by Lupe A. Flores
(Video performance can be seen here)
Waves of fatigue overcome my body
As I think about liberation
Make claims for open borders
Speak out against nativist legislation
Then snap back to my reality
Snap back to daily life by the Río Grande
Where my siblings
nieces nephews
primos primas
tíos tías
my grandmother
and myself
Are surveilled daily by the state
Harassed by its border guards
Where, during an early morning commute to work,
A blue-eyed, brown skin agent questions my existence
In broken Spanish with American nativist undertones
As his buddies pin me between their fist and the wall
Between their Brigadier pistols and the door
Where, at dawn off the shoulder of Military Highway,
Two State Troopers yell to my face that I must be or know “the enemy”
Yell to my face to get used to their presence
Yell to my face this is now normal
Where, one evening on the levee roads,
A brown skin rinche tells me
There is no other way
In a high-traffic zone
In a riverspace
They must identify, map out, secure
That they know has been in my family for generations
A space where lineage is reason for suspicion
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was only the beginning
Of how my abolitionist and contrabandista ancestors
Made burlas of white laws and resisted the border
Of how migration became a “criminalized dark anxiety”1
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was only the beginning
Of how the meandering Río Grande
Concretized into border walls in backyards
Of its transformation from fluid waters to rigid boundaries
Waves of rage and grief overcome my body
As I question my existence
My settler-colonialist lineage
My indigenous heritage usurped
And think about liberation
The anti-migration sentiment and desconocimientos2 festering
inside state and non-state agent bodies that look like mine
How can we dismantle the border
This wall behind my home
When white folk and
Brown and Black raza lift it up
Love its weight on their backs?
How do we move forward from here?
First Published in Poems and Numbers: http://poemsandnumbers.com/borderwall…
Lupe A. Flores, a queerfemme nepantlerx, was raised in a rancho near the Río Grande. They write between academic and creative prose to document coyotaje and border militarization in the RGV through their bodily proximity to the río, it’s policing and the irregular border crossings they’ve observed since childhood and into their graduate studies. Lupe’s published in Anthropology News, Allegra Lab: Anthropology, Law, Art, World; Río Bravo: A Journal of the Borderlands and openDemocracy: Free Thinking for the World.
NOTES:
1-For an analysis of how border policing is experienced beyond the border and has increasingly relied on the racial profiling of brown non-citizens and citizens alike, fueled by legislation and practiced in everyday policing of communities of color in the United States, see Latinx anthropologist Gilberto Rosas’ essay, “The Border Thickens: In-Securing Communities After IRCA,” in International Migration 54 (2), 2016.
2-Chicana feminist autohistorian-theorist Gloria Anzaldúa defined desconocimiento as: “To not see is to be in a state of desconocimiento. Desconocimiento is the state of not knowing, either by willful intention, that is by setting out to remain ignorant, by refusing to know or not know or not knowing by default, by expediency. Desconocimiento is an ignorance that damages, betrays trust, and destroys. It fosters miscommunication with irreversible harmful effects.” (Anzaldúa, “Queer Conocimientos,”)!