Elena
My Spanish isn`t good enough
I remember how I`d smile
Listening my little ones
Understanding every word they´d say,
Their jokes, their songs, their plots
Vamos a pedirle dulces a mama. Vamos.
But that was in Mexico.
Now my children go to American High Schools.
They speak English. At night they sit around the
Kitchen table, laugh with one another.
I stand at the stove and feel dumb, alone.
I bought a book to learn English.
My husband frowned, drank more beer.
My oldest said, 'Mama, he doesn´t want you to
Be smarter than he is' I´m forty,
Embarrased at mispronouncing words,
Embarrased at the laughter of my children,
The grocery, the mailman. Sometimes I take
my English book and lock myself in the bathroom,
say the thick words softly, for if I stop trying, I will be deaf
when my children need my help.
Pat Mora
Jorge the Church Janitor Finally Quits
Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1989
No one asks
is lost
where I am from,
when the guests complain
I must be
about toilet paper.
from the country of janitors,
I have always mopped this floor.
What they say
Honduras, you are a squatter's camp
must be true:
outside the city
I am smart,
of their understanding.
but I have a bad attitude.
No one can speak
No one knows
my name,
that I quit tonight,
I host the fiesta
maybe the mop
of the bathroom,
will push on without me,
stirring the toilet
sniffing along the floor
like a punchbowl.
like a crazy squid
The Spanish music of my name
with stringy gray tentacles.
They will call it Jorge.
Martín Espada
Heart of Hunger
tobaccopicker, grapepicker, lettucepicker.
Smuggled in boxcars through fields of dark
morning,
tied to bundles at railroad crossings,
Obscured in the towering white clouds of
cities in winter,
the brown grain of faces dissolved in bus
station dim,
thousands are bowing to assembly lines,
immigrants: mexicano, dominicano,
frenzied in kitchens and sweatshops,
guatemalteco, puertorriqueño, orphans and
travelers,
mopping the vomit of others' children,
refused permission to use gas station toilets,
and the steel mill glowing.
leaning into the iron's steam
beaten for a beer in unseen towns with white
porches,
Yet there is a pilgrimage,
or evaporated without a tombstone in the
peaceful grass,
a history straining its arms and legs,
a centipede of hands moving,
an inexorable striving,
hands clutching infants that grieve,
shouting in Spanish
fingers to the crucifix,
at the police of city jails
hands that labor.
and border checkpoints,
mexicano, dominicano,
Long past backroads paved with solitude,
guatemalteco, puertorriqueño,
hands in the thousands reach for the cropground together,
fishermen wading into the North American
gloom
the countless roots of a tree lightning-torn,
to pull a fierce gasping life
capillaries running to a heart of hunger,
from the polluted current.
Martín Espada
Federico's Ghost
Martín Espada
and aiming for Federico,
The story is
leaving the skin beneath his shirt
that whole families of fruitpickers
wet and blistered,
still crept between the furrows
but still pumping his finger at the sky.
of the field at dusk,
when for reasons of whiskey or whatever
After Federico died,
the cropduster plane sprayed anyway,
rumors at the labor camp
floating a pesticide drizzle
told of tomatoes picked and smashed at night,
over the pickers
growers muttering of vandal children
who thrashed like dark birds
or communists in camp,
in a glistening white net,
first threatening to call Immigration,
except for Federico,
then promising every Sunday off
a skinny boy who stood apart
if only the smashing of tomatoes would stop.
in his own green row,
and, knowing the pilot
Still tomatoes were picked and squashed
would not understand in Spanish
in the dark,
that he was the son of a whore,
and the old women in camp
instead jerked his arm
said it was Federico,
and thrust an obscene finger.
laboring after sundown
to cool the burns on his arms,
The pilot understood.
flinging tomatoes
He circled the plane and sprayed again,
at the cropduster
watching a fine gauze of poison
that hummed like a mosquito
drift over the brown bodies
lost in his ear,
that cowered and scurried on the ground,
and kept his soul awake.
Blessed Be The Truth-Tellers
For Jack Agüeros
Jack who crossed his arms in a hunger strike
until the mayor hired more Puerto Ricans.
In the projects of Brooklyn, everyone lied.
My mother used to say:
And Jack said:
If somebody starts a fight,
You gonna get your tonsils out?
just walk away.
Ay bendito cuchifrito Puerto Rico.
Then somebody would smack
That’s gonna hurt.
the back of my head
and dance around me in a circle, laughing.
I was etherized,
then woke up on the ward
When I was twelve, pus bubbled
heaving black water onto white sheets.
on my tonsils, and everyone said:
A man poking through his hospital gown
After the operation, you can have
leaned over me and sneered:
all the ice cream you want.
You think you got it tough? Look at this!
I bragged about the deal;
and showed me the cauliflower tumor
no longer would I chase the ice cream truck
behind his ear. I heaved up black water again.
down the street, panting at the bells
to catch Johnny the ice cream man,
The ice cream burned.
who allegedly sold heroin the color of vanilla
Vanilla was a snowball spiked with bits of glass.
from the same window.
My throat was red as a tunnel on fire
after the head-on collision of two gasoline trucks.
Then Jack the Truth-Teller visited the projects,
Jack who herded real camels and sheep
This is how I learned to trust
through the snow of East Harlem every Three Kings’
Day,
the poets and shepherds of East Harlem.
Blessed be the Truth-Tellers,
Jack who wrote sonnets of the jail cell
for they shall have all the ice cream they want.
and the racetrack and the boxing ring,
Martín Espada
Legal Alien
Pat Mora
Bi-lingual, Bi-cultural,
able to slip from "How's life?"
to "Me'stan volviendo loca,"
able to sit in a paneled office
drafting memos in smooth English,
able to order in fluent Spanish
at a Mexican restaurant,
American but hyphenated,
viewed by Anglos as perhaps exotic,
perhaps inferior, definitely different,
viewed by Mexicans as alien,
(their eyes say, "You may speak
Spanish but you're not like me")
an American to Mexicans
a Mexican to Americans
a handy token
sliding back and forth
between the fringes of both worlds
by smiling
by masking the discomfort
of being pre-judged
Bi-laterally.