"Twin Plant."
I google and get gemela but know cuate from coatl:
The twin and serpent entwined in the word,
Mirror image of head and tail,
Forked tongue knit of sibling and sibilance.
In Maquilapolis, without the factory parts,
The women workers in Tijuana mime for the camera.
They could be tethering distant kites,
Leading discrete symphonies,
Churning arms in tai chi's cloud hands,
Rather than assembling flat screens for a factory plant.
Move your hands as fast as your mouths,
My nana says her supervisor ordered them in Phoenix.
She started in '68 her line work that moved
Duty-free parts from factory to fábrica,
Over the border, to be assembled with cheaper labor.
Retiring in the '90s, as the murders of maquila workers were
on the rise,
My grandmother may have had a part, a chip she inspected,
Placed inside a product by a woman working in Juárez.
Faced with the violence, words seem empty, feel fabricated.
When I try imagining the woman holding the circuit
my grandmother inspected,
I am shy and frightened.
Maybe she came up to the border from Durango or Oaxaca,
Maybe Sinaloa, where my nana's mom, Rosario, came up from.
Maybe, like her, it was the first time leaving home.
I imagine parts of a life but cannot know the whole.
In Spanish class, we learn indirect and direct object
pronouns,
How they connect to the conjugated verb.
In English, I place the who before whom and what in the wake
of acts.
To think of indirect and direct in union with my actions
is to think in relation.
In the syntax of an assembly line--
what part of speech are you?
What part is duty-free?
I like to imagine the talk and clap back,
The factory line side-eye somehow encoded in those Phoenix
circuits--
Recorded, overdubbed, downloaded
Within the photolithographic nano-paths
My nana Pat and her co-workers inspected.
Lithography originally copied sheet music.
Could we hear then a choir--
a gossip of warning, of healing, of organizing and resistance--
Inscribed on the staff lines of the circuit?
Chisme is gossip but also gadget,
thingamajig from Latin's cimex,
That bug and malware of whisper,
Hack of na-huh, and virus of ¿de veras?
On a circuitry neither discrete nor discreet
but integrated with words
And like the phones their parts made moving at light speeds
And faster than their hands ever could.