without the identity of the earth and the animals either. We must call on what Indian literary critic and theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak called “strategic essentialism,”5 and even expanding it to the earth and all sentient and non-sentient beings in order to find our commonalities in the common struggle. Instead of feeding a “network of doubling, uncertainty, and equivocation,”6 we must offer mutual trust, assurances for a collective work done for liberation of people. Where spaces for ambiguities are held together.
Be Aware of Our Own Selves: Circulation and Borderlands
Every single human being is a work of many materials, forms and compositions, entities and voices and belongings. Star dust, our common ground is the universe and the earth, humus, where we all come from. As we inhabit this piece of the land around the world, what distinguishes the Latinxs people, among other things, is the complexities of our borderlands. We inhabit many worlds and none of these worlds are full. We are people of no one country. We are the borderlands, No somos de aquí ni de allá. Estranamos a todo y todas. We are in the midst of a state of slumber, numbed, and yet, fully active, fully wired. We are wrestling to understand our walk in the desert, in what poet Paul Valéry called the “leap of no return.”7 In Portuguese Lonjura sem retorno, in Spanish: lejos sin regreso. We are somewhat, not in the same complexity and specificities, like the African people that, in the words of Mbembe, are marked by “the articulation . . . of a thinking of circulation and crossings.8 Our circulation is limited, and our bodies crossed by so many borders: economic, sexual, gender, class. The cultural economy of US demands a form of circulation of goods and cultural artifacts and ways of living that tends to detach us from our own circulation of sources of sustenance and communal living. If we don’t hold to what we learned from our great grandparents we will not be able to know who we are and engage with awareness and fullness into the newness of the new circulations within this country. As we learn about ourselves and the histories of those from the bottom of this country that we are not part of the American “WE.” The American WE is very specific to a group of people, pertaining to a middle upper white class. The WE don’t have allegiance to its own white people either, for the real commitment is around class compromises. The white trash are not part of the WE of this country either. So, it is a naïve move to try to assimilate with the hopes of belonging. Trump’s America has its greatness to his own people. Make American Great Again, MAGA, is not a gathering of all of the US people but rather a political discourse and act on the whiteness of this country. For us it is a wakeup call for discernment to struggle. Yes, we belong, but as a daily act of resistance. Thus, to know ourselves is to know the brown reasoning of ourselves, the circulation of our sources and the ways in which we inhabit the borderland. Gloria Anzaldua has given us our itinerary, our territory and our spirituality: borderlands a spiritual Mestizaje.9
Aim at Changing Feelings too, not Only Ideas
The white reason has impinged on us a “codified madness” so we lose our forms of thinking and resistance. “Race” says Mbembe,
is a form of primal representation. Unable to distinguish between the outside and the inside, between envelopes and their contents, it sends us, above all, back to surface simulacra. Taken to its limit, race becomes a perverse complex, a generator of fears and torments, of disturbed thoughts and terror, but especially of infinite sufferings and, ultimately, catastrophe. In its phantasmagoric dimensions, it is a sign of neurosis—phobic, obsessive, at times hysterical. As Frantz Fanon has noted, “race” is also the name for bitter resentment and the irrepressible desire for vengeance. “Race” is the name for the rage of those who, constrained by subjection, suffer injuries, all manner of violations and humiliations, and bear countless wounds.”10
Under the MAGA “generator of fears and torments and thoughts of terror,” we are seeing the infinite sorrows of our people, the catastrophe of our countries, and the merciless account on the lives of the immigrants, here and elsewhere. We must ponder the ways in which we have to deal with the emotional results of this madness, the ways in which we are drenched into paradoxical relations between feelings and actions, syndromes and disconnections, spiritual injuries, mental illnesses and resentments. How do we access these orbits and convolutions of emotional difficulties when we are the very ones who conjure psychological work as unnecessary and waste of time? As rage is a respondent to all of these calamities, we must muster our own selves, go deep into our own hearts and learn how to deal with it. So, our first movement is towards our soul so we find ways to keep the devouring mouth of rage to destroy us. Once we can understand that and deal with it, we can channel the energy of rage into forms of resistance and transformation and create paths of liberation.
Stay Connected to the Ground
Our ancestors were deeply connected to the earth, they knew their deep relations were done with the ground on which they lived, the animals around them, the waters, the fish, the birds, the seeds, the sky. Our modern life doesn’t allow us to stop and connect with anything. Many of us are always running with projects and deadlines. Many are just trying to survive, just one step away from being completely rolled over by this economic situation. In whatever way, we must learn to pause, sit next to a tree and hear what the tree can tell us. As Job instruct us: “ask the animals, and they will teach you; the birds of the air, and they will tell you; ask the plants of the earth, and they will teach you; and the fish of the sea will declare to you.”11 We need to change our whole theological edifice and start from the ground, finding ways to deeply connect with the earth, gain our wisdom form the bio-system and those who have dealt with it for a while. Against the hydro-agri-business system of extractivism. What is the point of fighting for a world that is about to cease? We need to expand the notion of Martin Luther’s King’s beloved community and understand a community with the human and non-human and in a form of life together that does not entail the exclusion of anyone.
Knowing Our People
Our people rise, our people resist and protest. In the most wonderful ways. Our history is filled with moments in history when our people rose and created new worlds. They are resistance everywhere! Subcomandante Marcos and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in Mexico is resisting! The Teachers Movement also in Mexico is resisting! The Landless Movement in Brazil resisting! The Argentina’s Anti-Austerity Movement and the women are resisting! The students in Nicaragua are resisting! The campesino movement in Colombia is resisting! The environmental movement in Honduras is resisting! The queer movements everywhere are resisting! The indigenous communities everywhere are resisting!
And we also resist according to specific challenges with lots of fun. Let me tell you one story. Do you remember when lawyer Aaron Schlossberg shamed a staff person at a Manhattan eatery?” He shouted something like: My guess is they’re not documented, so my next call is to ICE to have each one of them kicked out of my country. If they have the balls to come here and live off my money—I pay for their welfare. I pay for their ability to be here. The least they can do—the least they can do—is speak English.12 All stupidities he said . . . Surely he called for a reaction. What happened in the next days is that “the city came out with several apt responses, one of which was a street party outside his flat—a protest in true Latino form. Lots of people went to the front of his apartment and brought a Mariachi band, tacos trucks, Pinatas with his face and loudspeakers playing reggaeton and Latin pop, with flags of all Hispanic countries. It was a fantastic party!13 We have to know our people well. We are blessed to be part of this fantastic group of people!
Creating an Aesthetics of Life and Death, Tears and Joy
At, under and around the wall, we laugh! We laugh hard! We laugh in time and out of time. We laugh in place and especially out of place. We defy death with our stubborn laughter. We laugh during the day and cry when night comes. We laugh and cry together. When there is the news of a son that was fund alive in the desert, when somebody goes to a detention center, when someone has crossed the desert safe, when someone is raped. We laugh and cry without ceasing!
The borders and the economic crushing of our communities are maddening. So, to find life out of this maddening
