Aztlan and Death in the Desert and Mayday Occupiers

Aztlan and Death in the Desert and Mayday Occupiers
By Al Osorio

Somewhere north of  Hermosillo, Sonora, a father contemplates the evening sky and thinks of his headstrong daughter, his thoughts an intermingling of  love and hope and memories – and regret, regret for promises not yet kept.

The evening air is cool, a welcome respite from the oven-like heat of the day. While small creatures traverse the desert floor in their endless search for sustenance, somewhere north of Nogales a soft breeze caresses the hair of Marisol Ruiz Gutierrez. Marisol takes no notice of the soft breeze. Marisol no longer takes notice of anything.

Marisol would not marry, nor raise children, nor drink horchata on the porch at the end of the workday. She would never again listen to music, watch a novela, purchase a new pair of shoes, or walk in the rain with a sweetheart. For Marisol, the clock had just struck forever.

The broad Indian face looked upward, eyes wide open,  staring sightlessly into the noonday sun. Her skirt was hiked up, whether by a human or an animal interloper it was difficult to say. The young woman’s body had begun to cook, skin expanding and cracking from the blazing heat.

Marisol would not rise before dawn to report to her first job, endure the whistles of men as she walked by, hear their calls of whore and bitch when in shyness and humiliation she turned her head and looked at the ground as she scurried past. She would not fear the immigration officers or the police. She would not suffer the pain of an aging body without access to medical care, the agony of children in pain due to lack of that same medical care. The pain which had beckoned would not now take place.

A column of ants files along her neck and across her cheek, forking into two paths entering her nostrils. Similar processions advance up each exposed thigh, passing the blister beetles feeding on soft tissue.

She would not stand before a group of  Mayday Occupiers and speak to them of the pain and misery that fueled her will to resist. She would never explain her fear of deportation was so great that the talisman of a permit brought a measure of comfort, nor would she hear her explanation repeatedly ridiculed by those who had not listened. She wouldn’t hear that her conditions for feeling safety were viewed by the Occupiers as giving them orders on space they had claimed as their own.

She would never have reason to grasp the concept that her struggle for dignity was a conscious decision to die on her feet rather than live on her knees, more revolutionary than the Twittering Occupiers dressed in thrift store chic who extolled their own efforts as revolutionary while criticizing hers as surrender to the State.

Regardless of the circumstance, fate in the form of a struggle for dignity returned an Indian woman’s bones to Aztlan. After ten thousand generations she has come home, cradled in the arms of the earth mother, her soul guided to paradise.

Somewhere north of  Hermosillo, Sonora, a father contemplates the evening sky and thinks of his headstrong daughter, his thoughts an intermingling of  love and hope and memories – and regret, regret for promises not yet kept.