187 Reasons

I’m in San Francisco for the National Book Critics Circle board meeting, and the award finalists for the six categories will be announced tonight at City Lights Bookstore (I’ll post the poetry finalists as soon as the party’s over), so it seemed appropriate that I highlight a title from City Lights Press.
Additionally, the media has been inundated with snapshots and portraits (flattering and unflattering) of the potential presidential candidates, all of whom have been fielding questions and criticisms regarding certain charged topics such as the economy, the war, and, yet again, “illegal immigration.” How fitting that this book by Chicano poet Juan Felipe Herrera take its position, politically and poetically, fiercely and unapologetically, with its collection of “undocuments.”

Herrera defines “undocuments”:
1. Multi-vocal passage-ware lacking authorized verifications regarding entry and/or social identity.
2. Texts utilized by non-state-authors for mobile existence in-between officialized national entities.
3. A system of undocumented signification of & for the people.
4. The spoken subject within the context of exile, illegal ID status and/or “alien” assignations.
5. Transgressive acts of perception and interpretation within a shifting borderlands territory.
6. Flux moments in-between being & non-being.
Herrera’s book gathers 36 years of writings that speak to his sustained activism as a voice for a community that continues to be vilified, demonized and victimized by politicians, especially each election year. Mexicans are used as scapegoats for this country’s economic and societal woes. Exploited as cheap labor, they are also the easiest targets, within reach and within earshot.
It’s difficult for me not to become impassioned or even emotional when discussing these matters because I’m the son of an undocumented Mexican woman. In 1994, when Proposition 187 hit the ballots (an initiative designed to deny “illegal” immigrants social services, health care and public education), there was talk that this would include the children of “illegal” immigrants, and that meant me. I was attending college and feared that I would lose my student loan. This would not be the case, of course, but that didn’t stop me from recognizing that this was going to be a fight I would have to come back to again and again. And here I am, here we are, fourteen years later, in the familiar boxing ring.
But back to Herrera: he gathers poems from nine previous books and chapbooks, photographs and photo-poems, journal entries he calls “Aztlán Chronicles,” a prose narrative and even a “video” documentary commemorating the May 1st, 2006 mass demonstrations across the country in the historic “Day Without a Mexican.” He calls this table of contents his “Tabula Raza,” his effort at “tearing the new language out of the old structures.”
A number of the pieces use his trademark humor and biting critiques in the shape of the anaphora (he acknowledges Ginsberg as an influence), which are very performance-based because of the momentum escalating with each repetition. These are long pieces, like the title poem with its 187 reasons Mexicanos can’t cross the border. It begins:
Because Lou Dobbs has been missing the subjunctive again
Because out suitcases are made with biodegradable maguey fibers
Because we still resemble La Malinche
Because multiplication is our favorite sport
Because we’ll dig a tunnel to Seattle
Because Mexico needs us to keep the peso from sinking
Because the Berlin Wall is on the way through Veracruz
Because we just learned we are Huichol
Because someone made our IDs out of corn
Because our border thirst is insatiable
And in the poem “Mexican Differences Mexican Similarities”:
You build the fence we climb the fence
You hammer it up we rock it down
You draw the line we erase the line
You reinforce it we loosen it
You block it we dig under it
You use nightvision we use huaraches
You use bomb-smelling dogs we use chorizo-scented cucarachas
You as Are you an American citizen? we say Yes way before you
You organize we unionize
Herrera includes here, not only the stories of the undocumented (those who make it, those who don’t), but also elegies to Chicano literary heroes like José Antonio Burciaga, to his own personal losses, like his mother, and to las mujeres de Juárez, the hundreds of sweatshop workers murdered along the international border. The long poem “Señorita X” also commemorates the women who have not given up seeking answers to the deaths of their daughters: “This is the song of mourning mothers with revolution guitars.”
After reading the collection, my rage at the injustices against the Mexican people diffuses, because this book is not about blaming back or making noise, it’s about celebrating a people’s struggle and survival. It signals that the fight is never-ending, but neither is the music, the song, the story of perseverance.
Herrera states in his introduction, “I didn’t start out to be a poet. Because I had been silenced I started out to be a speaker.” And he does so, “Poesy mad/ & Chicano style undone wild.”