Dreams from Many Rivers
Page 5
EL CLUB CUBANO
VIVIANA
New Jersey, 1965
We lost our home, jobs, happiness,
and way of life
when we fled the island
as refugees
on Freedom Flights.
So we start clubs in Elizabeth and Union City,
where everyone gathers to remember and dream
of night stars gleaming on the serene waters
of el Río Armendares and el Río Manatí.
All week, we work as waitresses and janitors,
even though we used to be dentists and doctors
on the island.
•
Until we learn English,
weekends at the club
with songs and dances
will have to be enough
to keep us hopeful.
Music is the only part of home
that we were able to carry away
hidden deep inside
our rhythmically beating
hearts.
TRANSITION
AMALIA
New York, 1965
My family left the Dominican Republic
because of all the political trouble,
a situation so disturbing and tragic
that whenever grown-ups
talk about it,
they either whisper
or holler
at each other.
All I want now is peace at school,
where everyone separates into groups
from different countries, Spanish-speaking
or English, so that I’m always somewhere
in between.
EXILE OR IMMIGRANT?
CARIDAD
Florida, 1968
My parents brought me here
when I was a baby, almost ten years ago.
I don’t remember Cuba, but I’ve seen
plenty of photographs, and I know
we call ourselves exiles, always dreaming
of going back …
but I wonder if it will be up to me to decide
when the time comes—should I stay
and become a United States citizen,
or move back to an island
that might no longer
feel
like my real
home?
¡HUELGA!
RAY
California, 1968
In the town of Delano, surrounded by vineyards,
my family can’t afford to buy even one bunch
of grapes.
Our work on farms keeps other Americans
well fed, but we sleep in shacks or cars,
with no bathrooms, no water, not even
a river, just polluted irrigation canals.
I pick fruit all day, before and after school.
Scorching sun, hunger, thirst, discouragement.
Nothing ever changes, until la huelga—the strike!
It started three years ago, when Filipino workers
were the first to walk out, soon followed
by Mexican Americans like my parents,
who were born in California
but are still treated like foreigners.
All we ask for is minimum wage, but farmers
are used to paying migrants much less, so they
bring in strikebreakers from Mexico, people
who really need work and don’t understand
what it’s like
to be born here
yet so easily
replaced.
Next, another sort of strikebreaker appears.
Men in pickup trucks, swinging clubs and yelling
insults.
Our leaders, César Chávez and Dolores Huerta,
have taught us to be peaceful, following the examples
of Martin Luther King and Mohandas Gandhi, so now,
when brutal thugs attack us, we fall to our knees
and pray.
Nonviolence works slowly, but it does eventually
succeed in changing the minds of people in cities
who watch TV news and see how we’re treated.
Eventually, ordinary shoppers join our grape boycott,
refusing to buy any fruit harvested by workers
who don’t earn a decent wage.
•
Now the landowners don’t have any choice.
To stay in business, they have to sign
labor contracts, proving that peace
can win against violence,
with fairness replacing
injustice!
VOTING RIGHTS
WILLIE VELÁSQUEZ
Texas, 1969
In towns like Crystal City, Mexican-Americans
live on one side and everyone else
on the other.
Teachers demand English, but some students
only know Spanish, and others prefer to blend
both or shift back and forth, like the natural flow
of a winding stream on the Rio Grande floodplain.
After kids hear about walkouts
at schools in California, they march out, too,
calling themselves Chicanos now, instead of
using a hyphen.
Those farmworker strikes
spread to our Texas fields, but when violence
enters the picture, people separate
into factions, argumentative groups
that believe this or that, when really
all we need
is unity
at the voting polls.
So that’s my only goal now: voter registration
and making sure our votes count.
Millions of votes.
Millions.
ANTI-WAR
FRANK DEL OLMO
California, 1970
Rich boys avoid the military draft
by staying in college, but poor ones
die in Vietnam.
So many Mexican American soldiers
are sent to the violent front lines
that back here in Los Angeles,
families march, shout, and even
throw rocks
to protest.
Policemen attack.
My journalism mentor—Rubén Salazar—is shot
and killed. Can it be a coincidence?
I don’t think so, because everyone knows
he’s been documenting police brutality.
His death leaves the Los Angeles Times
without a journalist who can speak Spanish,
so I move into the essential role
of bilingual
investigative
reporter.
It’s hard to believe that just a few years ago,
I tried to volunteer to be a fighter pilot.
It’s lucky I had bad eyesight and was rejected
by the air force.
Otherwise, I never would have gone to college
and learned how to make up my own mind
about war and other
sorrows.
A MATHEMATICAL GENIUS
ALBERTO CALDERÓN
Illinois, 1974
As a child in Argentina, numbers already
amazed me, and when I grew older, I began
to realize that I could offer easier ways
to solve
complex problems
that even adults
could not
understand.
A scholarship brought me to Chicago,
where my engineering background
now helps me turn fascinating ideas
into useful ones.
Whenever I have a chance, I return
to my homeland, where I find talented students
and help them travel here to continue
their studies.
•
There’s no end to the wide variety
of problems—both mathematical and social—
that can be so
lved simply by combining
education
and compassion.
RECRUITED BY A FACTORY
ALFONSO
Massachusetts, 1975
Businessmen came to the mountains
of Colombia, in search of weavers who know
how to string a loom
and create cloth.
When I left my home far behind,
I thought this textile mill in the cold north
would employ me forever, but now it’s closing,
so I’ll have to move my whole family
to North or South Carolina,
where there are rumors of jobs
weaving threads of cotton
into beautiful patterns,
or even just fixing
broken looms.
THREE LANGUAGES
MERCEDES
Illinois, 1980
When war broke out
and the death squads came,
we fled through Mexico,
leaving Guatemala
forever.
My husband was gone,
my babies so young,
and when the people
who smuggle refugees
made me work
as a maid in a hotel,
I never imagined that I
would be able to learn
a third language,
but here in Chicago,
my children already
know how to flow back and forth
between English and Spanish at school,
before returning to K’iche’ Maya
at home, where I feel free
to wear my own
embroidered clothing,
instead of that stiff, ugly
toilet-cleaning
uniform.
BOATLIFT
ORESTES
Florida, 1980
We arrive by the thousands,
then tens of thousands, until we become
one hundred and twenty-five thousand total,
a sea
of desperate
refugees
floating
from the port
of Mariel
in Cuba.
Floating to our new homeland, where angry
grandchildren of refugees from Europe
complain
and insult us
because we speak Spanish.
Don’t they know that we’ll learn?
•
Refugee is such a simple word,
so similar to refugiado,
yet somehow
at the same time
refuge seems infinitely
complicated.
TEACHING
JAIME ESCALANTE
California, 1982
In my native Bolivia, the students were hungry,
but here in Los Angeles, students are also poor.
Poverty, I show them,
can be temporary.
In the past, I’ve had to work mopping floors
and washing dishes, but now I’m back
to my real passion, helping young people
qualify
for college.
FRAGMENTS
MARÍA
Washington, DC, 1985
When El Salvador grew too war-torn
for children, a church helped my parents
bring me and all my brothers and sisters
here, where danger is a word I see
all around me, at school,
every day.
Guns on the street
are just as perilous as guns
in battle.
Refugee and asylum now seem like words
caught between shattered fears
and flowing
hopes.
OPPORTUNITIES
ANGELES ALVARIÑO
California, 1987
Arrow worms, umbrella jellyfish, siphonophores.
I’ve spent my whole life studying these three
groups of creatures that dwell in deep oceans.
When I was a professor in Spain, I had no idea
that I would be offered a chance to work
in San Diego.
Now I’ve shown how certain jellyfish
are particularly sensitive to fluctuations
in water temperature.
Climate change?
Is such a thing possible?
If the trends I’ve noticed are true,
then we need to seize
every opportunity
to figure out why
the world’s oceans
are growing warmer,
so that we can discover
scientific ways
to protect
nature.
ENGLISH-ALSO
MARTÍN
Arizona, 1988
I arrived in the US
stuffed under the hood
of a pickup truck.
From Nicaragua to Honduras,
then El Salvador and Guatemala,
always crossing
through a zigzag
of wartime
dangers.
By the time I reached Mexico, all I had left
was the air in my breath, and these
nightmares.
So I enroll in English classes just as soon
as I reach Tucson, because this is my life now,
and I don’t think the state of Arizona
should have passed that unfair
English-only law
that doesn’t make sense
to any parent who wants
smart children to quickly learn
two ways of being understood,
instead of only
one.
FIELD TRIP
GONZALO
California, 1994
Today our class visits a museum
where I see a quilt with a flowered border,
barbed wire,
and a ghostly,
nearly invisible
image of a family
running.
It looks just like the warning signs on roads
where Mami and I ran when we crossed
the border from Tijuana and then
had to race across busy freeways
in the United States, escaping
Border Patrol cars
that tried to chase us.
At the museum, I study a little square of paper
on the wall, a printed note that gives the name
of the quilt artist: Consuelo Jiménez Underwood,
a Mexican American of Huichol indio ancestry.
•
She grew up in a migrant farmworker family
like mine.
Does that mean that I, too,
could become an artist,
using my own
memories
from distant Oaxaca,
with pictures and words
from our Mixteca language,
to create visions of beauty
wrapped in barbed wire
bordered by flowers
of hope?
A SCIENTIFIC HERO
MIREYA
Massachusetts, 1995
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Who could have guessed that I, a quiet, shy
immigrant from Uruguay, would ever
have the chance to learn from the same
earth, atmosphere, and planetary science
professor—Dr. Mario Molina—who won
the Nobel Prize!
Born in Mexico and educated in Europe,
he earned his doctorate in California,
where he researched the damaging effects
of certain chemicals used in air conditioners
and refrigerators, compounds that have now
been completely banned all over the world,
because the brilliant Dr. Molina proved
that they were destroying
our earth’s
&
nbsp; precious
atmosphere.
•
One scientist
can make
such a difference!
Imagine a whole team of minds, struggling
to understand climate change, so that we
can solve atmospheric problems
before it is too late
to correct
our careless
everyday
mistakes.
WE ARE NOT VILLAINS
ALFONSO WILLIAMSON
Connecticut, 1996
Born in New York, I spent much of my childhood
back in Colombia with my family, before returning
to the United States at the age of twelve,
when Flash Gordon comics gave me
visions of courage.
I knew I would be an artist someday.
Now I’m old, and I’ve already brought
the Star Wars movies into comic book form.
Daredevil, Spider-Man, Spider-Girl,
I’ve worked on them all …
but it will take more than a superhero
to bring peace, to end the drug wars
that pass back and forth like storms
raging across my family’s
two countries.
FREEDOM FIGHTER
ROBERTO
Illinois, 1999
Out of prison.
Pardoned.
Nineteen and a half years of my life sacrificed.
Those bombs were futile—I see that now—
but the cause of independence for Puerto Rico
still seems right to me, because as long as we
remain a commonwealth instead of a country,
people like me will feel owned, like objects,
instead of included,
as equals.
A least that’s how I feel, but my sister says she wants
statehood, and my brother claims he’d like everything
to just stay exactly the way it is.
Mixed up.
PART SIX
FOR OUR LIVES
CURRENT TIMES
The twenty-first century has been so filled with turmoil that sometimes it’s easy to forget the way vast rivers of hopeful dreams ripple and flow through this nation, along with all the troubling confusion.