A Place to Stand

The prologue opens with Jimmy Baca’s first encounter with prison, when he is five years old. He reveals that his mother takes him to the prison where his father Damacio Baca is being held. Baca vividly recalls the fear he felt at the sight of men crumpled in heaps inside the darkened cells.

Baca’s father reprimands his mother for bringing the boy to the prison, but despite his fear, Baca longs to stay with his father. Cecilia Baca, Jimmy’s mother, refuses to bail his father out of prison. This confinement, Baca reveals, is just one of the many times his father has been imprisoned for drunkenness or violence.

Conditions at home are difficult with Damacio Baca in prison, and the Baca children begin to sense that they may be moving soon.

Jimmy Baca says that he returns to this memory repeatedly because, as an adult, he would repeat the pattern of near continual imprisonment that he saw in his father’s life.

Baca explains that after his own incarceration, he came to feel more comfortable in prison than in the free world, where he felt alienated and inferior. Often feared because of his dark skin in a white society, Baca noticed the way others clutched their belongings in his presence. Even those charged with his education shunned him because of his Spanish accent, he says.

Despite the despair and fear he felt in prison, Baca notes that he actually found hope in prison. “Very simply,” Baca says, “I learned to read and write” (3-4).

Baca closes the prologue by identifying the audience for his memoir: his young sons. Because his own parents and grandparents kept family secrets from him, Baca wants to be certain that his children learn the truth about his life from him. He also writes, he says, for his father, who was never able to change his life.