The Border and Migrant Children on My Mind: New Song and Poems

Melinda Palacio

Somewhere in the Sonoran Desert

While I continue to revise my next novel, I am also writing poems and studying music. At first, my guitar practice was intermittent and relegated to when I remembered a song I wanted to learn. Two years ago, I became serious about learning how to play. That's when Steve bought me the beautiful guitar in the photo. I take it everywhere and practice whenever I get a chance, whether we are on the road or at home. I've given a handful of presentations along with my poetry readings, including earlier this year at Pueblo Community Community College, where I sang the Bird Forgiveness theme song, a song I wrote to accompany my latest poetry book, Bird Forgiveness. I never thought my interest in learning guitar would be accompanied by singing and writing songs. Learning music is a never ending rabbit hole because everything is connected and there is so much to learn. Steve used to urge me to write songs because I am a poet and he saw a natural fit. I was skeptical, thought the idea a joke, and laughed it off. Now that I've written several songs, I'm glad I have added another creative outlet to my repertoire.

Many of my recent poems have been about the situation at the border. I keep thinking about the children separated from their families, abused, and jailed. At this moment, I'll hold off on sharing the poems, but will have a follow up post once they are published. However, I can share the song that I wrote. An example of this rabbit hole is how learning the guitar led to learning how to read music and write it. My working title for my new song is All at the Border or When La Llorona Meets the Devil. I don't think I have to spell out who the devil is in this story.

For me songs are stories. La Bloga's own Michael Sedano calls songs Poems with Wings, a fitting description. This song about the border is my newest song. I wanted to wait to share it, but with the latest indignations which included shooting migrants in the legs and moats with alligators, along with current immigration atrocities, I couldn't wait to dress up the song with a more polished production. Let's just say this is a work in progress and very much a first draft. Last month, I sprained my broken ankle and was disabled for several weeks. The good news about being forced to slow down is that the experience produced new writing and a new song. My friend Lora suggested I write a new song during my convalescence, so this one is dedicated to her. I'm glad I didn't spend the entire time bent out of shape because I couldn't walk. I challenged myself with this latest song. I threw in some difficult bar chords. This isn't an easy song to sing either. The production is a video selfie with me singing and playing into the recorder on my iPad. I have yet to fall into the Garage Band black hole or into the art of movie or video making. If there's interest I will post polished versions of this and other songs.

For more information on why Immigration is such an important topic and why we need to celebrate creative contributions in moments of crisis, read about Reyna Grande's literary metamorphosis in her essay, Immigration and Transformation in World Literature Today. Although I am very familiar with Reyna Grande's work and her story, reading her essay inspired me to share this song. Grande says that as a writer she has learned to see writing the way James Baldwin saw it: as a tool to change the way people see the world. "As an artist, I've learned to hear the call to action, to be deeply aware of when our society is in distress, of when human rights are at risk. I've learned that artists do as Toni Morrison once said: 'We speak. We write. We do language and help our civilization heal'." Reyna Grande's words reminded me that the poems and songs pouring out of me lately are a response to our community's collective trauma.


Here's my latest song: All at the Border.

If video is not playing, view on my Youtube channel.

Climate disaster & denial grows

Aztlán & Méjico burn

[this article originally appeared on Frontera NorteSur]

In the Southwest US, smoke from massive wildfires contaminates the air and forces evacuations. 200 miles from the mammoth Wallow Fire, the skies of Albuquerque, have recently resembled Los Angeles and Mexico City in their worst years of pollution.

Stretching from Texas and New Mexico and deep into the Mexican interior, drought parches vast expanses of land. Mountain lions, bobcats and bears wander into urban El Paso and Albuquerque.

A major fishery for the US, Mexico and other nations, the Gulf of Mexico is poised to suffer its fourth environmental calamity in less than six years. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the so-called dead zone, which is traced to nitrogen-rich fertilizers washed into the Mississippi River and then into the gulf, could expand to a record size of between 8,500 and 9,421 square miles this year due to increased run-off from this year’s heavy flooding.

Although the reports are dramatic and growing, consumers of the US mass media will find little or next to nothing that suggests that the environmental catastrophes are in any way connected to the broader issue of climate change.

Almost as striking as the disasters themselves, is the systematic, noticeable failure of the US mass media to raise the possibility these climatic upheavals stem from human-caused releases of greenhouse gases, let alone devote any thorough attention to the growing pile of scientific evidence that confirms climate change. Instead, events are often presented in an episodic manner, or described as the consequences of a normal La Nina year or just the hot, dry weather of the pre-Monsoon season.

Broadcast across hundreds of radio stations, the voices of personalities like Rush Limbaugh, who calls climate change a “hoax” and a “costly myth” akin to the Santa Claus tale, arguably get more play than the sober studies of organizations like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the National Research Council.

Yet even the US military takes climate change quite seriously and is planning for its possible outcomes. A 2010 Pentagon report, for instance, noted that the Department of Defense is actively formulating future policies and missions based on the premise of climate change.

In a commercial media market that treats the climate change story with routine omission or outright denial, a recent Associated Press story illustrated the limits of coverage. The piece recounted how extreme weather events-tornadoes, floods, wildfires and the like-had sowed havoc this spring, reaching virtually unprecedented numbers during April alone.

While hinting at climate change, the story pulled back from the political limb when it quoted Tom Karl, director of the National Climatic Data Center in North Carolina, who cautioned against focusing on any single cause for the freaky weather but still affirming that “clearly these things interconnect,” without giving further explanation.

On the other hand, essayist Chip Ward [Fire's Manifest Destiny] cut to the chase in his depiction of an arid western United States that is “burning up and blowing away” in front of our very eyes.

“Global warming, global weirding, climate change, whatever you prefer to call it--it’s not just happening in some distant, melting land out of a storybook,” Ward wrote. “It is not just burning up far-away Russia. It’s here now.”

On the ground, the environmental disaster bubbles and bursts across borders. Like the southwestern US, a huge swath of Mexico reels from epic drought. In the northern state of Tamaulipas, thousands of cattle have reportedly died because of water shortages, while in another border state, Chihuahua, small ranchers draw water from wells meant for human needs in a desperate bid to keep their livestock alive.

Jose Luis Luege, head of Mexico’s National Water Commission, acknowledged that 40 percent of his country is afflicted by the worst drought since 1971. From January 1 to May 19, nearly 300,000 personnel from federal, state and local agencies, as well as from civil society, battled 8,900 forest fires affecting close to 1.5 million acres.

Representing farmers, the National Campesino Confederation is demanding that the federal government declare 15 Mexican states disaster areas. “If this implies reorienting the budget, or additional resources, than it is necessary to do so,” said CNC President Gerardo Sanchez.

Already, climate disasters are costing Mexico a pretty penny. According to the Secretariat of Agriculture and Livestock, the federal government has budgeted more than $1 billion this year to pay for farm and ranch losses arising from droughts, freezes, hailstorms, cyclones, torrential rains, and flooding. An additional amount in the neighborhood of $100 million has been set aside by various governmental agencies to cover insurance, the secretariat said in a June 22 press release.

In the short and medium term, the climate disasters could keep driving up the price of food. A report from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development predicted 30 percent higher food prices within the next decade. That’s on top of the 40 percent increase registered over the course of just the past year.

In the long-term, some scientists contemplate much grimmer scenarios. At an April meeting in England, 27 of the world’s leading ocean experts warned that global warming, acidification and dwindling oxygen levels are threatening the mass extinction of marine life. Emerging ocean conditions resemble those that preceded the five mass extinctions of life on the planet, according to the group.

“The results are shocking,” said Alex Rogers, an Oxford professor who co-authored a report by the International Programme on the State of the Ocean. “We are looking at the consequences for humankind that will impact in our lifetime.”

Additional sources: AFP, June 20, 2011. Article by Marlowe Hood. El Diario de Juarez, June 19, 2011. Guardian (UK) May 21 and June 18, 2011. Articles by Jules Boykoff and Rupert Neale. TomDispatch.com, June 16, 2011. Article by Chip Ward. Associated Press, June 16, 2011. Article by Randolph E. Schmid. La Jornada, June 2 and 19, 2011. Articles by Ariane Diaz and editorial staff. El Universal, June 3, 14 and 19, 2011. Articles by Adriana Covarrubias, Notimex and editorial staff.

© 2011 Frontera NorteSur:
on-line, U.S.-Mexico border news
Center for Latin American and Border Studies
New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, New Mexico

For a free electronic subscription email: fnsnews@nmsu.edu

Even Arizona Chicanos are locos

Everybody knows Arizona is crazy, but most of us thought it was only the racists and militia types. It seems that maybe some Ariz. Chicanos have also gotten too much of the sun and sand.

But these vatos are a different kind of crazy. The staff of Bad Subjects seem to think that Internet readers might still be interested in a fairer world, one where words like democracy, civil rights, and people power apply not only to Libya and Egypt, but maybe to the U.S. Southwest.

For over a decade Bad Subjects has been publishing a non-commercial news sources deep in the heart of jingoism. Since you might be as unaware as I was about their irreverant, fact-based, scholarly pieces and coverage, below is a message from the Los Tres editors about the website and briefs about their latest issue; it's worth the navigating. Chingau--they even got Rudy Acuña to join them, along with female and some non-Chicanos writers.

"Bad Subjects is a collective that publishes a magazine--Bad Subjects: Political Education for Everyday Life--and provides access to it via a public-access website. In 1998, Bad Subjects founded a small educational nonprofit corporation, also called Bad Subjects, which promotes the progressive use of new media and print publications. Donations to the nonprofit go toward funding printed copies of the magazine Bad Subjects (distributed for free), and other related projects, such as Bad Subjects books. Bad Subjects seeks to revitalize progressive politics in retreat.

"We think too many people on the left have taken their convictions for granted. So we challenge progressive dogma by encouraging readers to think about the political dimension to all aspects of everyday life. We also seek to broaden the audience for leftist and progressive writing, through a commitment to accessibility and contemporary relevance. Bad Subjects was founded in September 1992, at UC Berkeley. Since then it has circulated widely, and today we actually have about 250,000 readers from around the world per month."

Dear colegas:

The special issue on Arizona biopower is live. Happy 4 de Julio (let the fireworks begin, grin). Please forward around.

Paz y best

Arturo, Peter y Mike

When Arizona is brought up many scholars, educational and immigration rights activists across the U.S. just shrug and say "Arizona is crazy" or "that is Arizona for you". However, we strongly believe that Arizona is a bas-relief to a matrix of racialized biopower that seeks to criminalize and denigrate subjects based on fear driven paranoia about indigenous and mestiza/o peoples. We sincerely hope that this issue of Bad Subjects will make a positive difference in highlighting the racism, violence, and anti-immigrant hysteria coming out of Arizona today.


Table of contents Issue 81: Arizona Biopower

This issue: Political Education for Everyday Life provides insight into the acts of state-sponsored biopower in the Arizona-México borderlands.

Ya Basta! with State Sponsored Racial Thuggery

Arturo J. Aldama, Peter J. Garcia
 – We find that when Arizona is brought up many scholars, educational and immigration rights activists across the U.S. just shrug and say "Arizona is crazy" or "that is Arizona for you". However we strongly believe that Arizona is a bas-relief to a matrix of racialized biopower that seeks to criminalize and denigrate subjects based on fear-driven paranoia about indigenous and mestiza/o peoples.

Outlaw Arizona: State Seceding from the United States and Humanity

Roberto Cintli Rodriguez – 
Over the past several years, Arizona has unquestionably become synonymous with reactionary politics and reactionary anti-Mexican, anti-immigrant and anti-indigenous legislation. Arizona's image has been further tarnished during the past few years by being home to Operation Streamline in Tucson.

The Search for Reason – Rodolfo F. Acuña
 – Last week I revisited Tucson, where my mother was raised and where at the age of five, when arriving by Greyhound, we stayed in an adobe house in nearby downtown.

No Somos Criminales: A Decolonial Response to Nativist Racism in the US

Arturo Aldama
 – For all those perceived as illegal, even if their ancestry predates by several generations the arrival of European immigrants, how do we read their harassment, deportation, assumption of illegality? Is this also a predictable outcome of the processes of nativism? Your racialized construction trumps claims to indigenous identity and ancestry?

On Arizona's Failed Democracy: Where is Chicana and Chicano Studies?

Peter J. Garcia
 – The neoconservative backlash against civil rights and social justice is attempting to criminalize Mexican immigrants and is threatened by any form of decolonial activism or liberation movements that might have prevented the social implosion occurring in Arizona.

The Veils of the State: Contextualizing Political Affiliation, Acts of Violence and Illogical Justifications of the Rhetoric of Patriotism.

Doreen Martinez
 – When it came to light that Mr. Loughner failed to have any formal political memberships, a shift away from the deeper connection he embodied occurred and one veil of the borderlands was achieved. Therein is a critical failure to understand Jared's racial and gender entitlements e.g., his context or what we could refer to as his borderland status.

Arizona: From Jim Crow to Juan Cuervo

Alberto "Beto" Gutierrez – 
Unfortunately, the paradigm of race has been historically framed as a Black and White relation, overlooking more subtle forms of anti-Mexican, anti-Chinese, anti-Japanese, and anti-Native American local and national legislation and public policy.

Resisting a Mechanized Consciousness

Christopher Gonzalez – 
As cool as it may sound, no one in America should want to be a machine. To be a machine means you are expendable and exploitable. It means that you are just a number and that there are a hundred more behind you who are ready, willing, and able to do the kind of work you do. It means having a devalued sense of self-worth and adopted fatalism that speaks to your contribution to the world as being transient. We need to conceive of strategies that limit this sort of thinking in the Chicano/a community which aspires to move thinking beyond the attributes of labor.

Que Me Toquen un Corrido Pesado!!!: An Analysis of the Narcocorrido and Its Rise to Popularity in the United States

Jesus Acosta – 
The narcocorrido is a drug ballad, yet there is a great deal of multiplicity within these songs.

Danny Trejo's Body: Immigrant Males, the Border, and Citizenship in the American Imagination

Nohemy Solórzano-Thompson, Tia K. Butler
 – In this article, we discuss the symbolic and material forms this war against immigrants manifests itself in the United States. Using the films of Danny Trejo and most importantly what happens to his body in these films, we posit that it is possible to read the multiple forms anti-immigrant sentiments are performed and enacted in American popular culture since the late 80s.

Last Stand

Harry Gamboa Jr. – 
A man and woman are standing on soapboxes with their heads covered by black hoods while their wrists are bound behind them. A hangman's noose is placed around each of their necks.

From This Side: Images on Immigration from the United States

George Rivera – 
The issue of immigration is evident in many parts of the world. It is part of the human condition. We must intervene on this reality. Artists must do their part too.

Allegory and Alterity: Regulating Labor, Immigration, and the Ruinous Emblems of Hate in Michigan

Mike Mosher
 – Michigan is the site for draconian laws from a Republican Governor and Arizona-copying cowboy legislators, yet perhaps the undead symbol of white supremacy should be legislated most of all.

"We Have Found New Homes for the Rich": The Underclass Won't Wait to Join Obama's "Everybody"

Joe Natoli
 – A "capitalist environment" has socially engineered us as demonstrably as whatever tradition centered gold earrings in the middle of one young Class Warrior's ear lobes.

Arizona Inspired Artwork

Jake Prendez
 – Three works that comment on what's going on.

Normalizing Noncompliance: Militarization and Resistance in Southern Arizona

Geoffrey Boyce and Sarah Launius
 – Laws like SB 1070 are meant to divide people from one another by reifying fear, distrust and violent the exclusion of some. The We Reject Racism campaign worked to directly confront this process through cross-sector organizing that undermined pre-existing divisions in our communities and worked to mitigate the impacts of the law.

–fin–

U.S./Mexico border climate change • Obama: "Change you can freeze in" • $25k writing stipend

The best source for U.S./Mexico border news, Frontera NorteSur, did an article on 2/8/11 about how bad this winter's been for Americans and mexicanos. If you think you were cold, read on. My excerpts below highlight the worst. [emphasis added]:

The images and news reports from Chihuahua, New Mexico and Texas were gripping. Last week's sub-zero temperatures grew sheets of ice on the walls of unheated homes. Water lines froze and burst, wells clammed up, natural gas shortages left towns without heat and the normal functioning of schools, business and factory production was thrown into chaos. On both sides of the US-Mexico border, governors issued disaster declarations and troops were called out to assist with emergency relief.

"We can call this historic", said Dave Novlan, meterologist for the National Weather Service in the border town of Santa Teresa, New Mexico.

In neighboring Ciudad Juarez, a city already battered to the bone by extreme criminal violence and economic crisis, 90,000 families were reported without water the first weekend of February. Next door, in El Paso, Texas, the city water utility took the extreme step of ordering residents not to shower, wash cars and clothes and otherwise restrict water usage until further notice.

In Aldama, Chihuahua, nearly three dozen animals-parrots, snakes, crocodiles and a monkey-froze to death at a private zoo, while the epic freeze was suspected in the death of a $30,000 giraffe at a zoo in Clovis, New Mexico.

Across the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua, at least 19 people were reported dead from cold weather-related incidents by February 3, even before the temperatures took more turns downward. By the end of the first week of February, four additional victims were reported in the state of Tamaulipas, which also borders Texas.

Of the 19 Chihuahua victims, nine reportedly succumbed from carbon monoxide poisoining, six from hypothermia and four from burns. In a non-lethal fire, Ciudad Juarez firemen unable to overcome frozen water lines were forced to watch the historic building housing the Lion's Club burn down.

Earlier, in January, a broad swath of northern and central Mexico shivered in the cold. Even in the tropical port of Puerto Vallarta, where thousands of Canadian and US "snowbirds" pass the winter along with migratory humpback whales every year, unusually low nightly temperatures had residents and visitors snuggling up in sweaters and coats.

In northwestern Mexico, more than 1.3 million acres of grain, vegetable and fruit crops were reportedly damaged or destroyed in the most recent bout of extra cold weather. One farmer assessed the situation as a "total loss."

Mexico's Secretariat of Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries counts on an additional $100 million in disaster compensation funds this year. The federal agency considers Mexico among the most vulnerable nations to impacts from climate change in the Americas.

But Mexico's potential crop losses came at a time when a kilo of staple corn tortillas was already fetching ten or more pesos, or one-fifth the amount of the daily minimum wage. In 2011, some economists warn of further rising food prices in the months ahead.

Probing slightly beyond the emergency nature of the extreme weather, which by most accounts was the most severe spell since the 1950s or 1960s, some mass media outlets spoke about an archaic infrastructure or the inability of the New Mexico Gas Company, for example, to supply enough energy to freezing residents, 32,000 of whom were stranded without gas heat for days on end.

But almost without fail, US and Mexican media coverage had one thing in common: no mention of how human-induced climate change might be responsible for the Deep Freeze of 2011.

The climate change omission extended into government and business circles. Annette Gardinier, New Mexico Gas Company president, insisted the freeze was a "50-year weather event" not experienced since 1971 and 1911, and an emergency situation of similar magnitude was "unlikey" to happen again.

In an Internet article, however, Santa Fe resident Subhangar Banerjee noted the link between Artic warming and the predictions of climate scientists of "more frequent and severe intensity winter storms" arising from "human made climate change."

Banerjee also cited other evidence of climate change in New Mexico, including the massive die-off of pinon trees since the turn of the century, and the record high temperatures of 100 degrees that were registered in the normally cool state capital of Santa Fe last June and July. In contrast, February temperatures in Santa Fe plunged to -40 with the wind chill factor thrown in, according to Banerjee.

"Crazy February" arrived just as Congressman Fred Upton (R-Mi) rolled out legislation to prevent the US Environmental Protection Agency from limiting greenhouse gas emissions blamed for climate change by the world's leading scientists.

Federal officials urged residents of New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas and Oklahoma to have an emergency kit ready and stay on the alert for advisories from the authorities.

To read the entire article, clic here, then "Environment."

© Frontera NorteSur (FNS): on-line, U.S.-Mexico border news
Center for Latin American and Border Studies
New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, New Mexico

For a free electronic subscription email: fnsnews AT nmsu DOT edu

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The same week comes this headline. Draw your own conclusions:

Obama To Cut Energy Assistance For Poor

He want to "drop funding for the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) by about $3 billion."

During "one of the most brutal winters in history."

[To read the entire article, click here.]

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NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS

LITERATURE FELLOWSHIPS: CREATIVE WRITING

Targeted Fields: Humanities. Open to fields related to creative writing.

Open To Postdoctoral Scholars.

Open to U.S. citizens or permanent residents.

Eligibility Requirements

You are eligible to apply for Fiction if within the last 5 years you have published: at least 5 different works of short fiction, a volume of short fiction, or a novel or novella. You are eligible to apply in Creative Nonfiction if within the last 5 years you have published: at least five different creative essay, or a volume of creative fiction. You are eligible to apply in Poetry if within the last 5 years you have published: a volume of 48 or more pages of poetry, 20 or more different poems in five or more literary publications.

Stipends of $25,000. Deadline 3/3/2011

Program Description

Several fellowships are offered to creative writers to interpret, explore, and create fiction and creative nonfiction works. Fellowships allow recipients to set aside time for writing, research, travel, and general career advancement.

For more information

Literature Fellowships: Creative Writing

Room 722

National Endowment for the Arts

1100 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW

Washington, DC 20506-0001

(202) 682-5034

LitFellowships@arts.gov

www.nea.gov/grants/apply/Lit/index.html

http://www.nea.gov/grants/apply/Lit/index.html>

submitted by: Alvaro Huerta, Ph.D.