Alumna takes concept of poetic justice literally

Alumna takes concept of poetic justice literally

BY DAVID MEDINA
Special to the Rice News

Sarah Cortez ’72 puts on her bulletproof vest. The custom-fit garment
covers every inch of her torso, and in spite of the discomfort
it produces, especially in 100-degree Texas weather, Cortez,
a deputy constable in northeast Harris County, lauds the
lifesaver.

Cortez loves
her vest so much that she has written a poem in its honor.
In “Ode to Body Armor,” she beseeches the vest
as if it were a guardian angel to protect her: “Sturdy,
lightweight, space-age Kevlar/miracle of modern technological
advancements/mysterious fusion of high tenacity fibers encircling/my
heart, lungs, and guts. Protect me against/the bullets of
those who wish to kill me …”

With her vest,
her blue and brown uniform, her close-cropped hair and her
authoritative demeanor, Cortez looks like an ordinary cop.
But she is not. Not only is she Hispanic and female, but
what really sets her apart is that underneath that hard
shell lies a sensitive soul who can write poetry like few
can in the world of law enforcement.

“There are
a lot of people who write poetry about being a police officer,
but they are not poets,” says Nicolás Kanellos,
director of Arte Público Press. “Sarah Cortez
is a poet first, and because of her talents she is able
to capture the insights of the unknown culture of the inner
city and particularly of the police work and the mind-set
of a police person.”

Her book, “Undressing
a Cop,” was released this September to many favorable
reviews. Kirkus Reviews praised Cortez for writing “convincingly
on the charged topics of lust, fear and home.” Latina
Magazine called it a “dazzling collection” of
poetic works that leaves you “panting for more.”

Some of the poems
that appear in the book previously were honored with the
1999 Texas PEN Award for Poetry. “What the Texas PEN
organization must have recognized as unique are the different
worlds Cortez inhabits as Chicana, woman, artist, police
officer and community activist,” says José Aranda,
associate professor of English at Rice. “Her poetry
is replete with a certain steely naturalism of these worlds.”

Many of Cortez’s
poems talk about the hardships of a being a cop—officers
getting shot, officers getting killed, officers working
a bloody traffic accident—themes little explored by
poets. “You hear about the humanizing of the victim,
but you never hear about the humanizing of the police,”
says novelist Tony Diaz, founder of Nuestra Palabra, a Houston
literary group for Latino writers. “She got her voice
in a field that is pretty much untouched.”

Her lyrical poems
also explore her Mexican roots and depict the pleasures
of physical love. “They are not written for the sake
of tantalization,” explains Cortez. For example, the
title poem of her recent book is about how police officers
can become emotionally closed after years of seeing the
dark side of humanity.

Writing poetry
is the latest development in Cortez’s varied career.
Her three degrees—a bachelor of arts in psychology
and religion from Rice, a master’s in classical studies
from the University of Texas and a master’s in accounting
from the University of Houston—allowed Cortez to pursue
several different professions. She was a teacher at St.
Agnes Academy, a tax accountant for Arthur Anderson, an
employee-benefits consultant for Buck Consultants and a
police officer.

But for Cortez,
who is 50, being a poet always was in her heart. The Houston
native was in second grade when she decided to be a writer.
At 12, that dream dissipated after she saw a picture of
Ernest Hemingway in scruffy clothes, which made her think
that all writers were doomed to poverty.

She graduated
from high school in 1968, a year of social unrest in the
nation, but Cortez says she was oblivious to all of that
because she lived in a very protective family environment. “I was very naïve, very innocent,” she says.

At Rice, she
became interested in comparative mythology thanks to Thomas
McEvilley, a professor of art and art history. “His
classes inspired me to want to learn more,” Cortez
says. She taught herself ancient Greek and then pursued
a master’s in classical studies at the University of
Washington in Seattle before she transferred to The University
of Texas, graduating in 1979.

She returned
to Houston and worked for two years at St. Agnes Academy,
where she taught Latin and English and coached soccer. Though
she loved teaching, the pay was too low, she says, which
prompted her to seek a more lucrative profession. After
she received her master’s in accounting in 1981, Cortez
worked for Arthur Anderson for three years. She then moved
to a smaller firm, but realized that accounting was not
for her. She switched to employee benefits and worked for
several years for Buck Consultants until she was laid off.

During this
time, Cortez was actively involved with her civic organization
in trying to stop sexually oriented businesses from proliferating.
Working with Houston police officers in combating the problem,
Cortez became fascinated with policing and decided to try
her hand in law enforcement.

“I also
was getting tired of moving papers,” explains Cortez.
“For 14 years I had been sitting behind a desk, and
I wanted something different.” Her decision to become
a police officer cost her personally. Her husband, Cortez
says, was so against the idea that it caused the couple
to divorce. Her parents, however, were very supportive.

Cortez knew
she was taking a big risk. She was 41 and would be competing
against much younger students in the police academy. She
also was leaving a successful career to enter one that offered
no promises. Cortez graduated in 1993 from the University
of Houston Criminal Justice Center and got her first job
as a police officer at the University of Houston. After
a year, she was promoted to corporal and began training
rookies and conducting crime-prevention programs in addition
to her law enforcement duties.

In 1998, she
joined the Office of the Harris County Constables, Precinct
Four. She now handles traffic stops, sexual assault cases,
barking dogs and crime-prevention programs.

As Cortez has
found out, being a cop is not easy. It takes a lot of physical
and psychological stamina to deal with sexual assault cases
and traffic stops. Cortez remembers one case in which she
had to work eight straight hours without eating, resting
or going to the bathroom while trying to get medical evidence
and facts from people who were lying or were afraid to talk
about the victim of a sexual assault.

“There
is a wide range of human activity, and if it is not illegal,
most of the time I can’t do anything about it,”
she explains. “I am not a marriage counselor or a priest.”

But she is on
a mission to make the streets safer. She looks forward to
putting on the uniform and patrolling the northeast Harris
County neighborhoods. “To me the ultimate challenge
of police work is that you have to be able to walk into
any situation and know immediately how to handle it and
keep everyone safe, including yourself, and do it in a legal
way,” she says.

While working
as a police officer, Cortez returned to her childhood dream
of being a writer. She began by writing personal essays,
and she managed to get a few published in a literary magazine.
When her marriage was falling apart, she attempted to write
fiction, she says, but poetry came out instead.

In 1995, she
was accepted to attend a summer writing workshop for women
in the Oregon wilderness. Texas poet Naomi Shihab Nye, a
teacher in the program, said she was having a hard time
trying to select the members for the class when she came
across Cortez’s poems.

“Boom!—there
came Sarah,” writes Shihab Nye in the forward of “Undressing
a Cop.” “Her poems, with their tough muscles,
neat lines and rippling visceral imagery, woke me right
up. It was not only the rarity of police-world imagery in
her poems that captured me, or the tantalizing, edgy sexiness
discovered late at night, but an organic sense of narrative,
a gripping rightness in how she shaped and layered a vivid
scene. Many of her scenes made an eerie underworld feel
very near.”

Cortez writes
about the two things that fascinate her more than anything
in life: sex and death. “Those are two places where
people of the Western culture allow ourselves to experience
mystery,” explains Cortez. “Mystery is essential
in our lives. We all have an innate need for mystery and
also an innate need to understand it.”

While readers
might assume that the poems are autobiographical, Cortez
says that most are not. She says the poem’s voice is
not always the writer’s and that she writes about cultural
experiences. “Sometimes I might be telling a story
that happened to another female,” she explains. “I
am always looking for the truth of the poem. I am always
reaching for that story under the story.”

Glimpses of
her own story, however, are seen in certain poems, especially
those that long for her cultural heritage, an aspect of
her life that she neglected for many years. “I was
raised to be white,” she says. “I grew up in a
white neighborhood and went to schools that were predominantly
white.” Cortez says she “felt really stupid”
in her effort to recover her past, because she doesn’t
speak Spanish. Searching for a way to reconcile her inner
conflict, she audited a Chicano literature course at Rice.
Aranda told her not worry about her linguistics shortcomings.
“He told me that as long as I had Mexican blood, my
roots always would be Mexican.”

Success in writing
has brought demands on Cortez for more writing, and policing
has taken a back seat. She is working part time as a cop
and devoting more time to writing and teaching. She recently
was appointed for a second year as a visiting scholar at
the University of Houston’s Center for Mexican-American
Studies, where she is teaching a creative writing course
and completing a book about childhood. She is working on
a first novel and editing an anthology of her students’ work.

Her latest job
change is just one more chapter in a long and varied career,
and Cortez relishes the many transformations of her life. “I learned many valuable things in each one of them,” she says.

“It’s
a path. Picking something and staying with it—a career,
a hobby, a relationship—is a spiritual journey. The
most important thing is what you learn by sticking to it.” Her second-grade dream of being a writer took many detours,
but it arrived well-protected, shielded by a bulletproof
vest.

— David
Medina is a senior editor for the Sallyport and the minority
affairs director.