So my bisabuela, my grandmother's mother, her name
was Rosario, and she went by Chayo.
My nana Chayo had a tiendita also,
a little store in front of her house,
and she sold raspados and chicle and soda.
And on certain days of the week, she had menudo.
And in '72, the conservative legislature passed a law
prohibiting collective organizing striking
during the lettuce harvest, during the harvest,
and Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez came to town to protest.
And Chavez hunger struck.
He did a hunger strike, and he did so
at a community center that just happened
to be across the street from my nana Chayo's tiendita.
And this poem referenced that history.
Raspadas.
A keening sent throughout Barrio Campito,
Nana Chayo's grinder crushed black ice for her raspadas.
Just west of stockyard, slaughter, and Union Pacific
tracks, she, too, conducted that silver arm
in her home's small storefront, feeding ice to shaving teeth.
In raspar, hear her voice's saw scratch and wood
fire below enameled pots.
Ronco, my nana, her daughter says
when I call up infirmo like bronco and bronchitis
and those roping winds in mesquite--
open opera, these trees hoarse with asthma.
Huelga came too from pant, blow, and breathe.
Bellows resist.
So in '72 when Huerta and Chavez came to Campito for his fast
at Santa Rita Hall that summer amid monsoon no less,
they chanted with Coretta Scott King and Joan Baez sí se puede.
Across the street from my nana's tiendita y raspadas.
Con leche, con piña, con fresa, she poured flavors from bottles
lit like church glass.
Up from Sinaloa 1917, she came bird breasts
to her breasts, bra-pinioned wings,
smuggling swaddled tight cockatoos,
silenced over the border with coos and seed.
Rosario, entrepreneur, renter of tar roofs
to gold-toothed cattlemen, stood over pitfire ladling
to sod farmers tripe and hominy and started out some years
prior from lettuce cars packed, bound for markets east,
swiping ice cakes for her raspadas, their bright rosary
our heirloom.
Went by Chayo, for short, rancheras from her radio.
I saw her once shake out her dress and molt.