When There Were Ghosts

The poem’s 12 stanzas of couplets (two lines each) allow the images to be developed in multiple stanzas. This creates the sensation of the stanzas bleeding into one another like the projected movie images on the screen and cigarette smoke. The arrangement of the 24 lines in this way causes the poem’s form to mirror its content.

Ríos’s poems are somewhat narrative—they tell a story. The first stanza sets the scene of the story he tells about his childhood. He grew up in Nogales, Arizona, which borders a Mexican town of the same name, in the 1950s and ‘60s. Traveling between the border of the Mexican town and the Arizona town is reflected in the structure of stanzas as well as in their content. The town’s dual national identity—American and Mexican—is reflected in how each stanza contains two lines (couplets). The content of all the stanzas develops the image of the projected movie being both in the smoke and on the screen. This doubling of the movie’s projection is like the doubling of the town’s name across the border. There is the American side of the town and “the Mexico side” (Line 1) of the town. This introduces the theme of Living in Borderlands.

In addition to the period and the geographical location, the speaker uses the first stanza to introduce the setting: movie theaters. He establishes that movie theaters were a common sight in these towns: “There were movie houses everywhere” (Line 2). The experience that the speaker goes on to describe in the rest of the poem is one that is shared by many people. The common sight of movie theaters introduces the theme of Blended Identity.

In the second stanza, the speaker develops the idea of time. The poem is set in the past. The period being described, the 1950s and ‘60s, is distinguished from the date of publication—the 2010s—by laws and practices. Legally speaking, smoking had been generally banned from theaters by the 2000s. This means the culture of the theater, or the practice of attending the theater, has changed. The speaker says, “[F]or the longest time people could smoke” (Line 3), indicating that they were once permitted to smoke in theaters in the past, but they generally can’t in the present. The speaker’s Blended Identity can be seen in how the past is still alive for him hauntologically in the memories he shares in the present moment. In other words, the culture of the past is a ghost in the speaker’s present life.

In the third stanza, the speaker establishes how the smoke in the theaters changed the viewing experience. The film, run through a projector, can be seen “[o]n the screen and in the air both” (Line 6). This is due to how the cigarette “smoke rose” (Line 5) and filled the theater. The splitting of the movie in this way develops the theme of Living in Borderlands. Just as the town is geographically projected across national borders, the movie is projected across the border of the screen and the air. The movie “told itself” (Line 5), just as the speaker tells the reader about the past. The audience of the theater can be connected to the audience of the poem. The hauntology of the movie is that it is a film that features actors who are dead in a fictionalization of the past, yet it still haunts the speaker’s life as a memory. In other words, the past movie theater experience is a ghost in his present.

The fourth stanza develops the imagery of the movie theater equipment. The projection equipment symbolizes how national identity is projected. National borders are artificial lines created by governments, breaking up landmasses arbitrarily. The “wavering mist of the cigarettes” (Line 8) not only provides a literal description of how the theater looked but also speaks to how national borders are not real. They are insubstantial like mist and, hauntologically, ghosts. They exist as political structures and signage—the lines on maps are not drawn on the ground. This develops the theme of Living in Borderlands.

The fifth stanza focuses on the doubled image rather than what is producing it. The projection—a movie—is made up of a story and characters. The image being doubled means that “every story was two stories” (Line 9). There can be different narratives across borders, which develops the theme of Living in Borderlands. The characters in the movies are also doubled, and the speaker refers to a character’s double as “its ghost” (Line 10). This repeats a key word from the title, adding an element of magical realism. Like the name of the town itself, people within the towns can have the same names across the border. America is haunted by its treatment of people migrating across the Mexican border and by its colonial past—movie characters becoming ghosts in the smoke represents America’s hauntology.

In the sixth stanza, the speaker further develops the idea of time. He says, “Looking up we knew what would happen next” (Line 11). Looking in the smoke, which is closer to the projector, the image appears slightly before it appears on the screen, which is further from the projector. This emphasis of this slight delay develops the theme of Blended Identity. The storyteller—the poet—knows what is going to happen before it does in the story he tells. He is a blending of the past (that he describes) with the present (the poet currently telling the story). The audience in the movie theater is compared to the poet in their ability to see into the future of the story. Blended Identity can be seen in the use of “we” (Line 11): The audience goes on to be part of the movie within the poem, and the poet includes his audience as a part of the experience outside the poem (or meta-textually).

The sixth and seventh stanzas are enjambed, which means that a sentence that begins in the sixth stanza is completed in the seventh. There is both a line break and stanza break in “as if the movie were dreaming / itself” (Lines 12-13). This is also the very center of the 24-line poem, putting these lines in the position of mirroring the entire poem. This line, “dreaming / itself” (Lines 12-13), then can apply to the movie as well as the poem.

The seventh stanza goes on to develop the theme of Blended Identity. Again, the speaker uses the pronoun “we” (Line 13) to emphasize how the movie theater audience was part of the movie, blended with it, rather than outside of it. The smoke, showing a glimpse into the future, is the vehicle by which the audience blends with the movie: “[W]e were part of it [...] not just the audience” (Lines 13-14). The people watching the movie are given the perspective of being part of its creation, not simply its consumer. This develops the theme of Living in Borderlands by showing that borders are permeable and that people are still people on both sides of a border. This gently alludes to the politics regarding immigration.

In the eighth and ninth stanzas, the speaker turns from the story to the characters. Characters are portrayed by actors. While actors are hired for their specific looks, the image projected into the smoke is distorted, so the faces are less distinct. The speaker notes how the faces of the actors are “hard to make out exactly” (Line 16). The blurriness of the images is how the famous actors can look “a little like” (Line 18) the speaker’s relatives. The comparisons between movie stars—beautiful strangers—and the familiar and familial figures of the speaker’s aunt and uncle emphasize the theme of Blended Identity.

Stanza 10 connects the resemblance of the speaker’s relatives to the Blended Identity of the movie’s audience. He says, “And so they were, and so were we all in the movies” (Line 19). The repetition of the pronoun “we,” as well as the new emphasis of “all,” demonstrates the blending of identity here. To further develop his experience, the speaker then turns to the singular pronoun in “I remember it” (Line 20). The poet is both the collective audience (part of a collective identity) and a specific individual, defined by the limits of their sensory perception. However, the list of sensory perceptions is enjambed across Stanzas 10 and 11. The smell and taste of “[p]opcorn” (Line 20) as well as the tactical sensation of “gum on the floor” (Line 21) are familiar to many people.

In Stanza 11, the speaker returns to the collective pronoun in “we ourselves” (Line 22). This builds upon the “we all” (Line 19) in Stanza 10. The latter is an encompassing statement—we all can be read as everyone. Stanza 11 takes this a step further: “We ourselves” (Line 22, emphasis added) is a way of emphasizing how the self is identified through the collective—identity formation is something that happens in groups. Identity reflects the blending of individuals into wholes, as the singular pronouns I/my are surrounded by the plural we/our. The “we ourselves” (Line 24) is repeated in the final line of the poem, driving home the importance of this point—the self is part of a larger group, and this group forms who we are.