Intrinsic Border

Luz Aguirre

Within me dwells the chaos of the border, misunderstood by my brethren, misunderstood by my brothers of assimilation. As time is spent in exile, I pursue my origins as others strip me of nonexistent levels of Mexicanness. I am and will always be a kind of misplaced soul. I don’t pray to the virgin, la Guadalupe has a different meaning to me. She has the makings of an inconvenient Tonantzin, an inopportune Coatlicue.

I am the border. One side, both sides and none, belonging everywhere and nowhere. I see the innocent, the disturbed, the suffering and the ones who seek to gain. The anesthetized pain is banished from my being. It is allotted to the ones who have a better fit. However, the ones who fit harmonize even less than me. And Tlaloc falls, he has no way of purifying me, I’m impurifiable. Bastardized by society, bastardized by myself. Under the pouring rain, I baptized myself Lepidoptera, of soaked wings and complicated flight.

And the immigration debate so cold and detached. We are not beasts of burden as the rhetoric suggests. Beasts do not dream, and we have come this far because we allowed ourselves to dream. And the border and the border and the border…