The Immigration Project

Thanks, Ms. Johnson. You made a Difference.

2011-10-06T22:07:00.000-07:00

A Youtube campaign in August had individuals making videos thanking the teachers in their lives that made a difference. When I saw this, you were the first person I thought of, and though you are no longer here, I wanted to thank you, Ms. Johnson, the only way I know how.

In American Lit at La Salle High School my Junior year, I remember reading Richard Wright’s Native Son as a class, and how you didn’t shy away from explaining the masturbation scene to a classroom of 20+ 16 year-olds. Or how you talked to us like people. You spoke about “impotence of power” with such earnestness I couldn’t giggle, and I had to listen.

As we followed Bigger Thomas around a dark and impoverished Chicago, as we read Wright’s graphic murder scene, you posed a question to us: “What happens to a person who has never seen beauty?”

What happens to a person who isn’t allowed beauty? You asked this, and I have never stopped trying to answer your question, Ms. Johnson.

You taught me other important lessons that I have not forgotten about literature and essay writing, and you were the first person to introduce me to feminist ideas. But it is your question that follows me everyday into the classroom, and it is what I now ask my own students. It is the question I look for every time I open a book; it is what I carried with me in my pack hiking in the Arizona desert; it is what I work for every time I write.

Thank you, Ms. Johnson. You made a difference in my life.

9 Days in the Desert: A Photo Essay

2011-09-26T18:17:00.000-07:00

First two nights with no more deaths we camped out in an old convent in Tuscon, AZ

A poster from No More Deaths' WRR campaign against SB 1070

The before photo. So fresh and so clean and ready to go.

Day 1: The road to Arivaca, AZ

The road to Byrd Camp aka NMD's home base

The desert in blume

Day 2: My first water drop.

The Surban with a broken frame but a working radio

Me hiking.

We left messages on the water to let the migrants know they could trust it. We also wanted to pass on some hope.

A gila monster we found dead and turned over on the road.

Day 3: Josseline's Shrine

This marks the where the body of Josseline--a 14 year old girl traveling with her younger brother--was found by a No More Deaths volunteer after her coyote abandoned her in the desert.

Hiking among desert blossoms and underneath a blistering sun.

I love the flowers of the barrel cactus.

A breathtaking desert sunset.

Downtown Arivaca, AZ

I do believe it is hot here.

Day 4: A Migrant Trail

Me, ready to quit.

A water gallon slashed by Border Patrol. This is a common occurrence.

My Sharpie sketch of La Virgen de Guadelupe.

Montana Peak aka Hippy Mountain over looking Ruby and Ruby Lake beach.

Ruby Lake, less a lake and more a pool of green sludge, but when you haven't showered in days, you'll take it.

Refreshed and feeling good.

A virtual fence. These towers monitor hidden censors all over the desert that track migrants.

Day 5: We Reject Racism in Byrd Camp

A dead tarantula in camp.

A dead baby gopher snake that a team of ants carried under a fellow volunteers tent.

A shrine to the migrants.

Welcoming and kind instructions for migrants.

The newbies looking good in front of the Frankentent and water supply.

Day 6: Morning glory.

It's hot and dry.

Desert life aka an ant hole

A destroyed and abandoned car in the middle of nowhere

Feeling good after the "Oak Tree" water drop and hiking into a canyon

The view

A live tarantula. They tend to come out at dusk.

Day 7: Dead Man's Pass and a view of the Baboquivaris mountain range looking south.

Border Patrol are notorious for slashing water in Dead Man's

Attempting to look rugged in DM or "Gumdrop Valley"

The view of the east. It's hard not to look out and wonder who is out there, who is in need?

The port of entry at Sasabe, AZ

"The Wall"

Sleepy Sasabe

Day 8: Byrd Baylor's home

Day 9: a rainbow over my tent

Saying farewell to the desert and some fellow volunteers

One last photo to remember the violence and death that is occurring right now in our country, under our watch. Border Patrol slashed this gallon and countless others, very well knowing that people are dying from heat exhaustion and dehydration. Illegally crossing borders is not punishable by death and humanitarian aid is never a crime. No matter what your stance on immigration, let's remember that people are dying, and their only crime is dreaming of a better life for themselves and their families.

For more on Border Patrol abuses please check out A Culture of Cruelty--the extensive NMD report documenting thousands of abuses. It isn't a few bad apples; it's a culture.

9 Days in the Desert: Day 9

2011-09-07T16:35:00.000-07:00

Day 9: And Now Goodbye

Last night I volunteered to be wake-up for our final day. Wake-up can be anything from going around and knocking on people’s tents to playing an instrument or singing a song. This morning I woke up at 5:30 am. The sun was still down and the sky was navy and jeweled with a thin crescent moon glowing high above camp. I sang The Beatles’ Blackbird. As I walked figure eights around the campground and sang, “Take these sunken eyes and learn to see all your life, you were only waiting for this moment to be free,” I kept my eyes on the horizon and took note of its moment of silence and darkness just before awakening. For the first time in nine days, I felt hope like a small spark in my chest just beginning to grow. Alone in a sleeping camp with the thought of blackbirds flying, I felt the rise of something beautiful.

After one run through of Blackbird, no one woke or stirred. I took the opportunity the quiet and dark gave me and climbed up on the grey Silverado truck and waited for the sun to rise. A thunderstorm rolled from the southeast cracking lightning and threatening to come our way. The tips of sun began in the east coloring the broken clouds in shades of pink and purple, and the crescent moon still crowned the sky. Elizabeth woke up and came and joined me. We sat together on the roof of the truck. She shared a cigarette with me. We didn’t talk, but instead let silence sit between us. The smoke entered my lungs and the morning sat on my shoulders. I would be O.K. I didn’t need to build walls or fill space with noise. For once, I could just be, she and me sitting on a truck watching the desert come alive, the day begin. That was enough. That was a lot because for the first time in nine days I was present. For the first time, I gave myself permission to be alive in the desert.

By the time the sun had moved over the horizon the entire camp was up and moving about. People were pouring coffee, brushing teeth, heading to the toilet. Our last day was upon us. As I walked back to my tent to begin packing and breaking down, Winston called out, “Look a rainbow!” And there, streaked across the bright sky, an arch of colors just above my tent. This morning brought the desert a blackbird, a crescent moon, pink clouds, a navy sky, a rainbow, and now goodbye.

9 Days in the Desert: Day 8

2011-09-06T17:09:00.000-07:00

Day 8: Byrd Baylor

Today is the final day of patrol in the desert. I volunteer to stay in camp and “hold it down” with Ricardo and Mike. The Silverado’s battery is dead this morning and the Suburban’s starter is shot, so without a car Elizabeth also has to stay back in camp. The cars are always an issue. Every morning one or another has to be jumped, every afternoon one or another has a flat tire. It is a never-ending puzzle to keep cars, people, and supplies properly moving through the desert. No one in camp knows about cars. Our patient from earlier in the week, Francisco was a chauffer in Guatemala, and for a couple of days he was able to tinker with the engines. With my limited Spanish I was able to act as go between with Francisco and other volunteers. That felt good, like I was useful for something. So many times in camp I feel like I’m along for a ride. I’m placed in the back seat of the suburban, jostled around, taken out of the suburban, pointed to a trail, and then I drop water, and repeat. Too many times I feel like a visitor, like a witness, like a writer, but that isn’t the reason I came. I cam to stop writing, to take my nose out of a book, take my fingers from the keyboard and be active, do something, help.

The Spanish helps with this feeling. For too many years I have allowed others to shame me out of speaking. As a Chicana, people (other Latinos and Spanish speakers) judge me for having limited Spanish. It is a critique I’ve heard my whole life, and unfortunately, instead of practicing and speaking, I have become quiet in the face of the jeers. But now, for the first time, I feel a real need to speak Spanish and little hang up seems inconsequential when held up to the realities of the desert and even the world. This is my opportunity to be a help to someone. I can be a comfort to someone. I can communicate. I can break down a wall, a wall I built around myself because of fear. I want to break down this wall, even if it is the only one I can.

Around lunch, Elizabeth asks if I want to walk with her to Byrd Baylor’s house to feed her horses. Byrd injured herself early in the summer and has been staying in Tucson. The volunteers have been caring for her horses and keeping an eye on her house. It is across the wash that runs around the back of the camp and up a hill, and is a beautiful hand-lay stone house with many Mexican and Native American influences and art. There is a succulent garden, hammocks, a windmill, barn, old rusted out bus, and a patio with a purple and pink mural on the floor of hand prints with two cots with blankets and pillows ready for any tired traveler (people are not the only travelers she welcomes. NMD volunteers have strict instructions to leave a plank of wood in every pond and water trough in order for bees to be able to drink without drowning). Elizabeth tells me a story that when she built the house the contractor laid the foundation and took off with her money, and that she and her friends built the home by hand, brick by brick, over years. Byrd has turned into legend around camp, perhaps made bigger by her absence. I feel her presence and the sacredness of the place and feel an ache that I do not have the opportunity to meet her. In some part of my brain where my fantasies run wild I imagine she is a kindred spirit and we are friends, or at least teacher and student, and we sit on her porch over-looking her garden writing magical tails of nature, want, life, death, and celebration, working together to create a more just world, a world where everyone is allowed beauty.

The Other Way to Listen is just one example of Byrd's beautiful children's books of Native American Folktales and the desert.

9 Days in the Desert: Day 7

2011-09-05T13:29:00.000-07:00

Day 7: Dead Man and The Wall

Today I take on Dead Man’s Pass, a drop in the saddle on the south side of the Baboquivaris mountain range, with Lilly and Elizabeth, a long-term volunteer that recently broke up with her live-in girlfriend in Brooklyn to move to Tucson--I think the desert is her other woman. Lilly decides to rename Dead Man’s, Gumdrop Valley, in an attempt to make it less intimidating, and I am happy to give it a try. This is Lilly and my first hike with long-timer, Elizabeth. Lilly and I have both had a hard time physically through the week, and I warn Elizabeth of this on the drive, but she doesn’t seem bothered.

The Baboquivaris run north and south right into the Pozo Verde, a range that runs east and west and rides the border. Dead Man is an important drop because it is the western most point No More Deaths can reach without heading into the Tohono O’odham reservation where we do not have permission to go. The reservation can be the most dangerous area to cross and many people pass through Dead Man’s before heading in, so this point is our only chance to get them water. It is also a good spot because this is where people can pass through as they cross from one side of the range to the other, or as they move north over the ridge. Because it is such a well-trafficked area, BP are notorious for slashing our jugs here, and this drop has turned into a cat and mouse chase with decoys and attempts to out hike them.

Elizabeth, Lilly, and I take ten gallons up the north peak first because Elizabeth says it is the harder side, and it is best to get it over early. We find the decoy pile and walk another 100 yards up a steep, rocky path over grown with an assortment of cactus like nopales with red tunas, barrel cactus with orange sunburst flowers, tall noble saguaro, and crooked cholla. I walk slow to avoid getting stuck with white needles. Before we drop the water I draw the Virgen de Guadalupe on my three jugs. Then we walk back down to the saddle and up the south side, the “easier” side, which hugs a barbed wire fence marking the reservation border. When we don’t find any water on the trail we head back to the car for a short rest and to pick up another 10 gallons before heading up to the south side. On the 2nd trip up I am surprised by how much sweat slicks from my skin and how hard it is to breath.

“This was easier the first time,” I say feeling the pain of the climb.

“You didn’t have 3 gallons on you before,” Elizabeth informs me.

“Oh yeah.” I laugh.

“Each gallon is 8 pounds. That’s a lot of weight you’re carrying,” Elizabeth says.

“I wish you hadn’t told me that. 24 pounds sounds so much worse than three gallons.”

“Sorry.”

At the top there is a gorgeous view expanding west across the reservation and one just as spectacular expanding east. It is the closest I have been to the Baboquivari peak, loving nicknamed Babo, that overlooks the entire desert and that has been like a watcher of our work.

It feels good to be able to drop 20 gallons at Dead Man’s Pass with two other women. I feel strong. After a week of being in the desert I have conquered a fear that has tied my chest in knots for days. I defeated Dead Man’s!

From there we tried to do a hike in Pozo Verde, but there was a lightning storm. Elizabeth said it was still fruitful because she was able to route good driving directions to the area, which will make a return trip much easier.

Then we drive to Sasabe, a border ghost town with a port of entry, to see “the wall.” The wall is a red rusted fence lined with tall metal beams that dips and rises with the terrain and haunts the sleepy dilapidated town.

Divides and walls happen everyday. Around the fire pit that night, people talk about feeling a division amongst long-term volunteers and newbies. People are still coping with the stresses of the week and with caring for multiple patients. I have been making myself mad trying to talk to people, trying to relate. I try to say something funny and no one laughs. I say something sad, and people walk away. Finding someone to speak to has become just as hard as anything else out here. Elizabeth shares with me that when she returns to Tucson for a few days of rest, she has a hard time being alone. She likes to be in groups of people in order to kill the thoughts. Kill the feeling. I realize I am also scared by the silence, and I have become desperate to talk it away. We are all building walls within ourselves.

9 Days in the Desert: Day 6

2011-09-03T19:43:00.000-07:00

Day 6: Finding a Way to Feel

I returned to Jalisco’s “Oak Tree” drop with Winston and Jason to take the water we missed the day before. The area still had heavy Border Patrol, but no helicopter.

We made two trips to the “Oak Tree,” each time carrying 8 gallons on us because while scouting the area we discovered two separate and distinct trails passing under two separate oak trees—the shade and placement of which could be a good rest stop. After dropping our 16 gallons we decided to hike back into the canyon for a couple of hours and see where one trail lead. The hike was not too strenuous and no one was in a hurry. We kept a steady pace and didn’t talk much. After an hour in, we stopped at a vantage point where we could see Ruby, Montana peak (Hippy Mountain), and the valley. It was all-encompassing and quiet. It felt good to be out there, in the sun, working out knotted emotions through the muscles.

I do these water drops every day and I feel good about myself, I feel like I’m accomplishing something, but then a migrant is found, or a person wanders into camp, or a story is shared, and nothing makes any sense anymore. My well-meaning tasks of the day are blown to tiny little bits of hope scattered across the desert and swept off by the wind.

But today, I don’t think of that because today I can climb, and move, and feel the breeze on my sweat-glossed skin. I can look across a vast valley and see its rugged, untouched beauty. Today I can feel my heart in my chest, my breath in my lungs, and my legs tire. Today I can feel.

On the journey back Winston and Jason have a talk about religion. Winston grew up Baptist but left the religion for many reasons, one of which being he identifies as queer. Jason grew up Catholic and went to a Christian Brother’s university, and though he is now a Catholic Worker, he is no longer Catholic and doesn’t know if god exists. They talk about callings. Winston is in seminary school to become a United Church of Christ minister. People in camp have often asked him about callings. I like to hear him talk. He is thoughtful and balanced. He shared that to him a calling is not always something you like to do or something that is good for you. I wondered if writing is mine. Together we talked about prayer, meditation and community, and I thought that this ritual of walking, this conversation we shared, could be a prayer. I don’t know if god exists, but I do believe in magic, and if anything the desert if full of magic and the unexplainable. It is in the mesquite trees, in the fire-orange flowers blossoming out the top of barrel cactuses, in the Ocotillo that stretch like fingers up to the sun like praise.

The second half of the day the entire group (Jason and Winston volunteered to “hold it down” in camp) headed back to Ruby Lake to celebrate Sonia’s 23rd birthday with swimming and brownies baked from a solar oven. The festivities were somber with six days of stress pressing on everyone’s minds and muscles, but people swam and even laughed. I tried to show Jacques how to float on the water to no avail, and people took turns jumping off the rope swing. Kennedy suggested that who ever jumped from the rope had to scream something funny, the more random the better.

“Hot Pocket!” Mike sang as propelled himself into the lake.

“Happy birthday, Sonia!” Jacques screamed making the whole group ring out in a joined, “Ah.”

“I heart Jacques!” Davey cheered with a click his knees before plunging into the murky green sludge. Over the days, our 18 year-old Frenchie had turned into object affection around camp. The frivolity helped lighten the weight of the week, and for once it felt like our collective fears had quieted for a moment.

Getting out of the water, I laid out on the white sand and let the sun bleach dark worries from my body. In a strange trance, I felt my limbs relax and sink into the sand, my cheeks warm with sunlight, my body calm with recent memory of green water washing over me.

And then we all gathered to go and I walked off the beach like waking from a dream, and headed back to reality.

9 Days in the Desert: Day 5

2011-09-02T20:19:00.000-07:00

Day 5: How do you forget to feel?

I don’t know what to say about today. It is now 10 o’clock at night, I’m lying in my tent writing in my journal, the mumblings of conversations have quieted, and I can hear a helicopter circling over camp. It feels like I have been on the front lines all day. I feel the closeness of danger sitting beside me in my tent, and even though I’m exhausted I fear closing my eyes. I fear sleep.

This morning we were in Jalisco hiking water out to a drop named the “Oak Tree,” when saw two or three BP trucks, a horse patrol, and a helicopter circling, around and around, above the peaks, like a dark omen blanketing the day. My stomach turned with the helicopter, they are not only searching, but watching. Before we could drop our water, we decided to head back to the car and get the hell out of there because we had no way of knowing what they wanted or what would satisfy them, and we worried they might follow us and slash our gallons.

As I listen to the helicopter outside my tent I can picture the earlier helicopter swirling in the midday sun, and I know what it feels like to be watched. This is a police state. This is Arizona, and worse, this is my country. I must remember this moment. I must not forget even if I want, even if, when I’m back home in bed, the whole scene seems impossible.

XXXX

I remember a conversation.

“Does your family know where you are?” Yessica asked. It was after lunch. Other people had gone out on patrol, but I stayed back at Lilly’s request to tag-team with our Spanish. The group was always concerned with coordinating one medic and one Spanish speaker for each patrol out and in camp. Lilly was “holding down” the Spanish all morning and needed help and distracting.

“Yes, they are very worried about me,” I told Yessica.

“Oh, yes. The desert is dangerous.” She shook her head.

“It’s worse for her than me,” Lilly added. “She is Mexican. She has more worries.”

“You are scared of them too?” Yessica asked.

“Yes. I don’t know how they see me, or how they will treat me.”

“Imagine that. And you are in your own country.” She shook her head again.

The conversation switched to her daughter. Yessica told us that she loves to eat pizza, but rarely eats meat. She shared this because she knows Lilly also doesn’t eat meat. She smiled as she talked about her. Yessica’s daughter is eight years old.

“What is her name?” I asked. I saw a flash of worry run across her eyes. She gave a quick look to Francisco for approval before saying, “Her name is Lupe.”

“Was she born in December?” I asked making a reference to the feast day for Virgen de Guadalupe on December 9th. “I have an aunt named Lupe. She is born in December.”

“No, she was born January 4th.” She smiled. We were quiet for a moment.

“The first time I crossed, I was four months pregnant. In the middle of the night, I felt like I was losing my baby, like I was going to miscarry. I prayed and prayed to the Virgen to let me keep her.” She rubbed her stomach as she told this story. “I rubbed plants and mud on my belly and just prayed and prayed. And then when I was in the U.S., I prayed that she would have all her limbs, that she wouldn’t be sick. I worried that maybe I had damaged her walking in the desert. But when she was born fine, I named her Guadalupe, Lupe, to thank the Virgen for my daughter’s life.”

Questions I wanted to ask moved through my brain, but I wasn’t sure how to ask, or if I should ask. I wondered where Lupe was. I wondered how long they had been apart. Was she on the other end of this move in the U.S.? It was obvious she missed her even though talking about Lupe didn’t make her sad. In fact every time she shared some detail, she smiled.

“Where is she now?”

“Guatemala.”

“She is with family. We have a lawyer friend who is down there now. He is a U.S. citizen. We have it all worked out, paid him and everything. When we get to Florida he has promised to bring her. Everything is worked out. We just have to buy her ticket,” Francisco shared.

“She is American,” added Yessica.

“Whichever one makes it to Florida, will send for her.” Francisco said this with a smile. He was proud of his well-made plan, but I only heard, “whichever one makes it.” The statement was ominous. The statement rang with various unfortunate possibilities and tragic endings that started with the separation of mother and father from daughter. “Whichever one makes it,” he said as fact, as unchangeable.

The conversation was getting hard. The more I spoke to them the less likely I would be able to forget this nightmare later. The door I entered was quickly closing.

They asked me about our hikes. They have often shown concern for our long days and ask how we are feeling. Their kindness hurts. I told them that that I get tired and that sometimes I want to cry. I felt ashamed to share this, but I acted out my tears and they laughed at my silliness.

“When we were walking, it was night. At first we were being chased and we had to run up to nearly the top of Hippy Mountain.* There were dogs and helicopters, but somehow at the top of the mountain we were able to hide and rest. Then the next day we came down, but after another day, I didn’t want to walk anymore. I couldn’t. I started to cry. I couldn’t do it, but then Francisco shook me by my shoulders and it was like I felt a calm come over me. I felt strength.” She shook her fists in front of her to illustrate what Francisco had to do.

“I took her to a hill and I pointed in the distance to the houses we could see, and I said, ‘do you see those? We will go there. We will go to the houses.’ But no, as soon as we walked down off the hill she started crying again.”

“I couldn’t see them anymore. I couldn’t see anything. He told me he knew where he was going, but how was I to know? I couldn’t see anything.”

“Well, didn’t I know? I told you I did,” Francisco laughed at this, and Yessica smiled at him. Yessica was ready to give up. They had no idea what they were heading to, no idea who they would find, no idea if they would see Lupe again.

I wonder why some people are born into a life of suffering and why others are born into a life of privilege. What makes us different? What brings us together at this moment and yet, grips us in different realities? Who makes our reality?

At one point, we get word from a patrol out in the field that they have found someone alone on the side of a road. We didn’t know much more than he was alive. I looked at Yessica upon hearing this, and for the first time I see her face turn dark. It was hard to look her in the eyes because it was like I could see memories of panic and pain rise back in her like a storm. Francisco patted her on the shoulder.

“Thank God, they found him. No?” Yessica said. “No, he wouldn’t have survived out there alone.” She shook her head and kneeded her hands. I tried not to look at her.

We heard a story that this man was falling behind with his group. His coyote was on drugs and when this man couldn’t keep up, the coyote beat him, took his shirt, and left him (“for dead” are words no one is willing to add). He was without food or water for many days. It was unclear how many days.

“Thank God they found him. No, thank God,” she said again. I looked at her. I could see tears begin to form in the lips of her eyes. I put my hand on her shoulder in an attempt to comfort her. Her tears grew fat. I felt my own starting to form and my hand burn hot with need and emotion sparking like bolts electricity in the space between my hand and her shoulder. Unable to take it, I dropped my hand and scurried away to find a task to accomplish. Something easy with a beginning and an end—cooking dinner, washing dishes, unpacking the truck—something I could do without thought, without feeling, without this never ending electric need that just kicked me off my feet.

XXXX

I now know no good can come of feeling because there is no comfort for the things the questions that bubble up in our chests. I now know why in the cars on the way to patrols we listen to Katy Perry, Nikki Minaj, and Brittany Spears. There are no answers in the world. There is no order left. All there is are manageable tasks and pop music with beginnings and endings and catchy hooks.

And I still can here the helicopter circling above my tent.

* Hippy Mountain is Montana peak. Migrants call it Hippy because it stands above Ruby and Ruby Lake, which was once a hippy commune. Strangely enough, Yessica and Francisco walked on the edges of Ruby Lake when they were lost only days before I went skinny dipping there. Another example of the same place holding horribly contrasting realities.

9 Days in the Desert: Day 4

2011-08-31T00:42:00.000-07:00

Day 4: Mala Mujer

This morning I head to the Warsaw and California drops off Ruby Road with Davey, Jacques, an eighteen-year-old Frenchmen learning English, and Mary, a kind, confident Catholic Worker. Davey explains that our first drop is at the end of a rigorous up hill hike. He promises it will be the only hard part of the day, and the worst of it will not last more than 30 minutes. I calm myself with the thought that 30 minutes sounds manageable.

The first half is an easy walk along a rocky wash, and I feel good. I carry two 1-gallon jugs and 2 cans of beans in my backpack—18 extra pounds, but then the incline starts and doesn’t stop. I trip and fall. The weight of my pack throws me forward. Well-meaning, Jacques advises me to walk slower.

This trail is very overgrown, and I am introduced to Mala Mujer (bad woman), a bright green plant with large starred maple-like leaves detailed with white veins and white polka-dots washed from bud to base in white sharp hairs. It might be pretty, except for that when I brush against one I can feel a multitude of hairs run up and down my leg creating individual sharp pains all at once. Somehow it reminds me of being electrocuted, and I slow my stride to carefully step over or around every Mala Mujer I see. She is a demon plant.

We keep moving up. I’m out of breath, and it is clear I’m out of shape, and can't move at the same pace as everyone else. I get a twinge of shame.

I feel the cool of water work down my lower back and into the seat of my pants. “You have a leak,” Davey says. Grateful for this, I stop to remove the gallons off my back and examine the damage. I don’t see anything.

“We try not to carry them in packs because they can break easier that way. We want to avoid that.” I take one out and continue up.

A few more few feet and I start to stumble. “It’s just at the top of the hill,” Davey reassures. I squint into the direction he refers to search for this “top,” but I don’t see it, and it doesn’t come. Water is still leaking down my back.

I have a soaked butt, I’m the only one struggling, and I feel stupid.

I stop to take out the second jug, but again, no visible cracks. Without word, Jacques takes it from me and charges up ahead. His eighteen-year-old energy makes my 31 years feel worn.

I keep moving, slowly. My legs start to give out, and I must brace a hand against my knee to hoist myself up. The sun is beating me down. I feel a heaving in my chest.

“I need to stop.” The whole group halts.

I try to settle my breathing, but it’s hard. I try to drink water, but my hand shakes spilling it down my chest. After a couple of minutes, I feel the exhaustion and panic subside as it has done every day before, and I’m ready to go again, but no more than another 10 steps and I’m on the verge. A dizzy fantasy of throwing down my one gallon to the rocks, pushing off my pack, and plopping on the ground like a six-year-old having a tantrum fills my mind. I want to throw a fit. I am ready for a fit.

“I can’t do this!”

“It’s here! We’re here,” Mary calls from 20 feet ahead and it’s like I’m in a joke. Davey tells me to rest where I am as he takes my last gallon to the top. So close, I suck the tears back into my eyes and trudge my way to the drop—a cluster of gallons sitting in an elbowed pass beneath the shade of a mesquite tree. A barbed wire fence cuts right through the bottleneck of five trails heading down four different slopes.

“You guys are awesome! Getting this drop is so important because as you can see we are hitting many trails. We have a chance of reaching a lot of people,” Davey says. I have no emotion about this. We find evidence of slashed gallons by Border Patrol. I have no emotion about this either.

I sit my soggy ass down on the ground and allow the feeling of failure to soak in, to numb me.

Davey passes us sharpies to write messages on the water. These are meant to communicate to migrants that the water is safe to drink. For two days I’ve been trying to find a symbol that would convey what I want to say to those walking, a symbol that will give them hope, a symbol that they will know without doubt. Below the mesquite, I decide on an image and draw a line figure of the Virgen de Guadelupe with little flowers at her feet and the words, “Que dios lo bendiga.” Yes, the Virgen is hopeful. The Virgen can help me.

"SAMARITANOS," in reference to The Good Samaritans, another humanitarian aid group, is a word migrants have told NMD they trust.

“I’m sorry I’m so serious right now,” Davey says. “I’m just really worried over things at camp, but I want us to be able to laugh. It’s good to have fun. I don’t want this to be so hard.” I would welcome a laugh, but there is nothing to laugh at.

Over the course of the day, I fall a total of three times, and on the last one I jam the heal of my palm into rock and sprain my hand. It stings and I don't want to focus on it, but the entire day stings. Davey bandages up my hand while Mary and Jacques carry gallons a quick walk from the road.

“Today is a bad day,” I say.

“Oh, I’m sorry." He finishes wrapping my hand. Fighting the urge to give up, I walk over the bank on the side of the road to meet Jacques and Mary at the final drop. I feel a need to see it, to finish.

Before going to camp we stop at Ruby, an old rusted-out mining town with a lake that is less lake and more pool surrounded by a white sand beach created by the mine’s mineral deposits. It is some kind of surreal mirage.

We take off all our clothes and jump in. I have never done such a thing, but I haven’t showered in days, and the water over my naked skin is soothing (I have just checked an item off the bucket list). Mary, Davey, and Jacques take turns jumping from a rope swing. Jacques doesn't pull up high enough and the three of us in the water gasp at how close he is to the rocks. He plunks in and bounds back out with a big smile and I look of "what?" We laugh.

I float on the cool surface and try to wash this feeling away that sits with me, not heavy, but haunting: if I can’t do this, what am I here for? Why did I come?

The desert is una Mala Mujer I've walked directly into.

9 Days in the Desert: Day 3

2011-08-30T00:02:00.000-07:00

Day 3: Josseline

Today I participate in a 4-hour hike through an area called Blue Grass with Mike, a soft-spoken and meticulous Catholic Worker, Jason (Mike’s foil), Lilly, and Ricardo, a young Latino L.A. punk. If you know me, you know the idea of me participating in a hike is comical. I have more than once exclaimed from a trail, f*@k this $h!t! But here I am stumbling over unclear paths, bushwacking half the time through heavy vegetation full of thorny plants and cactus that scratch at my legs and arms, and continually rolling weak ankles on loose rocks.

There is a lot of debris along these trails: empty tin cans, blankets, hats, water bottles, and one fresh footprint of a man, and at one point I get the eerie sense that the hills have eyes. I want to call out to whatever/whoever is close, but I don’t. If people are close, they will most likely not show themselves. They do not trust us even though we call out “¡Tenemos agua!” and write messages like “¡Buena suerte!” and a personal favorite, “Que dios lo bendiga” (my grandmother’s regular send off) on water jugs so they know they are safe.

Our first stop on this hike is Josseline’s Shrine. It sits at the bottom of a canyon where a group hills meet next to a wash sprinkled with small stoney pools that reflect the sky. Mike explains that when a person becomes dehydrated they tend to move to the lowest point and he gestures to the high walls surrounding us. He recounts Josseline’s tail as best he can: Josseline was a 15-year-old girl traveling north with her brother. When she became weak she urged her brother to go on without her. Later, a No More Deaths volunteer found her body while hiking on a regular patrol. Her shoes were off and her feet were dipped into one the pretty pools of water. They were able to identify her body by the pink shoes she had.*

This story consecrates the reflective pools of water at my feet.

The shrine itself is a white cross with her name written in script and painted with pink flowers. Rosaries adorn the cross along with a framed Virgen de Guadalupe tied by a pink ribbon and a photo of Josseline standing before a church altar. I’m taken by how small she is. Her body is thin in the way a young girl’s body can be before it begins to round and soften. It makes me sad to see this girl forever on the precipice of womanhood.

Back at camp, I feel the ache that has become my muscles and all I can do is lay still in our one hammock. A kind breeze comes through bringing with it an afternoon cloud cover from the sun. I’m thankful because camp often sits beneath a stagnant heat that is impossible to escape. I hear a group of people in the distance figuring out how to fix the torn tarp that shades our water supply, but I do not move. I can’t. My heart starts to beat fast and my breath shortens. I don’t think I can do this. I hate this! I hate hiking! It frightens me to imagine one more day of this work. For the 4th day in a row, I want to cry, but then somehow my body relaxes, and without warning my mind shuts off, and I fall asleep to the sounds of people fiddling with plastic tarps.

When I wake, a new Frankentent has been erected from old bits of tarp and all my anxiety has lifted. I feel strong again. It’s strange and wonderful how quickly the body can forget exhaustion and pain.

Once up, I walk over to the med tent to find our patients sitting out front under some shade. The woman has her foot up on a chair in care of her sprained ankle. She shows me where she lost a toenail. I tell her I have friends who like to run and it is common amongst runners (I guess I say it to soften any worry).

She asks me about my hike and I tell her it was tiring. She shares that it is even harder at night. They have no lights and can’t see the paths and don’t know what they might be walking into—cactus, snakes, rocks. She shows me the severe slashes that have created a red fleshy pattern on her arms as proof. My hike was nothing in comparison. I wasn’t running for my life. I wasn’t moving in the dark. I wasn’t being chased. I was allowed the opportunity to rest and regain strength without fear. I was allowed a rest.

I think about Josseline. All she probably wanted was to stop for a moment and let her feet cool in the water, take a moment to catch her breath. Maybe she thought she would be able to catch up to her brother. Maybe she promised him she would. Somethings make no sense like why Josseline, a young girl, was never allowed a safe place to rest.

*Some details in this story are in correct. Josseline was fourteen and her shoes were green, but this is how I first heard it. For a more accurate telling you can read this excerpt from the book The Death of Josseline: Immigration Stories from the Arizona Borderlands.

Here is an interview with the author Margaret Regan at NPR.

To learn how you can contribute to the efforts to end death and suffering in the desert, please go to the No More Deaths donation page.

9 Days in the Desert: Day 2

2011-08-28T23:08:00.000-07:00

Day 2: I’m Brown

“I see no changes. All I see is racist faces.” -Tupac

First thing in the morning we sign up for the day’s patrols, but before heading out the group opens a discussion on creating “safer spaces” amongst each other, within the desert, and when meeting Border Patrol. The long-term volunteers assure us newbies that every day and every encounter with BP is unique and that there is no way to predict what will happen. Lilly, a generally jovial, blond college student, asks if she should take her ID. Jason, a mid-twenties spiritual Catholic Worker, says it isn’t necessary if any of us are apposed. “Just say, ‘I’m an American citizen.’” Even with Jason’s long, dark scraggly beard it is easy to see his crystal blue eyes, and I wonder if such a statement will be easier for him than for me. There is only one other volunteer in camp that looks “Mexican,” but no one talks about that. There are radicals in this group and they seem willing for confrontation, and I decide to keep my thoughts to myself. I decide not talk about that either.

As long as I can keep the promise I made to my mother and father to be careful, the promise I made to myself, then they can do what they want. I know I have no intention of exploring what might happen to me if I refuse to give over ID. I think back to the jokes I made before leaving California about getting deported, and I realize they are no longer funny. The only thing that makes me feel safer at this moment is knowing that my ID is already tucked into the front pocket of my pack. I don’t talk about that either.

Now in the suburban bouncing down a rocky road to our first drop, Davey again addresses the concern over ID and Border Patrol. I feel a little easier about voicing my apprehension within this smaller group of Davey, return volunteer and gender bending woman, Teddy, and fellow newbie Winston. Everyone in this car with the exception of me is queer. Queer identity is important to them and to many people in camp. I don’t wish to take that away from anyone, but right now that’s not the identity issue that has my chest tightening and my hands shaking.

Davey tries to assuage my and the other volunteers fears by explaining different scenarios that may occur. “Sometimes they just wave us by. Just so you know, they did once jump out of the bushes with automatic rifles drawn and got mad when we weren’t migrants. Sometimes they detain us and threaten us. It’s always different.” He explains that the lawyers often dissuade volunteers from handing over ID because it is a leverage tool BP use to keep volunteers detained and intimidated long enough to get information. I didn’t think about that. I also didn’t consider the possibility of having to evade questions. This all worries me, and once again I’m faced by my reality. I’m really in the shit now.

We each voice how we would like to respond to BP if encountered and discuss what showing ID could mean for us as a group and individually. Davey is six-foot, no more than 165 pounds, blond, tanned, and dimpled. I don’t know if he can really know my individual concerns, and even though I find it easier talking in this space, I still dance around the subject for a minute before saying in a shaky voice, “I don’t know how they will treat me.” Breathe. “I’m not so sure I can just say, ‘American citizen.’ You know?” Breathe. “Um. Because, well, I look like this.” My hands are numb and my stomach turns as I say the words out loud. I feel as if I have just betrayed myself. I feel exposed. Suddenly, the twisting weave of braids pinned up at the back of my head feels dangerous, and I wonder if I should have made a more “American” hairstyle choice this morning. I don’t know why I have to think this way. I don’t know why I have to share myself with Davey, Teddy, and Winston this way. It angers me. It makes me sick. I’m brown in a desert where people who look like me are being hunted down with guns and dogs, and I don’t know who I can say that to, how to say it, or even if saying it will make a difference.

By the end of the day we make 7 water drops. Each water drop can be a hike of anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour. I hike with 2 1-gallon jugs and 2-4 cans of easy open pinto beans in my pack over rocky uneven and overgrown terrain. The work is hard. Many times I find myself out of breath. Late in the day the muscles in my thighs begin to quiver every time I have to take a step down off a rock or descend a hill. I worry that I will not be able to handle anything more rigorous than this.

On the drive back to camp I scroll through the Ipod and find Tupac’s Changes. I stick my hand out the window and feel the breeze cool my skin. Now and again, I look around at the landscape—hills and valleys in the shadows of mountains as far as I can see. It’s green and wild flowers bloom all along the hills. This isn’t the desert I imagined. This is rocky. This is beautiful. This is unforgiving, and I feel the danger. What is calling people to cross this treacherous area with so many factors (BP, heat, snakes, mountain lions, minute men, etc) against them? I’m struck by the desert’s beauty and then just as quickly by its tragedy. I am looking out over a living graveyard. I hear the woman’s wails again from the night before. I think about her. I think about those still out there. I choke back tears, turn my face into the wind, and listen to Changes.

9 Days in the Desert: Day 1

2011-08-28T13:44:00.000-07:00

Day 1: No Turning Back Now

We arrive at Byrd Camp (called so because it sits on children’s book author, Byrd Baylor’s property in the town of Arivaca) around noon and begin a third round of training and orientations. We are introduced to the med tent—a tarp tent with a swinging door that holds a red cross emblem on the outside attached to an old motor home. Medical supplies are stored in the motor home with a row of cots laid out inside the tent. I suddenly feel like I’m in an episode of M*A*S*H without the theme song. From there we are introduced to the kitchen and “office” (another tarp tent attached to an old trailer), the dining area (a row of three picnic tables beneath a tarp cover), the water tent, the dirty dishes station, and last the bathroom that sits at the end of a stone-lined trail where we find a bucket placed below a standing toilet seat next to a green metal cooler filled with toilet paper and hand sanitizer. The day before I had heard the words “poop bucket” which sent a quick panic through me and now here I am facing it.

After the tour, we get training on GPS and maps, search and rescue (though recovery is more likely) protocol, and medical procedures where we learn how to look for and treat heat exhaustion and dehydration, and how to dress a blister. We are also introduced to “lightening position,” and what to do if we see mountain lions, rattle snakes, tarantulas, scorpions, and centipedes as if ranchers, minutemen, and Border Patrol with guns aren’t enough to worry about.

After dinner we circle around the fire pit to talk camp roles. A part of this experience feels a lot like summer camp, but just as I am comforted with that thought Davey, a person on the “Leadership Team,” darts out of our circle and into the darkness. All discussion ceases as we hear him speak to the darkness in Spanish, “Come in. Come in. You are welcomed here.” He is assuring someone that this is a safe place. And then the wailing begins. Loud, high-pitched sobs of a woman break the night and my reality. Her screams are long, full-body, and desperate. I want to cry with her. I take a quick look around the circle and everyone is shocked mute. No one looks anyone else in the eye. This is not summer camp.

Someone within the circle proposes a medical person goes out to meet Davey (there are four people in camp with either EMT or Wilderness First Response certificates), and Jason goes out into the darkness. The woman continues to wail and Kennedy (a woman who works with the group, but lives in town) proposes a woman goes to meet them. I try to imagine what it might be like for this woman to find a strange camp in the dark, frightened, perhaps injured, desperate, only to be met by two men. I picture her flagged by them. Sonia quickly removes herself from the circle to meet them. Jason returns to the fire and asks that someone warms up food, and another person leaves into the darkness. By now her wailing has calmed and we listen to the grumbling of conversation. Davey invites her into the med tent.

“Should we continue?” someone in the circle suggests, and we return to the doling of camp roles as if nothing has changed, but of course everything has. Davey returns with an update: There is a man and woman in camp with us. They were split from their group by Border Patrol and chased by dogs. She is very scared of dogs. They have been lost without clean water or food for two days. They are trying to get to Florida. We will be checking their vitals and caring for their injuries. Their names are Francisco and Yessica. Don’t be afraid to say hello when you get a chance.

Don’t be afraid to say hello? But I am afraid. I gulp back the round, dry lump in my throat and stare out into the darkness. I don’t think I am ready for this. I’m not ready for it to be real. When did I become this person? How did I get here? I didn’t know it would be so quick. I didn’t know I would thrown-in without warning. Suddenly, I am (we are) responsible for the well-being of two people and I should say hello. To say hello means there is no turning back. There is no turning back now.

I wonder if this is what war feels like.

No More Deaths Training

2011-08-15T20:44:00.001-07:00

I got to Tucson on Saturday night at about 10:30pm and took a van share straight to the abandoned convent I was told I could stay. Once there, I met my first NMD's volunteer, Smat. He was here for the training too. We chatted a bit, I made myself a sandwich and headed to one of the empty rooms to place my things on the ground and setup "camp." It's quiet in the convent. There is a room with furniture for toddlers with a play rug and a slide. Everything in this room is in primary colors. There is another room with four bookshelves filled with books on saints for children from the 1950s and such with a few tables and chairs. There is a kitchen, a few bathrooms, and that's about it. No beds, no couches, no internet, no TV. Already on my first night, my sleeping bag and mat laid out on the concrete floor, I thought, what have I gotten myself into? And I quickly chuckled at how unbelievably privileged I am that I can't lay on a floor in silence for more than 2 minutes without wondering how I can get out of this. The following day, Sunday, the other volunteers appeared and we got a 6 hour long training on border history, the Good Samaritan project from the '80s, No More Deaths, open communication and consensus, and a talk on legal matters. This last one was an important talk as some of the things I would be doing in the next 10 days might be on a fine line of what is legal and illegal, but by then my stomach was growling for dinner and my back aching for a stretch, and I just thought, well, I hope I don't get ticketed for anything and made a note to take my ID with me everywhere.

Day two began with a two hour lecture and discussion on the prison industry, SB 1070 and copycat laws, and Operation Streamline. This video kind of gives a quick overview on how these are all connected:

This was definitely new to me, and I still want to do much more research on the subject, but it's hard not to feel an emotional reaction to the profiteering of convicted migrants. Not to mention how it makes my stomach turn every time I see another example of how money really runs the government, not the people.

After lunch we went to the Tucson court building to see Operation Streamline in action. Operation Streamline is an action meant to streamlining the judicial system to get more illegal immigrants prosecuted of a federal misdemeanor in a shorter amount of time. And basically that means a federal judge sees 70 men a day, 5 days a week within the time span of 45 minutes to an hour and a half. And for that to happen a judge calls up 5-7 men at once. It's like a removal factory, except they aren't necessarily removed, but placed in our prison system from anywhere from 30 to 180 days, and then sent back.

It was heartbreaking to see these men and one woman shackled at the ankles, waist, and wrists, still wearing the clothes they walked the desert in, still dirty, still lost. As I walked into the pristine court room the smell coming from the right side of the room where they all sat and then the sound of the jingling chains were the first things to hit me. There is so much more I want to say, but I will leave it here for now. Here is an article from NPR on Operation Streamline.

Tomorrow I finally go to the desert. I have to say I'm a little apprehensive about it. There will be no toilets or showers. There will be rattle snakes and diamond backs. There will be border patrol and ranchers, and of course there will be migrants. Even though I've been told of what I will find out there, I still don't know what to expect. I feel like a soldier new in country. I have my clean socks and I have my water supply ready, but that's about all I can do. That and wait, wait to be in the shit.

Upon Volunteering to Head to the Arizona Border: I'm Sick-inducingly Frightened

2011-07-12T22:36:00.000-07:00

Today I received the acceptance of my volunteer application with the human rights group No More Deaths, and I suddenly feel like vomiting, fainting, and jumping around all at once. I wonder if such a feat can be done.

No More Deaths is a Unitarian Universalist social justice group based in Tucson, Arizona. Their mission? To do what the name states, ensure no more deaths of border crossers in the Sonoran desert. I learned about No More Deaths two years ago when I conducted an interview with Walt Staton, a young man and No More Death’s volunteer, who was fined for littering when he placed life-saving water bottles in key points along the border to help save individuals from dying of dehydration and heat exhaustion. In certain areas like the Buenos Aires Wildlife Refuge, it is considered a crime to leave out water for border crossers even though water is a basic human necessity and people are dying in large numbers every summer. A year ago this month, it was reported the bodies of 40 illegal immigrants were found on the Arizona border just in the first two weeks of July, with the total number of deaths being in the thousands "since Operation Gatekeeper went into effect in 1994."

See, I read articles like this one and I feel my breath shorten and like I need someone to start fanning me before I pass out--you know, like in the old movies and news clips--because I don’t know how I can face these real tragedies in person. It’s so much easier to deal with it from a Google search in the safety of my living room.

Immigration is important to me, obviously. It has been since I was a young teen, since my parents instilled in me this awareness for social justice, since I knew my parents were immigrants. And I care about finding positive and socially conscience alternatives to the immigration issue in this country. And yes, I care about saving lives, or more so, I care about spreading awareness of government laws that intentionally or unintentionally cause harm and death to individuals. This is important to me, but hey, I’m no saint. I'm not even that nice most of the time.

What I am is a writer. And as Iranian poet, Sholeh Wolpe once told me, we must each use the resources we have to do our part. So I try as a writer and poet to do that thing I do, but sometimes it doesn’t feel like enough. Sometimes, I feel like I’m exploiting the issue from my laptop, and it’s when this feeling creeps into my consciousness that I begin to consider crazy ideas like voluntarily going into a detention center or camping out in the Sonoran desert in the middle of August. These types of ideas are the ones that make my friends raise their eyebrows and go, “Oh, Xochitl, you always love to get ‘real.’” But I don’t necessarily love it. It’s more like a personal dare. If you cared, I tell myself, then you’d get out there and do something about it. But it’s so scary, I reply. What are you, chicken? Come on. You can do it! (these conversations are not out loud). So I sign up, even though I’m scared shitless because I worry doing nothing is even more cowardly. And anyway, it’s not like it’s a lifetime commitment. I’m going for 11 days. And anyway, I can always write about it. (That’s the advice people always give me. Come on this trip. You can write about it! Why not move to another town? You can write about it!) But honestly, writing is not my main goal, though I should probably place it high on the list.

My main goal may just be to survive the week without freaking out or losing my mind. My goal is to be apart of something positive and important, life-savingly important, even though just thinking about camping in the desert for 7 nights with only a sleeping bag, hiking in the blistering August desert heat, and constantly fearing the moment I will walk around a sage bush to find some wounded hopeless person on a seemingly deserted road (I don't even want to consider the death part of No More Deaths) makes me feel like crawling into my skin, sinking down to the hardwood floor, and seeping into the cracks. I feel possible of conducting such matter bending acts if it means I don’t have to go, but then I hear myself, You claim to care about immigration, and now you just want to hide?

Sometimes it isn’t enough to write about a subject. Sometimes you have to experience it, but that is sick-inducingly frightening! Coming face-to-face with human suffering is not my idea of fun, but I once again dare myself to try. To try and survive, I guess, because the people I will be out their helping are surviving something much more difficult then I will ever experience as a privileged American living a relatively easy life in Los Angeles with the comfort of family, friends, a good education, and stable job to support me. So I challenge myself to be uncomfortable for a short time in order to try and understand the suffering of others, and maybe even help someone in the process.

If you would like to help, No More Deaths asks all their volunteers to raise $400 in order to support lodging, supplies, and food while with them. If you are able, I would really appreciate your donation, even if it is $5. I promise to do the rest.

You can send your donation to my Paypal account at xochitl_julisa@hotmail.com, or email me for other alternative forms of donations.

A New "Coming Out"

2011-06-30T00:10:00.000-07:00

Earlier in the week, NPR did a story on Jose Antonio Vargas, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who has written for New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, and San Francisco Chronicle, who just "came out" as an illegal immigrant. In an interview on All Things Considered Vargas states: "I am sorry for breaking the country's laws — my country's laws...I am no different than anybody else in that I wanted to live my life and I wanted to survive and if I didn't tell those lies, I couldn't have gotten work and I couldn't have survived."

Coming out is the latest tactic taken on by DREAMer activists as a way to put pressure on Congress who voted down the Dream Act bill this past December. As Viridiana Martinez--an activist inspired by Jose Antonios Vargas' story--states: "The biggest obstacle we have is fear. So, coming out is a declaration that I am dropping the fear. I am taking my struggle in my own hands."

And perhaps in response, ICE has taken a surprising and hopefully promising turn with a new "memorandum granting its agents 'prosecutorial discretion' to extend leniency to DREAM Act-eligible people and others while cracking down on those who pose 'a clear risk to national security.' Leniency would take the form of deferred deportation, usually for up to 12 months, at which time individuals could request an extension and potentially reapply every year."

This new coming out is definitely the latest form of civil disobedience to take to the streets, not unlike the Montgomery bus boycott or the lunch counter sit-ins from the Civil Rights Movement of the '50s and '60s. As Thoreau said in his essay Civil Disobedience, "I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government." Let's hope Congress does right by these young people who have proven themselves smart, able, and willing members of our society, and lets hope they do it soon before some of these brave kids get deported.

In other news, Georgia recently voted in a SB 1070 copycat law, but Federal Judge Thomas Thrash blocked parts of the new law--scheduled to go into effect July 1--because "the state is enforcing immigration law that should be left to the federal government."

Two days ago DREAMers took to the public streets of Georgia and "Six young illegal immigrants were arrested...after they sat down and blocked traffic near the Georgia state Capitol to publicly declare their status and to protest state policies targeting people who are in the U.S. illegally, the latest in a string of such 'coming out' events."

Immigration Project Focus on: John Muir

2011-05-25T20:20:00.000-07:00

Last month I had planned on writing a focus on John Muir in honor of Earth Day on April 22nd and John Muir Day (recognized in California) on April 21st,* but unfortunately, I never got to it. And as I am starting to enjoy the beginnings of the summer break and a respite from teenagers and grading, I thought I would finally get to an Immigration Project Focus On. Such IP focuses have included John Lennon, Dith Pran, and Jacob Riis, and I hope to continue this tradition as a way of celebrating the contributions of immigrants from all parts of the world to our nation's history and culture.

Muir is a name I have heard of all my life as it is the moniker for high schools, streets, trails, mountains, and campsites. As a Californian, I learned of John Muir's contributions to our National Parks, namely Yosemite, in the 4th grade when I learned about Spanish Missions, the Gold Rush, and other highlights of California history. The Muir name has always been in my Californian consciousness, (if only in name) and as something that reflects innately American much like the names Wilson, Jefferson, and Franklin. So I was surprised on my visit to Scotland in 2006, to find that Muir was a Scotsman. The Scotch pride seemed to have Muir's image and name everywhere, even more so than in California, and this is when I learned that John Muir, father of our national parks and co-founder of the Sierra Club, was a Scottish immigrant.

There are too many things to be said about Muir and his contributions, but I will try to give you a few highlights. John Muir was born on April 21, 1838 in Dunbar, Scotland and emigrated to New York by way of Glasgow as a child with his family in 1849. He is known as an early naturalist and conservationist, and believed our natural surroundings were nature's churches, often describing the peeks and domes of Yosemite as the spires and arches of European cathedrals. Different from other conservationists of his time who believed in conserving natural resources in order to sustain their use for human consumption, Muir believed that natural areas should be preserved and left virtually untouched as spiritual places for rest, worship, and appreciation.

He was a celebrated nature writer who wrote countless articles about the Yosemite, Mount Shasta, Alaska, sequoias, glaciers, etc and was published in such places as Atlantic Monthly, Outlook, New York Tribune, and Harper's. He had the opportunity to meet another great essayist, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who visited Yosemite in the twilight of his life, and though Muir wanted to take the writer on a backwoods private camping trip through Yosemite, he declined due to his age and health. Muir was greatly influenced by Emerson's writings as well Emerson's contemporary and another great nature writer, Thoreau, and according an article by John Swett, after Emerson met Muir he stated, "He is more wonderful than Thoreau."

But Emerson was not the most famous person to have visited the mountain man in the Yosemite Valley. That title goes to President Theodore Roosevelt who took a three night, four day trip through Yosemite in 1903. Muir convinced the President to join him on the trip Emerson could not, and after leaving behind his secret service and aids, Roosevelt enjoyed a private hiking and camping excursion through Yosemite where Muir spoke about the importance of preservation and a national park system.

President Roosevelt and Muir in Yosemite in 1903.

You can read President Roosevelt's memory of the visit in this Outlook article from January 16, 1915. There is a funny anecdote where Muir inadvertently insults Roosevelt.

Roosevelt on Muir: "He was emphatically a good citizen. Not only are his books delightful, not only is he the author to whom all men turn when they think of the Sierras and northern glaciers, and the giant trees of the California slope, but he was also - what few nature lovers are - a man able to influence contemporary thought and action on the subjects to which he had devoted his life. He was a great factor in influencing the thought of California and the thought of the entire country so as to secure the preservation of those great natural phenomena - wonderful canyons, giant trees, slopes of flower-spangled hillsides - which make California a veritable Garden of the Lord."

Can you imagine being in the quiet of a sequoia grove with these two giants of history? What a moment that must have been to have these two men bundled by a fire beneath snow sprinkled trees and the wide starry night above their heads. How else, but to bring the President to the source, could Muir have convinced Roosevelt to work for the preservation of natural areas like Yosemite and the expansion of federal parks?

Muir was successful in saving Yosemite from sheep grazing, farming, and other development by helping it become a national park, but unfortunately he was unsuccessful at saving another beautiful natural area, Hetch Hetchy Valley, that Muir believed was Yosemite's smaller twin: "Most people who visit Yosemite are apt to regard it as an exceptional creation, the only valley of its kind in the world. But nothing in Nature stands alone. She is not so poor as to have only one of anything." Unfortunately, Hetch Hetchy, though within the federally protected Yosemite Valley, could not be saved after the Raker Act of 1913 was passed by Congress, which allowed the damming of the valley to create a water supply for San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area. The battle for Hetch Hetchy was late in Muir's life and career as a conservationist, and was a major blow to the man who made his life's work saving these natural cathedrals.

A photo of Hetch Hetchy Valley taken prior to being dammed.

Muir's description of Hetch Hetchy from the article "Features of the Proposed National Park": "Here you will find a glorious view. Immediately beneath you, at a depth of more than 4000 feet, you see a beautiful ribbon of level a ground, with a silver thread in the middle of it, and green or yellow according to the time of year. That ribbon is a strip of meadow, and the silver thread is the main Tuolumne River. The opposite wall of the cañon rises in precipices, steep and angular, or with rounded brows like those of Yosemite, and from this wall as a base extends a fine wilderness of mountains, rising dome above dome, ridge above ridge, to a group of snowy peaks on the summit of the range. Of all this sublime congregation of mountains Castle Peak is king: robed with snow and light, dipping unnumbered points and spires into the thin blue sky, it maintains amid noble companions a perfect and commanding individuality."

The founding of the Sierra Club was to help stop development over natural areas like Hetch Hetchy Valley and it continues to do this type of work today. Where I live in the San Gabriel Valley such a battle has been boiling for the last couple of years over the Whittier Narrows Natural Area--which sits along the bank of the San Gabriel River. The natural area is a wildlife sanctuary in the middle of the suburban expansion and development of San Gabriel Valley and is home to countless species of birds and plants. Currently, there is a plan to build a 14,000 square foot building for a "Discovery Center" (a museum focused on watersheds and life along the river) and a 116 space parking lot over the natural area. The idea of destroying a wildlife sanctuary in order to build a museum educating children on nature is ludicrous and goes against Muir's own belief that the structures of nature are much more spectacular than any structure made by man.

For more on the Whittier Narrows Natural Area or to find out how to help go to Friends of the Whittier Narrows Natural Area.

For more about John Muir and the Sierra Club go to Sierra Club website, which has a fantastic collection of Muir's writings and journals and a great bibliography.

For more on Muir's adventures check out The Wild Muir.

*John Muir's birthday is April 21st, and though he is seen as a father of conservation, the date of Earth Day has no affiliation with John Muir.

Publishing News and a Poem for My Grandmother

2011-05-16T00:31:00.000-07:00

I'm excited to share that Writer's at Work has chosen my poem, Ghazal of the Traffic, for their Poem of the Month series. It's great to have one of my "My L.A." poems finally find a home. You can check it out here.

From Ghazal of the Traffic

On a corner a child sells ripe mangos, yellow and green.
She looks familiar, but I have traveled too far in the city.

A hipster girl draped in vintage wails down Hollywood Blvd.
Countless are the broken dreams and scars in the city.

Radio gossip: coke-filled-photos, anorexia, Anna Nicole.
We keep our famous in air-punched-holed jars in the city.

In other news, this past Wednesday, May 11th, marked my grandmother's 90th birthday. That's right, 90! We had a mass to celebrate this past weekend, much like the one we had last year that I wrote about in this post. To commemorate the day, I wrote a little poem about my grandmother. It is a bit of a love letter to my grandmother and to all my cousins. I feel lucky to have had 3 brothers and 15 cousins to grow up with. Like I tell my cousins, Erika and Gloria, at every family wedding (after a couple of rounds of tequila), "I'd kill for you!" Of course, actual blood shed is highly unlikely, but there is little I wouldn't do for my family. I think it also fits into the "My L.A." poems because when I think of L.A., I often think back on weekends spent at my grandmother's home in Boyle Heights.

A shot of my grandmother's front steps.

On the Front Steps

We ate pink and blue ice cream
shaped like feet and rockets
bought from rusty trucks
singing down Fairmont. We gossiped

and giggled into cousins’ ears,
sugary colors dripping onto the
red concrete below us. We watched
the boys play football in the street,

and our grandfather manicure his lawn.
We inhaled the fragrances of orange,
guava, rose, fern, and every other plant
that grew green and full around us.

We grew much the same way
over years, maturing like plants
around her as she nourished us
with tacos de crema, bowls of conflais,

huevos con weenies smothered
in katchun katchun. She tended
to our insatiable bellies with pieces
of chocolate and cookie, and fueled us

with spoons of frijoles from a pot
that never emptied, and like magic
she nursed her little plants
from a tiny kitchen, and we sprouted

into wild creatures too big for front steps.
Knowing we could never be potted
and still, she sent us off with a kiss
and a prayer, “Que Dios lo bendiga,”

and stood at the top of the steps—
yellow light of the house framing her
small body like a saint—to wave us goodbye,
our bellies full, our hearts and minds strong.

My niece, the next generation of little plants.

May 10, 1869: A Date for Railroads and Chinese Immigrants

2011-05-10T23:27:00.000-07:00

I learned that today marks the 142nd anniversary of the completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad. According to the book The Other Half--a biography about Gilded Age muckraker, Jacob Riis--"35,000 miles [of rail] was in place by the Civil War...By 1869, Americans could take the train from coast to coast." (Buk-Swienty, 48). As many know, the laying of these miles and miles of track from coast to coast was due, in a big part, to the painful and dangerous work taken on by Chinese Immigrants.

KCET Departures has a good article marking the history of our railway system and the contribution of thousands of Chinese immigrants. You can check it out here.

Or you can go here for more on the Transcontinental Railroad and Chinese immigrants.

A Poem by William Archila

2011-04-23T20:25:00.000-07:00

Latest News

At work, no one has seen him or his taxi.
Newspapers read, "Juan Márquez Missing:
Any sighting, please contact family."

A few months ago, police led a trail
to graves: some broken bones,
the kind you find in times of war.

In Nicaragua, they remember him,
poet so blue and modern like Dario,
almost a song of swans about to break.

Honduras spoke of him naked, hairless,
barefoot, tobacco skin without toenails
or ears, a man of ants and stray dogs.

Two weeks ago, a boy found a body
dark as eggplant. His wife, worn and rumpled,
could not recognize the blown-out face.

My mother thinks he's deep in the ground,
sleeping with torn clothes, thick,
dank roots spreading over his limbs.

The rumor goes at night in smoky bars
he met Jesus of Nazareth, a red lightbulb
flickering on and off in the corner.

Today I heard he's a bus driver
in L.A., circling long avenues,
parks, the same hotel signs, traffic

lights, the rain that falls at night.
Around ten, a rumor goes he gets lost
in a downtown dive, drinks his shot of gin.

Don Chamba, a shoe shiner from Santa Anita,
gave me the final word the other day.
"To me," he says, "those stories don't mean shit.

By now, after all those small deaths,
he has to be a soiled shoe, a worn-out tire,
aflame, smoking by an empty highway."

This poem is published in William Archila's debut collection: The Art of Exile (Bilingual Press, 2009).

William Archila was born in Santa Ana, El Salvador, in 1968. When he was only twelve, he and his family immigrated to the United States to escape the civil war that was tearing his country apart. He eventually becaem an English teacher and earned his MFA in poetry from University of Oregon. His poems have appeared in Agni, Blue Mesa Review, Crab Orchard Revewi, The Georgia Review, and The Los Angeles Review. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife.

The Art of Exile is the recent winner of the Emerging Writer Fellowship Award from the Writer’s Center and the International Latino Book Award. The Art of Exile was also featured in “First Things First: The Fifth Annual Debut Poets Roundup” — the Jan/Feb 2010 issue of Poets & Writers.

For more on this collection and Salvadorean literature check out Adolfo Guzman-Lopez's KPCC article, "Salvadoran American's Poetry Makes Amends for Silence Over Civil War."

Angel Island Poems

2011-04-18T23:10:00.000-07:00

In one of my first posts I talked about the journey of Chinese immigrants through Angel Island in the early half of the 20th century, and shared the book ISLAND: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910-1940. I now realize that I didn't share any of the poetry from the book. Here are two poems from the book that were transcribed and translated from immigrant reflections scribed into the wooden walls of the detention center barracks.

34
For what reason must I sit in jail?
It is only because my country is weak and my family poor.
My parents wait at the door but there is no news.
My wife and child wrap themselves in quilt sighing with loneliness.
Even if my petition is approved and I can enter the country,
When can I return to the Mountains of Tang* with a full load?
From ancient times, those who venture out usually become worthless.
How many people ever return from battles?

*A Cantonese colloquial term for China.

2
Because my house had bare walls, I began rushing all about.
The waves are happy, laughing "Ha-ha!"
When I arrived on Island,* I heard I was forbidden to land.
I could do nothing but frown and feel angry at heaven.

*The colloquial name given to Angel Island by the Cantonese immigrants.

A facet of the immigrant journey that always fascinates me is the willingness to be cast out into the unknown, the decision to be neither here nor there. I often wonder how this decision is made knowing that venturing out might make you "worthless"? Knowing that this country will most likely see you as worthless, no matter your background, because you don't speak the language. I think perhaps because I was born in the this country, I might never understand what can be worth becoming worthless for.

A Poem on Borders by Sholeh Wolpe

2011-04-10T09:22:00.000-07:00

My Brother at the Canadian Border

by Sholeh Wolpé

For Omid

On their way to Canada in a red Mazda, my brother and his friend, PhDs and little sense, stopped at the border and the guard leaned forward, asked: Where you boys heading? My brother, Welcome to Canada poster in his eyes replied: Mexico. The guard blinked, stepped back then forward, said: Sir, this is the Canadian border. My brother turned to his friend, grabbed the map from his hands, slammed it on his shaved head. You stupid idiot, he yelled, you’ve been holding the map upside down.

In the interrogation room full of metal desks and chairs with wheels that squeaked and florescent light humming, bombarded with questions, and finally: Race?

Stymied, my brother confessed: I really don’t know, my parents never said, and the woman behind the desk widened her blue eyes to take in my brother’s olive skin, hazel eyes, the blonde fur that covered his arms and legs. Disappearing behind a plastic partition, she returned with a dusty book, thick as War and Peace, said: This will tell us your race. Where was your father born? She asked, putting on her horn-rimmed glasses. Persia, he said. Do you mean I-ran?

I ran, you ran, we all ran, he smiled. Where’s your mother from? Voice cold as a gun. Russia, he replied. She put one finger on a word above a chart in the book, the other on a word at the bottom of the page, rought them together looking like a mad mathematician bent on solving the crimes of zero times zero divided by one. Her fingers stopped on a word. Declared: You are white.

My brother stumbled back, a hand on his chest, eyes wide, mouth in an O as in O my God! All these years and I did not know. Then to the room, to the woman and the guards: I am white I can go anywhere Do anything I can go to Canada and pretend it’s Mexico At last, I am white and you have no reason to keep me here.

I saw Sholeh read this poem at my reading series Hitched at Beyond Baroque Literary/Arts Center in March, and I fell in love with it. Before reading it, she shared that this happened to her brother and that it was a true story.

This poem is from The Scar Saloon (Red Hen Press, 2004)

You can hear Sholeh read this poem here or visit her website at www.sholehwolpe.com.

Hitched is an inter-generational reading series that couples established poets and writers with their emerging cousins. April 17, 2011 at 4pm we will feature Jenny Factor with Lisa Cheby and Mariano Zaro with Barbara Blatt. I hope you can make it!

Sholeh Wolpé is the author of Sin—Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad (University of Arkansas Press, Oct. 2007), The Scar Saloon (Red Hen Press), Rooftops of Tehran (Red Hen Press, Jan. 2008) and a Poetry CD (Refuge Studios). She is the coeditor of upcoming anthologies, Iconoclasts and Visionaries, and With Love, From Iran – Poems of Love and Seduction.

Harlem and The DREAMers

2011-04-03T09:30:00.000-07:00

April is National Poetry Month, and as celebration I will post poems through out the month of April that are somehow related to immigration.

Here's a particular favorite of mine by Langston Hughes. "Harlem" ponders the question, what happens to a dream deferred? Hughes was speaking about the marginalized and abused African Americans of Harlem and across the country in the 1930s, but I think his words hold relevance to the immigrant issues of today. The DREAMers are young men and women brought here illegally by their parents, who didn't have a say in the matter, who know no other home but the U.S., and who are now threatened as adults with detention and deportation every day. They are not allowed to dream or flourish, go to school or hold jobs, and are like prisoners in their own home. I wonder, what will happen to them if they are given no options?

HARLEM by Langston Hughes

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

To learn more about the Dream Act, or find a way to help go here.

Luis J. Rodriguez Speaks Up for the Youth

2011-03-28T18:21:00.000-07:00

Author of Always Running: La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A. and founder of community cultural center and independent press, Tia Chuchas, Luis J. Rodriguez, wrote an opinion piece, Opinion: Arizona Teacher's Letter is Sleepy Lagoon All Over Again, comparing Arizona and the latest political focus on the gang and immigration "problem" to Sleepy Lagoon and the Zoot Suit Riots of 1943. What touched me most was Rodriguez's reminder that those the politicians target are those we should protect: our youth.

"In fact, in my work among the most gang-ridden neighborhoods in this country and elsewhere I’ve found that the majority of youth are not in gangs. And those that are usually join them when they are poor in material matters as well as cultural and spiritual ones...I’m convinced we can solve the economic mess we’re in by drawing on our common hopes, common aims, and common energies—and not at the expense of the most vulnerable or easily targeted among us."

This sentiment made me think of the DREAMers and of Father Boyle, author of Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion, and his Homeboys. You can now help Father Boyle and his effort to make "jobs not jails" by heading into your local Ralphs to purchase their chips and salsa.

Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times

We need to continue to find positive alternatives like these to help our community and our children find a safe place in this country because they deserve that much, they deserve our support.

Georgetown University Writes Dangerously in Immigrant America

2011-03-27T10:23:00.000-07:00

If I had the money (and the time off from work), I would fly to Washington D.C. next week to attend Geogetown's symposium, Writing Dangerously in Immigrant America. This two day event on April 5th and 6th will will host an all-star list of socially conscience writers including Domincan-American superstar and author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz, Haitian-American author of Breath, Eyes, Memory, Edwidge Danticat, L.A. Times columnist, Hector Tobar, and columnist and author of Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields, Charles Bowden. "The themes across the symposium’s sessions will focus primarily on the vexed relationships between the U.S., its emerging immigrant-diasporic communities, and the specific American regions they mostly represent: the Caribbean, Central America, and the U.S./Mexico borderlands."

If you are in or around D.C. and are able to attend this event, I would love to see your cheat notes, or hear your thoughts.

Banksy in L.A.: The Academy Awards Edition

2011-02-27T18:38:00.000-08:00

I'm sitting in my living room at this moment watching, like many others around the country, the Academy Awards. One person in town for the event is world renowned street artist Banksy. How do we know he is in L.A.? Because he left his tracks on the eastside of town.

Photo taken from laestside.com

The blogger, LA Eastside found this Banksy original on the corner of 1st and Soto St, in a part of town known as East L.A. or Boyle Heights. From those not from Los Angeles, this area sits in the shadows east of Downtown L.A. and is home to many Latino immigrants from Mexico, Central and South America, cultural centers like Josefina Lopez's Casa 0101 and Corazon del Pueblo, as well as long lasting Mexican-American families like my own. My grandparents moved into a home only blocks from this corner 50 years ago when they first came to the U.S., and my grandmother continues to live in that same home today. This is what I often call, my L.A. As young and beautiful people from all over the country continue to flock to Los Angeles every year, heads filled with dreams of being high, hip, and on TV, there is another L.A., my L.A. that is rich with culture and a long history.

Banksy is currently in L.A. for an Academy nomination for his documentary, Exit Through the Gift Shop. It's good to know that true artists will always work to bring light to a greater struggle. Banksy may be in Los Angeles to participate in the Hollywood dream, but he is also aware of its reality.

And the reality of street art is nothing lasts, as shown in this post by Melrose & Fairfax blog.

Photo taken from MelroseandFairfax.blogspot.com

One or two days after going up, Banksy's latest stencil was tagged by a graffiti artist before the whole thing was cut out of the wall, probably to be auctioned for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Some seem outraged by the vandalism of Banksy's piece and the cutting of the wall, but I'm sure Banksy is more than happy with this one piece's journey. It is what Exit Through the Gift Shop is about, after all. Banksy isn't working under some naive belief that his artwork will be left alone. But I like to believe that the owners of that building, those who cut the wall, are a hardworking, immigrant family who could use the extra money to send their kids to school. That would make for a nice Hollywood fantasy. Maybe Selena Gomez will play the smart, but sassy daughter who can finally head to Stanford after struggling all through her youth selling oranges on the street in the Movie. Take that Christian Bale.

Applecore (Baltimore): Are Chip n' Dale Mexican?

2011-02-26T14:10:00.000-08:00

When I was a kid the classic Disney cartoons--Mickey, Minnie, Donald, Goofy, Pluto, and Chip n' Dale--were regular guests at hour house. We had a collection of VHS Walt Disney Home Video Cartoon Classics: Goofy Sports, Scary Tales, Halloween Haunt, Mickey & The Gang, and on any given evening one of my brothers or me would pick which to watch. As a family we guffawed at Goofy's transformation into Mr. Motor bulldozing down a cartooned 110 freeway in a yellow sports car, watched in merriment as Mickey, Goofy, and Donald traveled the open road in a silver airstream, and let our eyes widen like Donald's hungry gaping beak as Mickey shaved the last slice of bread into paper thin translucent sheets for dinner before selling the farm cow for magic beans and climbing the stalk. We practiced our best "Wahahahooee!", competed around the dinner table to see who could eat their corn on the cob like a typewriter like Donald, and memorized lines to make the others laugh, "I smell chocolate pot roast with pisnacho-- with smicshmashmi-- with mishmashmo-- green gravey!" But my all time favorites were the ones starring Donald Duck as he engaged in epic, catastrophic battles of will with Chip n' Dale.

There was something about the escalation of violence between a tightly wound, anal retentive duck and mischevious chipmunks who happily ruin all his well-made plans that tickled me pink. Donald was always so earnest and meticulous about his model trains, toy planes, about cooking a hardy breakfast, clearing his front path of snow. And at the moment he has it just right, Chip n' Dale come in to take a joyride, sneak a tower of perfectly stacked flapjacks, eat all the apples, take all the popcorn. They unapologeticaly take and take from the fruits of Donald's hard work, and even though Donald retaliates, the battle always ends with a red-faced crazy-eyed duck sitting at the center of an atomic sized pile of rubble, and the chipmunks still sitting in their tree.

Recently, I decided to introduce my 5 year old nephew to some of my favorites via Youtube: Out of Scale, Apple Core, and Three for Breakfast. We watched together, and I was reminded of all those years back sitting in the living room with my brothers and our VHS collection sprawled on the floor. He laughed just like I thought he would at all the right spots. And while he laughed, I began to see these old favorites with new eyes.

Donald in his sailor uniform, with his well-manicured home, multitude of toys, all the necessary conveniences, and the chipmunks living off the land, working on a farm, camping in an orchard, always being chased out, always being blamed for stealing all the resources (Can you say taxpayer money?). These characters suddenly started to look familiar. Is Donald an all-American, veteran conservative? Are Chip n' Dale Mexican?

In the episode, Applecore, Donald owns an apple orchard. At the beginning of the cartoon he is taking stock of his land and picking apples. He is happy out in the fresh air, on the land he owns, ripe, red apples all around him. Then he turns one over in his hand and finds it infested with small bites. He then sees that all the apples have bites taken out of them. Of course, soon he finds Chip n' Dale and battle begins. Donald wants the stealing, loafing vermin off his land, and he will do anything, even resort to chemical warfare to get them out. But who was on the land first? Who do the apples really belong to? Hmmm.

In an episode titled Out of Scale, we first see Donald driving on a miniature locomotive, conductor's hat on his head, through a miniature town and countryside, but it's not quite finished, not quite perfected. He starts planting model trees until he runs into a real tree out of scale with the rest of his plan. He decides to uproot it, move it, and put a to scale miniature in its place. Chip n' Dale, just back from a nut gathering excursion climb up their tree to find it much changed. The tree is barely much taller then them, and before they can even comprehend what has happened, Donald comes and shakes them out of the tree and tries to chase them out. I think of Chavez Ravine, Arizona, and other stories from the southwest. Chip n' Dale illustrate a classic story of displacement.

As I have explored these stories, done all the important research aka watching cartoons (I love being a poet), I was surprised to find Donald a sympathetic character. I actually feel for Donald, all his hard work, his time put in, his youth spent defending our nation as a sailor in the Navy (as his uniform suggests). He reminds me of the older generation, people from my parent's generation who take pride in their gardens, in bricking the front porch, making the perfect batch of lemonade and sitting out on the new porch to drink it. Doesn't he deserve respect? Doesn't he deserve to enjoy the house owns, the life he worked hard to create without chipmunks coming in and stealing his pancakes, using his kitchen, eating his apples? It only seems fair. It took a cartoon duck with an anger management problem to help me begin to understand the motivations of the conservatives when it comes to the immigration issue. It doesn't mean I agree with them. It doesn't mean that I think the militia or SB1070 are right, but I can see where they are coming from. Maybe someone should show those militia a couple of episodes because they would see that creating a war zone never works out well. Just ask Donald.

Here is excerpt from a poem I'm working on inspired by the cartoon:

Out of Scale: The Assimilation of Chip n’ Dale

Chip n’ Dale carve dwelling into trunk,
gather chestnuts, horde berries,
need nothing. They are chipper chipmunks
until a duck steams forward on locomotive
with plans for a model town. A duck
in engineer cap plans a model life.
More tracks must be laid, more houses
tracked, more contracts written up.
Donald pauses, ponders the possibility
of a stadium for goofy sports, serious
money, but development is halted

Publishing News

2011-02-09T09:42:00.000-08:00

I'm excited to share one of my Chavez Ravine poems, "Mud-caked," has been published in the latest issue of The Los Angeles Review. Issue 9 features the work of Bruce Holland Rogers. Other contributors include Dana Gioia and Annie Finch.

"Mud-caked" is inspired by one of Don Normack's beautiful black and white photos that capture life in the now extinct Mexican neighborhoods of Chavez Ravine before homes were torn down for Dodger Stadium. The girl in the bottom left photo is the inspiration for my poem. I tried to give a glimpse of what her life may have been like with a thematic focus on ownership.

Photos are taken from Don Normack's Book Chavez Ravine: 1949.

Excerpt from "Mud-Caked":

Boys can battle for brown-grassed hills,
but they won’t snatch Bunny
—one mud-caked, plump-stuffed bunny—
from her tight grip. When she goes in for the night
she will tie Bunny to a pipe with twine:
her bunny, her patch of dirt, her pipe and twine.
Like a horse at a saloon, she will tie Bunny up
before going in for supper, before her mother can say,
“Don’t you dare bring that filthy thing in,”

Poets Take DC, Sandra Cisneros Talks Chicano Lit, and other News

2011-01-31T19:23:00.000-08:00

This week the AWP 2011 Writing Conference will be held in Washington DC. Many different writers, publishers, schools, and journals from all over the country of all genres will gather together from February 2-5 to hold panels on a myriad of subjects and readings celebrating the work of our modern storytellers.

One event I wish I could buy a last minute ticket to DC for is a gathering of poets "for healing, tolerance, reflection and peace on the steps of the US Congress." On Saturday February 5th from 12pm-2pm there will be a press conference, rally, and public "floricanto" (a collective poetry reading) in response to the recent Arizona tragedy, passage of Arizona SB 1070 & HB 2281 (and other copycat state legislation), the death of the Dream Act in the senate, and the latest rounds of deportations.

For more information on the rally and other immigration and "Floricanto" events during AWP this week, go here.

It is essential for writers to speak about what is happening right now with immigration legislation. As quoted on the Poets Responding to SB 1070 fb page (where the Floricanto began), "Peace goes into the making of a poem as flour goes into the making of bread." -Pablo Neruda. It is our job to tell the stories of those that go unheard. It is our calling to be truthful and specific about our worlds and those not known by the mass public. But it is not easy.

NPR did a story this week, "New and Established Writers Redefine Chicano Lit", with interviews with Sandra Cisneros, author of House on Mango Street and Caramelo, and David Rice. I think Cisneros spoke well of the need, especially now, to create spaces for our writers and our stories: "when I wrote [House], I wrote it from someplace, a very optimistic young women in her early 20s, hoping things would get better in the United States for people of Mexican descent. But, I could never dream what would happen post-9/11 and with the community being under siege as it is right now with Mexican people really being vilified at this time of American history."She also spoke about the loss of Chicano literature in schools due to HB 2281 copycat legistlation in Texas: "I think it's a time where we're not having those opportunities to tell our story...I'm just one person that can go out to the schools, and the demand and requests from the schools is enormous. There aren't enough of us published to go out. And the ones that are published are not getting distributed. So it's a difficult task. I feel it every day...especially since, recently, our Texas Board, removed a lot of us from social studies. A lot of us are getting removed from textbooks...So we need those other writers, but it's a difficult time."

Speaking of published writers telling the immigrant story, I've been reading The Madonnas of Echo Park by Brando Skyhorse. It's a great read that tells multiple tales of Latinos living and working on the streets of L.A. from the time before Chavez Ravine was home to the Dodgers, up until modern day with an undocumented worker zigzagging through the booths of the annual Echo Park Lotus Festival in search of a place to dump a murder weapon.
Here is a quote from the book that had me thinking about SB 1070 and the like: "Anyone who works on the street knows there's a rule in L.A. the cops have: Special Order 40, or what the trabajadores call "santo cuarenta." The cops can't stop you if they think you're an illegal, only if they think you're an illegal about to commit a crime. This is to encourage illegals to come forward if they have information about a crime. They also can't hold you for more than twenty-four hours if the one thing they've got on you is that you're an alien. It's tougher in L.A. for illegals now, meaning cops have to ask you where you're from no matter what. But as long as you lie and tell them your from here, they won't check your background or report you to immigration. As long as you lie."

With the way the legislation is currently going it will only target the wrong people, and make it harder to convict the real criminals, so we have to look for positive alternatives like The Dream Act.

Unfortunately (unfortunately doesn't really communicate the amount of pain and disappointment, the breaking of hopes, felt by the Dreamers), the Dream Act was voted down in the senate recently, after it passed in Congress. It was a major blow to our educated youth who have been working hard to make a life here in the U.S.

Fortunately, President Obama did not forget about the Dreamers, and in last week's State of the Union Address, called for the senate and congress to look again at The Dream Act saying, "They grew up as Americans and pledge allegiance to our flag, and yet live every day with the threat of deportation." I think many were unhappy he did not say more, but the fact he is addressing it, can only be positive. This article from Reuters, "Obama to push for Dream Act again in 2011" has more on Obama's plan to push for the passing of the Dream Act.

Remembering Cambodia and the Work of Dith Pran

2011-01-17T14:49:00.000-08:00

In the summer of 2006, I took a five-week tour of Southeast Asia with three college friends. Not more than two days in Bangkok, we traveled by bus to the Thai-Cambodian border, and then by taxi for the six hour ride across the "Dancing Road"* to Siem Reap, Cambodia. All our travel books explicitly, and seriously, advised travelers to not travel over the border by road, but with only two days into our trip, none of us wanted to spend the extra money on airfare, and plus, we figured, how bad can it be?

The answer to that question may be another post entirely, but as anyone who's made the trip knows, the journey is a strange and dangerous trek, that leaves you frightened, shocked, and mystified until the moment you find yourself back in the dizzy air-conditioned malls of Bangkok.

Cambodia is both the most beautiful and most tragic place I have ever experienced. The people there are suffering, but they are warm and open with their stories. They seem to smile easily despite the constant reminders of their unspeakable past and current impossible situation. When I think of Cambodia, I think of our taxi driver who shared his memories with us, I think of the laughing children we visited at the English school, the saffron draped monks passing us in the street, the massive silent faces of Bayon, and the tiered towers of Angkor appearing in the sunrise. And then I think of amputees sitting at ever corner, child-beggars holding infants in one arm while the other extends out asking for money for formula. I think of the U.S. dollar used everywhere, the Thai electricity, the French and British five star hotels, and the unusable expanding farmland littered with live mines, deadly keepsakes from of the Vietnam War, U.S. occupation, civil war, and the Khmer Rouge. There is too much feeling in Cambodia, too much to say that I find it impossible to unpack all my impressions of this strange and magical place, but still, now over four years later, it doesn't leave me.

Last night I stumbled upon the 1984 movie "The Killing Fields"* starring Sam Waterston. This movie is based on the book, The Death and Life of Dith Pran, written by New York Times war correspondent, Sydney Schanberg. It tells the story of Schanberg’s Cambodian interpreter and friend, Dith Pran, and his four year journey of survival through Pol Pot's "Year Zero."

Dith Pran in Siem Reap in 1989. Photo by Steve McCurry
Copyright 2008

Unbelievably, Pran survived torture and starvation in countryside work camps by masking himself as an uneducated taxi driver (the Khmer Rouge ruthlessly targeted educated people infamously killing individuals who wore spectacles). By 1979 the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia driving Pol Pot's forces to the Thai border and liberating the work camps. From there, Pran traveled barefoot from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap, and then later to the Thai-Cambodian border (again by foot), where he was finally reunited with his friend Sydney Schanberg, the only person who kept hope that Pran was alive even though it was highly unlikely. It is estimated 2 million Cambodians were murdered during Khmer Rouge four year regime; their bodies were piled into mass graves along the countryside, now known as "The Killing Fields."

In 1986, Pran became a U.S. citizen and continued to work as a New York Times photographer until his death in 2008 from pancreatic cancer. His partner and friend, Sydney Schanberg, was quoted in this NYT article, written at the time of Pran's death, saying, "I’m a very lucky man to have had Pran as my reporting partner and even luckier that we came to call each other brother...His mission with me in Cambodia was to tell the world what suffering his people were going through in a war that was never necessary. It became my mission too. My reporting could not have been done without him."

Pran could have escaped (along side his wife and children) when the U.S. evacuated its forces from the capital in April 1975, but he stayed with Schanberg in order to help him and other western correspondents tell his country's story to the rest of the world. Then, when he survived four years of Pol Pot's regime and the systematic murder of 2 million Cambodian citizens, he used his experience to spread awareness of Cambodia's modern genocide, his country's hardships, and the tragedy of individual suffering. This was his life's work.

You can read about Pran's four year nightmare, and his 1989 emotional return to Cambodia (after a 10 year exile) in his own words in the NYT article "Return to the Killing Fields."

In Pran's final NYT interview--done shortly before his death--he asked that the fight against genocide continue. "One time is too many," he said. He hoped that others would carry on what he made his life's work: “If they can do that for me my spirit will be happy."

As someone who has been touched by the beautiful people of Cambodia, I share a little bit of Dith Pran's story in order to do as he wished, continue to spread awareness of those suffering around the world.

Other books on the subject:

The Children of Cambodia's Killing Fields: Memoirs by Survivors by Dith Pran.

When Broken Glass Floats: Growing Up Under the Khmer Rouge by Chanrithy Him

*The road to Siem Reap gets its name because it is an unpaved red clay path raised about three feet above the landscape that does not hold up well to the rainy weather. Western passengers appear to be dancing around in taxis and buses as vehicles travel over the rough terrain for multiple hours.

* "The Killing Fields" is currently on Netflix Instant Watch.

Making Verbal Tamales for Christmas

2010-12-27T19:02:00.000-08:00

My family making tamales. Photo by Gabriel Bermejo.

A month or so back my friend Erika Ayon and I met to collaborate on poetry projects. During our meeting we created a form together. I've always wanted to create my own form, and this felt like the perfect time. We call it a tamal, as in the Mexican treat often eaten at Christmas. A tamal should be seven lines long, begin and end with the same line, rhyme on the 2nd, 4th, and 6th lines, and customarily mentions food.

On Wednesday December 23rd (aka Christmas Adam), I spent the day with my grandmother at her house in Boyle Heights. While sitting with her I heard a young girl singing Silent Night through the streets as part of a Posada*. This moment inspired the following tamal.

Posada

A young girl sings Noche de Paz
through a silent East L.A. night.
From my Grandmother’s stoop I watch
families weave winter streets by candlelight.
"Grandma, lo oyes?" She sets knitting down
to listen. We find our shelter tonight
as a young girl sings Noche de Paz.

My grandmother's front stoop. Photo by Erika Medrano.

Happy Holidays, to all! I hope you all have enjoyed moments of peace and beauty with those you love.

Please feel free to give the tamal a whirl. What kind will you make?

*Posadas are a Mexican tradition where a community reenacts the journey of Mary and Joseph through Bethlehem to find an inn. People walk through the streets going from house to house singing songs and asking to be allowed inside. They are denied many times until they get to the home/church/community center that welcomes them in. Once inside there is a party usually with piñatas, champurado, pan dulce and other treats.

WWJLD?

2010-12-08T20:04:00.000-08:00

On this 30th anniversary of John Lennon's death, I wanted to write something about him. Make a tribute. Say something worth saying (if it is even possible when talking about such a larger than life personality).

John Lennon has long been a a focus of inspiration for me. I remember being a junior in high school taking a Religions of the Word class(I went to a Catholic High School). For my final project I made a poster in black pen and marker of different symbols from all the major religions with the lyrics to Imagine and All You Need is Love written around the borders. I got an "A".

John Lennon was one of my earliest influences (after my parents) in concern to my interest in human rights and social justice.

He still continues to be a major influence on me and a beacon for hope and reason. I have often asked myself, WWJLD?

On 9/11 when President Bush made his public address--his goofy drawl and odd smile giving me no comfort--I thought two things: I want Clinton! and My god, what would John say if he had lived to see this?

And then again, in the last few years--feeling the drag of two wars and the apathy within me and those around me--I have wondered, where is our John Lennon? Where is that person to unify us, guide us, give us hope. These days, those great leaders feel like a nostalgic trend of the past, of days gone by. From time to time I wonder, are all our best leaders dead?

The most tragic part of Lennon's story--at least for me--is that he still had so much he wanted to accomplish. With a small child and an new album on the way, he was bursting with desire to live life. And then I think about that little 5 year old beautiful boy.

Three days before being murdered on the sidewalk in front of the Dakota, where he had made a home with Yoko and Sean, he was quoted in an interview as saying, "What they want is dead heroes, like Sid Vicious and James Dean. I'm not interested in being a dead fucking hero."

As his immigration lawyer, Leon Wildes, said "Can you imagine, if that beautiful man had lived more than five years after he had gotten his green card, what magnificent music he would have continued to bless us with?"

Imagine.

Speaking of immigration. I found this great story from Lennon's immigration lawyer, Leon Wildes, complete with personal anecdotes and hilarious little insights like when he got the call to represent the Lennons he asked, "Alan, tell me, who is John Lennon?" (he also didn't know what cannabis or hash were)

You can read the story here

Writing for Colored Girls

2010-11-29T18:50:00.000-08:00

A still from the movie For Colored Girls

I recently went to see For Colored Girls, the newest Tyler Perry production based off the 1970s play by Ntozake Shange, For Colored Girls Who Consider Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf. The play to film adaptation is a bit awkward as some stage limitations and dramatics do not transfer well to the screen, but I still enjoyed it. And though the title more than suggest that this movie is intended for “colored girls," I found that the film’s strength lies in the universality of each woman’s story (seven in all) as manifestations of womanhood that transcend race or color. With a diverse representation of female roles in society as well as a diverse representation of societal and domestic issues (domestic violence, abortion, rape, struggle with monogamy), this movie feels like a story for the every-woman.

Unfortunately, the title may keep more than a few women away, as a good friend—who is Caucasian American—told me, “I would never see that movie. The billboard pissed me off.” Her issue was that the movie's title, posters, and trailers aggressively communicate that this movie isn’t for her, and she didn’t like it. This is interesting considering how many women of color have felt similarly about the latest rom-com opening starring Katherine Heigel or Amy Adams. It is evident to me that the film purposefully means to push against big-budget movie norms (as more than 90% of all the people in the film are African-American), but it is unfortunate that such a beautiful and universal story should make a woman feel unwelcome.

As a Latina writer, I often wonder if it is possible to tell a story that is specific and culturally grounded without being exclusive. I wonder what makes a story universal?

When I began The Immigration Project, I wanted to be able to tell individual immigration stories because I felt, and still feel, that by hearing specific stories of struggle, survival, and triumph, readers can find something human, something not unlike themselves. Even with all our differences—language, religion, politic, etc—there are innate things that make us human, individuals, and alive.

But no matter what my intentions are, many will only see my writing as Latino, Mexican-American, immigrant, minority, or colored and because of that there will be people who will not read my work because they think it is not for them or about them. But aren’t all stories about human existence in some way about us? So how can I be specific to my culture, language, and concerns, and yet at the same time not exclusive? Is it something I should even worry about? Or should I just work on telling a good story?

A couple of weeks ago I finished Junot Diaz’s book The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Here is a story that’s microscope is acutely focused on an east coast urban, Dominican immigration story with a side of fanboy/speculative fiction. And even though it is a Latino-Caribbean immigration story, it hasn’t met any of usual limitations. Diaz has received national attention for his book, MFA students all over the country have picked it up, and I have had many friends from different educational and ethnic backgrounds recommend it to me. So what makes this book different from others like it, namely In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez (my favorite book which is also about the Dominican Republic)? Diaz references Alvarez’s book more than once, but I doubt a large number of non-Latino people have clambered to read it. So what’s the difference? And should I be concerned? Should I worry that I am exclusively writing for “colored girls”? If I am, is there a way to be inclusive?

I will continue to ruminate, but for now I leave you with Junot Diaz’s take on this topic. I definitely liked what he had to say, and if you have read his book, it makes for a nice epilogue.

Border Poets at Beyond Baroque this Friday

2010-11-16T17:52:00.001-08:00

Photo by Holly Winters

This Friday November 19th at 7:30 Beyond Baroque Literary/Arts Center will host six amazing voices from Juarez and Tijuana, also known as the borderlands of Mexico. These poets have gone to great lengths to travel to this side of the Rio Grand to bring their unique voices and point of view to our L.A. stage.

We’ve seen the news stories, heard tales of horror, been warned of the dangers of these middle areas, and now thanks to these poets' efforts we can listen to language and narratives that capture the truth of these places like no news report ever can.

Border Poets features: Edgar Rincon Luna, Martin Camps, Bibiana Padilla Maltos, Armando Molina, Jose Rico, and Anthony Seidman.

Beyond Baroque Literary/Arts Center
681 Venice Bl. Venice, CA 90291
Phone 1-310-822-3006
Admission $7, students/seniors/children $5, members FREE

EDGAR RINCÓN LUNA’s collections include Aqui comienza la noche interminable and Puño de whiskey.

MARTIN CAMPS is the author of three collections: Desierto Sol, La invención del mundo and the award-winning Extinción de los atardeceres.

BIBIANA PADILLA MALTOS is a Tijuana-born poet. Her collections include Equilibri...os, Intrucciones para cocina, Los Demonios de la Casa Mayor, Los Impersonales, 25 ScoreS 25 and Mini Poemas.

ARMANDO MOLINA is this year’s winner of the prestigious David Alfaro Siqueiros grant. He also coordinates events at the library in the Parque Central of Ciudad Juárez.

JOSÉ RICO’s translations recently appeared in a special issue of Luvina dedicated to the literature of Los Angeles.

ANTHONY SEIDMAN’s poetry and translations have appeared in Poetry International, Rattle, Hofstra Hispanic Review, Luna, Crate, The Bitter Oleander, Beyond Baroque, Nimrod, Reverso, La valquiria and La jornada semanal. His collections include Where Thirsts Intersect and Combustions.

Hosted by XOCHITL-JULISA BERMEJO.

Learning from the Hijab

2010-10-14T01:06:00.000-07:00

I went back to teaching high school—after a two year hiatus—at the beginning of September. Returning has been difficult for many reasons, but one is the atmosphere I teach in. I work at tiny private school of 100 students where 20% of the school's population is international. Two-thirds of those students are Chinese while the other one-third are Saudi Arabian. It quickly became apparent that, though my schedule was English I and Performing Arts, I was to take charge of teaching the Saudi nationals English, which was minimal, at best. Just today, while working on their vocabulary, one student asked, "What does malice mean?" I said, "What does the definition say?" He read, "a desire to do harm to another person, to hurt them." I said, "What do you think that means?" He stared blankly at me. I tried again, "What words do you understand in that sentence?" His reply, "person."

Besides dealing with their non-existent English skills, I also have the challenge of dealing with young Saudi girls being out of Saudi Arabia, for what I am guessing, is the first time ever. All the young ladies wear the traditional hijab head wrap, and cover all their skin except for their faces and hands. I am amazed at how beautiful their headscarves are. Everyday they come into class with a different color: gray with metallic stripes, saffron, hot pink to match their hot pink shoes, pastel floral prints wrapped around their olive faces. Sometimes one or two of them will wear mascara and eyeliner, on special occasions one wears turquoise liner just on her bottom lid making her almond eyes shine. They are beautiful.

When school started it was the middle of Ramadan so many of them didn't start trickling in until 1, 2, 3 weeks in. One girl came in a week and a half into the term. She sat quietly, her eyes darting from one over-stimulating sight to another, and looked as if she would shatter into pieces if someone, anyone, looked her in the eyes. She was in my Performing Arts class and I tried to inform her, as gently as I could, that everyone in Performing Arts was required to perform (I probably should had thought this out, but I had never been in this position before). She instantly burst into tears. She took the piece of her scarf that ran along her hairline and pulled it down over her face. I tried to comfort her, pad her on the back (though I worried that kind of touch wasn't acceptable), tell her we would figure it out, but she only grabbed the end frays of her scarf, as if a blanket, and dragged it across her face. At one point I picked up her eye contact, if only for a second, to say, "it will be alright," but then I saw her, I saw me trying to speak to her, saw how impossible the situation was, and my heart sunk. I can't even imagine.

After 3 weeks of shuffling and settling, I finally had a set class mixed of Saudi nationals, Chinese nationals, and U.S. students. And once the shock wore off from all of us, something magnificent started to happen.

Last week I was reading the story "The Beginning of Something" by Sue Ellen Bridges where a fourteen-year-old girl has to deal with her first death and her first kiss at the same time. It’s a “rite of passage” story. As a discussion question I asked the students, "What are the traditions of your culture when someone dies?" And suddenly students were excited to share Saudi rituals, Chinese rituals, American rituals, and I thought, How cool is this? I shared with them the Mexican-Catholic tradition of a novena, where loved ones pray the rosary for nine days after the death to help the soul reach heaven. They like to hear about my culture too. They all wanted to share, all wanted to speak, to teach. That’s when I realized the unique strength of this class to be teachers as well as students together.

This week we read "Brothers are the Same,” by Beryl Markham where a Masai boy has to prove his manhood by killing a lion. For class discussion we brainstormed different kinds of rites of passage and came up with a list: earning a driver's license, first kiss, cooking for your family for the first time, getting a job. For homework that night they were to write a paragraph about a rite of passage they experienced in their own life. The girl who was about to shatter just two or three weeks before wrote a very beautiful paragraph that described her experience moving to the U.S. and how in Saudi Arabia a girl must wear a hijab when she becomes 14 (a sign of growth), but wearing it here, she is looked at as if she is from the moon. I think that says something about her, about her strength. A few weeks before she was ready to dissolve into her desk, and now she was beginning to express her experience.

With legislation in Spain and France focused on outlawing the hijab, I think of this young girl and my other students. I think about how beautiful they each are and how unique. I think about their strength and their ability to teach one another about the world, about themselves. I can’t help it. That day we talked about different funeral traditions I thought something I don't often think as a liberal-border-line feminist-Chicana, We are so lucky.

Two Parisian women protest France's Hijab ban by covering their faces and baring their legs.

Poets and Community: Thoughts from the Latino Books and Family Festival

2010-10-10T20:44:00.000-07:00

This past weekend was the Latino Books and Family Festival at Cal State L.A. I was lucky enough to be invited to speak on a panel at the event entitled "From Inspiration to Publication: The Business of Poetry" with poets Alicia Partnoy, William Archila, Rafael Alvarado, Erika Ayon and Melinda Palacio. I was honored to be sitting next to such accomplished writers.

In March I attended a panel at UCLA featuring Alicia Partnoy, author of The Little School: Tales of Disappearance and Survival, about Argentine political prisoners' writing and art, and I was excited to be able to finally introduce myself. It was also an honor to sit along side William Archila whose book, The Art of Exile--a poetic account of his exit from civil war El Salvador in 1980 and his later return--won the festival's International Latino Book Award in Poetry. I bought Archila's book today at the festival, and am already in love with it. Beautiful images of here and there, and consequently feeling alienated from both feel dreamy and magical, but as William explained at our panel, what we here in the U.S. call Magical Realism is an everyday-way of thinking in Latin American countries.

Walking through booths of Latino publishers, bookstores, writers and organizations made me feel lucky to be a Latino writer welcomed by a supportive community. Sometimes being a writer can be lonely. The act of writing is solitary, but what I love about being a poet is the opportunities it brings to share stories and experience a moment of togetherness. On the truest level this community is hopefully felt when we read a poem about a man's memory of being a boy in El Salvador or a political prisoner's story of survival, but it can also happen in public spaces.

It is about community. We share our stories to understand each other and gain a sense of sameness. Or as Father Boyle, Founder of Homeboy Industries, author of Tattoos of the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion, and the festival's keynote speaker said it is a mutual experience. A moment in time when we discover a kinship with one another.

In my household there is an ongoing debate about the state of the Latino community in the U.S. Of course, we all know there is still along way to go, but in my house some think we have focused too much on art, literature, and education and not enough on business and politics. That may be true, but we need Latino writers and poets, books, publishers, bookstores, and community centers if only to have a place to be recognized and seen because no one else is going to do it unless we make them.

As David Orr said in his essay "The Politics of Poetry" (I'm summarizing here and taking liberties) politics and poetry both demand a mastery of rhetoric and politicians--just as poets--are “people who imagine new ways of being and perceiving.” Orr refers to this as a totalizing vision. The politician and poet’s ability to imagine a wider worldview allows both to clarify for a public a new or different reality through language. So yes, it would be good for our community to have more Gloria Molinas and Sonia Sotomayers in places of power, but we also need Luis J. Rodriguez, Sandra Cisneros, Gary Soto, Martin Espada, and Julia Alvarez (to name a few).

Support your Latino writers, buy a book, and let's keep the community moving together.

SB 1070 News Round Up

2010-07-31T11:05:00.000-07:00

Thursday July 29th, the day the new law was set to take effect, Judge Susan Bolton ruled to stop certain measures (the most contraversial measures) of the law. This new injunction has temporarily blocked measures requiring officers to check immigration status during stops, making it a crime to not carry papers, and making it a crime for the undocumented to work.

Below are few articles from this week in SB 1070 and immigration news (some more balanced than others).

Arizona Immigration Law Blocked by Judge in Temporary Victory for Obama by Ed Pilkington.

"While some of the most draconian aspects of the law have been blocked, Hispanic groups are unhappy about sections including a provision to make it a crime for undocumented day labourers to get into an employer's vehicle and a vaguely-worded clause against the "transportation" and "harbouring" of illegal immigrants."

Arizona Immigration Protesters Hit the Streets. Anna Gorman and Nicholas Riccardi report on protests rising around Phoenix, the injunction against SB 1070, and Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio insistence: "It's going to be business as usual."

Hector Tobar questions, Arizona's Immigration Law: Aimed at Criminals or at Workers?

"It seems to me that Americans are of two minds about the immigration question. They like the immigrants they know personally and are willing to extend this generosity of spirit to many of those who've entered the country illegally. At the same time, they believe the United States is a country of laws and want a system where those laws are respected."

Baby Baiting. Robin Templeton writes about the "Baby Anchor" fallacy.

"When you read the statistics about how the undocumented population has increased, you have to realize how much of that is the direct result of blocking people from gaining legal status who, before, legitimately could." --Maria Blanco, director of the Earl Warren Institute at the UC Berkeley, School of Law,

Preparing to Interview Sholeh Wolpe: Educating Myself on Iran

2010-07-24T16:41:00.000-07:00

June 2009 only one thing was on my mind: graduating. In the final weeks of my MFA program, I frantically worked through the last bits of requirements, practicing my 15 minutes of poetry in the mirror, thumbing through the notes and handouts of my senior lecture trying to smoothly verbalize theories I was worried I didn’t completely grasp. This left no time for the outside world. At the exact same time citizens of Iran were gathering in the streets to protest against a corrupt election and tyranical government, Twitter was a flitter, and the entire world witnessed a young woman’s murder captured by the camera of a phone. Did I take much notice? Not really. There was no time.

I remember classmates talking about Neda. I remember people in the commons area saying, “Can you believe what’s happening in Iran?” but I shrugged it off and kept my focus on the hoops in front of me. Then Michael Jackson died, and it was like the whole world stopped. It started with a text. Someone announced, “Michael Jackson is dead,” and suddenly the students around me flipped open cell phones and laptops. Perez Hilton (I went to Perez and got mocked), TMZ, New York Times, Reuters, Los Angeles Times, where flashing before screens as we waited for updates, texted, and Facebooked. Neda was Dead. Iran was imploding on the other side of the world, but here in my world Michael was dead.

A year later, the year anniversary of my MFA, the Green protests, Michael’s death, The Splinter Generation (the zine I edit for) was allowed to republish two poems from Atlanta Review’s Iran Issue. The poems represent some of the first voices to come out of the Green Movement of Iran. This lead me to invite the guest editor of that issue, Sholeh Wolpe, Iranian poet, translator, and editor, to be a guest on Splinter’s BlogTalkRadio show, Splintered Thoughts, and for some lucky reason she agreed. I was instantly paralyzed by my ignorance.

How can I interview a woman about Iran, when it barely broke through my own consciousness? How can I interview her when the main memories of last summer were my senior reading, and listening to Man in the Mirror and tearing up with classmates? How can I talk about Iran when I am so far away in a different country, a different culture, a different state of mind?

I asked our main editor, if he might want to do the interview instead, but he couldn’t. Or wouldn’t. I was the one with the idea; I would be the one to do it. But a year later, and I still knew nothing. What to do, but get to work reading articles, watching documentaries, and reading poetry.

There is a fear that drives much of my work: I am a vapid idiot. I worry that at any moment I will be discovered and kicked out of the creative club, my MFA stripped and my computer cleaned of every poem and essay. There will be a brand too (a t-shirt that reads “stoopid” with an arrow pointed up), that way when I go to poetry readings those around me will be properly warned. Is it that big a fear? In a way, yes. I don’t read the paper, reading novels and poetry books are work not entertainment, I can’t quote Vonnegut, the Brontes are strangers to me, William Carlos Williams an impossible uncle, and worst of all, I like reality T.V., the really bad stuff.

Not wanting Sholeh, or any Splinter listener to know the evil truth, I went to work, and discovered a very complex situation with a beautiful culture and people faced with a tyrannical government. One thing I know, Iranians are not their government.
The women stood out to me. Banned from government, made to wear hijabs/niqabs/burqas, restricted in their public goings on, and mostly tied to the home, life is difficult, and yet, they fight. They enter university, wait to marry, and conduct individual protests like allowing some of their hair to be seen below veils. Perhaps a small protest, but it speaks hugely to the strength of the individual.

Before speaking with Sholeh, I searched the cyberspace for a whole universe of knowledge, downloaded, and reflected, but I am still so very ignorant. I have never lived this existence, will never live it, and I feel there is a whole lexicon of knowledge and culture I can never crack. I feel so unequipped, and yet I must try. I may never feel knowledgeable enough to talk about Arabic Nations, and the struggle in Iran, but what I can do is question, search, and when I have someone like Sholeh Wolpe, a poet and activist, I can ask and listen.

I can share my own fears and inadequacies because we are all human. All of us, know matter where we come from, what religion we grew up in (I grew up Catholic), what websites we consider news, what news channel we watch, what country we were born in, what side of the border we stand, what side of the war we happen to be on, are individuals trying to live, trying to be brave, trying to learn.

Highlights from the Sholeh Wolpe interview on poetry, politics, and Iran to come.

Drop Dead Diva, Deportation, and a Dream

2010-06-29T15:07:00.000-07:00

Click here to watch the clip at mylifetime.com.

Drop Dead Diva, an original Lifetime program, is a scripted show about a young fashion model named Deb who dies in a car accident and comes back to life as Jane, an older, wiser, plumper attorney. The latest episode had a storyline about Jane's assistant, Terry (played by comedian Margret Cho), whose cousin, a young man that she and her mother raised from infancy, is arrested on a minor charge, found guilty of a misdemeanor, and ordered to return to South Korea, although he has lived in the U.S. his entire life and, until his arrest, did not know he was an illegal immigrant.

Because this is an uplifting show about human experience, the storyline has a happy ending when Jane, the young man's defender, finds a loophole discovering that her client's biological father was a North Korean and argues asylum. But reality is not as kind as prime time programming. In our real court system this young man would have been deported, or--if he had the means--been held in a detention center for an unknown amount of time as he fought for asylum. In our real court system, immigration hearings are never so neatly and happily tied up.

It is sad to think how many real stories begin much like this fictionalized one, but end very differently. There are infants and children brought into this country every day, without say or explanation. My own mother was brought into the country illegally as an infant by her parents, and she never understood why her father would leave her behind in L.A. every time he took her younger sister and brothers to visit family in Baja California. (She began to believe she wasn’t his daughter.) These things do happen, but unfortunately they happen to people who don’t have the luck of fictional T.V. characters who can afford high class lawyers. No, the real world is much much harsher.

Perhaps the result of Drop Dead Diva’s immigration storyline is unbelievable, but it is good to see a prime time show presenting a story on immigrant rights through a recurring character (Cho) that the audience has connected with. And also, that the story focused on a Korean American family because we are all connected in these stories.

If you are interested in immigrant rights for children of immigrants you can check out the Dream Act and sign a petition here, or get active here.

An Interview with Douglas Kearney

2010-06-21T18:45:00.001-07:00

Last week, I wrote an interview with Doug Kearney for The Splinter Generation. Doug is a, as his bio says, poet/performer/librettist/educator. Much of his new book The Black Automaton (Fence 2009) is a mix of visual art and poetry that comes together in an investigation of race and culture in Los Angeles and the United States.

His poems reflecting on his experience with the L.A. Riots from his predominantly white neighborhood in Pasadena/Altadena definitely caught my eye. I was also in the San Gabriel Valley, and can remember the ominous plumes of smoke rising from the west and taking over the city. As an Angelino, a developing minor, and a person of color, the L.A. Riots meant something to both of us (and probably many artists of our generation), but in different ways. And that's what I love to discover, what this blog is about. It's about finding those connections within the human experience as much as the uniqueness and individuality.

From The Splinter Generation interview:

XB: In your book The Black Automaton the L.A. Riots are a backdrop for a series of poems. What hand do you think the riots had in shaping you as an African American poet?

DK: The riots happened my senior year in high school. I wasn’t a poet then. My family was the only black family at this white church. I had been in The Pasadena Boy’s choir, which was largely a white organization; so a lot of my peers that weren’t at school where white folks. When the L.A. Riots came down, having to ask that question, “Whose side [am] I on?” crystallized all these fears of not being sure where I belonged.

At the time, popular music included groups like Public Enemy and Arrested Development, so there was a sense among African Americans that you were supposed to have something to say. And [the question became] what would I have said? Who would I have betrayed? The riots, their impact on me as a poet, allowed me to identify a question that I figured I could only answer through the kind of introspection that poetry allows. And what is crazy, even after all this time, I still don’t know what I would have done. And I think, “City with fire and a piece of silver,” revealed to [that] me.

XB: You mention “City with fire and a piece of silver." That poem stood out to me, for one, because of its element of chance. In some of your more visual poems, like the “Black Automaton in Tag” series, there is a feeling of chance, almost like “Choose your own adventure” poetry. Can you speak about that?

DK: Those “choose your own adventure” poems came from people telling me that they would not have gotten the poem if it were not for my performance.They meant it as a compliment, but a part of me could only hear that to them the emotion and ideas of the poem were not in the language itself. That means that it wasn’t well written; it was really well performed.

So I wanted to go back to the lab, and try to write poems that would demand the eye, demand a reader. And not only demand it, but reward it. I wanted to try to create a poetry [where] the page itself would become a stage. And so, the text of the Black Automaton poems that you are talking about is partially about scoring a way of reading.

What’s interesting is that I wrote [those poems] not using Word, but using design programs that would allow me to put text anywhere I wanted. I composed it by putting a text box in a spot, and I’d be like, “OK, text here. No, that doesn’t work. Let me move that.” I wanted to create this page that would perform itself. And what I began to realize when I would look at [those poems], I had no idea how I would read them. If you are looking at the “The Black Automaton in what it is #3: Work it out,” I have no idea, necessarily, how to make the fact that the word “work” is repeated four times inside all these brackets sound. It really becomes an investigation of how we read a thing.

XB: Performance is something that certainly informs your writing process, and as you know there is a long-standing debate between performance poetry and poetry on the page. Where do you see your work falling on this spectrum?

DK: When I started writing and performing, I was going to a grassroots writing workshop called Writer’s Block in San Diego, and it was modeled after The World Stage’s poetry workshop. The only difference was during the workshop, Writer’s Block people never [brought copies], so you never got a chance to read the poem, only hear it, and it ended up being a critique of the performance. And that’s when I really started hearing about the debate of page versus stage. At that point I [thought], “Well, shoot! Why have an argument about it? Let’s have a poem that works equally well on the paper as it does in the air.” That lead to certain experiments that I was doing with poetry, and what I learned was, you can do things where the tension of the poem comes from the differences, the limitations of hearing a poem versus being able to see it and vice versa.

XB: Would you call yourself a performer or a poet?

DK: On my bio it says performer/poet/librettist, and those are all things I do. I consider myself first and foremost a poet. I think I do the most good for poetry as a culture by saying I’m a poet. Then you don’t think that going to a “poetry reading” involves sitting and falling asleep. And at the same time, you don’t believe that if someone does a dynamic reading of a poem they can only be a spoken word artist or a slam artist.

XB: As a Latina poet, I often think about the connection between ethnicity, politics and poetry, and I’m curious on your thoughts as an African America poet. Is it possible to separate race and poetry? What is the connection?

DK: It is totally possible that one day I’m going to feel I’m sick of writing about black face and minstrel shows, and race, and I will write a poem about seeing my wife coming out of the swimming pool. Then the question becomes—if I describe my wife—is it suddenly a poem about race because I describe my wife’s dark brown skin? Is it a poem about black pride and black beauty? That’s baggage the reader brings, to a certain extent. For me, I don’t see them as separate. To say that you are a writer, and the fact that you are an African American has no bearing on your writing is a little difficult to believe. You might not write about black shit, but that can be because you are black, at which point you are writing the blackest shit ever.

Jacob Riis, The Camera Weilding Muckraker of Five Points

2010-06-02T23:17:00.000-07:00

Jacob Riis

The other night I caught one of my favorite movies, Gangs of New York, on T.V. Though I own the film, there is always something satisfying about finding a favorite while flipping through channels. Watching the final riot scene I started to wonder how much of the story was fact and how much was fiction. A long journey down the Google hole dropped me in the lap of one Jacob Riis and the Muckrakers of the Gilded Age.

What does this have to do with the Immigration Project? For one, Jacob Riis was a Danish immigrant, and two he used photography and journalism to bring about social reform to the immigrant tenements and slums--such as Gangs of New York's Five Points--of Victorian New York City.

Here are some examples of his work:

Riis' photography, magical lantern shows, and books including, How the Other Half Lives, brought the struggle of the poor to the attention of the upper class and people in power, namely New York City Police Commissioner, Theodore Roosevelt (newly discovered as my favorite U.S. President). Roosevelt and Riis' time together lead to a life long friendship and partnership in working towards social reform.

If Jacob Riis was alive now, he may have a blog. If he could see our modern world he may wonder what had changed, if anything. Today, is not much different from his day. There is still a hugely unequal distribution of wealth, the upper class continues to give a blind eye to the struggles of the poor, and the middle and lower classes blame immigrants for the poor state of the job market, housing, and wealth. And so we as artists must ask, WWJD? What would Jacob do?

He would rake the muck and so should we.

Splintered Thoughts: Poetry, Politics, and the Individual

2010-05-11T20:23:00.000-07:00

Click here for the latest Splintered Thoughts Blogtalk show.
On today's show we listened to poet and Mexican immigrant, Erika Ayon, share narrative poems about her childhood as a street vendor selling oranges. Her poems give us a personal and touching view of a way of life many of us will never experience, but pass by (at least in L.A.) daily. She also introduced us to the Dream Act, a proposal for undocumented students to become citizens under certain moral and educational stipulations. This month is very important for the Dream Act and in order to help this proposal become a bill you can call California Senator Diane Feinstein and ask her to support the proposal, or for more information you can visit dreamactivist.org. Don't be afraid to get active. Here is something we can do now to help young, hardworking students have a brighter future.

We also spoke to Arizona-based activist, Walt Staton. He is familiar with the immigration issue as he has been volunteering with human rights group No More Deaths since 2004, bringing water and medical aid to migrants crossing the dangerous deserts of Arizona. He spoke out against the negative turn Arizona has taken, and asked us all to look for a more positive solution. Instead of making the border a full out military zone, he suggests tearing down the wall and decriminalizing immigration. Perhaps, he has a point. The more we criminalize immigrants the bigger the war will get. If we don't take a different approach, who knows when it will stop?

Fight fear with knowledge and compassion, not guns and walls. And remember that we are all human, all individuals.

Sin Miedo: A Poem for the May Day Marchers

2010-05-04T18:09:00.000-07:00

Walking around the May Day march on Saturday, I saw people dispersed through the crowds wearing true green shirts that said "Indocumentado" (undocumented) on the front, and "Sin Miedo" (without fear) on the back. This father and son were two people wearing these shirts. I was very touched by their courage.

Sin Miedo

He clutches his son,
whole arm tight around shoulders.
They move, side pinned to side,
like a three-legged race,
but these indocumentado do not run.
They walk slow, with purpose.
Father has brought his boy
onto the street, into the den.
Among thousands, they are exposed
to marchers, signs, helicopters
flying over head. Looking
to the sky they appear stacked,
helicopter over helicopter,
over high-rise, over crowds,
over concrete. Red and white
stripes flutter like a satin prison.
He brings his boy in tighter.
Father and son, protector
and protected. But windows
are watching, and people move
in every direction.
They are vulnerable to the whims
of a mob. To brick and Billy clubs,
fire hoses and dogs, rope and hate.
This is what the father considers
as he folds his son under his arm,
and they continue to march.

Shifra Goldman and Poetic Arte!

2010-05-03T00:17:00.000-07:00

Saturday night I attended an event of Latino American art, poetry, and academia in celebration of one great artistic mind, Shifra Goldman. If you don’t recognize her name, don’t worry, I didn’t at first either, but I assure you, you have felt her influence. A Jewish American academic, who came from a Yiddish and English bilingual family, she is attributed with being one of the first to call for the conservation of Siquiero’s whitewashed Olvera Street mural, “Tropical America,” when most people forgot it existed. Her critical analysis and books, Dimensions of the Americas, Contemporary Mexican Painting in a Time of Change, had major influence in the European and American art worlds of the 70s and 80s when many believed nothing of significance could be birthed in Latin America, and generally made such names as Rivera, Siquieros, and Orozco world-known.

All this I knew about Shifra, the writer and Latino art champion, before I walked into Avenue 50 Studio on Saturday night, but what I gained by being apart of this celebration was so much more. We began with an acoustic guitar performance by her son, Eric Garcia. After playing two songs, he invited in his preteen son to accompany him on violin, and instantly the crowd was uplifted. The shaggy haired twelve year-old talent was nothing less than charming. Next was film director and writer, Jesus Trevino, who read from his memoir, Eyewitness. He shared a section about Shifra and his time with her, and her influence. As he read it was clear that many in the room know her personally. He spoke of her work with “Tropical America," her philosophy on politics and art (they cannot be separated), and it was like I could hear the audience smiling. The next performer, a poet, Ramon Garcia, was also fortunate enough to know her personally. She had taken him at a time when he was new to Los Angeles. He appeared young, and I wondered how exactly they met. How was he so lucky to have dinners with her at a bad French restaurant in Echo Park? “Taix” he shared with the room, and many laughed. Bad food, but good discussions, a majority of the 60-70 people now crowding in the tiny art studio agreed. I realized that I was only a visitor; I have never met Shifra, but I now wish I could have.

Other poets, Gloria Enedina Alvarez, Adolfo Guzman-Lopez, and George Kalmar, shared poetry and memories, as well as members in the audience, and every story told was like it’s own special gem. Artists, poets, friends, a son, all were touched by her in some significant way. And it seems if you had come to know her, you were certainly influenced by her critical and caring mind. She was a mentor to artists, and other lost children of Los Angeles, and I began to wish I was a little older, a little more lost, a little more hungry and that this surrogate mother could be mine too. I imagined sitting with her in Taix drinking a dirty martini and listening to her speak about art and revolution. I wondered what heated discussion we would have, and how she would generally “school” me as I make notes in my mind. If only.

She is bedridden now, and in the final stages of Alzheimer. Her son shared that he visits with her daily, and before coming to this event he sat with her. He recorded a minute long video of Shifra knotted in her bed, her brilliant mind somewhere locked in the darkness of the past. He carried her into the event on his white Apple laptop, and it was then I remembered Frida Kahlo.

Or I should confess, the movie Frida (Shifra may not have approved since it seems she didn’t care for Hollywood). I remembered the final scene, where Frida, one leg amputated and very ill, lays in bed on the opening night of her exhibit. I remembered the doctor’s order, and how friends carry her, heavy wood-carved bed and all, to the event to celebrate, to see the culmination of her work.

In some way Shifra was there, and we celebrated with her.

UPDATE: Sadly, Shifra Goldman died from complications to Alzheimer at 85 on September 11, 2011. For more on Shifra's life and legacy, you can read her obituary at L.A. Times here or this piece by Adolfo Guzman-Lopez at KCET. She will be missed.

Images from May Day 2010, Downtown Los Angeles

2010-05-01T23:21:00.000-07:00

I arrived in Dowtown around 10:30 am, and joined the march at 9th and Broadway. Walking over to Broadway, I past two women and a young girl. It is possible they were mother, daughter, and granddaughter. They were armored with white shirts and U.S. flags, and like me, they were rushing to get to the march. Hearing them exchange Spanish words, seeing the generations, I fought back tears. Just yesterday I read how Arizona has banned ethnic studies classes and teachers with accents teaching English, and I realize I am not marching or fighting for me, but for them. From 9th all the way up to city hall and Villaraigosa's white doves, commissioned with message of change for the White House, I allowed the power of the people to sweep me up.

Earth & Poetry Day April 18 at Whittier Narrows Nature Area

2010-04-14T00:43:00.000-07:00

The public is invited to enjoy the timeless combination of nature and poetry when the historic Whittier Narrows Natural Area plays host to a free Earth & Poetry Day event on Sunday, April 18.
The family-friendly celebration, 11 a.m. – 2 p.m., will include a docent-led nature walk at 11 a.m. followed by poetry performances and refreshments beginning at 12:30 p.m. Attendees are invited to bring a nature-themed poem to share.
The event will include performances by touring spoken word poet Jared Paul, of Providence, R.I., and Southern California poets Deborah P. Kolodji, Chris Wesley and, 2009 PEN Emerging Voices Fellow, Erika Ayón. All activities will take place in or leave from the picnic area outside the nature center.
The event marks both National Poetry Month and the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, which this year falls on Wednesday, April 22. The natural area, a wildlife sanctuary founded by the National Audubon Society, celebrated its 70th anniversary in 2009.
The Whittier Narrows Natural Area is located at 1000 N. Durfee Ave., South El Monte CA 91733, across from South El Monte High School. Parking is free.
This natural area, home to numerous species of birds and other animals and plants native to wetland communities, is currently in danger. For more on saving this nature reserve visit the Friends of the Whittier Narrows Natural Area .

Education and Jaime Escalante

2010-04-03T15:49:00.000-07:00

The other day I walked into my house and found my father and two of my brothers sitting around the kitchen table discussing some pressing matter. This is our favorite past-time. Other families may enjoy throwing the ball around, board games, or watching sports, but nothing gets us more excited than an argument over Obama's progress or lack there of, immigrant rights, big government, the state of public schools, allocation of state money, and so forth. We sit around the kitchen table blood boiling calling each other loyal "automotrons" and other such ridiculous insults.

On this particular day the argument had something to do with education and the state of Latino progress in comparison with the rest of the nation. My brother Julio, the oldest and arguable the smartest (he went to Stanford...whatever!) mentioned a quote he had heard that the Chicano movement of the sixties and seventies did the population a great injustice by focusing on education and not on business. My brother Gabriel agreed and thought we might be better off today if they stressed becoming part of the market instead of focusing on things such as cultural studies in colleges. Basically, they argued that the movement created a whole generation of teachers and thinkers, but no money makers or government players. My only retort: "But it's part of our makeup to encourage community, culture, and education." They didn't seem too convinced, and went on to discuss those people who have made it to the upper echelons like Villaragosa and Gloria Molina. I decided to retreat to my computer and let them solve the world's problems without me.

The next morning, while getting ready for work, my father had the news on in the living room, which had a live feed from Garfield High School and the memorial for educator Jaime Escalante.

And I thought, "See, this is what it's about."

Jaime Escalante changed people's lives. More than that he changed how his students' saw themselves. He gave them tools to succeed, and what more can we ask for? That's why education and art and community are important. It reminds of who we are, and by knowing who we are we are able to accomplish more.

He told his students, "I'll teach you math and that's your language. With that you're going to make it. You're going to college and sit in the first row, not the back, because you're going to know more than anybody." He gave them an even playing field. He gave them the language and the space to achieve, and that is essential.

May Sky: There is Always Tomorrow, An Anthology of Japanese American Concentration Camp Kaiko Haiku

2010-03-28T14:28:00.000-07:00

The beginning of this month I went to UCLA for a panel on political prisoners of the Dirty War of Argentina of the 70s and 80s, and the art and writing that came from experiences of unlawful imprisonment and torture, but political prisoners are not always in other countries. Here is a touch of WWII history and an annotation of the book May Sky. If it sounds on the academic side, it's because I stole parts of this entry from my grad school critical paper on Japanese internment and witness poetry.

A Little History:

On December 7, 1941, Japanese planes attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The next day the U.S. declared war on the combined Axis powers of Germany, Italy and Japan. On February 19, 1942, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 which declared the Western states under martial law allowing for, according to Anita Haya Patterson––author of “The Resistance to Images of Internment: Mitsuye Yamada’s Camp Notes,”––112,000 Japanese Americans, two-third of which were born in the United State, to be unlawfully and forcefully evacuated from their homes and imprisoned or “relocated” in internment camps. Relocation, as described by poet and historian Violet Kazu de Cristoforo in her book May Sky: There is Always Tomorrow, was inhumane: “The internment of Japanese Americans living on the West Coast involved a process by which they were registered, numbered, tagged with shipping labels, and placed aboard buses, trains or trucks for shipment, under armed guard, to temporary location euphemistically called ‘Assembly Centers’” (51). Such descriptions of the “process” are chilling considering the migration of a population of a people has the sound of a package being sent through the mail.In camps, life was not nearly as dire as the concentration camps of Europe that occurred at the same time, but human rights still were not protected by the law as stated in the U.S. Constitution. People were not directly mistreated with torture or death, but they did face certain injustices such as racial prejudice, unlawful imprisonment, and the loss of individual freedoms. Considered enemies of the state, Japanese Americans throughout the Western states were unjustly imprisoned in camps created out of makeshift bunkers and at times housed in horse stalls usually located in desolate areas. In the Rohwer Concentration Camp, for example, which was located near Little Rock, Arkansas where weather conditions were extreme, barracks were described by de Cristoforo as, “tar paper covered, hastily erected structures with ill-fitting doors and windows which did not close properly. As well, there was no running water and no coal supplies for heating stoves” (62).
May Sky: There is Always Tomorrow:

May Sky: There is Always Tomorrow as compiled, translated, and prefaced by Violet de Christoforo is a book that combines history, poetry, culture and human rights, and tells the story of Japanese internment not through photos, facts, or essay, but with a hefty collection haiku written by those inside internment camps. Why haiku? In the introduction from a volume of haiku collected at Rohwer Concentration Camp in September 1944, the poets describe the phenomenon: “In order for us to transcend our condition we must immerse ourselves in nature, and be grateful to find happiness in the life of haiku poetry” (qtd in de Cristoforo 89).

In many poems there is a definite immersion in nature. This haiku by Reiko Gomyo, written while she was imprisoned in at Rohwer uses nature as a symbol for her oppression:

Feeling oppression
withering weeds
are dense (qtd in de Cristoforo 197)

Or this haiku written by Neji Ozawa while interned in Gila Indian reservations sanatoriam (where the title of the book is taken from) where the sky is a sense of hope:

From the window of despair
May sky
There is always tomorrow (qtd in de Christofor 223)

Or this haiku by Kazue Matsudo, interned at Tule Lake:

Like minded people gather
new shoots sprout from pine tree
early summer day (qtd in de Cristoforo 205)

What I find intriguing is how important the imagination becomes when faced with such harsh realities, and that while some of these poets were poets before and after, others may have never picked up a pen or a brush before, but are suddenly drawn to art as a form of coping and survival. Or as de Cristoforo says, "Like a comet, some of the wartime haiku writers emerged only momentarily from obsurity, flashed across the literary firmament and, when war ended and infamous concentration camps closed, vanished into oblivion" (30).

Another book on poetry from Japanese internment: Camp Notes and Other Writings by Matsuye Yamada.

For more on poetry as survival: Poetry as Survival by Gregory Orr.

For more on witness poetry from civil rights violations around the world:
Against Forgetting edited by Carolyn Forche, with an excellent essay on poetry of witness.

For essays on poetry and politics: Praises & Dispraises by Terrence Des Pres.

ESLABONES: State Terrorism and Resistance in Argentina

2010-03-07T17:07:00.000-08:00

On Friday I headed to UCLA for a panel on Argentina's political prisoners from the Dirty War of the '70s and '80s, and the book Eslabones, a new volume of stories, poetry, and testimonies of political imprisonment and torture from Cordoba, Argentina. In grad school I wrote my critical paper/academic thesis on witness poetry from Japanese internment camps of WWII compared to poetry from the book Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak edited by Marc Falkoff, and I went to this panel with a continued interest in human rights activity with concern to political prisoners and torture, as well as how the writing process affects those who have experienced such horrific crimes.

Alicia Partnoy, the author of The Little School: Tale of Disappearance and Survival in Argentina, which speaks of her experience as a tortured desaparacido, spoke of the need to tell these stories as "a need to record history," to ensure people never forget.She joked that she writes her story now because someone told her, "We are not getting younger any time soon," but the importance of sharing her experience is no joke as she recalls the process as liberating: "It has to be liberating."

The highlight of the afternoon was Dr. Irene Martinez who read her poem, "Chichi Bruja/las balerinas," from the Eslabones collection that recalled one of her compañeras in prison who would tease Irene for having over grown eyebrows. Once this woman found two scraps of metal during the 20 minutes a week they were allowed outside. The scrap metal became makeshift tweezers this compañera used to reshape all the women’s eyebrows as their personal beautician. Of course, my paraphrase of her poem does not do it justice, but I found it a beautiful story of disappeared women, kept from homes and family including their young children, interrogated and tortured on a regular basis, finding some sense of normalcy, of tenderness, in something as small as two scraps of metal acting as a ballerina’s feet on their eyebrows.

"Being beautiful was also important," Dr. Martinez shared with the room. Partnoy nodded in agreement, and shared how women would make mascara out of toothpaste and ash.

After her reading, Dr. Martinez went through slides from a photography project entitled, "Flying Away of the Mattress." The first slide showed three women, naked, blindfolded and sitting on a floor lined up as if in a sled. She explained that they were forced to sleep multiple women to a mattress, but that the nudity was her artistic interpretation. She stated that these artistic renderings "help me get it out of my system," and that making artistic choices, like the nudity, helped her to "own it." This reminded me of the book Poetry as Survival by Gregory Orr who said “To name something is to assert control over it" (30). It would seem that Dr. Martinez found a form of expression that allowed her to take ownership over a horrific and harrowing experience that has helped her to cope while also educating others.

Poetry News and Videos

2010-02-21T15:50:00.000-08:00

Back in November 2009, I, along with L.A. poet Rafael Alvarado, started a reading series at the Arroyo Seco Central Library in Highland Park with help from our library contact and librarian, Erika Montenegro. Our inaugural reading was a huge hit with readings from PEN Emerging Poet, Erika Ayon, myself, and famous L.A. writer, editor, and community activist Luis Rodriguez, author of Always Running: La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A.

The event was covered by a local L.A. public access station. You can check out excerpts from our readings and interviews from the story below.

And for a little inspiration, check out this video of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez singing, "Deportee 1976." Thank you Christina for passing this on to me.

Enjoy! And let's remember that poetry, politics, and the people are rarely exclusive of each other.

Peace, Love, and Community.

Lito Aquino Part II: American Life and Philippine Memories

2010-02-12T23:47:00.000-08:00

Lito Aquino, first-cousin of Pilipino politician and activist Ninoy Aquino, is kind in opening up his home to me on a sunny Los Angeles afternoon in September. Him, his wife Coy, and preteen son, treat myself and their other guests (his adult daughter and son-in-law) to a large spread of of homemade Pilipino cuisine before we head into the living room to conduct our interview around a coffee table.

Left to right: Coy Aquino (wife), Andrew Aquino (son), Elizabeth Myers (daughter from previous marriage), and Lito Aquino

After speaking for nearly a half-an-hour, Coy surprises us with the traditional Pilipino desert, Halo-halo. Lito explains that Halo-halo means "mix" and that the dessert is a mix of shaved ice, ice cream, banana, jack fruit, and beans. The lavender taro ice cream is smooth and rich on my tongue, and the bits of bean and fruit make for lovely chewable surprises between crunching ice shavings. Everyone takes a break to scoop out mouth fulls. I wonder how Lito has been able to mix his Pilipino self with his American self. I wonder if this glass of swirling flavors is not unlike his journey to life in America. Or do the tastes of taro and jack fruit simply remind him of life in his home country? This is what mixes in my mind as we continue.

Immigration Project: Do you ever think about going back?

Lito Aquino: I would have to say I am too Americanized. I’ve told everybody—including Coy—her mom (gesturing to his daughter) was a great influence on me. We were married for ten years, we never quarreled. We talked civilly, and well, that is Pilipino culture too. But American culture is good because here, if you work hard, you do your job, you do good to people, you mind your own business, usually they don’t mind you. In the Philippines, when you are doing good all the necks are up—they are like this (he raises his hand to his chin and stretches his neck up and shifts his eyes like someone peering over a fence)—to find out what you are doing. They try to tell people about you. The good things about you, the bad things about you, and if they envy you, they mostly tell the bad things about you. And if they want favors from you, you really don’t know who they are. They may seem like your friends, like they would give their life for you, but you turn your back and there is a snake biting you. That’s what I didn’t like.

If I went home and they knew I was the first cousin of Ninoy, people would start asking me for favors, and maybe one day I would say yes, and then people will be coming to me expecting me to help them because I am an Aquino. I don’t want to be in that position, and that is one of the things that I learned from my family. We don’t give favors, especially to family. We were taught to help people in a [privileged] position is not right because you are taking advantage of your powers. That’s why the Philippines are always corrupt because of [favors], the old system. But in our family, and in Ninoy’s family— The Aquinos are never like that.

IP: What were some fond memories of life in the Philippines?

LA: The memories that really speak to me were how we were raised. On Saturdays and Sundays, instead of living the life a rich boy, [my father] would bring us to the hacienda and let us work the farm. At that time we didn’t have trucks, we had water buffalo that plowed the field. We had to do what the farmers were doing: ride the [water buffalo], plow the field, take out the grass. Just like the farmers. No special treatment because [my father] wanted us to know where the harvest was coming from. And he was always telling us, “Respect the farmers. Respect the farmers because what is coming to you is coming from their sweat. So respect them.” That’s how we were treated.

IP: Knowing you lived a privileged life in Philippines, would you go back to it if you could?

LA: Here it was hard at first. If someone saw me now living in this dump, they won’t believe it. They would never expect that I would live in this kind of dump and do the work that I do for [my wife], and my son.

But I cannot handle [the Philippines] anymore, especially now. People are going hungry left and right. If I go there I would want to help, but I can’t afford to help. I would rather live like this.

And you know what? I am very happy in this kind of life. I never have to think how much I will have tomorrow. How much money will I have to spend on other people? I don’t have those problems. In the Philippines, I think the richer you are the more problems you have because of the culture, and the situation there. And in the present condition, nah, I don’t think so. I think I’ll die here. I’ll die here.

IP: You mentioned that your second wife—your daughter’s mother—helped you become more Americanized? How do you mean? Can you give me an example?

LA: Like being prompt. In the Philippines if someone asks you what time you are coming for dinner, you say, “maybe seven o’clock.” When you say seven o’clock you show up around 9 or ten. That’s Pilipino time. [Coy] hates me for this because I stick to the rule that you are either 15 minutes early or 15 minutes late. So whenever I make an appointment, I’m there. I am never late. That’s Americanized.

(Coy walks into the room from the kitchen and Lito asks if she can pick out a way he is Americanized. Right away she says, “Time. He can never be late. Even for parties, we have to be early.” They joke about a party they arrived for a half-an-hour early and won a trip to Catalina for being prompt.)

IP: What were the hardest things to get used to when you first came to the U.S.?

LA: Finding a job. First of all, I was not a yet a permanent resident, I was a tourist when I came here, and people told me, “you’ll have trouble.” The hardest thing was finding a job when you don’t know how. I found a lot of tricks.

Do you want to know what they are?

IP: Sure, I need a job.

LA: When I came here I had a very high resume. I thought putting my resume for an application would do me good. Later, I found out I was rejected because—you see some high executive at Jack in the Box where I worked told me this—it’s wrong for you to tell the resume you have to the vice president because they will be afraid of you taking their place. They told me, “Say you are high school graduate.” So I said it, and I got a job.

IP: What was your first job when got here?

LA: Assistant manager for Jack in the Box (he shows a wide smile).

Lito in Los Angeles circa 1978

Oh, it was hard. You see, in the Philippines when they say “manager” you are somebody. When I saw the listing for “assistant manager” I said, “Manager, aha!”

So I interviewed and I passed the interview because I said I was a high school graduate. And I got the job as assistant manager, and low and behold, I found out that an assistant manager working with Jack in the Box at that time was just a name. The manager would assign me to the graveyard shift. But when you close they tell you a lot of things you should do because you are assistant manager. And there were always cuts I had to make by the end of the day. I had to meet the [ordered cuts], or I get fired. So I would cut the schedule for the grill person and do the grill at closing time. I cut the schedule for the maintenance person to save time and labor, and I would do the maintenance. I was cleaning everything, even the toilets and garbages, and I would get home at one and your mom (speaking to his daughter) would be so upset with me: “Why do you have to do this thing?” I said, “Because we have to have money. I have to give you something.”

Valentine's Day Contest

2010-02-08T12:52:00.000-08:00

Last month I entered my poem, "Quinceañera Serenata," (inspired by photos and interviews from Chavez Ravine by Don Normack) to Trellis Magazine's Valentine's Day poetry contest. Trellis Magazine is a great source for new as well as experienced poets for publishing, inspiration, and knowledge. They always have fun contests and great informative links.

I am excited to announce that my poem was selected to be part of their current Inspired Poetry: for Valentine's Day issue. The contest took 12 classic love poems (Shakespeare, Lord Byron, Liz Bar Browning) and asked participants to write a new poem inspired by the form, imagery, theme, etc of one of the originals.

Click here to see the current issue in PDF form. Poem is on 26 with notes on 27.

I hope everyone finds love and inspiration this Valentine's Day!

For My Grandmother: An L.A. Story

2010-01-25T23:51:00.000-08:00

From left to right: my father, grandmother, mother, and me

In my search and thirst for the past, for the faces of our history, I have forgotten the faces that brought me to the subject of immigration in the first place. I have forgotten that the story isn’t always something out there in the world, but something right here inside my own home, inside my own family.

This past Saturday my family decided to have a Catholic mass in my grandmother’s (my father’s mother) honor. In December my grandmother was in the hospital after she suffered an episode, which many of us feared was a stroke, and that our worst fear––the inevitable truth of her passing––was upon us. Watching her, my tiny grandmother, skin as delicate as tissue paper, struggling and crumpled in her hospital bed, I tried to hold back tears, as I suspect we all did, in what seemed like an attempt to keep this fragile creature from dissolving.

Thankfully, it wasn’t a stroke, and she was back in her Boyle Heights home by Christmas Eve. To celebrate, we had a mass said in her honor this past weekend in a small Catholic church, Mission San Conrado, up above Solano Avenue, in the shadow of Chavez Ravine and Dodger Stadium.

Yesterday, once again looking through Don Normark’s photos from the book, Chavez Ravine, 1949: A Los Angeles Story, I came across a black and white landscape shot of Solano Avenue and the north slope of La Loma. The homes of La Loma are gone now, but the church, the site of my grandmother’s mass, stands at the foot of that hill, and it is still green, still looking untouched. After the mass, my brother Andres took his son Armando and our nephew Gabrielito up the steps behind the church, past the ceramic alter to the Virgin Mary, to explore this greenery. I wasn’t up there with them, but I’m sure the boys played pirate, adventurer, conqueror, as I’m sure the boys of La Loma did 60-70 years earlier.

Inside the church, during the homily, the priest (speaking only in Spanish) addressed my grandmother, who with the help of her youngest daughter slowly rose to her feet. He asked her, are all your children here? She nodded. And are these young people your grandchildren and great-grandchildren? She smiled and nodded.

Some of the great-grandchildren attempting to sing for their great-grandmother

And señora, he asked, where are you from in Mexico? Teocaltiche (a small pueblo in Jalisco, Mexico), someone in the aisles assisted. Is anyone else here from Teocaltiche? My father raised his hand high up and let a proud grin spread wide over his face. And señora, how long have you been here? My grandmother laughed, shyly keeping her glance low in what seemed like an old school sign of respect for clergy, Cincuenta años. Fifty years, she told him.

And here I was trying to find an L.A. story, lamenting the loss of the culture and people of Chavez Ravine, not realizing that culture still lived in here. Normark’s photos illustrate a lost town, but the hills are still here, the Spanish is still here, and family is still here.

In 1949, Normark stumbled into Chavez Ravine. In 1949 my grandmother was raising three young children in a poor pueblo in Jalisco, Mexico (my father once told me how they didn’t have electricity in Teocaltiche, and that the children waited for full moons to play out in the streets at night). In 1949, the inhabitants of Ravine's La Loma, Bishop, and Palo Verde communities grew their own vegetables and milked their own goats that grazed along the green hills all around their homes. In 1949, my father scaled the hills surrounding his town with his grandmother to collect nopales (cactus) to accompany the simple meal of frijoles, chile, and tortillas that his mother was preparing back home for dinner.

My father, first on the left, with his siblings, cousins, and grandfather in Teocaltiche, Mexico

And now in 2010, sixty-one years later, the houses on the hill of La Loma are gone, but my family thrives. And my small, unassuming grandmother stands in a church beaming with pride to be surrounded by her still growing family of seven children, nineteen grandchildren, and twenty great-grandchildren. And in an hour two of those great-grandchildren, Armando and Gabrielito, will be conquering the hill just outside. And somehow, there is comfort in knowing nothing is ever completely gone.

Chavez Ravine: A Los Angeles Story

2010-01-24T15:21:00.000-08:00

Before Lasorda and Valenzuela, before we bled blue, before Dodger Stadium Chavez Ravine was a collection of three sleepy communities–La Loma, Bishop, and Palo Verde–existing in the hills sandwiched between downtown and Elysian Park. There, poor, mostly Mexican-American families made their homes out of shacks and makeshift dwellings, but when a young photographer, Don Normark, stumbled upon the inhabitants of Chavez Ravine, he felt he "had found a poor man's Shangri-la." He had found three communities full of life, pride, and strength. Of course, most know that the homes that once scattered across the hillsides where vacated and bulldozed, at first for a public housing project, but later the public land was sold to private investor, Walter O'Malley for Dodger Stadium. So what was once a vibrant Mexican-American enclave hidden in the hills of Los Angeles became the site of the major Los Angeles professional sport institution known as The Dodgers.

What is especially astounding to me is that Normark accidentally stumbled on to La Loma, Bishop, and Palo Verde, when he was searching for a wide shot of downtown, but was so inspired by the place that he came back more than a dozen times with his camera in hand. Little did he know, nor the subjects of his photographs know, that the place he was capturing would soon no longer exist.

And now because of the work of a young, novice, but inspired photographer, we have a look back at a time and a way of life that has become obsolete in wide-spread industrialized Los Angeles.This is one of my favorite photos. He is demanding his own poem.

The book, Chavez Ravine, 1949: A Los Angeles Story, is full of Normark's black and white photos and is accompanied by interviews with the people who once lived there. It is an amazing source, and a reminder of a simpler time when neighbors knew one another, and L.A. was green and untouched.

Here is a portion of a poem inspired by Normack's photographs and one woman's memories of life in the ravine:

Quinceañera Serenata

“And what was really, really special was that on Saturday, five o’ clock in the morning when the sun was coming out, the boys used to play the guitar and serenade everybody, and it was so beautiful to hear the music in Spanish.” ––Carmen Torres Roldan

Mi quinceañera, en tela blanca,
como linda flor de la mañana,
blushes before an open window’s light.
A virgin veil sweeps black coquettish eyes,
and hands hold prayers like fiery drama.

Dawn calls me to sing my serenata
for this child-bride, this niña querida,
versus for young apricot cheeks. Ayay,
mi quinceañera.

Poem Notes:

The form of this poem is a rondeau. It is missing the final stanza for publication purposes.

A quinceañera is the celebration of a girl turning 15 years-old. It can also refer to a girl who is turning 15. This Mexican tradition is still very prevalent among Mexican-Americans.

Publishing News

2009-11-18T12:03:00.000-08:00

This month, I am excited to share the unbelievable news that I have poems published in the fall issues of two fantastic journals:

The Los Angeles Review Issue 6-"Photograph of a Secret"

PALABRA Issue 5-"El Capitan of Isla Negra"

Both of these poems are examples of my attempts at magical realism, and are inspired by South American writers Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, and the colors, language, and images of that rich continent.

Now back to my other work. This week I am conducting an interview with Kaliso Mwanza, an immigrant from Zambia. His story of struggle and triumph is incredibly inspiring considering he escaped a life-threatening situation in Zambia only to find himself in an impossible one, nameless and without representation inside U.S. detention centers.

More on Kaliso and Lito Aquino: Part II, to come soon.

Lito Aquino Interview Part I: Escaping Marcos, Martial Law, and Possible Death

2009-11-04T21:30:00.001-08:00

Julio “Lito” Aquino, Pilipino immigrant and first cousin of Benigno "Ninoy" Aquino, sat down to talk with me in his modest home in central Los Angeles. Sitting in a cramped kitchen elbow to elbow with Lito, his 11-year-old son, adult daughter from his second wife, and son-in-law we begin to dig into a heaping pile of pancit (Pilipino noodles) and a large pot of chicken stew prepared by his third (and current) wife, who sits close by in case any of their guests need anything. As we eat, Lito coaches me on how to season my pancit with fish sauce and Pilipino limes that look like miniture round oranges. Barely touching his plate, he excitedly shares a memory from childhood; a memory it is clear his children have heard many time before.

"We Aquino's were society, but we weren't treated like rich kids. No way," he tells me. Though they lived a hacienda livelihood, his father demanded the children spoke to everyone, especially the servants, with respect. "We had to call them sir or ma'am. And if we didn't," he shakes his hand and scrunches up his face as if to say it meant trouble.

“’Julio!’ my father yelled. I knew I was in trouble when he called me Julio. ‘Bring the barracuda.’” He informs me that his father kept a stuffed barracuda tail above the doorframe of his office that was used for punishing major infractions. This time, it was a maid who accused Lito of not speaking to her with respect. “I don’t know if I did, but he took that barracuda in his hands” he pantomimes stretching a long object between his hands and bringing it down, “Kha! Kha! With the barracuda, and woo, it hurt.” He laughs and pretends to rub his bottom as he might have as a small child.

Lito in September 2009 holding a childhood picture of himself

Memories like these bring joy to Lito. These are the stories he tells his children over and over again in hopes to instill some of sense old country respect in American children, but not all memories are so warm.

We move from the kitchen to living room, where a popular Pilipino talk show, hosted by Kris Aquino--daughter of Ninoy and Corazon Aquino--plays on a large T.V. that takes up most of north wall of the room. He points out that the host is his niece, and this is the gateway needed for Lito to begin a story where the villains are much more dangerous than a stuffed barracuda.

IP: Why did you leave the Philippines in April 1977?

Lito Aquino: I had a warrant of arrest. Being the first cousin of Benigno Aquino during Marcos' martial law [was dangerous]. Marcos was looking for close relatives of Ninoy because at that time they accused him of being a Communist. And when they imprisoned him they wanted a close relative associated with him [to find] reasons to keep him there.

I was working at the Philippine National Bank [at the time]. I was one of the top executives, but because of intrigues, because people wanted my position, because I was the first cousin of Ninoy Aquino they started putting out news and gossips about me that I am trying to sabotage a program of Marcos. I had the privilege [in my state position] to run three provinces—[The government program] subsidized farmers and the land, and the government would buy fertilizer and things like that for the farmers. People who were trying to bring me down started telling that I was trying to sabotage that program. But because I’m an extrovert people would tell me things, even those who were in the opposite camp. They would say, “you better be careful. There are people who want your position. Anything can happen.”

This photo captures Lito receiving an award from the National Bank in 1971

Then a connected friend in the government told me that I have to be aware because a warrant was being issued on my name. Then a runner came to my house to tell me the warrant was issued and said, “If you want to leave or hide, you should do it.” But by that time, I was already prepared. I was ready to leave, and I had a visa because my mom and my grandma were already gone.

I was [snuck] out of the airport because a General in charge of the airport was a friend of mine. He let me sit in his office, and when the plane was about to take off they brought me to the plane.
[By the time they] sent the warrant of arrest, I was not at home. I was already on my way out. And all my clearances were Okayed because I had friends [in government] who got clearances for me. That was the only way you could get out. All I had to do was board the plane.

IP: This was during Marcos’ martial law?

LA: You know, the first year, people like me, and people in society appreciated martial law because it turned out that martial law educated and disciplined the waywards. People would rather not commit corruption because they would be jailed. But then after the first year, when relatives and friends of the First Lady, Imelda Marcos, started wanting to eat a part of the pie that’s when corruption started again. And the poor got poorer, and the sick— You know. And we were back at the same ol’ thing. And there was no democracy, no liberty now. They were free to get you, pick you up, put you in jail, kill you, or what they called—we have a term—salvaged.

IP: They would salvage people? What does that mean?

LA: You’re salvaged. You’re cut. They kill you. They bring you somewhere in a remote area, and no one finds you anymore. You’re dead. You are disappeared and no one knows where to find you, so they said you were salvaged. Gone.

The worst part is that they would go to your house, and they would do anything. Threaten your whole family. And if you didn’t go with them, they would shoot you. Literally shoot you, take you, or torture you. Before you get salvaged they want to get any information. They torture you to the max, and then after getting the information, if they think you need to be salvaged, they salvage you.

IP: And no one knows what happens to you?

LA: Sometimes there are graves, but even now, they don’t know where they are. They are still missing. But some were not salvaged, but kept as prisoners. They were kept in prisons for a long time.

IP: Might this have happened to you, had you stayed?

LA: I would have been [interrogated] to make a case against Ninoy. Maybe, if I was tortured that much— I really don’t know. It only takes so much, as much as you can handle. But if maybe—God—maybe I would have said anything they wanted just to get them off me, and they would have used it. And then, maybe, I would be salvaged.

IP: Knowing all this, what was it like when you left?

LA: When the plane took off [that day] I was still in Philippine territory. If they find out that I am on that plane they could have told the pilot, “Bring it back.” So until I left the Philippine territory my heart was like this (Lito pounds his hand against his heart). Because as soon as they find out that I disappeared—

It was only two/three hour difference from when they went to my house, and maybe the people who went to my house thought I went into hiding. They didn’t know I was leaving. So instead of going to the airport they sent people out to look for me. As a matter of fact, two days after I left I was in the newspaper. It said, “Julio Aquino in Canada.” They didn’t know I was here.

Talking with Marilyn Nelson

2009-10-17T15:59:00.000-07:00

The other day I had the pleasure and good fortune to conduct an interview with accomplished African American poet Marilyn Nelson for the World Wide World Network series Moe Green Poetry Discussion. Nelson is the author of at least 12 poetry books including Carver: A Life in Poems, Fortune's Bones: The Manumission Requiem, A Wreath for Emmett Till, and her newest book Sweethearts of Rhythm now available. Her honors include two Pushcart Prizes, two creative writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Fulbright Teaching Fellowship, and the 1990 Connecticut Arts Award.

I was especially excited to speak to Marilyn because many of her books are focused on African American history, are research based, and are about real people. As a person just beginning to delve into the world of research and interview based poetry focused on an American experience, it was amazing to hear about her process and how much work goes into each poem and each book. If anything, talking to such an accomplished and talented poet made me realize how much work I have ahead of me.

Here are some excerpts from the interview:

On balancing history, poetry, and social justice themes:

I don't think I could pull anyone of those threads out and say it was more important than the others because they are all apart of the fabric of the poems. These last several books are based on historical research. And what I am doing is telling true historical stories, and it is important to me to be true to history. And because I'm writing about African American history, these–what you're calling–social justice themes are involved because that's what African American history is about in a kind of general way. And I want to make them poetry because I'm a poet. If I could write prose maybe I would write them as prose, but I don't write prose. And if I'm going to write history, I'm going to write poems about history. What I'm trying to say is all these things are involved. I wouldn't choose to not be true to history, in order to--i don't know--making something rhyme.

On writing persona poems:

Let's look at Fortune's Bones. The story is about a skeleton that is in the collection of a museum in Waterbury, Conn. The museum asked me to write a poem to honor this skeleton because the museum had some research done about the skeleton, and researchers found that it was the remains of an 18th century slave. He was owned by a doctor, a bonesetter, and they found out that this man, Fortune, and his wife Dinah and their several children were enslaved in the doctor's household around 1740-1750. Fortune died, and the doctor took his body to a hill outside of town and performed an illegal dissection. It was against the law to perform a human dissection in the 18th century. The doctor performed the dissection and then prepared the bones by stripping the flesh from it, drilling holes in the long bones, and boiling all of them to free them from flesh, then reassembled all of them and hung them in his house for a little medical school. And my first thought was what would it be like to be Dinah, Fortune's wife? To be living with her husband's skeleton living in the house? What would it be like to be trapped in a house where you are considered subhuman? And to have to do the housework including–probably–sweeping around and dusting your husband's skeleton. What would that be like? So I had the story, there's no record of what this woman must have felt like, but the historians know that she continued in this house. It required me only to imagine what a human being would feel like, what a woman would feel with her husband's skeleton hanging in a room.

On the importance of history:

I'm telling parts of history that need to be told and retold. It's where we get our identity from. It's important for everyone to learn about American history. These are all parts of American history. These stories are gifts to me. I've been lucky to take the time to do the research and write up these really terrific stories. The fact that the stories are written in poems, means they are being read by people that might not pick up a history book.

Click here to listen to the complete interview..

It was such a treat to speak to a woman like Marilyn Nelson who finds history, art, and the human experience so important. I believe as she said that this history is American history, and not soley African American history, just I think the history of immigration is American history as well. It is these aspects–not our military and foreign policy–that make our country unique. It is important for us to remember our past, and to remind ourselves of the human experience that has built this country.

Marilyn Nelson's newest book,Sweethearts of Rhythm, tells the tale of an all-female interracial swing band from the 1940s, is now available in bookstores and online.

Amreeka Brings Me Back Home

2009-09-21T13:21:00.000-07:00

Lately, I've spent my afternoons stuck and sticky on the couch while watching marathons of such shows as "Top Chef" and "Gilmore Girls." As I watch, I often think, I should read, I should write, I should work on my blog. But instead I flip through channels to find last week's episode of "The Rachel Zoe Project."

This weekend I finally decided to remove myself from the growing dent in the couch. I took a walk around Downtown L.A., enjoyed a free art and light exhibit in Pershing Square with my three-year-old nephew, sat outside in the garden to read, and yesterday I treated my mother to a viewing of "Amreeka."

"Amreeka" is a movie that follows a mother and son as they emigrate from the West Bank to the U.S. just as the first Iraq war breaks out. Written and directed Cherien Dabis in her feature film debut, she pulled the story from her own memories of her family's journey to the U.S.

In the movie, Muna, the main character and mother of a sixteen year-old boy, begins working at a White Castle in rural Illinios. In one scene she laments that back at home she had two degrees and ten years experience working as a bank clerk, but none of that matters in her new country of residence. Her son, Faddi, also has to traverse the many pitfalls of life in the U.S., especially figuring out how to perserve his identity amongst small-brained American high school boys. But where are they to go when they are outsiders here, and outsiders there?

It is easy to see that this film was a love letter to family, culture, and roots, and reminds me that no matter where we come from we all struggle for the same things: security, respect, and a home. And so "Amreeka," with it's beautiful portrayal of an Arabic home, brings me back to my home: this blog.

Walt Staton and The Splinter Generation

2009-08-03T10:00:00.000-07:00

Walt Staton is a volunteer for No More Deaths, a humanitarian group working in the southern deserts of Arizona to give water and first aid to illegal immigrants crossing into the country. This past winter, while placing water jugs in key points along the border, Walt was handed a littering citation. He fought the ticket, and in June was found guilty by a jury. He is currently awaiting sentencing, which may include up to a year in prison or $10,000 in fines.

No matter what your stance on illegal immigration or the government's border policies, in the words of Walt, "you have to be a complete crazy wingnut to say I want people to die in the desert."

Photo by Holly Winters and taken from her blog at brazilanduruguay.blogspot.com

Last month I had the good fortune to sit down and speak with Walt Staton on behalf of The Splinter Generation, the online literary journal I am poetry editor for. Seth Fischer, founding editor, offered me the assignment knowing my interest in immigration issues. The interview went live this morning at http://www.splintergeneration.com/.

Here is a piece:

Splinter Generation: When you actually see someone struggling in the desert, how does that change your original outlook?

Walt Staton: It starts to put the world in perspective. You start meeting real people. You meet moms, and you meet children, and you meet dads, and uncles, and grandpas, and you know, the people that I consider to be heroes. I mean these people are basically saying, “I refuse to raise my children in poverty, or I refuse to live in a situation where I can’t get a job that is dignified. I can’t live with dignity, so I’m moving.”

I think the courage of people to migrate is a really inspiring thing, but it’s kind of tough in a lot of ways because there isn’t a whole lot we can do. I mean, we are out there as medical people, and with food and water just to–– I guess if you find someone in their worst possible state, if they’re in real medical distress, then we can take them to a hospital or something. But the hardest part is realizing there is not a lot we can do. We can’t drive people places. So you meet these really amazing folks who are making a very powerful statement with their feet, you know, and you are just a little blip in their longer journey.

SG: How do you keep going?

WS: Ultimately, I think it’s the refugees and migrants themselves. I mean they are the ones who really have the journey to struggle through. I don’t know how to really explain it. But it’s sort of like it’s their lives that are in their hands, and I have a great deal respect for the people who make that choice to move for a better situation.

I think where we can blend into the struggle with people here in the United States is once refugees arrive and are being threatened by ICE or threatened by local police, I think that’s a big call for [all] us to respond and say, “No. These are our brothers and sisters, these are our neighbors, these could be family members, and we can’t just stand by.” That’s building our communities, and making it broader than just a couple of activists. I think it’s really important that we see ourselves in a community with all these people. That’s what keeps me going.

Photo by Holly Winters and taken from her blog at brazilanduruguay.blogspot.com

A poem inspired by Walt Staton:

from The Watcher

The Watcher witnesses
statements with feet
stamped into sand,
sealed into the boarder
making migration official.

The Watcher protects
each statement
as if ancient folklore,
as if oral history
articulated with toes,
as if hieroglyphics swept
over by history and dust.

The Watcher is a guardian,
he is an anthropologist,
he is the archaeologist
of living history
and attempts to clean away
corrosion and neglect.

For the full interview with Walt Staton please go to http://www.splitnergeneration.com/.

Preperation and Learning the Interview

2009-07-28T16:22:00.000-07:00

Over the last few days I've been working on my first official interview for The Splinter Generation. I've found that readying an interview for online publication is much harder than I imagined. There's scheduling the interview, conducting the interview (which includes a multitude of it's own difficulties), the pain of transcribing, editing, writing an intro...and that's only what I've discovered so far.

I appreciate the opportunity to try out my interview skills with Splinter, and thank my buddy Seth (founding editor) for all his help and advice. I hope he knows I'm going to hijack all this wonderful wisdom and use it here.

As for now, I continue to prepare, and am excited to have my first official Immigration Project interview scheduled for Monday.

I will be talking with Pasadena poet Maja Trochimczyk. She was born in Poland, and first moved to Canada in 1988, where she learned English, and started writing poetry about her displacement and loss of language. She moved to the U.S. in 1996, and I'm so thrilled she has agreed to sit down with me. I look forward to hearing about how language, loss of language and learning a new one, has affected her as a writer.

Angel Island

2009-07-22T11:23:00.000-07:00

I wrote my first immigration persona poem while at Antioch. I had started researching poems written inside U.S. detention centers: Japanese internment camps, Guantanamo Bay, and Angel Island. I first learned about Angel Island during my undergrad. I was taking a combination class from both the Asian American Studies and Latino American Studies departments on immigration. There were two professors, and they took turns lecturing on their area of expertise. One day the Asian American professor was lecturing on the immigration of the Chinese, the discriminatory ordinances they had to endure, and The Chinese Exclusion Act that barred entry to immigrants based on their Chinese background. And he said in passing, "You know that's when they started writing poems on the walls at Angel Island."

Angel Island has been considered the Ellis Island of the west, but as Ellis welcomed, as it says on the Statue of Liberty "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free," Angel Island's main purpose was to keep Asian immigrants, namely the Chinese, out. One of the only ways a Chinese immigrant could enter the country is if he could prove citizenship through relatives already living in the country. The only way to prove such things was to endure hours of interrogation. This created "paper sons:" boys and men who claimed citizenship through false papers. Individuals were held at Angel Island from anywhere from two days to two years.

In 1970, thirty years after the detention headquarters was closed, a park ranger discovered characters etched into the walls of the old living quarters. As immigrant hopefuls were detained at Angel Island waiting to find out their fate, it seems they began to scribe poems about their journey, about Angel Island, about their heartache and hope, on the walls of their barracks.

Back at Antioch I started to research more into this topic. I read the book Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910-1940. And as I worked Jenny Factor, one of my mentors at Antioch, suggested I try writing my own poem in response to what I was reading, and that's how this project first began.

An interview from Island:

"My family pushed me to come. They wanted me to make a better living. They couldn't send my older brother because he was too old to match the age of my uncle's paper son. I studied (coaching papers) for a whole summer at school. It included many, many generations. I had to remember everyone's name, the birthday, and if they passed away, when. And you had to know the different points of the village, what it looked like. I remember I had an English cap that we picked up in Hong Kong and inside the cap, my father hid some coaching notes, so that once in a while, I could refresh my memory. But I never had a chance to look at them, because you're among people all the time and you don't trust anyone. There was no private place where I could be alone to study them. One time, they were playing catch with my cap and they didn't understand why I was so upset. I was scared." --Mr. Wong, age 12 in 1933.

From my poem “Boy in an English Cap”*

Father hid coaching notes
inside grey lining of an English cap.
I wear it on board President Lincoln
to shield from harsh ocean winds.
I pray it will land in good fortune.
Papers nestling above thoughts;
head aches under the weight
of an English cap, secrets it carries.
English key to a riddle
I do not understand. Father says
it will unlock my future in distant
golden lands.

*Poems I hope to publish at a later time will only appear on this blog in portions.

The Beginning

2009-07-21T04:15:00.000-07:00

This morning at about 3:30am I woke up from a restless summer sleep with an idea. Over the last two years I've been working on an MFA in poetry. In that time, I've written a lot of poems about a lot of different things, but have not had one idea that I would want to work on for a book. But tonight something may have come to me. I have written a couple of poems about immigration, detention, and internment. Some of them are persona poems taken from stories, or interviews I read in books. But what if I was the one doing the interviewing? Would people be interested in telling me their stories? Imagine the kind of stories that are out there? Imagine how similar and yet completely unique each story would be. This is The Immigration Project.

My idea for this blog to gain interest in what I'm doing, and by gaining interest perhaps some people will be willing to tell their story, and perhaps even allow it to become a piece of poetry. Immigration is not a new topic in this country, but it continues to make headlines as if it is new. My hope is that by people telling their stories, people from all ethnic and religious backgrounds, we can gain some understanding of each other. At least that's the idea that came to me at 3:30 in the morning on a hot and restless night.