Esther Lin
At the time of this writing, the federal government states that “reuniting thousands of migrants children [and] their parents or guardians at the U.S.-Mexico border may not be ‘within the realm of the possible.’”
The “border crisis”—a phrase that calls to question what constitutes a border and what defines a crisis—has been newsworthy for some since summer 2018, if primarily for the brutality of a forced separation of babies from mothers, toddlers from fathers, sisters from brothers. And yet the separation of families has always been part of the immigrant narrative. What we see now is the ugliest, most immoral form of what generations of parents and guardians have voluntarily sacrificed in the past and will continue to do so, in the hopes of a sustainable future.
Poems like Aline Mello’s and Jesús I. Valles’s speak to parents who send their children to a destination where they believe the child will emerge radiant, triumphant, and better than they would have been in the old country.
What the child knows is that they have emerged an undocumented immigrant. Valles writes: “And if . . . I emerged from the womb my father made me, am I citizen if I was born out of this truck[?] Am I a citizen? Why not?”
Would it have been better to stay?, the child wonders.
Perhaps not, but the child is often left with lingering uncertainty. Mello writes of the mother: “Her hand is cold / but she raises it like a flag.” Alone, these undocumented poets define the self apart from the family. And sometimes the definition comes up empty: “A mile from the border, among the grey- / eyed juncos and cattle, no one knows my name,” writes Anni Liu.
As refugees attempt to cross borders, the refrain from the judge or agent is please explain. Form after form, the undocumented are confronted by “Please explain in the space below” when they find no representative boxes to tick. The federal government has been asked to please explain. The parent who is parted from the child may never receive an explanation. The child trains herself to explain to herself—and to others—what exactly has happened.
The editors of Quarterly West have invited us, undocumented and formerly undocumented writers and friends of Undocupoets, to share our work in this feature. Not to explain, but to explore, shake up, and unearth, for ourselves and for each other, what the parent, child, sister, and self become once we’ve arrived.
Undocupoets seeks to promote the work of undocumented poets and raise consciousness about the structural barriers that they face in the literary community and to offer a more complex and nuanced narrative of the undocumented experience that many do not know exists. We believe in supporting all poets, regardless of immigration status. Please visit us at siblingrivalrypress.com/undocupoets-fellowship. If you know someone you believe may benefit from learning about Undocupoets, kindly spread the word.
—Esther Lin, Co-organizer for Undocupoets
Esther Lin was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and lived in the United States as an undocumented immigrant for 21 years. She is the author of The Ghost Wife, winner of the 2018 Poetry Society of America’s Chapbook Fellowship, and was awarded the Crab Orchard Review’s 2018 Richard Peterson Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Indiana Review, Pleiades, Ploughshares, Triquarterly, and elsewhere. A 2017–2019 Wallace Stegner Fellow, she currently organizes for the Undocupoets, which promotes the work of undocumented poets and raises consciousness about the structural barriers that they face in the literary community.