If you want to celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month in Kansas, begin by speaking up for us
Former Kansas Poet Laureate Huascar Medina reads outside the Carnegie Center for the Arts in Dodge City International Festival in September 2019. (Topher Enneking)
Hispanic Heritage Month is just around the corner. As a poet performing across Kansas and beyond, I traditionally find it the busiest month of the year.
Organizations and institutions treat this time as most appropriate for paying Latino artists. I am not complaining about the added consideration afforded to me during this month of celebration. Regardless of your heritage, any troubadour hawking books on the road to make a living knows you can’t spell “poverty” without the word “poetry.”
This year has felt different.
I have not been contacted by as many organizations or institutions as in past years. I’m wondering if the volatile political climate, election season, or the current administration’s attacks on and punishments for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion is the culprit. The threat of losing federal funding for diverse cultural programming has hamstrung well-to-do, progressive, forward-thinking entities.
There is always the possibility that a poet may say something truthful that sounds political, causing an offended donor to invoke the ominous Hatch Act to cut federal funding. My work has been described as political, but in actuality it’s simply personal. It’s an amalgamation of voices singing about the lived experiences of people like me, my friends, my family and people I will never meet.
First- and second-generation immigrants live in the same place as people who do not want them there and, in some cases, loathe the fact that we live here at all, in the heartland.
When I consider the word heartland, I think of the heart as a container — a symbol of love, not one of hate. I still struggle with the hate present in this part of the country. The heartland feels more like a hateland, more like a hurtland, these days.
Maybe the title of my latest book, “Protest as Love Poem,” is the concern. It sounds radical and political.
Yes, it is radical and political. It is radical to love in a world full of hate. It is radical to embrace empathy in the face of barbarism.
My love poems are civic poems, my civic poems are love poems. There is no difference. Advocating for the ones you love is romantic. Advocating for the safety of strangers is humane and endearing.
This is why I believe collective survival is a love language. Collective survival is a group practice by those who care, share and work together to stay safe and meet basic needs during crises, difficult times, neglect or systemic oppression, rather than relying on self-reliance alone.
Some people’s love language preferences are giving gifts, words of affirmation and quality time. I prefer offering solidarity.
Spending that quality time in activism at a rally or march defending democracy or advocating for commonsense gun laws, indigenous rights, women’s rights, transgender rights or supporting pro-immigrant groups. So many human rights are being violated that we wouldn’t run out of date night activities.
With all that said, I’m no longer interested in being the token Latino poet to check off an inclusion list. The time of being hired as a performer rather than a speaker is becoming less and less palatable to me.
Latinos are being targeted year-round by an increasingly secretive, militarized police force known as Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. Kansans are celebrating their brutality, and politicians are promoting hateful messages in political ads. Do you want to know what I think about that and how art functions as a mechanism of change?
Or do you just want me to entertain you with my trauma?
My questions to the organizations and institutions that want to hire me are straightforward: What have you done to bring awareness, mitigate or respond to the harmful attacks occurring to the communities I belong to, the communities you say you serve? Will you be OK with me reading protest poems about living and surviving in the middle of America?
Or do you just want a poem about love or nature that doesn’t quite address the nature of fascism, racism and xenophobia in the heartland? I can assure you, even the birds have changed their tune this season. You can’t escape the reality of the world around us. What’s happening is not normal.
I will give you this poem to share for free this Hispanic Heritage Month. I have others like it; some are more direct and loving. Read it. Share it if you’re really interested in discussing what’s happening right now to Hispanics in Kansas.
Backyard Cottonwood
Apartment windows operate
as sanctuary exits.
A clear view
of the American heartland
turned hurtland.
The sky fell again today
and I’m unsure if we are
floating or drowning,
falling or flying.
In the new morning,
an American robin sings
the same song — an old
melody of survival:
Breath is the nearest sky,
and it takes sky to sing,
and it takes sky to fly.
And the sky lives in most things,
so Heaven is in most things.
And the sky already knows,
not every song takes flight,
not every caged bird sings,
not everyone is free.
Huascar Medina is a poet, writer, and performer who lives in Topeka. His latest book is Protest as Love Poem. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.