Character Analysis Of Jimmy Santiago Baca In A Place To Stand

In the novel A Place to Stand, Jimmy Santiago Baca goes through many difficult hardships in his life that land him in prison for many years, but in the end, it ultimately worked out in his favor because he is now well-known for his poetry and screenplays and have won many prestigious awards on top of that. Throughout the novel, he deals with many issues that include his family and how he learns to forgive not only himself but his family as well and the unconditional love that he has for them that has made him the man he is today. His family played a huge role in why the way he was. His family never gave him the time of day and made it seem like he never existed to them. Jimmy wanted to feel wanted from his family, especially his mother

His mother was embarrassed by her children and wanted climb the social status with Richard quickly and so she left Jimmy and his siblings in the care of the grandparents, while she took off to start a whole new life that she had dreamt of. Once Jimmy had gathered enough courage to finally go and meet his mother again after all these years, he was surprised that she had really gone on with her life without him; “When the door opened and my still-attractive mother looked from me to the two children clinging to her, she introduced me to them as a friend, shattering the hope that I’d allowed to grow in my heart” (Baca 44). After the awkward encounter, Jimmy had with his mother; he knew he would have to go on with his life without his mother and he was devastated by

“After my first son Antonio, was born in 1983, my mother came back into my life. I was thirty-one and I hadn’t seen her since the brief encounter shortly before going to prison” (Baca 259). His mother wanted to start over again and come back to the familiarity that she had once known and leave her current lifestyle and come back to the one she had originally had and just start over from scratch, she had questions for Jimmy as Jimmy had questions for her and that they could just sit down and relearn who the other person was. Unfortunately, Jimmy’s mother had passed away in an unexpected away. Jimmy’s brother Mieyo took her death the worst because they had just reconnected together and he was happier than Jimmy had ever seen him as. Mieyo went back to drinking and he to passed away in an unfortunate way too. Jimmy was utterly shocked, “the three most important people in my life, with no linguistic skill to express themselves. They lived in shame. They lived with guilt” (Baca