El Mango Entero #3
Hello mi gente,
Welcome to El Mango Entero. If you’re new here, bienvenidos. I hope you’ll consider subscribing and staying here. This newsletter is a space to reflect. Often, I’ll share a poem or other artwork that’s been on my mind. Hopefully, you’ll join me in that process of reflection and clarification.
This past weekend, I spoke at Harvard’s 10 year reunion for the class of 2010. I was asked to speak about poetry and what I’ve learned from a life spent in literature. Because I think you might enjoy the speech and because I volunteered to write personalized poems to people donating money to bail funds (more on this later), I am sharing my speech in its entirety here. I don’t have video of the speech yet, but when I get video I’ll share that too.
Bienvenidos to all my classmates. My name is José Guadalupe Olivarez. I’m from Chicago, so i would like to begin by greeting you the way people in Chicago greet each other. This is our cultural greeting. It would mean a lot to me to share it with you. In Chicago we like to greet each other by saying FUCK DONALD TRUMP.
Now that I have greeted you in my cultural tradition, we can begin.
I’m going to start by reading a poem I wrote.
This poem is called Mexican American Disambiguation.
Mexican American Disambiguation
after Idris Goodwin
my parents are Mexican who are not
to be confused with Mexican-Americans
or Chicanos. i am a Chicano from Chicago
which means i am a Mexican-American
with a fancy college degree & a few tattoos.
my parents are Mexican who are not
to be confused with Mexicans still living
in México. those Mexicans call themselves
mexicanos. white folks at parties call them
pobrecitos. American colleges call them
international students & diverse. my mom
was white in México & my dad was mestizo
& after they crossed the border they became
diverse. & minorities. & ethnic. & exotic.
but my parents call themselves mexicanos,
who, again, should not be confused for mexicanos
living in México. those mexicanos might call
my family gringos, which is the word my family calls
white folks & white folks call my parents interracial.
colleges say put them on a brochure.
my parents say que significa esa palabra.
i point out that all the men in my family
marry lighter skinned women. that’s the Chicano
in me. which means it’s the fancy college degrees
in me, which is also diverse of me. everything in me
is diverse even when i eat American foods
like hamburgers, which to clarify, are American
when a white person eats them & diverse
when my family eats them. so much of America
can be understood like this. my parents were
undocumented when they came to this country
& by undocumented, i mean sin papeles, &
by sin papeles, i mean royally fucked which
should not be confused with the American Dream
though the two are cousins. colleges are not
looking for undocumented diversity. my dad
became a citizen which should not be confused
with keys to the house. we were safe from
deportation, which should not be confused
with walking the plank. though they’re cousins.
i call that sociology, but that’s just the Chicano
in me who should not be confused with the diversity
in me or the mexicano in me who is constantly fighting
with the upwardly mobile in me who is good friends
with the Mexican-American in me who the colleges love,
but only on brochures, who the government calls
NON-WHITE, HISPANIC or WHITE, HISPANIC, who
my parents call mijo even when i don’t come home so much.
Let’s go back. I started writing poems because I was taught by my parents to obey authority. my parents are good, hard-working, Catholic Mexican parents. And so I went to public schools in Calumet City, IL where I was taught that there was only one language worth speaking in and that language was English. And because I was a child and I was taught to obey and watch and learn, I learned that lesson. And because I was a good student I also learned all of the silent lessons my school taught me.
For example, in my high school history classes, Mexican people show up three times: The first time México shows up is during colonization where indigenous communities in México are slaughtered by the Spanish. Then México disappears. México does not appear again until the Mexican American War. And what happens during the Mexican American War? Hella Mexicans get killed by United States soldiers and lose half the country. Mexico disappears again until the 1980’s where Mexicans are briefly mentioned during a unit on immigration.
So what were the lessons I learned? I learned that there were three possibilities for Mexicans according to my history class: Death by colonization, Death by war, or death by assimilation. The silent lesson. The lesson that was underneath my history textbooks. The same lesson was underneath my literature textbooks where we never read books by Latinx authors. The lesson was: the Mexican part of your identity is a loser’s identity. The American part of your identity is a winner’s identity. Because I was a good student, I learned to be quiet about my Mexican identity. To not talk about Sunday morning birria or my mom healing the house with vaporub.
But I also saw the ways that white supremacy was inflicting violence on my family. My mom and dad were swept up into the hoopla of America as much as anybody else. And why shouldn’t they have been? My dad moved to the United States, found work at the steel mill and by the time he was 30, he had purchased a house in south suburban Chicago. If you know anything about steel mills or Chicago, then you know what happened next. The steel mills closed. The house he bought was worthless because a round of white flight had slashed the real estate value of all of the houses in Calumet City. Our suburb was Black and Latinx. And the house my dad had dreamed of became a negative asset. Just like that. So I learned that in the United States you could do everything right. You could follow all the rules. You could say yes sir, yes ma’am, and still wind up evicted. Without health insurance. That your reward for doing everything right was the country telling you it was your own fault. You could study the English language, but if your skin was brown like my dad’s skin is brown, you were never going to be accepted as American.
What does all of this have to do with poetry, you might be asking. I don’t know, exactly, but I do know that I can’t think of why I started writing poems without thinking about my education. I started writing poetry because I saw my classmates in Calumet City write poems about race, sex, and family. None of our teachers ever asked us about those topics. I saw my classmates and I was like, “Yooooo! We can be the authors of our own stories.” And for me, poetry became the language of seeing. I know we think of poetry as expression, but I think it’s really about seeing. About paying attention to what is said in silence. About the textures of joy and gratitude and grief hidden in everyday objects and stories. And about all the violence dripping off press releases from police and public officials.
I would like to end by saying that now is a time for poetry. It is always a time for poetry. Because it is always a time for seeing. For facing the violence that funded and continues to fund so much of the American empire, an empire that built its wealth via slavery and has never paid reparations. It is time for poetry because it is time for imagining alternatives to the world we live in now. It is a time for poetry and not a time for practicality. Practicality is violent. The status quo is violent. The status quo is the world where me and my three younger brothers are going to have to pay $1,200 a month to pay for my dad’s insulin prescription for the rest of his life because he doesn’t have health insurance. The status quo is the world that wouldn’t let some of my tios y tias attend my grandma’s funeral in Mexico because they were undocumented. the status quo is the world that allows a police officer to murder Black people without consequence. I would like to encourage all of you who maybe do not know where to start or how to get involved in the struggle for justice to research police abolition. To research prison and jail abolition.
I wrote my book, Citizen Illegal, because I wanted to read a book where no Latinx people died. A book where we could not be gentrified out of our houses. Where we could not be colonized out of our culture. Where we could not be deported out of our homes. I hope that in my poetry and in my actions, I am helping to make that imagined world in my poems a reality.
Thank you for listening.
Quick Hitters
What I’m Reading: DEATH TO THE BULLSHIT ARTISTS OF SOUTH TEXAS by Fernando A. Flores. Last week was not a good week for reading, so I am still reading this book, which is very good and I highly recommend. I am also reading Ariel Francisco’s A Sinking Ship Is Still A Ship.
What I’m Watching: The new season of Ramy is very good. I’m watching that.
What I’m Listening To: Freddie Gibbs and The Alchemist released an album called Alfredo, and I’ve had it on repeat.
What I’m Playing: I’m happy to report that I won the title during the inaugural season of my NBA 2K online MyLeague. I’m in that league with two fellow writers and it brought me a lot of joy to beat them :-)
Personal News:
I had two new poems published at the Quarantine Times. Thank you to Mairead Case for the opportunity.
I’m reading on June 3rd with The BreakBeat Poets. RSVP here!
Nate Marshall and I (and a group of wonderful homies) are writing personalized poems for anyone who donates $20 or more to a bail fund. All you have to do is send proof of your donation and any instructions for the poem to poemsforthefree at gmail dot com.
Mexican Heaven:
I love everything about this photo. Make sure you read the whole thread for some examples of Black and Latinx collaboration throughout history.
That’s it for today. Look at that. This newsletter is going out on time. Shout out to me. Shout out to you for reading. For being alive. Let’s take good care of each other and keep fighting for a better world.
con cariño,
José