Tidal Basin Review, Summer 2010

On May Day this year, 2010, just one week after Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed SB 1070 into law, a handful of Split This Rock poets protested for immigration reform outside the White House, three blocks from our offices at the Institute for Policy Studies. We carried with us a stack of poems chosen from among dozens – and now hundreds – posted to the Facebook page, Poets Responding to SB 1070.

Like the Poets Against the War website set up by Sam Hamill in 2003, Poets Responding to SB 1070 is an open forum. Anyone may send a poem to organizers Francisco X. Alarcón and Alma Luz Villanueva. That day, we chose to copy and distribute four , both by poets we knew and poets new to us. One, by Alarcón himself, was posted on the site in both Spanish and English. The others were in English only. Here‘s one we used by Odilia Galván Rodríguez: Bridges v. Borders in another world a border would be a bridge crossing an answer We offered the poems without commentary. ―Poems?‖ The reaction from protesters stunned me. Hands reached through the crowd; we were met with enormous smiles, shy yeses. A rowdy young guy in the bright yellow T-shirt of his Latino fraternity reacted with pleasure and surprise as he took a poem: ―It‘s not every day someone hands you a poem.‖ No, it is not every day someone hands you a poem. When they do, the earth shifts the tiniest bit, the air between you shimmers a bit, daily life is disturbed. A poem can yank us, like that, just a little out of our normal orbit. By its very nature – a solo venture, an idiosyncratic voice – a poem is resistance to propaganda, a crazy dance in the face of conformity.

Ignorant myself of all but the basic outlines of Southwestern history, I turned to that grab bag of facts, Wikipedia. On the ―History of Mexican Americans‖ page I learned that many Mexican residents of what is now Arizona lost their land to Anglos as a result of the 19th century treaties that annexed the territory to the United States. I learned of Jim Crow-style laws that prevented Mexican Americans from testifying in court. I learned of hundreds of lynchings of Mexican Americans. I found none of this on the ―History of Arizona‖ page, as if this ugliness and horror were only the history of Mexican Americans and not America‘s own BROWNING ∫ 121