Tomás Riley will appear with Sham-e-Ali Nayeem for Equilibrium: Spoken Word at the Loft on Saturday, April 16, 2011. He is kind to share some of his work prior to the event.
by Tomás Riley
Christopher Columbus statue
October 1992—As the nation observed the Columbus Quincentenary, 5,000 or more Chicanas/os from Seattle to San Diego, Los Angeles to Kansas City, all converged on the US-Mexico border town of San Ysidro in counterdemonstrations celebrating the survival of indigenous cultures in the Americas through the 500 Years of Resistance March.
asphalt shook and rumbled under foot
and up the block heat and mirage combined to ripple like the sea
soon we would all walk on water
we martyrs
we aching fragments
searching for a face
• • •
October 1992, Columbus Day, and as we made our way down San Ysidro Boulevard toward the Tijuana border crossing I couldn’t help feeling a little swept up by the tide—its ebb and flow with myths about Columbus and indigenous ancestors all swirling over the breakwaters of the last 500 years. I resigned myself to following the drums, the danzantes leading the way with hard steps on hot streets. This was the pulse we found, all 5,000 marchers from places as far away as Oregon, Colorado, and Arizona; all of them beneath their banners; all of us beneath the grumbling of a monolith in motion. If we could speak anything that day, it would emerge in the beating of the drum in a cadence we could feel throughout the crowd.
• • •
break beats boomin’ off a red sun caught
between the upkeep and the downstroke
un homenaje al pasaje suroeste
• • •
I should add that this was all still pretty new to me, being one of those Chicanos who came to the movement intellectually before understanding it culturally (the net effect of growing up “super pocho” in the African American enclave of Emerald Hills in southeast San Diego). So when I say we found a heartbeat there it might be better said that I had found one where once was only absence, and with it came the tone and timbre of resistance. This is why we deal in metaphors. How else to describe what exists only within your chest but flows through others too as if we all flowed through the veins of giants? What hands throb beneath the surface of a world undone holding your feet down to this earth releasing just so often as to guide you ever forward?
Movements move like this, slowly, deliberately—almost tectonically—past all the shops on the avenue still open for business and the disbelieving onlookers. This was no exception. Already some 40 minutes into the breach, and the border was still barely visible on the horizon with its spiraling walkways at either end of the footbridge teeming with shadows.
• • •
go back
across
effete and desolate
america
not threatening
not warning
que te vayas pues
pero voy a llegar primero
• • •
I am on the footbridge looking forward into the milk of an interminable sun. Our yellowish heat burns at the edges of America. We slide fervently above the port of entry staring brashly at where we’d come from—where we were not from. Beneath us, hordes of commuters curse as Interstate 5 becomes a parking lot outside the port of entry into Mexico as the gates have suddenly closed. Car horns launch into a peevish symphony of “I demand my keys to the kingdom!”
And amid the palpable confusion five or six brown faces hurdle past the barricade racing between the traffic lanes at top speed, weaving, dodging, ducking toward el norte. The marchers roar in triumph! We look down from the overpass to see that no one is giving chase, and then roar louder, creating all the more disturbance and distraction as the men will make their way to safety. They will fade into our masses, blurring the line between the disappeared and the invisible among our ranks. If the whole thing halts here, we’ve already gained entry to the world.
• • •
here
there is nothing
but return
and you imagine
not to go
not to search
through useless pockets
and let what is
ungodly
be
Tomás Riley is a Chicano artist and activist born in Oakland, California, and raised in the southeast San Diego neighborhood of Emerald Hills. His work has been published in several anthologies, including Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam (Three Rivers Press, 2001). His first book, Mahcic, was published by Calaca Press in December 2005. As both a soloist and member of the Taco Shop Poets, Riley has performed at more than 200 venues across the country. His work has been described as a meld of Chicano bilingualism and conscious cultural politics set to a soundtrack of hip-hop, jazz, and indigenous ceremony. His aesthetic, however, defies the singular categories of any of these influences, opting for a controlled lyricism that fuses them all in a remix on a par with the pastiche of a master turntablist.
Tomás Riley will appear with Sham-e-Ali Nayeem at the April 16 Equilibrium: Spoken Word at the Loft performance.
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