Tidal Basin Review, Summer 2010

history. (Similarly, the white poet Martha Collins, whose book Blue Front chronicles the story of the lynching of a Black man witnessed by her father when he was five, is often asked by white readers, ―What does it feel like to be writing Black history?‖) Now, with SB 1070‘s companion law, HB 2281, forbidding the teaching of ―ethnic studies‖ in Arizona public schools, will it be illegal to teach this history of theft and oppression, which is the origin of so much white wealth in the state? And what‘s next? Will it become illegal to teach slavery, whereby I acquired education and privilege and comparative wealth, as the descendent of slave owners? ―Poetry gives politics and history a human face,‖ says poet and essayist Martín Espada. A poem can be a history lesson – sometimes the only one we have.

Poem For Raza Studies Students at Police State University I pray no arrest while probing the library records of my ancestry - Michael Medrano On the Census Bureau site, I learned that 30% of Arizona residents are of ―Hispanic or Latino origin.‖ Because of SB 1070, then, a police officer, whose parents perhaps arrived in the state in 1950, can stop anyone who looks Latino – 30% of his or her neighbors – whose ancestors may have lived in that land for years, and demand proof that they belong.

Do you carry your passport or your social security card at all times? I do not.

I have a family history in this country I expect I share with many Latinos in Arizona: One of my parents arrived here as a child; the other is descended from some of the first Europeans to cross the Atlantic. And yet no one is demanding that I prove my right to live here, to raise my child here, to walk in my own neighborhood – for the simple reason that my mother and my dad‘s ancestors arrived here from England, rather than from Mexico.

That‘s it. That is the only difference. ―Racial profiling‖ is a grossly inadequate term. It cannot begin to encompass the history of dispossession and oppression, what makes my experience so dramatically different from that of my Mexican American neighbor. For that, we need a radical act of imagination. We need a poem. We need a thousand poems. Let‘s write them today.

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