“Because We Come from Everything: Poetry &Migration” is the first public offering of the newly formed Poetry Coalition—twenty-two organizations dedicated to working together to promote the value poets bring to our culture and communities, as well as the important contributions poetry makes in the lives of people of all ages and backgrounds.
During the month of March, coalition members CantoMundo and Letras Latinas are partnering to present guest posts by CM fellows at Letras Latinas Blog that will include essays, creative non-fiction, micro reviews and dialogues between writers. This year’s theme borrows a line from U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera’s poem, “Borderbus.” Please return to this space and enjoy all the pieces in the series, and leave comments to participate in the dialogue.
Barbara Curiel, CantoMundo
Francisco Aragón, Letras Latinas
*
NOTES ON THE
PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE MEXICAN BORDER
by Cynthia Cruz
Borders are set up to define the
places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them.
A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A
borderland is a vague and undetermined place
created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant
state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants. Los atravesados
live here: the squint-eyes, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel,
the mulato, the half-breed, the half dead; in short, those who cross over, pass
over, or go through the confines of the “normal.”
——Gloria Anzaldua,
Borderlands/La Frontera
I read of a young girl who, after making
her way through Mexico and crossing the US-Mexican border arrived speechless.
The female worker assigned her case was unable to gather any information from
the girl—who was visibly traumatized and clearly rendered mute from her
travels.
Something happened during her exodus,
the act of abandoning her home and traveling to safety to the US—something so
traumatic she lost the ability to speak.
*
The girl was Mexican only when she
arrived on the border. Before that, she was a girl. A girl who lived in Mexico.
She became this something else when she arrived in the US, as she
entered its threshold. As Judith Butler writes, as Fanon and Louis Althusser
write, her becoming this other entity is the result of having being called into
it. When she arrived at the border, she became Mexican, an immigrant, a
refugee, a criminal. These are what the white border patrol or police person or
white civilians called her and call her; and so it is what she becomes, what
she became. Who she is now.
The border is a phantasm, a mirage
imagined and then formed, made, upon this imagining. Those who attempt to find
safety by passing through become something and someone else when they do.
*
Borders are unnatural, they are
man-made; artificial and a means to separate those in power from those outside
of it. The word border originated from the Old French bordure, which
means ”seam, edge of a shield, border.” A border is a “rip,” it is a “seam.”
A
border is a distinct act of violence.
*
I want to talk now of the body and what
happens to one’s body when one finds one’s self not at home in the world. In
Sara Ahmed’s brilliant text Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects,
Others, she writes: “Phenomenology helps us to explore how bodies are shaped
by histories, which they perform in their compartment, their posture, and their
gestures.” History and trauma are inexplicably linked: when one does not feel
at home in the world, one holds back, hesitates. Furthermore, when one has
become “Other” by others they are surrounded by, this is doubly so. Like being
bullied in school, being seen and named as less than because one has come from
someplace else, because one does not look like everyone else, does not speak or
move like everyone else—this informs and changes one’s self and one’s body
which, in turn, changes the way we move in the world. We take up less space,
speak less, we overcompensate.
*
How do boundaries, which are artificial
and a means of delineating who is allowed into the system and who is not,
inform the way one is able or un-able to move in such a world.
And how does one carry this border or boundary within one’s self? This knowing that one is always Other, always even when one makes one’s way into and through this boundary, never fully absorbed? Always, always on the outside of this boundary which does not stop at the border, but is carried and reaffirmed in a multiplicity of ways within the boundaries of the United States.
And how does one carry this border or boundary within one’s self? This knowing that one is always Other, always even when one makes one’s way into and through this boundary, never fully absorbed? Always, always on the outside of this boundary which does not stop at the border, but is carried and reaffirmed in a multiplicity of ways within the boundaries of the United States.
In other words, even when we cross
through and into, we never fully enter. We are always outside.
*
My own experience is this: I am the
daughter of a Mexican-American, a man whose family came to the United States
from Mexico, a man who was not able to complete grammar school due to his
having to work in the fields—
My father does not exist. Though he has
lived in the United States his entire life, he is invisible.
He is silent. He is framed and contained
by a system not interested in him. And the way this presents in his day to day life
is via access to institutions and means of earning a living.
It is not true, what he told me and what
his parents told him, that if you work hard enough, you will move out of the
class you were born into. It is not true there are no class systems in the
United States of America. Class is a boundary, a border; it keeps people in
their place. And the ideology that if one works hard enough, one can move up
and out of their class, is a means to silence those in this space. Ambition and
striving as a means to keep one’s mind and body busy while one is working
multiple jobs and not moving forward at all. As long as one believes that if
one just works hard enough, they will move up (and if they don't move up, it’s
their own fault), one will not notice that one’s entire life has passed by.
My father has worked his entire life. My
father lives in poverty.
*
When I was working as a nanny in the
Hamptons one summer my boss, the father of the small child I nannied, asked me
one evening, after I had finished my dinner at a separate table in a separate
room from the family, “How do you end up with the name Cruz?”
It was not until he asked me the
question that I became aware how much my name and what it meant had troubled
him; how, I realized when he asked the question, that it had been bothering him
since he hired me.
My name and where I come from arrives
before me even before I speak; I am positioned, who I am and my body, are kept
within that space.
*
To lose one’s voice when confronted with
a border, with a boundary, with power that does not want you to enter—this is
what I am attempting to address here. But words, as always, fail me.
*
What does it mean to lose one’s voice?
When I was a small child I did not
speak. Perhaps there was something I was not able or unwilling to articulate or
maybe my not-saying was in itself a kind of saying, its own strange
language.
And how does not speaking, a
not-speaking that may in fact be the direct result of the trauma of coming upon
a border, of experiencing not being at home, create its own border, its own
threshold?
And how might this self-formed boundary,
this threshold, serve as a form of resistance?
For my father and for my family,
assimilation was the aim as it is for many immigrants. And yet, it has proved
impossible; full immersion, impenetrable. We won’t be digested—we can enter, if
we enter, but then we remain, still, outside. Remnant, dreg, excess.
*
And finally, I have to address the
obvious: the very fact that I am living and surviving in this culture means I
am a part of it; I am, in a sense, assimilated. Also, though not middle-class,
I am also not without a place to live, I am not without work (adjunct and
seasonal and yet—work).
That I have enough food to eat and
clothes on my body, that I am not in immediate danger of my life, for my
security, of deportation—presumes a kind of integration that I must
acknowledge.
And yet what I am speaking of here is a
way that one can remain outside of, even inside, the borders. This is what I am
speaking of—when I think of my father who worked full time and often several
jobs at once, and yet never had a savings, never owned a home, is peripheral.
He did not leave a mark where he went. This is what I mean—a kind of
tracelessness, a silence that is the result of years of being on the other side
of gates and borders, counters and desks—always on the other side of power and
institutions, access—and a way of moving one’s body through space—knowing that
one belongs, that one’s body belongs in the space.
*
To be not at home, to be not at home in
a space that will not, cannot, absorb one, is to be disoriented, to be lost, in
a way. But also, this losing, this being not at home-ness, creates a stronger,
perhaps, other, sense of knowing.
What happens when one loses one’s sight
is that one’s sense of smell and hearing and touch become more sensitive—and in
a way, one becomes more animal in the way that animals trust what they smell
and hear, what their bodies sense, more than what they see. Intuitive,
perceptive, disoriented but oriented in a new, strange way, what Gloria
Anzaldua calls La facultad:
La facultad is the capacity
to see in surface phenomena the meaning
of deeper realities, to see the deep structure below the
surface. It is an
instant “sensing,” a quick perception arrived at without conscious reasoning.
It is an acute awareness mediated by the part of the psyche that does not
speak, that
communicates in images and symbols which are the faces
of feelings, that is, behind which
feelings reside/hide. The one
possessing this sensitivity is excruciatingly alive to the world
Cynthia Cruz is the
author of four collections of poetry: Ruin (2006), The Glimmering Room (2012), Wunderkammer (2014), and How the End Begins (2016). Her fifth collection
of poems, Dregs, is forthcoming in 2018 along with a collection of
essays, Notes Toward a New Language,exploring
silence and marginalization. Cruz has received fellowships from Yaddo and the
MacDowell Colony as well as a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University.
She has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College in writing and an MFA in Art Criticism
& Writing from the School of Visual Arts. Cruz is currently pursuing a PhD in German Studies at Rutgers University.
She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.
