The United States of America (USA) is adept at controlling its people: it categorizes them, numbers them, labels them, and, if some whistleblowers are to be believed, it keeps them under continuous surveillance. Among these divisions is a large group of people that the state loves to label as unlabeled, un-document them, and deprive them of any benefits while unflinchingly using their labor.
Of many those who endure the state’s exclusionary biopolitics and dodge its necropolitics, some have decided to assert their experiences with their unique voice and creativity. These voices, collected in the recently released anthology Here to Stay: Poetry and Prose from the Undocumented Diaspora (Harper Collins, 2024) edited by the Undocupoets, create their unofficial yet legitimate, nonbureaucratic yet significant documents within this volume. In these aesthetically rich articulations, they have registered themselves as beings of this earth, of the countries of their or their parents’ origins, and equally of America.
They have developed a category of their own: undocupoets. The name itself is an epistemological fightback and the poems, living testaments of their pains and pleasures, feats and defeats, many heart-wrenching trials, and precious little triumphs. Packed with experiences, insights, ideas, questions, and immense love, they holler through their poems: we are “Here to Stay.” As Laurel Chen writes in her poem “Greensickness,” “If grief is love with nowhere to go, then/ Oh, I've loved so immensely.” This resilience in the face of adversity is truly inspiring.
Edited by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, Janine Joseph, and Esther Lin, co-organizers of Undocupoets, an organization founded in 2015 to protest the immigration status-based, discriminatory practices of many poetry book contests, the anthology collects work by 53 erstwhile and present undocumented writers living in America.
Here to Stay is a powerful expression of persistence and endurance. Despite the innumerable difficulties of living as undocumented—such as hiding their identities and often bearing the brunt of deprivation and destitution—the continuing efforts of meaning-making of the experiences and articulating them is essential.
The act of stressing “staying here” is to signify the relevance of space and the urgency of the time lived. For them to endure the condition of unrecognition, yet build a community and a counternarrative with the potential of challenging the powers that exclude them becomes imperative. Hinting at the historical importance of their poems, Claudia A. Hernandez writes, “My journey from a perilous border crossing to teaching in Southeast LA shapes my poem exploring form, serving as a lens to examine borders, power dynamics, and profound acts of crossing.” Bringing in dozens of poets to converse with each other, thereby creating a symphony of struggles that accentuates awareness of time-space dynamics, is an effort toward the end. ‘Here to Stay,’ thus, is a small but significant chunk of a people’s archive of contemporary America.
Since many poets contributing to the anthology have either crossed the borders themselves or have listened to such stories from their friends and relatives, the stories of border crossing are featured in several poems and prose. For undocumented poets, the border is not metaphor, or political rhetoric, but about the actual physical act of crossing fences, militarized barriers, and fortifications designed deliberately to stop the flow of bodies from the other side.
Javier Zamora, who wrote the acclaimed book Solito (2022) in which he recounts his epic journey from El Salvador to Los Angeles at age nine, is reminded of the same arduous walk when he sees a teenage boy being dealt with by a border guard in the Mexican immigration office later: “He's alone. When I crossed,/ I was parentless/ but there were other adults.” For these writers, the likelihood of being caught, detained, and killed is so palpable that “border crossing” isn’t just another metaphor thrown easily by a careless writer in the name of trying to write a poem.
In “The poem where ants are immigrants and I am the U.S.,” Jorge Quintana compares immigrants with the “hungry ants” encroaching on the sanitized space of human houses in search of food and getting killed in the process: [hunger is a loose translation for the desire/ for citizenship // in my dreams I see ants/ crossing deserts for sustenance but finding/ death at my hand]. Even as a metaphor, then, the border is loaded with emotions, physical pain, and the attempts to survive the modern securitized crafting of nations, territories, and geopolitics.
Once people enter America without proper documents, their mobility is curbed. They cannot go back to their country; they cannot fly to other countries, and within the US, a fear of being caught never ceases to linger at the back of the consciousness. It is not for nothing that Leticia Priebe Rocha writes, “I am incompatible with this world in which one can rob another of motion.”
However, the conspicuousness of physical borders in the anthology simultaneously foregrounds the invisible borders segregating the people laboring hard to sustain America’s colossal capitalist economy. Even if some of the immigrants eventually become green card holders or citizens, they will be given a clear message that there is no guarantee that citizenship is “life-changing” and that “[t]here is a higher chance of being treated like you’re a human, but the risk of discrimination, abuse, and death is probable in this country” (Claudia Rojas).
Another significant feature of this anthology is the deployment of various forms and poetic innovation. While some use the structure and language of the bureaucratic forms that the state asks immigrants to fill out, others use the Excel sheet containing the names of people deported and detained. Poet, scholar and essayist Vanessa Angelica Villarreal explains the use of the table: "…words like ‘rows’ and ‘cells’ conjure the language of imprisonment, where complexity is sanitized, bodies are disappeared, and all sentences fit into boxes.” The form, per se, is a question against the incarceration of people who try to cross the borders. The most prosaic details morph into the most poetic of languages at the hands of undocupoets.
Reading Here to Stay is an opportunity to establish frank and honest communication with those whom the state hardly acknowledges yet alone allows to speak and articulate their genuine ideas and feelings. Here, the subalterns speak with honesty, clarity, creativity, and undeniable force. They remind us that if people are bodies and their physical and intellectual labor is serving the realm, then not just the “bona fide citizens,” but the immigrants, refugees, undocumented, and those the state recognizes as lesser humans, aliens, and unwanted all also constitute the “people” of the United States of America.
Amidst this attempted state erasure, the publication of this anthology is like the blossoming of a flower that germinates and blossoms on the farthest edge of an asphalt road, and that sends out the message of liveliness to those who have the carefulness to look at the margins of the road they tread on.
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