16 pages • 32 minutes read
Gary SotoSaturday at the Canal
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1991A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Chicano Literary Movement
Soto is a prominent voice in the Chicano literary movement and in Chicano poetry, which typically addresses themes of culture and identity, as well as discrimination and the validation of Chicano/a culture in the United States. This movement emerged in the 1950s with the work of poet Rodolfo Anaya, however with the 1970s being a critical moment for the work of ethnic minorities and women in the United States, the movement gained momentum just as Soto began to publish. His early life and family background influences his writing, having grown up in a working-class Mexican American family in the 1950s and 1960s in the San Joaquin Valley. After his father died when Soto was five, his family endured financial hardship, and Soto’s experience is often reflected in his poems and writing, where he depicts the realities of his upbringing in what he has referred to as a culture of poverty. Much of his work, including “Saturday at the Canal,” explores his sociocultural perspective, partly through the eyes of a child but also with the voice of an adult revisiting these pivotal moments playing with friends, observing his community, going to school, etc. Soto’s work in particular takes on the difficult subjects of poverty, trauma, and violence specific to his life growing up in tough neighborhoods in Central California, but these themes often simultaneously intersect with the role of community and friendship – these traumas may leave scars, but they are complemented by a bittersweet camaraderie of collective experience and community.
Historical and Geographical Context
Much of Soto’s poetry provides autobiographical snapshots into his life growing up in California; “Saturday at the Canal” takes place when he is about 17 years old—around 1969. The poem juxtaposes San Francisco with the town of Fresno in California’s Central Valley; San Francisco is the idealized city that the two boys would like to escape to, which contrasts with Fresno, the dusty small town they are itching to leave. While the boys are stuck in their relatively remote and conservative town, which is powered primarily by local agriculture, big changes are taking place in San Francisco, about 180 miles away. Students were protesting the Vietnam War at San Francisco State University and the University of California at Berkeley, the Black Panther Party was a powerful force in Oakland, and hippies and flower children had left a legendary impact on the city during the 1967 “Summer of Love” as they flocked to the city’s Haight-Ashbury district. San Francisco had become a popular destination for counterculture thought, poetry, and music; bands like the Grateful Dead, The Who, the Animals, Jefferson Airplane and many others played at large festivals in and around the San Francisco Bay Area. More than just an image on the postcard, San Francisco at this time was highly symbolic both to the country at large and especially to the two teenage boys in the poem. They are painfully aware that they are wasting their time beside a canal while big changes and counterculture thinkers were shaping American culture in towns like San Francisco, which would have seemed so close and yet so far.
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By Gary Soto
