PART I: “Refugees of a World on Fire”
LA CUESTIÓN
What does it mean to defend the dead? To tend to the Black dead and dying: to tend to the Black person, to Black people, living in the push toward our death? It means work. It is work: hard emotional, physical, and intellectual work that demands vigilant attendance to the needs of the dying, to ease their way, and also to the needs of the living.
–In the Wake, Christina Sharpe
LA CONEXIÓN
I do not believe that genocide and slavery can be contained. Neither has edges, yet each is distinct. Each form of violence has its own way of contaminating, haunting, touching, and whispering to the other.
–The Black Shoals, Tiffany Lethabo King
LA CREACIÓN
What might it mean to see ourselves as "refugees of a world on fire"? "What if we declared ourselves perpetual refugees in solidarity with all refugees"? Not citizen. Not naturalized citizen. Not immigrant. [. . .] But refugees fleeing some terrible atrocity far too threatening to engage, ejected out of the familiar into some unknown, still-to-be-revealed place.
–Pedagogies of Crossing, M. Jacqui Alexander
in my dreams/my birth calls/lingers around a path of debris/somewhere in 1992/three months before/the Los Angeles Rebellions/la primera hija de dos indocumentados/young folx/who exchanged love while crossing the border/now making home beneath fires/in my dreams
My parents made home on the corner of El Segundo y La Santa Fe, in an apartment building which housed a predominantly Latinx community. My father, a Mexicano from ********, Guanajuato was twenty-seven years old then. Almost my age now. A tall and slender man whose white skin turned red from all those weekdays and weekends of working at la llantera for less than minimum wage. Now in his fifties, as we watch the uprising on a hot summer’s day through our television screen, he tells the tale of a father who cautiously peers through the small apartment window [+]. In 1992, in the city of Compton, my father watched armed bakers protect their panaderia while the nearby liquor store got looted.
My mother, a Mexicana from *********, Michoacán was twenty-two years old then. Almost my brothers age now. A short and curvaceous woman whose brown skin began to lose its color from all those weekdays and weekends of staying inside the apartment without papi to guide her around the city. Now in her forties, as we watch the uprisings on a hot summer’s day through our television screen, she tells the tale of a first time mother learning to care for a child in an unknown territory. She learns from mothers in the apartment complex, remembers one of them making their way into the gates with boxes of diapers on hand. In 1992, in the city of Compton, my mother was reminded by my father about their “illegal statuses” and the consequences of being identified by the Los Angeles Police Department if they interfered in any way.
These are my parent’s memories. I was too young to remember scenes from the Los Angeles Rebellions of 1992 in the city of Compton, and yet, their memories are part of my history. It’s a history that spans across territories that are both known and unknown to me. A history that is as much interconnected with Black residents of the city that made home in shared landscapes following the Great Migration. I am consumed by the memories, testimonies, and histories of Black and Mexican communities during 1992, our grounding in this time and space aligns our bodies within the configurations of a landscape that has historically deemed us expendable. Albeit through different means. Black lives always the first target. The Los Angeles Rebellions are a moment in time where Black and non-Black Latinx memory and histories intersect. Haunting every last move and every last written word . . . complete or incomplete. . . as fragmented as it may be.
The summer of 2020 brought forth something similar, something to remember, a pattern, a repetition, and the fragments began to align.
To be continued . . .
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