by Aida Salazar
hands
sorrow
dreams
struggle
healing
heart
skin
You have been in my wings.
Through pages of love
I read to learn I’ve always
known how to fly free.
near silent Tía Raquel
in the cage for
my silver blanket
and my new mat
inside the same cold
the same piojos
the same toilet
the same fear
of all us cranes
with tearstained cheeks
and faraway faces
left
waiting.
I give them paper.
I give them what I know.
I tell them
right here is a
way to take to the
sky or to make
it bend into
your heart
so it
flies.
At least the heart.
At least that.
When I get called to the
office again, they tell me
to bring my things.
Alas I and II, my crayons,
Papi’s letter, and crane poems.
They give me a plastic bag
with the things they took
from Mami and me.
Her handbag plus
fifty cents for chocolate milk
a shiny concrete rock that glimmers in the sun
and a folded crane poem for Papi
I made at school so long ago.
The dried dead bee I collected in the yarda
is now dust, just dust.
You’re being processed for deportation.
Deportation? Where?
To Guadalajara, Mexico. Your relative Roberto Quintero
will be there to receive you.
But what about Mami? What about the baby?
I pound my closed fist on the table.
I will not leave here without them!
I am empty of tears. Nothing but anger fills up my voice.
Settle down! They’re in the holding cell across the hall.
You’ll be traveling with them.
What?
What he said
wrecks my head
like a cyclone
making landfall.
At first
I don’t have breath, or sight.
I don’t have a sentence, or a picture.
I reach to find
a silence beyond my body.
It doesn’t recognize the woman
hugging me, it doesn’t
know her voice, her choking cry,
Mi niña, mi niña. Betita, I’m here.
It doesn’t recognize
the sweet pattern of her face
but somehow, somehow
I find a glimmer that
encourages me to smile.
I find an opening where
memories float
back into me
to the longing for
the Mami I wanted
so much I called for
her in my sleep
the Mami I imagined in
a grave of flowers
I would never see.
That Mami is
now sweeping large
golden-brown wings
around my own
so tightly I
want to fold
into them
and let my
disbelief go and
allow all of her love
to hold me.
Mami opens a lumpy cloth
wrapped across her chest.
I don’t believe what
I see
a baby crane
with little feathery ears
rounded lips
like a puckered beak
sleeping.
This is your baby sister, mi’ja.
Her name is Alba.
Alba?
It means the first light of day.
I give her the lightest
kiss on her little head
but don’t get too close
so she doesn’t
catch my piojos
or my cough.
Her name is a drizzle
in my mind where I imagine
a crane poem for her
a horizon with only the top of a sun with eyes, peeking.
Alba, a crane who moves
from the night
and enters the light.
Mami, why are they sending us to Mexico
where the men might find us?
Where they might find Papi?
I am so afraid of the mountain, Mami.
They are sending us because I asked them to.
It is called “voluntary departure.”
Why would you? What about Fernanda
and our case for asylum—to be safe?
My heart and body are broken, amor,
she says, and cups her hand over my face.
We have all suffered so much. Now that I have you
I can’t bear for us to continue to live like this.
We need to be together again. We need to be juntos
even though I am afraid of Mexico too.
But I don’t remember Mexico.
I remember East LA.
My school.
Our yarda.
Will we ever come back?
We are cranes meant to migrate, right?
It is possible we might
one day, we might.
Higher above the land
than I have ever flown
closer to the sun
all below fades
from buildings and brush
to deserts
into an ocean of clouds.
I feel Papi’s words
curl their way
into my arms.
Dulzura, struggle, beauty
and they are mine too.
Mami and baby Alba
beside me.
Cranes in flight.
Soon, Papi’s
waiting eyes
will meet ours
in the warmest hugs again
he will see Alba fly
for the first time
and all those days
without one another
will swirl into a mist
that forgives
a wind that is love
to help us face
the thunder of danger, together.
Soon, we will
bring in our wings
and touch the earth
of another home.
Dear Reader,
Thank you for your courage to bear witness to Betita’s difficult story. While this is a work of fiction, much of what is shared is based on the experiences of real migrant children and their families. Her story is one that can be folded into a larger tragic and true story of the criminalization of migration that spans hundreds of years in the United States.
The history of humanity across the globe is one of migration. The Americas were populated just this way. We know of Aztlán, one of the homelands of the Mexica people (the place Betita’s father, Beto, references in the myth), because it was a migration story told through the Codex Boturini (one of the few remaining books of precolonial Mesoamerica). On the surface, the reasons why we migrate are too vastly different to see any commonality. However, when we look closely, the need to migrate is very similar in both the human and animal worlds. If we look at migration patterns—not only of people, but of cranes and other species—we will notice what all migrants have in common: They migrate to survive changes to their environment and for their well-being. It is humans who have drawn the lines in the sand, erected walls and borders around their territories, and deemed people “illegal” when they cross those walls and
borders.
The Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy saw thousands of migrant children, mostly Central American, separated from their parents, kept in cages, and treated inhumanely. This policy also brought about an increase in the number of migrants who died trying to cross the border or while in custody. Despite worldwide protest over the clear violations of human rights, this administration continues to hurt asylum-seeking children and families as its laws change for the worse each day to our continued horror. There is no compassion when migrants arrive, nor is there understanding for the reasons people are forced to flee their homelands with their children. I am heartbroken and appalled, not only by the Trump administration or previous administrations, but also by everyday citizens who support the message of hate toward migrants. The views of these people and their entitled claims to land and territory disregard the First Nations of the United States, hundreds of years of migration, and really, the human suffering that is at the very root of why people migrate.
I wrote Land of the Cranes with an understanding of the long and devastating history of raids, separations, deportations, incarcerations, and deaths my community has suffered. But also, I wrote from an intimate place. I, like Betita, was an undocumented child. I was born in Mexico and brought to the United States as a baby. My childhood fear of “La Migra” (immigration enforcement) and how they could easily rip our family apart hung over me until we received our green cards, though this was not necessarily a guarantee of safety. The immigrant community in which Betita was raised in East LA, and the fears, stigmas, and prejudices her community faced are mine, too. Though I was never detained or deported for being a migrant, some in my family and many in my community have been. This is a story I had to tell for us. But this is not the only story. This book is part of a wider literary tradition by numerous authors who’ve been speaking to the wound of migration for many generations.
I chose to name some of the characters in the book after children who died while in detention or while migrating. I did so with the utmost respect and love and also in order to honor their memory and add resonance to their lives—even if only within the pages of this book. I am hopeful more #ownvoices stories from the Central American perspective will rise to speak to the deep tragedies and sufferings these people have endured. These stories need to be told, especially because these communities—many of which are indigenous—make up the largest groups of migrants coming to the border today.
While these injustices may seem impossible to challenge, this crisis requires we break open our own humanity to try to find positive solutions. Our solutions must be steeped in respect for migrants and for their heartbreaking circumstances, and those solutions cannot be achieved by building more walls nor by acting with cruelty. I believe in our collective loving spirit, and this book, this long picture poem, is my offering de esperanza.
Thank you for taking the journey with Betita. May you, like her, search to find light in your darkest hour, or as her Papi says, “find sweetness in your struggle.” May you see that as a child, like Betita, you have the power to write, to draw, to speak up against and shut down the forces that seek to make migrants criminals. May your wings, your voice, help us, members of the human family, rise above the hate and carry the much-needed compassion and justice for migrants into a vast migration of change across the globe. All of us with love, flying, together.
Turn the page for a sneak peek at Aida Salazar's award-winning The Moon Within!
There is a locket in my heart
that holds all of the questions
that do cartwheels in my mind
and gurgle up to the top of my brain
like root beer fizz.
Questions that my journal
doesn’t keep so my little brother, Juju,
or other snoops don’t read them.
Questions that Mima
knows how to answer
but I’m too embarrassed to ask her
because they might
seem stupid or gross or wrong.
Like, why have my armpits begun to smell?
Or how big will my breasts grow?
Or when exactly will my period come?
I flush bright red
right through my amber skin
just thinking about it.
It was so long ago that Mima was
eleven, maybe she wouldn’t
remember what it is like
maybe she’ll make me talk about it, a lot
maybe wind herself into a lecture
about the beauty of women’s bodies
that I don’t want to hear from her
sometimes cactus lips.
Maybe she’ll just think I’m
delirious and say,
Celi, are you running a fever?
while she kisses my forehead.
My locket also keeps secrets.
Secrets tangle in the shyness of my tongue
even when I try to tell them
to my best friend
Magda.
Instead, my locket holds quiet my crush
on Iván who is one year older
than me and who can do a backflip
better than the other boys in his capoeira class.
Or the wish that Aurora, my “friend”
would just go away and
not have a crush on him too.
Or how often I sneak the tablet
from my parents when
I’m supposed to be practicing
music or dancing.
Though I’ve never seen it
I know my locket is there.
It keeps my questions
my secrets
warm
unanswered
and safe.
A beam of moonlight
squeezes through
my window’s curtain.
Luna is out tonight.
My eyes wide open like doors.
I’ll be twelve in a few months, I should
be allowed to go to sleep later
than seven-year-old Juju, who shares a room with me
but I’m not.
No matter that it is Saturday.
Round-cheeked Juju passes
out the moment his head hits the pillow.
And I stare at the May moonlight.
I watch her light up a sliver of dust
in my room.
Like a performance
small specks dance
twirl,
bounce,
float,
glide,
somersault.
They dance like I do.
I try to memorize their choreography
to use during bomba dance class
when Magda drums for me
and I am free to improvise
bring my own moves.
I smile to think that specks of dust
dance around me
though I don’t hear music.
Maybe they dance to the clicks and creaks
of our little house in Oakland
and the city crickets
and Mima’s and Papi’s footsteps
outside my door
Juju’s steady breathing.
And when Luna is gone
and I can’t see their floating
I know they continue to dance
in a dream
with Luna and me.
Mima says judging by my body
that soon my moon will come
and with it
my moon ceremony.
It’s a period, Mima, I tell her, not a moon.
She whips back,
It will come every twenty-nine days
just like the moon.
So it’s a moon cycle.
She doesn’t know that the moon
is a dancer to me, not a period.
I dread the ceremony where she will gather
all six of my aunts
some of my dance teachers
a constellation of grown-up women
to talk to me
about what it means to bleed monthly
and worse, I’ll have to openly share
my body’s secret
my locket’s secret
as if on display
like a ripe mango on a fruit stand.
I just about lose my lunch and I can’t
roll my eyes back into my head anymore.
Mima tosses her long night-black hair
to the side to explain for the twentieth time
while I turn my back and imitate her words:
Our ancestors honored
our flowering in this way.
It is a ritual taken away from us
during so many conquests.
The thought of having to talk
to anyone
especially adults
about secrets only meant for my
locket makes my insides crumble,
I won’t do it!
Please, Mima, please don’t make me do it.
Embarrassment will eat me up whole!
I shout from my heart.
Don’t worry, Celi, she calms,
your body will tell us when it is time.
Long and thick and
painted bright red
is how I dream
they could be.
But they are
little nubs at my fingertips
small, gnarled, and crusty.
I bite them and don’t
think about it like when you
eat popcorn during a movie.
I do it mostly when I listen
to Magda tell me a story
or when Iván is around
and I pretend not to stare.
Mostly it’s a nervous habit
like anxious ants crawling inside my fingertips.
My parents and my dance teacher, Ms. Susana, all say,
Celi, stop biting your nails!
But soon, up they zoom, right to my mouth
when I’m learning new choreography
or waiting for my turn to dance.
Mima says I can’t paint them
red until after I’m thirteen
