Thank you very, very much.
Everything comes full circle.
22 years ago, I was on trial for allegedly committing
the crime of bringing two Salvadoran refugees
across the border.
Of course, it wasn't a crime if I had, but I was covering it
as a journalist, and so was found not guilty on First
Amendment grounds.
And that experience came out of what happened here in Tucson.
The people here, Reverend John Fife,
who were indicted and convicted for assisting refugees
fleeing from Salvador and Guatemala from death squads
that our government was subsidizing
with our tax dollars.
And three days ago, I had the privilege
to go with John to the border, out to the camps,
to stop the death camps, to see where refugees die, Mexicans
die, to see where they're found, to see how they're helped,
to see how they're able, somehow, to go on
and so somehow, Tucson is home.
I mean things really come around full circle.
I'd like to open by reading it's "When in doubt."
This is from-- it's a prose poem that I managed
to smuggle into "Confessions of a Berlitz-tape Chicana,"
my essays.
Your pen is a gavel calling the world to order.
People come forth with their testimonies.
At a book fair in Houston, an old man
looks at you through smudged glasses
and says, please write that people in mental hospitals
aren't getting the right medicines because there
are no Spanish translators there to translate for them.
At a senior center, a woman says, right down
that Romero, Rosemary, boiled in water and used as a rinse,
keeps hair thick and healthy.
Another says, my mother used to sweep an egg over our bodies
and pray to get rid of fevers.
Write it down, because the young people don't know.
In the quiet of your room, you record the testimonies.
You light a candle for Paloma Escobar Ledeszema of Juarez.
She disappeared, like hundreds of women workers there.
Disappeared.
The police did nothing.
27 days after she went missing, her body
was found on the outskirts of the city.
Women around the world hold demonstrations and demand
action on behalf of the disappeared women of Juarez.
Too many times you walk away from the page to pour tea,
but voices call you back.
Grandpa Luis, author of corridos that were put to music,
corridos about the beauty of New Mexico, a soldier fighting
in the Philippines, an unjustly accused man.
Your great grandmother Juanita, who wrote and read letters
in Spanish and English for people
in her village of Los Lunas South of Albuquerque
calls to you too.
And you hear the voice of grandma Lucy whose students
had nothing to write with.
She cut wrapping paper she bought at Woolworth's and sewed
it into tablets.
She bought pencils, cut them in half,
sharpened them, then gave them away.
In the quiet of your room, in the clatter of coffee shops,
at the anti-war demonstration with your reporter's notebook,
in all these places and more.
Remember that you are the daughter
of Aztec scribes known as the keepers
of the red and black ink.
Those colors flow from your pen.
You write even when you are not writing.
Fall asleep with your notebook and ink leaks into the page.
A day or decade later you recognize the glyph
on the page, and with a great "Aha,"
you set out to translate it into a poem.
Years of stained fingers, the ink
is working its way to your heart.
You will die from writing.
You write because you are so human.
You fall in love the year that glaciers,
for the first time in recorded history, melt and crack.
You write a love poem.
A long time ago, you wrote, because we have no word
for light, we live in shadows.
Still, you persist in the hunt for that word.
You search for more paper as the candle honoring
the spirit of Paloma Escobar Ledezma burns furiously.
You email friends in San Francisco, Vietnam, El
Salvador, Africa, and Ireland.
They know shadows.
There is no burden too heavy for them.
Poets all, they promised to search for the word for light
in their languages and histories.
They put pen to paper and call the world to order.