One of the basic premises of the poem is gleaned form the title of the poem. A poem dedicated to the dead Californios might bring to mind the life and death of the Californios, or maybe what they left behind.
The first two stanzas take a look at the life of the Californios and the images that run in the narrator's mind when she looks at the land that they inhabited. The first stanza brings images and uses diction about birth, death and parents. "Cesarean" brings images of a life brought in a painful and slightly unnatural manner. What is it that Cervantes implies by using "cesarean" to describe the growth of the cities along the freeways? What is more, she calls the city of this method a "bastard child", possibly, an unwanted child. So, these cities that the Californios have inhabited, and by relation, the lives of the inhabitants, living in the "fertile dust", what statement that she makes? I suppose that the cities were unsupported, grew by themselves without the help of others. These cities grew independent but were unable to survive without the help of an overarching government. They were born of the earth but have no father to call their own. If the earth, the opportunity presented by the land. The father only precipitated events to cause these cities to spring up but offered up no way for the cities to continue their existences.
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