Imagine living in an environment where you and your family were seen differently than others, felt like an outsider, or didn’t fit in at all. Pretend you’re wearing your Halloween costume in April to school; people around you would make humor out of you, discriminate, and avoid you. The character in “XX” by Jimmy Santiago Baca wasn’t wearing a costume but had that feeling at some point. The poem discuses a Mexican man preparing for his death on a quiet afternoon as well as how death takes him away. The significance of this poem is death in general, the main idea of it is death as well as the past from the beginning of the poem. The topic of death in this poem could reflect how the author was feeling when he wrote this piece of literature. Continuing onto the significance of death in the poem, there are some Spanish words used in the poem. It starts out with the introduction of his ancestors, which is the past. “They’ve survived kill-dem-meskin-days, retained their humor for a good joke.” (5-6) The term ‘kill-dem-meskin-days’ means ‘kill them Mexican days’. From this we could tell he is referring to a time period where there was much discrimination towards Mexicans. However, these ancestors always look on the bright side of things which is why they still laughed at jokes to go through this tough time period. I believe that this is worth a a lot of respect for anybody that can always think of good during a bad day. After the line stated above, the poem goes on to talk about the ‘viejos’ preparing for death. The actions that they do include, “they pull their rosaries out, and put away their pictures of woman in bathing suits, they sign their names to church donor journals, tear up old phone numbers of old girlfriends in their wallets..”(10-16). We can conclude that the main character is a man since the poem talks about ‘they’ is putting away the pictures of woman in bathing suits as well as tearing up