This next one I wrote was for an anthology
that they're doing in California against Proposition 187,
which, you know, passed in November.
And I will tell you that I was able to go back there,
and I saw a very momentous thing.
I thought, like, it was back to the 60s and 70s
when we went in the streets, and we walked out, and we battled.
And I saw all these Latino youths out there.
I saw gang kids who would have killed each other,
out marching arm in arm.
And I saw that this was going to be the future--
if we let it, if we don't hold it back, if we don't crush it.
Anyway I decided to write this.
It's called "Seguro Que Hell Yes."
[LAUGHTER]
And it's actually an apology to Flaco Jimenez, who
has a song by the same name.
And it goes like this.
"We have passed this way before, laden with sod,
skeleton tongues marking the dark.
We have eaten of this dust, we have scraped it off our faces,
we have dreamed this wound, this world of vile tantas
veces that it's a song beneath our breathing.
Seguro que sí.
We knew it was coming before it came.
Ya hemos pasado por este camino, and venom eyes seek us,
taunting mouths greet us.
The most rooted people of the land
are the most revered and the most despised, making us
myths even as mother earth daily births us.
We cross many borders and then cross into ourselves.
This America that Emerson called a poem is a barbed wire.
Our sweat, our blood, and the lágrimas shed for thee,
is fashioned into a prison.
Freedom for some is slavery for me.
Whenever they lie, a part of us is murdered.
This we know, and our children cannot let it be.
This we know and we challenge our skins to take it on.
This we know because we have passed this way before,
seguro que sí, cactus bedding at our feet,
snake curling through our veins, ya hemos pasado por este
camino, and we can never stop coming.
The desert calls us out--
the fire scarred trees, the dried bones of elders,
the silent screaming of stones, they call us back
and we come, because we have died so many times to the sun,
because we belong to the rivers wild, because we never
feared the blue in the eye, the green
in the heart, the searing laws and guns and lies,
because we dreamed all of this, and now we are awake
to dream our dreams again.
Seguro que hell yes!"
You can clap if you like.
I don't-- [LAUGHS] I don't mind.
[APPLAUSE]