Who doesn't enjoy indulging in great food? With all the different types of food around today there are so many things to choose from, American, Mexican, Chinese, excreta. I love indulging in some Mexican cuisine every once and a while, so when I got to read Jimmy Santiago Baca's "Green Chile" I felt my little stomach talking to me. The theme of the poem is that there is something special between grandmother and her grandson because Baca likes his red chilies but his grandmother likes those green chilies. We will be digging deeper into this poem by looking at three different elements of poetry such as symbolism, imagery, and personification.
             Baca puts quite a bit of symbolism in this poem to represent something else. Lines 14 through 34 have him talking about a green chile pepper in an erotic way, it took me a couple times reading the poem to figure this out because you don't think about erotic stuff when you are talking about your grandmother. In line 27 and 28 Baca writes, "she thrusts her blade into and cuts it open with lust." The green chile is to represent the culture because even though the grandson loves the red chile better than the green he still eats the green ones because his grandmother is trying to keep him in the culture he may have grown out of. You know that the green chile is culture because on lines 39 to 41 says, "sunburned men and woman drive rickety trucks stuffed with gunny-sacks of green chile." The red chile is a modernized Americanize stereotype of the Spanish culture; you see plastic red chilies in young couples houses hanging above the stove in their kitchen they seldom use.
             You can also see some imagery in the poem from the way the green chile is described when we meet the grandmother; you can almost taste it in your mouth. The combination of the red chile and the green chile could also make a clear image of the both sides of the Mexican flag. ...