J.J. Hernandez | We Will Remain, and Continue to Remain

for G.A. My drug dealer in San Francisco rolls up on a Scoot & pulls out a bag of shrooms & a scale. His scale is a libra in the historical context of the word. He is a Libra in the astrological sense of the word. Under-anticipating, I pay for a heroic dose. You’re gonna melt, is all a libra man tells me, & in summer, he rides his bike or takes the Scoot. His van is only his home, not his means of transportation. Sometimes walking in the city is exhausting. We have drinks, I’m walking with a quarter in my bag, I’m tired, it’s still summer, & I’m still cold. I think about the sun & intergenerational wealth. I think about how much money the white man has taken from me. I think about my Latinx drug dealer, who is so assimilated, that he rides a road bike through Montana for fun. I like to look at the astrological signs to give myself something to believe in, but rather, they distract me from what is actually true. The border is always shifting, the landscape, though beautiful, is not spiritual, & if that small breeze that runs through the forest could speak, it would say, you are putting children in concentration camps, you are all going to die soon. A woman with an American Standard Bible at my door asks me if I think humans are getting worse, & I still, in my heart, say no, I think humans just figured out the means for destruction & will kill ourselves. I think that’s a scripture, too: a means to an end. At Lake Tahoe, a friend and I discuss intergenerational trauma/wealth. These white people up here got mad money & give it all to their children. If I had children & mad money, I would probably do the same. Another friend tells me I act like a Gemini, which, to me, is funny, because I contain the duality of a people who lived on a liminal plane. In the liminal, a girl & her father wash to the shore, dead, & we all forget about it, because it’s time to watch the Democratic debates, but a girl her father remain in that liminal river: dead. A liminal space stops being a liminal space when you commit to one of the sides. Say for instance, when my father asked me, if I wanted to receive the holy ghost. I was on the fence: liminality. But when I committed to taking Christ into my tongue, I moved out of that liminal space. So, when the Unites States conquered my people, & we lost the land we owned, we were forced to start over. Who wouldn’t go to Jesus after losing it all? I am the son of miners, vaqueros, & farmers. I am the border; I am still liminal. You can take our language, but you can’t transfer the dirt, The ground, it will blow and settle wherever it must.

This poem was written at the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley Summer Workshop, where I was devastated by the photo of a migrant father and daughter, who washed to the shore, dead. I then thought of a liminal river and the mythological and historical context of these liminal spaces as a Latinx person who grew up in the Southwest, which connected me to the linguistic terrorisms that Gloria Anzaldua explored, and how these linguistic terrorisms have been pushed into actual terrorisms. My last few lines and title are a nod to the end of "How to Tame a Wild Tongue," by Gloria Anzaldua, where she says, "Stubborn, persevering, impenetrable as stone, yet possessing a malleability that renders us unbreakable, we, the mestizas and mestizos, will remain."

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