Portside

To be a Mexican

is being in the bullfight – silver and black, red death
festive on Sundays when the curfews are lifted
but fear prevails

To be a Mexican is to long for the safety
of exile in anonymity and a golden cage
to search for comfort and security
finding it so far from God

To be a Mexican is to be a martyr
who martyrs himself and reveres martyrs
and studies a history of martyrs of victims
written in blood-stained free-trade ink

To be a Mexican is to be unwanted
and forgotten, persona non grata
celebrated on November second
with all the holy dead

To be a Mexican is to be the huizache, hard to kill

Hugo Esteban Rodriguez Castañeda, Librotraficante Simbolo, is a Mexican-born, Valley-raised graduate of the University of Texas at Brownsville who currently works as an interpreter in Houston. He received his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Texas at El Paso, and his work has previously been published in the 2014 Texas Poetry Calendar and the Latino Rebels: Bolder anthology.

This poem was first published in HEArt Online — the nation’s only journal of art & literature devoted to fighting discrimination and promoting social justice.