Jimmy Santiago Baca had little to live for when he entered Arizona State Prison, yet beyond the rage and desperation he found a new center – the quiet strength of poetry – and he blazed its trail with a fire that still burns today.
Told through extensive interviews with Jimmy, his family, friends and peers, A Place to Stand follows Jimmy’s path from Estancia, New Mexico – where he lived with his indigenous grandparents – through childhood abandonment, adolescent drug dealing and a subsequent 5-year narcotics sentence at Arizona State Prison in Florence, one of the most violent prisons in the country.
Brutalized by the inhumanity of his incarceration, Jimmy survived by exploring deep within, discovering poetry at his soul’s core. Through the life changing capacity of poetry, writing and arts, he stepped away from the violence and negativity around him, healing the wounds of his childhood and opening him to a new future.
Jimmy’s extraordinary life is both inspiring and haunting, simultaneously an indictment of our current criminal justice system and a model of the potential for human transformation.
A Place to Stand is inspired by Jimmy’s memoir of the same name, which has been called “elegant and gripping” (The Los Angeles Times) and “an astonishing narrative that affirms the triumph of the human spirit” (The Arizona Daily Star). It explores the life and mind of a man whose early life was dominated by sadness, rejection, anger and pain, a man who embraced language as a balm for his battered spirit, a man who – through the power of poetry – finally found his place to stand.
This film is being shown as part of The Resilience Conference, May 11-13, 2016 in Bozeman, MT at the MSU-SUB. The films are included in the conference registration fee of $70 ($100 after May 1); the conference is open to the general public. Non-conference attendees may attend the film by purchasing a ticket (in advance or at the door) for either film. PLEASE NOTE: There is limited space for the film Paper Tigers on Wednesday, May 11th at 6:30pm in the Procrastinator Theater (MSU-SUB) and priority will be given to conference attendees. The film, A Place to Stand, will be shown in a larger venue on Thursday, May 12th at 6:15pm in Ballroom A (MSU-SUB). We do not anticipate running out of seats for this film showing.
Please click here for more information about The Resilience Conference.
Gallatin Early Childhood Community Council (ECCC) is one of several core initiatives of Greater Gallatin United Way (GGUW) located in Bozeman, Montana. It is a community-wide collaborative effort to promote thriving children from birth through age eight. Gallatin ECCC provides leadership to community partners with the goal of creating an efficient, effective and comprehensive system of early childhood services in the Greater Gallatin area to ensure that every child has a healthy and enriched beginning. Gallatin ECCC serves as the Best Beginnings Community Coalition for southwestern Montana and is funded in part by the Montana Children's Trust Fund.