call La Migra;
if we try to go to Christian seminaries you will not be there.
For they are afraid of their statues and only concerned with their deep thoughts and research.
9 If we take the wings of the morning,
and go fight on the streets for our people,
they will come with the police and their laws and put us in jail
10 We wished your hand could lead us,
protect us, and hold us fast. But we have nothing.
11 For if we say, ‘Surely the darkness shall cover me,
and the light around us become night’,
12 Darkness we are;
We are the night that shines as the day,
We are darkness to the world
and to You too.”
Our time can be defined as a time of white supremacy dominion, millionaires and billionaires as political representatives, global regulation by hydro/agri-business, and brutal state control grounded on an endless state of exception that sanctions all forms of violence, the reality of the Empire is translated into a) a myriad of fears wrapped up in patriotism and religious certainties; b) the sooner death of the earth and c) a constant war on women, the poor, indigenous, black and brown bodies.
During such a time as this, when our borderlands are a sign of death, we raise our voices together and hold each other’s hands. When violence separates ninos y ninas de sus mamas y papas, we raise our voices together and hold each other hands. When border crossers are turned into unlawful people who are then prosecuted and have to plead guilty when they are NOT guilty of anything, we raise our voices together and hold each other’s hands. When violence forcibly injects psychotropic in our children as we hear reports from New Orleans of a 9-year-old boy who was kept in a children concentration camp and tried to run away. When a boy is then sent to the Shiloh Treatment Center in Texas and the doctor creates a narrative that says he needs psychotropic medication so he is drugged and tamed. His mother has no idea what is happening to her son. We raise our voices together and hold each other’s hands
When violence kidnaps our children in the midst of the night to be trafficked as we could see it in a video done by New York One TV in New York city, both cases were denounced by Democracy Now! We raise our voices together and hold each other’s hands.
This is the United States of America today! This is American fascism through bio-power and necro-politics fully lived at the borderland in the bodies of brown people! For we are not only the people who live in the borderland, we are the borderland. Thus friends, I must say, we have to place our personal suffering in perspective when we are dealing with this much bigger threat to our lives. We need empathy for our own people. We need to take a step further them, which can be a step away from where we are right now.
I pray to Jesus who said to not be alarmed . . . But in my prayer, I say Jesus, how can we not be alarmed? They are coming in the night; they are coming in the morning. How do we not go mad with all this? Here are some things for us to remember as we go through these times:
First, We Are the Ones Who We Have Been Waiting For
We can’t wait for anyone! Not even for God! For most of our theologies are traps that paralyze us and nurture us with fear and as I said, we don’t have many institutions to back us up and protect our lives. We can’t wait for anybody to come and rescue us. Like Job, we must find a way through our suffering within ourselves and our communities. The only way Jesus will come to us will be thorough each other and some friends. There is no big leader or an assortment of “they” that will come to us to save us. Jennifer Harvey rightfully says:
There is no all-powerful “they” out there who is going to swoop in and stop this. There is no one coming to end these injustices and degradations once-and-for-all. I have to admit something. Each morning, these days, I wake up, and I realize some part of me is holding my breath in anticipation. I’m hoping, maybe even expecting, this: surely today is the day “they” will come. I am waiting for “them.” And when “they” come . . . mothers fleeing war won’t lose their babies. And Black people’s lives and bodies will be secure. And borders will be exposed as arbitrary while the people who cross them are honored as sacred. And trans and queer people’s humanity will no longer be degraded and destroyed, but celebrated and revered. But, beloveds, “they” ARE NOT COMING. There is only you and I and we. You are the one you are waiting for. I am the one I am waiting for. We are the ones we are waiting for (as June Jordan said and Alice Walker cited after). So, we must be that. All of us. Today. Right now. In every moment. In every place. Beloveds . . . there’s something else we need to know about we. We are many. And if we really understand who we are waiting for, we are powerful. We can be that. What do we choose?3
There is none coming for us. We are the ones we are waiting for!
We Must Be Aware of Our History
It is said that a people who don’t know its history tend to repeat it. People who don’t know their own history will not be able to see the traps they are caught up in during the present time. People who don’t know our history will call the recent history a kind of collective unconscious fate, or destiny, instead of seeing what is happening now is due to our choices and positioning in the past. Knowing our history is to excavate who we are, where we come from and see the ways our being is always an interbeing, always connected with the earth and other people. Knowing our history will help us face the fears that surround us and work on our challenges and mistakes, naming the wrongs we did in the historical processes that defined our trajectory. People who don’t know our history tend to not know the difference between coloniality and indigeneity, easily confusing their hunter with their savior. People who don’t know our history tend to go in two ways: they either can’t see specificities, differences and commonalities or they become so self-righteous that they can’t see the interrelationality and the blurring lines between traditions and the expansive common belonging of the people. People who don’t know our history keep working with the tools of the master’s house within the master’s house.
Know the Immigrant Reasoning: Don’t Fall for the Empire Logic of “Conquer and Divide”
Achille Mbembe, Cameroonian philosopher and political theorist said in Critique of Black Reason: “The fierce colonial desire to divide and classify, to create hierarchies and produce difference, leaves behind wounds and scars. Worse, it created a fault line that lives on.”4 We so easily fall prey to this de-classificatory project of undermining our own people, of creating hierarchies of difference, of widening our colonial wounds. Sometimes we don‘t realize that all we do is to fight for the crumbs we are thrown. We must think that our work is to find a safe space for our community and save it from everyone. NO! We must think ourselves as a collective, as a community, as a cloud of living witness and ancestors, of foreigners and strangers, as people interrelated to many other people and the earth. Latinxs people are made up of Afro-Latinos, indigenous people, Africans, whites, yellows and blacks. As we are made of the earth, animals, sentient and non-sentient beings. To fall prey to a certain politics of identity that erases the earth and makes communities into self-enclosed identities, self-sufficient groups and islands of self-proclaimed safety and self-righteousness, is to became weak, disconnected, debilitated, and confused and to fall prey to a victimhood with self-awareness that weakens our collective struggle and common ways of living. We are many! We are the composition of peoples and ethnicities and animals in many humanities. We cannot be communities atomized into itself and in need to defend its identity territory
