WE ARE YOU PROJECT
Bio: Lilvia Soto
Chihuahua, México, 1939. Ph.D. in Hispanic Languages and Literature from Stony Brook University in Long Island, New York. She has taught Latin American and Latino literatura at Harvard and other American universities. She was the co-founder and first director of La Casa Latina: the University of Pennsylvania Center for Hispanic Excellence. She was the Resident Director of a Study Abroad Program for students from Cornell, Michigan, and the University of Pennsylvania in Sevilla, Spain. She has participated in numerous international literary conventions and festivals in Spain, Mexico, and the United States. She has published poetry, short fiction, literary criticism, and literary translations in journals and anthologies in the United States, Canada, Spain, Mexico, Chile, Peru, and Venezuela. She has an English-language manuscript of poems about the American Iraq wars and another English-language collection of poems that dialogue with Iraqi poems. She has also copleted an English-Spanish collection about language and her experience living in Spain. She is currently working on a bilingual collection about her return to Mexico in 2004, where she lived for six years, and the recovery of cultural and familial roots. She has published essays and given lectures on Spanish, Spanish-American, and Chicano writers (Leopoldo Alas [Clarín], Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes, José Emilio Pacheco, Alejo Carpentier, Fernando del Paso, Salvador Elizondo, Guadalupe Villaseñor, Laura Esquivel, Lucha Corpi), as well as on the history of the U.S.-Mexico border, the culture of Hispanics in the U.S., and the poetry of Chicana writers. As a consultant she offers Spanish-English translations and workshops on intercultural communications. You may contact her at lilviasoto@hotmail.com
roses in his bowl
What is this?
asks their father
placing his index fingers as horns
on top of his head.
The little ones chime in,
Bull!
Lowering his hands,
he forms a vessel,
inquires,
and this?
Bowl!
they shout with excitement.
He repeats the gestures, intones the questions,
a brighter glow in his eyes with each repetition,
as their sense of accomplishment at pleasing Daddy
reaches a crescendo.
They have his attention, they’re special.
At three, five, and eight,
they can pronounce bu and bow better than Mommy,
who learned English at sixteen
and cannot hear the difference.
If English is your second language,
and you marry someone for whom it is the first,
or only one,
you will be the foreigner in your own home.
But then, it won’t be your home
because you are the foreigner.
My children speak fluent English, so-so Spanish.
They console each other
and remember their father’s lessons.
Mom can’t tell a bull from a bowl,
her friends are artists, intellectuals, foreigners.
No need to listen to her.
It’s not their fault.
Hearing undocumented workers called aliens
reassures you that you are the only full human.
Hearing that others are terrorists,
dangerous, bad guys,
can give you a Messiah complex.
Hearing Let them speak English,
can make you deaf to the pain
and the yearnings
in others’ tongues.
It can make you blind
to the roses
your foreigner mother
planted
in the void
of your father’s hands.
Written in response to Choman Hardi’s "My Children."
roses in his bowl 1
1 With flowers here / is woven nobility, / friendship. / Let us enjoy them, / earth is their universal home.
-Nezahualcóyotl, "Songs Are Our Attire," "Ms. Romances de los señores de la Nueva España," f 41 r – 42 r, tr. Ángel María Garibay, Poesiá náhuatl, V. I, núm. 58, pp. 98-9. My translation from the Spanish. Nezahualcóyotl (1402-1472) was a Prince of Acolhuacan, a Nahua kingdom situated to the northeast of the Valley of Mexico.
(© Lilvia Soto 2012)
White
We could also electrify this wire with the kind of current that would not kill somebody,
but it would simply be a discouragement for them to be fooling around with it.
We do that with livestock all the time.
--Steve King, Representative from Iowa
It’s today’s face of immigration – the Mexican face – that explains why there is so much emphasis on walling off Mexico rather than Canada.
-Katie Ryder, “A better border is possible”
Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness.
- Matthew 23:27 (KJV)
Visualize it--
the longest of the Christian Era--
two thousand miles of protection
will cover the entire southern border
from the oil-streaked gulf to the cesium-spilled Pacific.
Some want cement
others, barbed wire.
King suggests electricity.
Will they feel secure with double layers
of discouragement
against the dark-skins of the world?
Will a crocodile-infested moat cure their insomnia?
Though not the original red-skins
God has told them they are the only real Americans.
And though their Homeland was built by colored hands
they swear it must remain
forever white.
Yellow hands built the railroads
black hands, the plantations
cinnamon-colored hands harvest the crops
fight the wars, and die
building the white wall.
Defying thirst, fear, and death
they cross the graveyard desert
to build the white man’s house
trim his magnolias and azaleas
harvest his pears, his almonds
champignons, and Chardonnay grapes
to wash his snowy linens
coddle his petite chou à la crème
diaper his delicate babies, and
hand sew the satin white interior
of his pearly box.
Yes, Americans, Real Americans,
you should build your wall
long triple layered
not of granite, glass, or wood
not of cement, concertina,
or discouragement current,
not virtual.
Make it original
for posterity
better and bigger than Maya Lin’s
a Coatlicue memorial--
no need for names--
only the skulls and the bones
of the sun-baked fathers
the brothers and sisters
the mothers and babies
the fetuses--
their smaller skulls good for filling in--
who die each day
building your whited sepulchre.
(© Lilvia Soto 2012)
of guns and roses
Con flores aquí / se entreteje la nobleza, / la amistad. / Gocemos con ellas,
casa universal suya es la tierra.
- Nezahualcóyotl, Los cantos son nuestro atavío1
-Nezahualcóyotl, "Songs Are Our Attire," "Ms. Romances de los señores de la Nueva España," f 41 r – 42 r, tr. Ángel María Garibay, Poesiá náhuatl, V. I, núm. 58, pp. 98-9. My translation from the Spanish. Nezahualcóyotl (1402-1472) was a Prince of Acolhuacan, a Nahua kingdom situated to the northeast of the Valley of Mexico.
If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge,
and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love,
I am nothing.
- 1 Corinthians 13
I want to bring one to the wall.
There’s earth behind my house, earth and pebbles
I’ll borrow straw, draw water from the well, bake it in the sun.
I will learn to make one adobe for the wall.
I will call my children, I will call my friends
we will all bake one adobe for the wall
that will help our neighbors feel secure.
We will bring our offerings
make a wall that’s high and strong
build it inside our border
add a few feet to the stolen land
we can paint it, let our artists draw a mural
sing a song of peace, celebrate.
We can bring our niños to the wall
each with a flower, an innocent margarita
a bluebell, a camellia white, a hyacinth blue
an heliotrope, a fleur-de-lis, a jonquil and a jasmine
a lady’s slipper and a lilac
lilies, we will bring lilies, white, yellow, calla, tiger, of the valley.
We will bring lavender, magnolias, zinnias, tulips, and verbena
ivy, mistletoe, and myrtle
orchids and blue periwinkles, peach and apple blossoms.
We will give them, we will give them
yellow poppies and pineapples.
Each of our angels will offer
a fresh blossom and the flower of his smile
to an officer of the Border Patrol, the Minutemen too.
We will teach them to ignore the harshness of the looks
the ugly names, the threats.
They will learn to levitate above the hatred and the fear
of the strong men who point the guns.
They think they’re rich, that we want what’s theirs.
Their leaders have not told them
how they got the land they’re dying to protect.
They’ve not learned their history of theft, slavery, genocide.
The Border Patrol, the Minutemen, the soldiers overseas
they’re all just boys offering their lives to defend what’s theirs
they don’t know their leaders use them to ransack the world
then complain it’s expensive to maintain them.
Like our migrants
they have grown at the bottom of the pile
picking up the crumbs their leaders scatter on the ground
and see no other option for their lives.
Give them flowers, heal their need of guns.
Let us love our children, make them strong
so they won’t want to cross
to a land filled with fear
deprived of love.
Let us build the wall, keep our children here.
We don’t want them to forget
live with fear and hate
starve for love.
Let us give their leaders roses.
They abuse their people, exploit and bomb the world.
Their hearts are filled with greed.
Let us give them roses, for they have not love.
(© Lilvia Soto 2012)
