of books. This appeal to nostalgia might compel readers who share similar memories. At the same time, he slyly integrates Rushdie into the conversation by comparing his own childhood in Eastern New Mexico to Rushdie’s in India—a parallel suggesting that reading is a universal pathway to knowledge. Moreover, at the time of the essay’s publication, news media had publicized the banning of Rushdie’s books in various countries around the world. The reference to Rushdie therefore sets the stage for the essay’s larger argument, that against censorship.

Anaya’s commentary arrives through personal anecdotes. According to Anaya, his friend’s inability to procure a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts evinces the publishing industry’s suppression of Chicano writing that incorporates certain cultural elements, such as bilingualism and local folklore and history. Anaya then moves from his friend’s experience to his own, in which his most known work, Bless me, Ultima, was burned by school board members. This transition toward more personal anecdotes creates an increasing intimacy that engages the reader. Moreover, the type of censorship intensifies, from his friend’s self-imposed censorship to that imposed by a group of people. The sense of escalation has the rhetorical purpose of retaining the reader’s interest; it could also galvanize readers who see the extent of censorship in their own country.

Because Anaya is commenting on censorship as it pertains to Chicano literature, he discusses discrimination against Mexican Americans. The discrimination informs their art—and this art, often deemed “too political” by mainstream audiences, reflects their history. The author recalls this history to talk about multiculturalism’s plight in the United States; for him, to upend censorship is to allow different cultural groups to employ their own forms of expression. He refers to these forms of expression as “tortillas,” symbolic shorthand for elements specific to Chicano culture. Anaya also uses a conditional argument to illustrate the negative aspects of censorship as well as the benefits of multiculturalism: Multiculturalism allows groups to express themselves on their own terms while readers from other groups can learn more about other cultures; so if censorship stymies these benefits, then the reader is left with no choice but to view censorship in a negative light.

Consequently, the essay ties censorship to a rejection of multiculturalism. Publishers continue to frustrate diversity by telling Chicano authors what they can and cannot write about. Anaya suggests that censorship is dire: One New York magazine advertisement even employed a false binary that equates multiculturalism to a “barbaric” threat to civilization. The media employs binaries because they are simple to understand, but that simplicity is often reductive. For example, the distinction between “good” and “bad” is usually complex and can shift across societies. Similarly, it is oversimplistic to assert that anything outside the dominant culture is antithetical to “civilization.” Anaya is worried by how such false binaries can flourish in society, and he hopes readers will share in his distress. Therefore, he appeals to the reader’s emotions, particularly fear and concern. He states, “Censors, I have concluded, are afraid of our liberation. Censorship is un-American, but the censor keeps telling you it’s the American way” (72); with this, he intends to tap into readers’ fear and connect it to a sense of democratic patriotism, particularly a commitment to the freedom of expression protected by the first amendment. This un-American/American concept is also a binary, but one that works in Anaya’s favor to stoke readers’ patriotism and rally them against censorship.

Presumably now with the reader’s allyship, Anaya’s final call to action is for mainstream society to embrace the emancipatory possibilities of multiculturalism: “Our distinct cultures nourish each one of us, and as we know more and more about the art and literature of the different cultures, we become freer and freer” (72). Anaya returns to two themes in his concluding thought: books as nourishment, and books as liberation. In the former, Anaya again plays off of the symbol of tortillas, reaffirming the idea that books are spiritual sustenance as tortillas are physical sustenance. He urges writers not to take the “tortillas” out of their writing because those cultural nuances (street language, bilingualism, folklore, history) are what create a culture’s identity and its literature. In the latter, having access to books by different groups (and to all their “tortillas”) continues to be a pathway to knowledge and, therefore, to freedom. Because the reader understands the importance of food at a fundamental level, they can understand literature’s role in nurturing the mind. The tortilla symbol uses a simple logic to convince readers that censorship is unjustifiable.