My mother’s religion was warmth, food, story, and stress as well, as she was conscripted into the force of assimilation and cultural genocide and tried hard to keep its clutches from snaring her kids; though that was her lifelong devotion, it was wrought with turbulence, violence, and bitterness.

I was really quiet as a child and as a teenager and into my 20’s and 30’s. A lot of my friends now would not believe that I’ve changed! However, it is the truth. I was actually mute for almost a whole year when I started high school, as I’d been traumatized by being raped when I was 15 by a white guy on a golf course in San Antonio, and not being equipped to deal with that at all. If I had accused him, I’d have been the one to ‘get it.’ My past experience with trying to get ‘justice’ when it came to holding white males accountable for their sexual violence was a dead end. I wear the physical scars on my body to ‘prove’ - body as Science, as citizen Science - to no avail.

So, by the time I was 15, after numerous violences, I think my mind just shut down, went on a deep sleep. In my early twenties, in a college classroom, I still remember how difficult it was to retrain my mouth to stay up with my mind. The muscles in my jaws and my tongue lost their memory for how to make words. It was frightening to lose so much power and to try to put the voice and the self back together as a jigsaw. There were numerous ‘pieces’ that just never got back, that were ‘lost’ forever. I think I spent my late 30’s doing so much recovery and acceptance that there are just some ‘pieces’ in sexual violence that we have to just let go to the void. Sometimes things reappear in dreamtime. Sometimes the ancestors bring me small memories that help to patch those really difficult memories that sear the skin.

So, poetry for me is and always has to be connected to the material. I spent too much time in ‘poetry workshops’ and was violated by the student loan indentured slave system for too long [paying for my MFA] to allow what I write to be relegated to ‘poetry for poetry’s sake’. What is that? There’s no oxygen for that, period. I come from the most hyper-militarized spaces in the North American continent, outside of Chiapas. Poetry has to be connected on the ground to communities, period.

My home places ARE the industrial metropolises. The metropolises with skyscrapers benefit directly and are privileged in direct connection to the deprivations experienced in the industrial metropolises of the Mexico-U.S. border and the Guatamala-Mexico border. Period. Poetry created in a vacuum apart from lived experiences (not appropriated ones) needs to be challenged in a serious way in contemporary college writing programs.