This next series of poems come out
of the history of the Farm Worker Acts
that we've had here in this country from the 1920s
through to the one that they're struggling to put together
now, a visiting worker program to the United States,
so that we can have enough people working in the fields.
Back in the '30s during the Depression,
when all of the Oklahoma and Midwestern farmland
was being blown to the winds, many of the people in power
decided that this was a good time
to start trekking Mexicans back across the border,
because we needed jobs here.
So, they were a bold lot, that congressional group.
They passed an act called The Repatriation Act.
And this poem is called "Repatriation."
But what you have to consider is that many of the people
repatriated had been living here for a generation already
and had families here.
"Repatriation, they called the process.
Red wheat senators and corn belt congressmen, Oklahoma farmers,
and stock market analysts bellowed,
'Repatriation,' a long word dipping into cracks
and crevices, an abstract word.
No conscience here.
A shorthand way to say, 'Get them out.
We're in the Depression.
They don't speak our language, send them
back to where they come from.
They're taking our jobs in the fields.'" Sound familiar,
by the way?
"A heartbeat later, a bright-lit nation cleansed you,
sped you away to Zacatecas, Guanajuato, the border's
membrane just a breath away.
On the other side, LA's finest clashed with Dust Bowl
migrants, native sons chasing a wind-blown land.
A nation's troubadour hummed, This land is your land,
this land is my land, a distorted
cradle in either tongue."