Univision and the Border Crisis

Univision runs a 2 hour special on the unfolding crisis at the border,

While my family and I eat pan dulce and drink canela in the morning.

Juan, a single father from Honduras, pushes his disabled daughter on a stroller

He is surrounded by people in similar scenarios of desperation,

Brown bodies crowded in anguish,

And I look across the table at my mother;

Look across the table at her children,

Su fortuna y su valor.

She does not want to look at the screen,

Does not want Univision to tell her where she could've been.

The footage is something out of a dystopia--

American Border Patrol agents fire tear gas at infants,

At warn-down women wearing flip-flops,

At men clinging to the last bits and pieces of their belongings.

I feel a sick sense of gratitude,

Thankful that I am not among them--

That my family made it across the border before it became a war zone.

The president calls them animals.

Kiersten Nielsen calls them lawless.

Footage plays of frightened people running for cover,

And Fox News anchors say this is the way the world works;

Fear and force,

And I think about all other tragedies and how they started.

Mami asks,

"Como pueden hacer esto," as we watch a woman pull her two daughters to safety.

Here, safety is away from the promise land,

Away from our locked gates now covered in barbed wire,

Away from the soldiers trained to fight terrorists

who are now staring down toddlers.

Barefoot, the little girls run across the dried up river bed that separates California and Tijuana,

That separates reality and a miracle.

And maybe this is the way the world works;

The center turns the periphery into enemies,

Corrales them to the brink,

force-feeds them lines about policy and arbitration under the barrel of a gun--

And at the mere sign of escalation,

They say death was something we had coming.

Univision reports,

"All of them,"

But I want to think,

"All of us."

Because my name is a silhouette on the border wall they are building.

Because that child choking on the concrete could've easily been my little sister,

Because despite my citizenship, every day I still feel like an outsider,

Like, I too, am pleading for a spot at their table.

But in my heart,

I know this is not my cross to bear.

Univision reports on the crisis at the border from the safety of San Ysidro.

I watch from the safety of my home.

I wonder how many rights we have to this story;

We get to experience this terror second-hand,

Like watching a fire through a glass-stained window.

Like reciting a prayer as an after-thought,

Like attending a funeral for someone we did not know.

That morning,

I ask mami to pass the milk.

She looks across the table at me,

At my siblings,

At our home and our fortune,

And then reaches for the remote and changes the channel.