A message from our Editor > Farah Karipineni, MD, MPH
Migrant Detention Crisis “Broken spears lie in the roads; We have torn our hair in grief. The houses are roofless now, and their walls are red in blood.” -Aztec poet, 1528
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Farah Karipineni, MD, MPH, is board certified in General Surgery and fellowship trained in Endocrine Surgery. She is currently practicing in Fresno as an Assistant Clinical Professor for UCSF. Dr. Karipineni earned her medical degree from University of California, Irvine School of Medicine. Her residency in General Surgery was completed at Albert Einstein Medical Center, and she completed her fellowship in Endocrine Surgery at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Dr. Karipineni has been published in journals including The American Surgeon, the International Journal of Surgery, and the Journal of Surgical Education.
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CENTRAL VALLEY PHYSICIANS
As a comparative literature major at UC Berkeley many years ago, I chose to focus on Latin American literature for one very specific reason—much of it was not literature at all. An aspiring journalist (I would find my passion for surgery later), I hoped to unveil the subversive political agenda addressing deep-seated hegemonic relationships present in much of Latin American literature. Upon reading firsthand Aztec accounts of 16th century Spanish colonization, like the heart-wrenching one above recorded in Miguel Leon-Portilla’s The Broken Spears, I still recall the sense of injustice that screamed out to me across the centuries. How could the world go on after such terrible injustice, I asked myself so naively. When I was a child, I vividly recall the first time I realized that racism was not at all a thing of the past as my elementary American history class presented it so neatly. I recall the fist moment I experienced the simple yet jarring fact that human life is not equal, and that something so seemingly arbitrary as the shade of our skin or the zip code we are born in set in motion either a world of full stomachs and privilege, or hopelessness and tragedy. I had the fortune of attending a very progressive high school, where my Spanish teacher required us to watch the movie El Norte, depicting the reality of many undocumented immigrants risking their lives for dreams of a better life. Many left children and parents behind to work more for less because even that was a better situation than where they were born. I couldn’t help but wonder if their desperation to flee their countries had anything to do with blatant pillaging of the Americas so long before. When I was 7, we hired a Cuban refugee named Nino to live with us as a full time groundskeeper of our family farm. Nino was quiet yet lovable, and quickly became a part of our family. My parents would ask me to translate tasks for him, and after awhile, Nino asked me to translate in his behalf as well. This is how I came to love the Spanish language, as a connection to stories full of hope and
Fall 2019