A Place to Stand

Baca places great importance on his family and explores this theme throughout his memoir. His teenage parents are flawed and selfish people, and Baca’s mother runs away with another man when her children are young. Baca’s father, a violent alcoholic, spends the rest of his life seeking her. Without parents, the Baca children find a home with their grandparents. This arrangement is short-lived, however, and the two boys are sent to an orphanage after their grandfather dies. From the orphanage, Baca is sent to a youth detention center and eventually to a state prison. Throughout his formative years, Baca has no real home or family, and desperately longs for both. In the worst of times in prison, Baca recalls his family and home in Estancia, New Mexico. These memories become a balm to his soul, and his ability to escape into the dream world of his childhood helps him endure his prison sentence.

Baca’s memoir is, in part, a literacy narrative, so readers would naturally expect that one of the book’s primary concerns will be the narrator’s experiences with language. Once Baca begins to write letters to Harry, the acquisition of language becomes one of the work’s primary concerns.