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.