Song of the migrant

Desfile mexicano en el Fruitvale de Oakland (photo: arnoldo colibrí; 2006)

I was born where I did not choose to have

wars and warlords

poverty and poverty-pimps

working class without work or exploitation

to speak languages other than english and dollars

I am stateless?

No, I am the eternal and new human being

As human as any American

As human as any white

As human with any passport

As human as your ancestors and your babies

As human as your hunger and love of things

As human that can fall in love with you regardless of your

citizenship or immigration status

wealth, property, money and assets

Stateless? No

Landless

Stateless? No

not a U.S. citizen

Stateless? No

War-torn, genocide, famine stricken

Stateless? No

My land, my home, my house, my fields, my gardens expropriated

Stateless? NO

Settler colonialist have stolen everything (except they can't steal what can never be theirs)

Stateless? No

A soul cannot be jailed, industrialized, displaced, distorted by English, displayed in zoos or studies

I live in a country that

I built with unpiad labor

on someone else's lands

squashed someone else's dreams and my own

put buildings atop our fertile lands

stabbed cathedrals into our sacred sites

put our tastes and foods cuisined out range of our pockets

stole our music our weavings our cosmos and her suns and constellations

wiped out by their cartographies of empire

I cannot marry you without inciting their dogs to hunt us down

I cannot work without the landlords and their police rounding me up on pay day

I cannot study in their schools and universities.

They offer me education in their prison cells and deportation to the dungeons of capitalism

I cannot get sick unless I want to die of the common cold

I exist for my lover

I live for my family

I breath for my ancestral horizons

I move in unison with the stars to reach the unpromised lands

To them I am only an economic unit, disposable, disappearable, desperate

I exist but on the paper of their realm of banks and private property: I am no one.

Survival is the name of my days, weeks and months

My dignity is indestructible.

You can inflict every harm, every torture, every abuse, every put down and surly name to me

and my humanity rises higher

than your highest official

than your gods who are deaf to our prayers

than your deepest love song, a love that goes bankrupt at the sight of our fists

If you're reading this

you are the one who is broken

I speak broken english so that your broken soul can understand

My body may be exhausted

My spirit my soul

my cosmos my lands

my ancestors my descendants (hungry and maybe waiting for a remittance of resistance)

my heart

are inexhaustible.

I am the stranger. What will you do?

July 25, 2025

_____

Poem & photo by arnoldo colibrí.