On the immigrant rights movement’s comforting words.
We must move beyond bromides & half-truths if we are going to survive.
I can no longer attend the rallies. I don’t have the stomach or the heart for it. I am afraid to see, deep in the crowd, their shining faces. Our Youth. I am afraid to hear their chants bang and echo syncopated to the beating of hundreds of fists against the windows of the detention center. I am afraid of their homemade signs and their slogans:
MIGRATION IS BEAUTIFUL. NO HUMAN BEING IS ILLEGAL. UNDOCUMENTED AMERICAN. WE DIDN’T CROSS THE BORDER, IT CROSSED US. AMERICA WAS BUILT BY IMMIGRANTS. IMMIGRATION IS NOT A CRIME. EDUCATION NOT DEPORTATION. IMMIGRANTS PAY TAXES.
I am afraid of the hope and the sincere belief that the words and the stenciled butterflies will bring down this system. I am afraid they will unmask me, that my cynicism will be laid bare. I am afraid they will not understand why I no longer believe in the words which stir them to action.
It’s been over a year since the slogans and the word undocumented have ceased to be a comfort. I resent them these days because so many of them are bold faced lies and the rest are numbing half-truths. I am so tired of lying. Undocumented is a lie.
I will not retread issues that have been written about at length much more eloquently than I could do at this time: the assimilationist narratives that are at their core anti-black and anti-indigenous. I want to instead focus on our tactics, on our words and the effect of what we say.
In short these words are meant to rally us and to cast immigrants in a different light. They’re meant to be exculpatory and raise sympathy. However, lifting the blame on immigrants, in my opinion at this time, also lifts the guilt off the state and off the millions of Americans who have benefited from our illegality.
We are not in this country clandestinely because we lack documents, let us be clear. In attempting to soothe our hurt, we have reduced our tragedies — personal and national — our traumatic experiences, our painful separations to what amounts to a clerical error.
If the attempt of Undocumented and of these slogans is to subvert narratives of migrant criminals, if the attempt is to elicit empathy from American citizens, we have failed miserably. All we have done is taken their words and attempted to invert them to fit our short term goals. We have conceded the points of the xenophobes in attempting to challenge their hatred and have made bromides out of our legitimate criticisms of systems which are murderous and ever-expanding.
We are not in this country clandestinely because we lack documents, let us be clear. In attempting to soothe our hurt, we have reduced our tragedies — personal and national — our traumatic experiences, our painful separations to what amounts to a clerical error.
Similarly, slogans like, Migration Is Beautiful, Migration is Natural, Migration is a Human Right, for all their good intentions, paper over what is an undeniably violent process. Migration in this century isn’t the search for greener pastures, it’s the forced displacement of millions under the threat of torture, starvation, suicide and homicide.
Our grave mistake has been to equivocate defending our right to live, our right to love, our right to exist in space with political campaigns to obtain permits and citizenship. We have allowed the perpetrators of a winnowing of millions of futures to escape the blame in exchange for their sympathies. I am thinking here not about ICE, not about the Federal government or the gangrenous paper governments of our countries of origin, but rather, to the American middle class.
They have seen the primary benefits of our displacement and our continued suffering. Directly, in the case of ICE, Border Patrol, Police Agents and their Unions, and indirectly in the case of anyone in this country whose standard of living has been subsidized by migrant labor. It’s necessary to include our allies in this list, they exploit us all the same.
It’s time we confront them. It’s time we admit that migration is a crime and that some humans are illegal. This is the truth. It is not our fault. It is yours.
You must own it.
I do not call myself undocumented these days. I am illegal. Millions of Americans, their Congressmembers, their Presidents, they made me this way. I am illegal, and I want you to remember why. I want you to remember that you attempted to keep me from learning to read in 1994. I want you to face the depravity involved in hating a four-year-old and wishing he’d die in the desert. I want you to reconcile with the psychic trauma you have locked me into. I want you to save your soul before it’s too late.
But, mostly, I want the movement to correct itself before I die. I want us to tell the truth about our condition. I want Americans, at last, to see the reality of their country in the world and of the peoples whose lives they’ve ended or shortened to satisfy their rates of consumption and levels of comfort.
We came out of the shadows to speak truth to power. It’s time our words reflected this. Let’s chant as we march, but let’s write honest chants. Let’s start telling the truth, let’s start pointing the finger and raising our fist.
