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Poetry of Resistance: Voices for Social Justice

30.11.2015

Dear Hatto,

Thank you for including me. I am sending you an "Introduction" for an anthology titled "Poetry of Resistance: Voices for Social Justice" that the Univerity of Arizona Press will publish next year. It includes 88 poets and the theme is, of course, the USA-Mexico border and the 11 million undocumented who live in limbo and in terror of being deported and separated from their families. You can use any segment of the introduction as an abrac for a panel proposal fo the September 23 - 25 conference on borders next year.  I am also sending you a poem of mine.

Best wishes to all,

Francisco X. Alarcon



"Poetry of Resistance: Voices for Social Justice"

Introduction

In April 20, 2010, nine Latino students chained themselves to the main doors of the Arizona State Capitol in a civil disobedience action, protesting the passing of SB 1070, Arizona’s “reasonable suspicion” law that allows racial profiling and police abuses against people whom law enforcers deem to be people who "may be" in the US without papers.  That same day Francisco X. Alarcón, who teaches at the University of California, Davis, received an urgent e-mail from professor Manuel de Jesús Hernández of Arizona State University that included a YouTube video of this protest and arrest of students.  Alarcón was very moved by their action that was reminiscent of similar civil disobedience actions taken by Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and his supporters. He immediately wrote a poem in English and Spanish entitled, “For the Capitol Nine / Para Los Nueve del Capitolio,” and dedicated it to the students arrested. He sent the poem to Professor Hernández who managed to get the poem to the students in jail. The students read this poem and sent a collective on-line message to Alarcón in gratitude.  

Alarcón wanting to share what was taking place with the widest possible audience, decided to post the poems in a new Facebook page that he created and called, “Poets Responding to SB 1070.”  He invited other poets, among them Odilia Galván Rodríguez, to join with him as moderators of this page, to encourage other poets, writers, artists, activists, and the general public to respond and keep each other informed on the challenges to this racist legislation, which also included HB 2281, a law that bans ethnic studies from being taught in Arizona schools. The poet-moderators then called on people to lift their voices and engage in non-violent direct action campaigns and to form challenges to any and all upcoming “copy cat" laws being proposed in other States. Hundreds of poems from all over the world were soon posted on their Facebook page. To date thousands of poems have been posted. Poetry of Resistance: A Multicultural Anthology in Response to Arizona SB 1070, Xenophobia and Injustice, is a reflection of this collective poetry endeavor and the power of the word.

Our Facebook page has been in existence since 2010, and in that time the moderators, chiefly Francisco X. Alarcón and Odilia Galván Rodríguez, have attended several national conferences, such as AWP (Association of Writers & Writing Programs), and Split This Rock, plus have been guest speakers and have held workshops in Universities, high schools, middle schools, and other poetry venues to spread the word about the mission and the response to “Poets Responding to SB 1070”, which continues to call for a humane and just immigration reform.  On Saturday, February 5, 2011 poets that were taking part in the 2011 AWP Conference & Book Fair in Washington, DC, held a press conference and a symbolic Floricanto/poetry rally on the steps of the US Capitol to bring attention to immigration issues under consideration by Congress and State governments that could have a direct effect on the civil rights of everyone, including the deportation of veterans of the US military.

But that is not all, because the moderators have a combined history of over 40 years of non-violent direct action campaign organizing experience between them they began including other topics and themes of “Poetry of Resistance” on their own Facebook pages. Other poets who have served as moderatos of this Facebook page of “Poets Responding to SB 1070”, many of whom have poems selected and included in this book of poems, are the following: Carmen Calatayud, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Elena Díaz Bjorkquist, Antoniette Nora Clayton, Sonia Gutiérrez, Israel Francisco Haros López, José Hernández Díaz, Andrea Hernández Holm, Scott Maurer, Edith Morris-Vásquez, Abel Salas, Raúl Sánchez, Hedy García Treviño, Alma Luz Villanueva, and Meg Withers.

Along with Michael Sedano, one of the editors of La Bloga, an on-line literary review that covers Chicana, Chicano, Latina, Latino, literature, news, and views, we’ve also done a weekly collaboration which features poets who contribute to “Poets Responding to SB 1070” – in a weekly Floricanto, a selection the featured poems.  Poet-moderators voted on the poems, which were submitted to the page, to be featured in the weekly on-line Floricanto in La Bloga.  This is a way to showcase not only the poets and their poems but also to widen the audience base of the issues of SB 1070.  These collaborations have included special themes like Mother’s and Father’s Day, The Best Poems of the Year, and Valentine’s Day.  We were also the first to do a special edition on Fukushima, hosted by Odilia Galván Rodríguez, which later became it’s own Facebook page: Love and Prayers for Fukushima.   All of the moderators, past and present, continue to contribute to social justice campaigns, which include the issues of Poets Responding.

This collection of poems reflects a ground breaking multicultural collective poetic project that involves thousands of engaged participants, hundreds of poems, and thousands of posted comments.  This project has become a significant poetic outlet and open public forum for people of all ages and ethnic backgrounds defining the new role of poetry and of poets in society in the digital age.  This project also connects poetics and politics in the Latin American and Chicano/Latino tradition in which poets become recognized voices of popular struggles facing common folk. 

In trying to think about how to sift through all of the hundreds of poems we’d received, in order to come up with a representative collection of work to present to the University of Arizona Press, the moderators decided that the poems that should be considered would be those that had been forwarded on to be featured in La Bloga. A process was devised where each poet-moderator received the poems and then voted on them.  The votes were then tallied and those poems, which received the most votes, were those the editors worked on to prepare the collection.

The end result is a unique multicultural anthology that is also multigenerational, geographically diverse, and includes poems in English and Spanish by emerging poets as well as by distinguished US poets such as: Francisco Aragón, Devreaux Baker, Sarah Browning, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Susan Deer Cloud, Nephtalí De León, Sharon Dubiago, Martín Espada, Juan Felipe Herrera, Genny Lim, Pam Uschuk, Alma Luz Villanueva, and Rich Villar, among others, who have lent their support to this poetic call for national dialogue on healing, tolerance, reflection and reconciliation.

Poetry of Resistance: A Multicultural Anthology in Response to Arizona SB 1070, Xenophobia and Injustice also serves as a poetic historical record of the aftermath of the passage of anti-immigrant Arizona’s SB 1070, a law that targeted immigrants and encouraged racial profiling, and the nation’s subsequent copycat laws, and also the subsequent humanitarian crisis of thousands of refugee children and families fleeing violence, death, desperate conditions of Central American countries in great distress.

Several themes can be identified in this book of poems as a result of poets who felt compelled to respond to the issues facing immigrants as follow:

•   Nature, Roots, and Land of Ancestors: Poems of ancestral ceremony, nature poems, indigenous roots and myths.

•   Border, Law, and Terror: Border poems, testimonials of fear, history of injustice and discrimination, bullying and subjugation.

•   Against the New American Apartheid in All Its Forms: Poems denouncing Arizona SB 1070, racial profiling, xenophobia, cultural misunderstandings, Arizona HB 2281 that intended to do away with ethnic studies in Arizona, denunciations of the new border wall, and the mistreatment of refugee children and their families fleeing Central American countries in distress.

•   Homages to Family and Fallen Border Crossers: Family accounts, barrio poems, re-affirmation of shared identities, epic poems.

•   Resistance and Solidarity: Poems of resistance, calls for actions, “Dream Act, “ demonstrations, marches and protests, humorous poems.

•   Sacred Spaces and New Visions: Sacred chants, poems of communal healing, calls for liberation, calls for comprehensive immigration reform.

In sum, this book is a work of heart dedicated to the struggles of people trying to figure out where they belong based on what their governments are doing and whom they are collaborating with.  With the latest influx of children refugees from Central America we know that the issue is bigger than first imagined, and that it includes policies of the US in Mexico and Central America and the people trying to make their way in a world that has become larger than borders.

 

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