Let Us Celebrate Anew a Happy 4th of July: Edifice of Gold / Edificio en Oro

These poems I have published in several places now, but I would like to share them with you here to show you all that though our freedoms are presently threatened in this "land of the free & the brave," people -- asylum seekers from across the world -- still seek this land, even with all its threats to our liberties.

We need to fight for them, for our future, as we remember the words,

"Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore."

Elegy to a Refugee Girl/Oda a una niña refugiada

It's been too long since I've written. My life has taken on too many changes, too many problems have come my way, and the little time I have left outside of work I use to help the asyum seekers I have grown to love passionately, and who are under attack, so fiercely, so wrongly.

What have we become as a nation?

Christ Bleeds in the USA Too 
El Santuario de Chimayo, New Mexico
© Ana M. Fores Tamayo

My poems "Elegy to a Refugee Girl / Oda a una niña refugiada" will be published in a book entitled Detained Voices / Voces detenidas, edited by M. Montserrat Feu Lopez & Amanda Venta, from Sam Houston State University. 

For Father's Day, for World Refugee Day, which this year falls on Wednesday, June 20th, all fathers should be with their children; all children should enjoy, with their families, the freedoms afforded to those of us in the free world.

Our wings are stronger than their hate...

Lots of schools, universities, and communities are fighting for DACA students -- and alongside them too -- but these endeavors do not take away DREAMers' hurt, their fear, their mistrust in a system that supposedly was going to protect them.

What happens to all the information the government now has of DREAMers? 

Will it use it to not only come after them, but also their families? And who will help their families now? After all, a huge part of DACA, for these students and dreamers, was being able to help in the day-to-day struggles their families go through, as they try to adjust to immigrant lives no one wants to acknowledge.

Photograph © Alberto Gutierrez. Courtesy of the author. 

Refugiado / Refugee

Two years ago on World Refugee Day, I published a very personal essay about my status as a refugee child, back then, yet what it is like now for refugees and asylum seekers. Today, I publish my own poem -- in its original Spanish followed by my English interpretation (because translation is never poetry!) -- about the plight of the asylum seeker, so that we know. 

The border fence, with menacing clouds hanging © Ana M. Fores Tamayo

So that we can be witness to our own ungodliness. 

The English version was published in Bad Hombres and Nasty Women, from Raving Book Press: if you would like to buy it, go to this link. There are many other great works in this little treasure! But I wanted to print the Spanish original too, so I am publishing both versions here now, the English below the Spanish. 

Refugiado

Mi alma en pedazos,
Veo el alambre de púa
rasguñando metal contra piel.
Llorando lágrimas de sangre,
Escucho disparos al vacío del silencio
de la Salva Maratrucha.
Lo empujo bajo la cerca
pero llora mi hijo,
aunque no importa;
lo hago porque
lo quiero.

Sombras brillantes en un mundo de obscuridad / Brilliant Shadows In A World Of Darkness

In today's world of American politics, what are we doing to our future? Are we stomping on the many varied voices of tomorrow, on future Masters students, PhDs, scientists, lawyers, doctors, educators? Are conservative politicians afraid of losing their majority? In Texas, at least, this Latino majority is an impending reality, as it already is in California. Thus politicians repress people and pass reactionary laws that only promote racial profiling. No matter what the trump administration says about security, we know they are afraid of losing their rule. 

They offer bleakness instead of light & unity...

La Madre Patria /Motherland
Courtesy © of En Pie de Lucha Performance

May Day: Helping with the Migration Crisis Across Borders

For May Day, I will take part in one of the many marches against what trump is doing to immigration (I don't capitalize trump's name because he is not worthy). You can too: look at marches going on in A Day Without Immigrants!  More so, however, I will add my two grains of sand by writing about what we can do proactively to help immigrants today. 

I was thinking that, since trump was elected, he at least had to have a majority. Though that was never the case and he won through electoral politics, his popularity has suffered even more so since his election. A case in point: I was food shopping in my very conservative neighboorhood supermarket (I know: what am I still doing here?), when I saw a little note left for me on my car bumper, in response to a sticker I have: "Immigrants & Refugees WELCOME." 

The note said, verbatim: 

"Thank you for your bumper sticker. Immigrants & refugees are our neighbors" 😉

From this, I gather there is hope for everyone here in the United States: we are still a welcoming nation! I think my advice on helping asylum seekers and refugees, then, will come in handy, for those of you who really want ideas on next steps... 

Daybreak in Alabama by Langston Hughes

On Martin Luther King's Day, I'd like to share this poem, which I have shared before but which I find so striking not only for its beauty but also for its essence of simplicity. 

If things could only be this way! 

Delta Mississippi © Ana M. Fores Tamayo

And yet, there is no reason why hope cannot let us see that daybreak in Alabama, know that the next few weeks and months can be of grandeur and not of dread, because we will all be working together as one...

Confronting Fidel Castro's Death through Poetry

As the end of the year approaches, I am finally beginning to confront the death of Fidel Castro, who changed the course of my life forever.

My relationship with him — even as an absence — has always been complex. 

When I was little, I remember seeing his photograph, a big bushy beard overpowering the frame. And while we were eating our supper, I would ask my mom innocently, as children often do, "Mom, doesn't Fidel get his soup noodles stuck all over his beard? And how does he ever get them out after he eats?"

My father in an undated photo toasting
for our future happiness, in Cuba
Fores Family Album

Maybe that's what happened to all those around him...

My father fled Cuba because he lacked political freedoms. He believed we had these liberties here in the United States, however, so my brothers, sisters, and I grew up convinced in this country of democratic justice and fair play. This lawyer — my gentle father — could have been imprisoned for years or died for us in Cuba. He suffered greatly trying to escape, just like my mother: as children, we do not remember much. And my parents never talked about it afterward, only to tell us how lucky we were to be living in this land. When my dad chose to come to the United States to ask for political asylum, he knew he wanted us to be able to live and speak freely, and he never doubted that we might not have that.

Teacher & DREAMer Tries to Explain Inexplicable to Children...

I can not imagine the pain of being a teacher today, especially in a multilingual school.

Having to speak with the refugees I help is quite difficult. Talking to young angels who do not understand the madness of the past few weeks seems to me impossible.... Worst, needing to reassure these same angels, when I find myself in the exact precarious limbo they fear is insufferable.

Yet Rosalía Salazar — graduate from the University of Texas, kindergarten teacher, and DREAMer — has to do just that.

DREAMer Rosalía Salazar with her kindergarten class

It has taken me a while to translate Rosi's message, since I have been busy with many projects and translations especially relevant to the wake-up call we've gotten, but her words are just as important today as they were the day she wrote them after the Trump election. 

Every Vote Counts, brick by brick

When I went to vote the second day of early voting, I should have written about what happened to me then — in this very conservative town where I live in middle America — because I was furious. 


But I did not, as I had too many other things preying on my mind, and this was just another thing on the list. As I see the articles going back and forth, however, and I see the atrocities going on in the name of "voter fraud," I cannot stand it any longer. 

Do you want to vote but think you cannot because you do not have proper ID?

When you go to vote, even if you do not have two pieces of identification, or if you do not have a photo ID, it does not matter anymore, according to Texas law, which was voted on and "trumped" down in July of this year, against all Texas Republican conservative wishes and much to Trump's dismay. According to the Federal Appeal Court, Texas was in violation of the Voting Rights Act, and so, the state had to find ways to accomodate voters who could not find appropriate documents, the ones the state wanted everyone to use but were hard to acquire for certain folks.

On the Responsibilities of Citizenship

In the past, this land has been renowned as the melting pot of nations. 

I am sure a lot of our parents, grandparents, and even great grandparents, however, are turning in their graves as my friend and colleague Paul Zoltan writes these cautionary words. The full support of the country our parents loved and clamored for, the USA — which they thought no one could surpass because of the liberty they won at such a hard price — would disappoint them. Our predecessors had to forsake their own countries. They left other safe harbors as well because they thought no one could ever offer them a better chance at safeguarding their liberties as this one true nation, yet that privilege now seems elusive. 

What was protected by the constitution they enthusiastically adopted as their own seems now to be a shard, used arbitrarily to break the most vulnerable, and indeed, many other populations as well. 

But I leave you with Paul's words, because he says it so much better... 

Paul's father's naturalization papers from 1965,
hanging in his immigration law offices

On theResponsibilities of Citizenship
By Paul Zoltan

In the waiting area of my small law practice hangs my father’s naturalization certificate. He took the oath of allegiance and became a United States citizen when I was all of eight days old.

My dad had arrived in this country as a refugee from Hungary six years earlier. The story of his exile begins, improbably, in Belgium. In 1958, two years after Hungary’s tragic rebellion, my father was chosen to represent his nation’s engineering achievements at the World Exposition in Brussels. Though Hungary’s Communist regime had encouraged him and other participants openly to share ideas with engineers from outside the Soviet Bloc, my father did so with trepidation: having grown up a member of Hungary’s landed aristocracy, he belonged to what the Communists called the “suspect class.” His three half-brothers, who’d never fought in the war, were sent off to Soviet work camps as “war criminals,” never to be seen again. When a telegram reached my father in Brussels demanding his immediate return to Budapest, he smelled a rat. Purportedly it came from the university where he taught, but his dean insisted she hadn’t sent it. So my father sought out the British Secret Service.

The Justice of the Immigration Court & the Power of its Judge King

I went to an Immigration Merits Hearing at the Dallas Courts recently — the last hearing before an individual or family is deported or given asylum — and this young mother and child from Guerrero, Mexico lost, as asylum seekers in the majority of these cases do. Although the judge admitted that the young woman "might be in danger," he said he could do nothing about the consequences such criminal activity effects on these poor folk in the countries from which they are escaping. The actions perpetrated in such countries were individual criminal proceedings, not governmental undertakings, and thus the people who suffered individually were not privy to meriting asylum under our government statutes, according to the judge's ruling.

Ternura, by Oswaldo Guayasamin © 1989

How can these learned men say such a thing? 

As a majority, do these judges have blinders on? Do they not see the massacres committed by the cartels of Mexico, or the maras throughout Central America (that we deported!), gangs that have taken over entire populations, becoming a de facto, criminal and parallel local government, so that people in these countries cannot live in peace? 

These refugees are fleeing for their lives; they are not economic refugees, as the immigration courts so often want to make everyone believe, or as many judges delude themselves into thinking. 

Instead, judges deceive everyone — including themselves — by stating young mothers' stories as filled with discrepancies, their credulity doubtful, and their exaggerations tantamount: how can these "liars" and "illegal aliens" live in our midst, they proclaim? 

IMMIGRANT...

With the presidential race and all it stirs up in our collective pasts as immigrants — because we are all immigrants, even if some of us go as far back as the Mayflower — we will realize that we are all living on borrowed land, and if we learn to live together, we can learn that we are all one, and no borders need divide us. 

Kristian (right) joined a number of other community activists of all ages in Las Vegas 

to street canvass for the Bernie Sanders campaign this past February.

Some of us came later too, not in the early migrations but in more recent relocations, and especially today, we are still arriving, because the forced exodus from other lands — due to politics, warfare, poverty, displacement, or what have you — are all legitimate. 

Poemas del destierro / Poems of Exile

Usually I post things about education or immigration.

Sometimes I post things on poetry.

So I thought, why not? 

This is about my father, and it is about his poetry, his beautiful poetry, which I want to translate completely, one day.  So this is the beginning... 

Today is my papi's birthday. He would have been 94 years young today, & he is still with me everyday, in everything I do. Looking at some old books, then, I decided to translate the prologue he wrote to his small book of poetry, of course, dedicated A MI ESPOSA/TO MY WIFE... 

I think this is the small birthday present I can give you, Papi. Little by little I will try to translate your book, and maybe, I will try to republish it, somehow, someday... Happy happy birthday, where ever you are!

Losing Paradise... Perder el paraíso

I’ll be off these next couple of weeks, a bit of repose after a long haul. 

Perder el Paraíso (Losing Paradise) by Tomás Sánchez, Cuban painter and engraver
http://tomassanchez.net/eng/work/paintings

But we won the asylum case for a young refugee mom with two children from Honduras, so I think I can take a little break before beginning again on a new case: a mother with two children who escaped from the Guatemala/El Salvador border. Her husband and brother-in-law were killed, and the maras — the gangs — tried to kill her son too, but their dog began to bark and saved him. 

PAINTING OVER GRAFFITI ON WALLS IS NOT THE SAME AS BLEACHING OUT BLOOD FROM PEOPLE’S COLLECTIVE MEMORY

The recent publication of the second damning GIEI report, first publicized in the New York Times with subsequent coverage on National Public Radio is clear evidence that the Ayotzinapa movement has endured the test of time by staying in the world’s attention almost two years after the forced disappearance of the 43 normalistas. The Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts responsible for the GIEI Report (named such for its acronym in Spanish) was created by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights on March 2015 to investigate what happened to the 43 students on September 26, 2014 in Iguala, Guerrero.

Guernica by Pablo Picasso, 1937 Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain
Guernica warns humanity against the devastation of war & suffering: aren't the forced disappearances of Ayotzinapa an annihalation of the worst sort?

I Do Not Exist.... UNDOCUMENTED!

I went to see the play Deferred Action this past weekend, a wonderful production about the trials and tribulations of the DACA movement, and the real lives it touches.

I hope the play catches on and begins to make its rounds in other cities: it is defnitely worth seeing.

Erik during the 2011 "I am a DREAM Voter" Campaign 

In any case, this play depicts the ongoing conflict brought on by the onslaught of deportation, and how DACA and the DREAM Act are trying to counter deportation's horrible effects. Millions of young people who were brought to the United States as children are now finding themselves in limbo, or their parents are in the crosshairs. Although the US government wants to deny these young people the only home they have ever known — the United States — they cannot call their home country their own either, because in most cases, they do not even remember it.

The Refugee Problem under USA's Rug in a Future Without Poverty

I have been too busy in the day-to-day to write anything much these days, but I did want to post my talk at the recent two-day conference presented by Future Without Poverty and dedicated to Reducing Global Poverty Through Grassroots Sustainable Actions. 

My husband Andrés L. Pacheco and I have been working with refugee populations at our southern border for the past few years, and we presented some of our findings during one of these excellent sessions. I am hoping to be able to post more in the future, but at least — for now — I can present my own, “The Chronic 'Refugee Problem' Under USA's Rug: Migration Along Our Southern Border." Andrés informally spoke about our process — what it is we do from beginning to end with the people we come into contact with — while I had a more formal, even if short, talk prepared. 

----------------

We began to work with refugees when we went to the border to help out in McAllen, Texas, along with people from the entire city and beyond in the state and country, as well as interdenominational organizations who put aside their politics because what we were suffering at the border was a humanitarian crisis.

May Day, Things Change; Things Stay the Same...

I was looking through my old May Day activities, and I came across this letter I had written to my petition followers two years ago, in 2014. Back then I had a little over 4000 signatures, yet today we have 10,141. 

Has that made any difference? Unfortunately, no. 

Indeed, what is a stark awakening — when looking at this piece from two years ago — is that conditions are eerily similar, if not worse. Though more people seem to know about our conditions, more people seem to condone them too, or look the other way. 

We must not give up. We must keep fighting, struggling to make a difference, a change for the better. 

I am a Man: Mural Design Artist Marcellous Lovelace
Based on Civil Rights movement, Sanitation Workers' Protest March, Memphis, 3/28/1968
photograph © Ana M. Fores Tamayo

The Rebellion of Los Mojados / LA REBELION DE LOS MOJADOS

My last post was from millenials and the vote, and how important it is. Now I bring you back longtime activist and frequent contributor Julio César Guerrero, telling us about the Xicano vote...

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Back in 1954, the Mexican film industry released an iconic movie entitled LA REBELION DE LOS COLGADOS. Based on a novel by B. Traven, the movie told the story of a Chamula Indian family that ended up working as slaves in the mahogany rich jungles of Chiapas, illustrating the socio economic conditions prevalent during the Porfirio Dias dictatorship, which brought about the Agrarian Revolution of 1910. It goes without saying that when the movie came out, things hadn’t changed that much under the reign of the PRI, which may explain why the film begins with the disclaimer, "Today Mexico is one of the great modern democracies."

Poster for film La Rebelión de Los Mojados, 1954

The story of La Rebelión de los Colgados is a classic depiction of brutal oppression characteristic of feudal times juxtaposed against the era of the industrial revolution. The title derives from the depiction of workers' punishment, if they did not comply with the work assigned. Each individual was forced to cut four tons of mahogany per day, and failure to comply led to punishment: they would be hanged by their limbs from a tree. By the end, the Indians rebel, turning against the company men.