PBS NewsHour Features Eduardo Corral & His Poetry

Jennifer Hijazi of PBS NewsHour introduces readers to poet Eduardo Corral, in a recent contribution to the news program's website. The son of migrants who crossed the border into Nogales, Arizona in the 1970s, Corral directs our attention to contemporary migrants' experiences. Hijazi explains, "The characters in Eduardo Corral’s poems are neither 'saints nor sinners.' They are immigrants, as well as daughters, community members, survivors and, like all humans, Corral said, complex." From there: 

Corral hopes his poems make the internal lives of immigrants visible, something he said is forgotten or intentionally omitted in the national conversation.

But laying bare the nuanced humanity of the immigrant experience includes writing about flaws, according to Corral.

In one poem that’s part of a series inspired by water barrels left for border crossers in the Sonoran desert, a woman who lacks access to food and water barely survives her crossing. What is she carrying with her? “A lot of internalized racism, colorism, anti-indigenous sentiment,” said Corral.

                                           In the desert, the moon
              shivers. Tonight, to stay awake, I’ll cut my feet
with glass.
                          Outside Oaxaca, in a clinic, my mother said,
“I hate your Indian face.”
                In the dream I’m running. My limbs skeletal
and scabbed.

Corral was inspired by photographs of water stations near Tucson, Arizona. The blue barrels, placed by a humanitarian group called Humane Borders, are a common sight in the deserts of Baja Arizona, marked by 30-foot flags so that they can be seen by migrants crossing from a distance.

“So in my mind,” said Corral, “I converted these barrels into text,” and the barrels became “containers for the cerebral, the mental, the emotional, because that gets often lost when we talk about immigration.”

Continue at NewsHour.