How to meet this moment
and a Mrs. Dalloway's reading
I feel far away from poetry. I don’t usually get very political in my newsletter, but this week feels different. I live in California. Many of the people being rounded up by ICE are long-time residents of this country. They are fathers and mothers and some of them are children. They may have come here illegally but many of them have built lives here. They work, they pay taxes, and they get nothing in return for that.1 Many of the people being detained are showing up at Immigration Court and trying to follow the rules. And legal immigrants and citizens are being rounded up too because ICE doesn’t ask questions first. The National Guard and marines have been deployed in LA and a sitting US senator was handcuffed yesterday because he dared to speak up in a news conference. I’m scared. I’m angry. And I don’t have the perspective of distance because it’s happening right now. So I find myself not knowing what to say.
Except for Native Americans, we are all immigrants really, whether we came here a few years ago or hundreds of years ago. I’m not here to debate policy or argue. I realize that the people who disagree with me aren’t going to be swayed by my words. But it’s important to me that I speak them because silence becomes complicity. And this is my country too, and although the founders themselves were often quite flawed, the ideas that led to this country’s founding, framed in the Declaration of Independence, were radical at the time. Rather than moving toward a true equality—that all people are created equal—we are going backward.
Instead of my words this week, I offer you a poem by Blas Manuel De Luna from his book Bent to the Earth.
Bent to the Earth By Blas Manuel De Luna They had hit Ruben with the high beams, had blinded him so that the van he was driving, full of Mexicans going to pick tomatoes, would have to stop. Ruben spun the van into an irrigation ditch, spun the five-year-old me awake to immigration officers, their batons already out, already looking for the soft spots on the body, to my mother being handcuffed and dragged to a van, to my father trying to show them our green cards. They let us go. But Alvaro was going back. So was his brother Fernando. So was their sister Sonia. Their mother did not escape, and so was going back. Their father was somewhere in the field, and was free. There were no great truths revealed to me then. No wisdom given to me by anyone. I was a child who had seen what a piece of polished wood could do to a face, who had seen his father about to lose the one he loved, who had lost some friends who would never return, who, later that morning, bent to the earth and went to work. Copyright Credit: "Bent to the Earth" by Blas Manuel De Luna. From Bent to the Earth, © 2006 by Blas Manuel De Luna, published by Carnegie Mellon University Press.
Casey Quinlan, “Study says undocumented immigrants paid almost $100 billion in taxes,” August 2, 2024, https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU01/20250122/117827/HHRG-119-JU01-20250122-SD003.pdf
Thanks LeeAnn. God, these are hard times.
Thank you for sharing that poem (and your thoughts)--both are so good to read.