by Dr. Rosa Sierra
"Nepantlera - those of us living in the borderlands of different cultures and locations, of events and realities"
Dr. Rosa Sierra is a disabled Chicana psychotherapist living in Canada who has written and taught in the academic and clinical worlds for about 15 years. She comes from a place of generational and childhood trauma and poverty rooted in family and societal dysfunction, and adds that "the writings I've done that are closer to the heart of my lived experiences have been much harder for me to share".
Exoskeleton is a photo of an emerging cicada I took in 2017 at one of my former homes in rural Texas. These suckers are everywhere and they provide the cyclic background hum of searing hot southern summers. They're both comforting and unnerving.
They wait 17 years to emerge and spend their short lifespans screaming, screwing, and consuming. Then they leave a mess of empty shells behind. I think of cicadas a lot when I think of Texas, Texans, and Americans in general. The metal moose, which comes apart in fragments, and the webs are also infused with meaning.
Cuentame sobre tu papa...
A tiny mountain village in Michoacán
Where steep cliffside roads have no guardrails
A boy's spirit twisted by machismo, drink,
and unfathomable horror visited upon an innocent heart
Sad hope soaring high above in notes of corridos
Sinking down, inhaled deep
as the hot, heavy air of pulquerias
then
Exhaled hundreds of miles north
as the choking stench of beer breath
Fueling the generational transmission
of colonial destruction
Mama sleeping with one eye open
The gun under your pillow
The guns smuggled across
Your coyote career
Your stint in Leavenworth
Watching you fade to white on the offenders’ list
My own dark eyes gaze back.
On a frozen night in a Valdez pub
My friend asks, "Sierra Leone,
Are you running to something or away from it?"
All melts into a sickening swirl
Of blinding sun and snow
Voices shrink into a soft, unified whisper
A life away, I hear myself answer
Sardonically
¿Por que no los dos?
As I caress the dead boy's hand
Cuentame is a reflection on a few of the recollections, family stories, and lived experiences that I revisit often as I make meaning of my existence as a nepantlera, the term queer Chicana feminist Gloria Anzaldua used to refer to those of us living in and guiding others through the borderlands of "overlapping and layered spaces of different cultures and social and geographic locations, of events and realities--psychological, sociological, political, spiritual, historical, creative, imagined." This space resists the jingoistic white supremacy of American exceptionalism and hypercapitalism and thus confronts nepantleras with continuous arrebatos (earthquakes) revealing ruptures between surface and depth, indigeneity and colonialism, healer and destroyer - all held within.
Cuentame is one expression of my countless efforts to piece together Coyolxauhqui - create new meaning and home from the pieces scattered about post-quake - in light of the layered colonialist abuses creating and maintaining poverty, addiction, machismo, and mental agony on both sides of the US/Mexican border and stretching to Canada where I now seek repose.
Related: The Poetry of Black Lives Matter