Here we are in Salem, the site of a great historic injustice, coming together to stop another historic injustice. And we will.
Injustice against immigrants is nothing new: the Chinese Exclusion Act passed back in 1882. Six years later, Walt Whitman had this to say about immigration:
“America must welcome all—Chinese, Irish, German, pauper or not, criminal or not—all, all, without exceptions: become an asylum for all who choose to come. We may have drifted away from this principle temporarily but time will bring us back…America is not for special types, for the caste, but for the great mass of people–the vast, surging, hopeful, army of workers. Dare we deny them a home—close the doors in their face–take possession of all and fence it in and then sit down satisfied with our system—convinced that we have solved our problem? I for my part refuse to connect America with such a failure—such a tragedy, for tragedy it would be.”
Here in New England, we tend to think that this “tragedy” is happening somewhere else. Yet, the first hate crime committed against an immigrant in the name of Donald Trump did not happen on the border. It did not happen in Texas. It did not happen in Arizona. It happened in Boston.
Trump announced his candidacy in June 2015, with the pronouncement that Mexicans crossing the border brought with them a range of criminal tendencies from drug smuggling to rape. That August, two brothers, Scott and Steve Leader, took him at his word, attacking a homeless Mexican immigrant as he slept outside the JFK subway stop on the Red Line.
This poem is about that hate crime. It’s also about Donald Trump’s idea of hell: empathy. There were many more healing hands than hurting hands placed on the victim’s body that night. Now, since this is a poem about a hate crime, there is some language and imagery you might find ugly. The poem is called:
Not for Him the Fiery Lake of the False Prophet
When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best…They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. —Donald Trump, June 16, 2015
They woke him up by pissing in his face. He opened his mouth to scream in Spanish, so his mouth became a urinal at the ballpark. Scott and Steve: the Leader brothers, celebrating a night at Fenway, where the Sox beat the Indians and a rookie named Rodríguez spun the seams on his changeup to hypnotize the Tribe. Later that night, Steve urinated on the door of his cell, and Scott told the cops why they did it: Donald Trump was right. All these illegals need to be deported. He was a Mexican in a sleeping bag outside JFK station on a night in August, so they called him a wetback and emptied their bladders in his hair. In court, the lawyers spoke his name: Guillermo Rodríguez, immigrant with papers, crop-picker in the fields, trader of bottles and cans collected in his cart. Two strangers squashed the cartilage in his nose like a can drained of beer. In dreams, he would remember the shoes digging into his ribcage, the pole raked repeatedly across his cheekbones and upraised knuckles, the high-five over his body. Donald Trump was right, said Scott. And Trump said: The people that are following me are very passionate. His hands fluttered as he spoke, a demagogue’s hands, no blood under the fingernails, no whiff of urine to scrub away. He would orchestrate the chant of Build That Wall at rally after rally, bellowing till the blood rushed to his face, red as a demagogue in the grip of masturbatory dreams: a tribute to the new conquistador, the Wall raised up by Mexican hands, Mexican hair and fingernails bristling in the brick, Mexican blood swirling in the cement like raspberry syrup on a vanilla sundae. On the Cinco de Mayo, he leered over a taco bowl at Trump Tower. Not for him the fiery lake of the false prophet, reddening his ruddy face. Not for him the devils of Puritan imagination, shrieking in a foreign tongue and climbing in the window like the immigrant demons he conjures for the crowd. Not even for him ten thousand years of the Leader brothers, streaming a fountain of piss in his face as he sputters forever. For him, Hell is a country where the man in a hard hat paving the road to JFK station sees Guillermo and dials 911; Hell is a country where EMTs kneel to wrap a blanket around the shivering shoulders of Guillermo and wipe his face clean; Hell is a country where the nurse at the emergency room hangs a morphine drip for Guillermo, so he can go back to sleep. Two thousand miles away, someone leaves a trail of water bottles in the desert for the border crossing of the next Guillermo. We smuggle ourselves across the border of a demagogue’s dreams: Confederate generals on horseback tumble one by one into the fiery lake of false prophets; into the fiery lake crumbles the demolished Wall. Thousands stand, sledgehammers in hand, to await the bullhorns and handcuffs, await the trembling revolvers. In the full moon of the flashlight, every face interrogates the interrogator. In the full moon of the flashlight, every face is the face of Guillermo.
The mass incarceration of migrant children—by the thousands—is also a hate crime. Let’s call it what it is. And that brings me to a place called Tornillo. The Trump Administration opened the Tornillo internment center in Texas in June 2018 and closed it in January 2019. My good friend Camilo Pérez-Bustillo, as Director of Research and Advocacy at Hope Border Institute in El Paso, was a major organizer in the campaign to shut down Tornillo—and shut it down they did.
Camilo told me: “the one place the kids detained there told us they felt free was on the soccer field . . . It was the only place they could be connected in some kind of physical flow with the world beyond the barbed wire, by kicking as many soccer balls as high and as far as they could, beyond the fencing around them. Large numbers of these balls piled up quickly outside and at the edges of the facility.”
This is a new poem, written for the event tonight, called:
Ode to the Soccer Ball Sailing Over a Barbed Wire Fence
Tornillo…has become the symbol of what may be the largest U.S. mass detention of children not charged with crimes since the World War II internment of Japanese-Americans. —Robert Moore, Texas Monthly
Praise Tornillo: word for screw in Spanish, word for jailer in English, word for three thousand adolescent migrants incarcerated in camp. Praise the three thousand soccer balls gift-wrapped at Christmas, as if raindrops in the desert inflated and bounced through the door. Praise the soccer games rotating with a whistle every twenty minutes so three thousand adolescent migrants could take turns kicking a ball. Praise the boys and girls who walked a thousand miles, blood caked in their toes, yelling in Spanish and a dozen Mayan tongues on the field. Praise the first teenager, brain ablaze like chili pepper Christmas lights, to kick a soccer ball high over the chain link and barbed wire fence. Praise the first teenager to scrawl a name and number on the face of the ball, then boot it all the way to the dirt road on the other side. Praise the smirk of teenagers at the jailers scooping up fugitive soccer balls, jabbering about the ingratitude of teenagers at Christmas. Praise the soccer ball sailing over the barbed wire fence, white and black like the moon, yellow like the sun, blue like the world. Praise the soccer ball flying to the moon, flying to the sun, flying to other worlds, flying to Antigua Guatemala, where Starbucks buys coffee beans. Praise the soccer ball bounding off the lawn at the White House, thudding off the president’s head as he waves to absolutely no one. Praise the piñata of the president’s head, jellybeans pouring from his ears, enough to feed three thousand adolescents incarcerated at Tornillo. Praise Tornillo: word in Spanish for adolescent migrant internment camp, abandoned by jailers in the desert, liberated by a blizzard of soccer balls.