Thank you.
I thought I'd start by reading a poem to my mother.
And the story with my mother is that she was Tarahumara,
a native from Chihuahua, Mexico, who actually called themselves
the Rarámuri.
But the thing is we were living in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico,
and this is the basis for my new book of essays.
And when she had me born, she went
across the border, the international bridge to Paso.
And the thing that people don't recognize
is that the Tarahumara people have
been in this area in that desert, Chihuahua Desert,
for at least 10,000 years, but there's a border there now.
There's fences.
There's a whole mess of things you have to do just
to get the other side.
But we were going from our land to our land,
and that's what people don't understand.
I feel very connected to my Indigenous roots
and to my mother in that sense.
One of the terrible things about the Tarahumara
is that they're very healthy when
they live in the Sierra, Tarahumara where they're from.
They walk for miles, they eat the three sisters, corn,
squash, and beans, they don't beat their kids,
they don't beat their wives, they
have just beautiful culture, but as soon as they get civilized,
they go into the cities.
And there's a ghetto in Chihuahua city
where my mom was born, called la Tarahumara.
They're alcoholics, they beat their wives and kids,
they've got diabetes, heart disease,
they get everything-- they become civilized.
So my mom, when we moved to Watts where-- first community
we moved to in LA was Watts.
My mom was in her 20s when she had me.
She was very unhealthy, very obese.
She had no teeth because they had all rotted away.
She had diabetes and also thyroid problems.
She was in bad shape.
But one of the problems she had is in this poem,
and I'll just share it with you.
And Watts is important for me because even though I
lived so many places in LA, it was the first community
outside of Mexico that I began to understand.
And I got a lot of the racial issues,
the racial discriminatory issues there going to school where
they were literally beat you up if you spoke Spanish, where
a teacher slapped me across the face in front of a classroom,
where--
you get the idea that this is not a good place to be,
all Black and brown kids.
Anyway, this poem is called "Heavy Blue Veins, Watts 1959."
Heavy blue veins streak across my mother's legs.
Some of them bunched up into dark lumps at her ankles.
Mama periodically bleeds them to relieve the pain.
She carefully cuts the engorged veins with a razor
and drains them into a porcelain-like metal
pillar called a tina.
I'm small, and all I remember are dreams of blood,
me drowning in a red sea, blood on sheets, on the walls,
splashing against the white pail in streams out
of my mother's ankle.
But they aren't dreams.
Is mama bleeding into day?
Into night?
Bleeding a burst of memory, my mother,
my blood by the side of the bed, me on the covers
and her slicing into a black vein
and filling the pale into some dark forbidding
red nightmare which never stops coming, never
stops pouring, this memory of mama and blood and Watts.