By Jessica Helen Lopez, Xicana Poeta y Maestra and Eduardo Esquivel, NMDT Program Manager

Here is a message from our Undocumented relative and Immigrant activist, Eduardo Esquivel of the NM Dream Team. The New Mexico Dream Team (NMDT) is a statewide network committed to create power for multigenerational, undocumented, and mixed status families towards liberation. Through training and leadership development, they work to engage their community and allies in becoming leaders through an intersectional, gender-equitable, and racial justice lens. NMDT rallies to develop and implement an organizing and advocacy infrastructure for policy change fighting to dismantle systematic oppression. Their vision is to build people power for the uplifting of immigrant communities & people of color. NMDT is committed to empower multi-generational undocumented and mixed status families for liberation, as well as empower the GENTE by means of cross-movement building among Indigenous, People of Color, Queer Identified, poor folks and, otherwise known as marginalized populations. Their mission is a message of celebratory resilience.

This is a call to action!

• Problem: The economic recession caused by the COVID19 health crisis will impact undocumented communities the worst. While we expect a rise of unemployment and low-income workers to be laid off, undocumented immigrants are not eligible for critical social programs such as Unemployment. Furthermore, undocumented immigrants will not be eligible for the federal government economic stimulus package leaving the community with zero paths for economic relief. 
• Solution: The State of New Mexico can create a program that mirrors the federal unemployment program for undocumented folks and other non-eligible populations. Setting up a fund for unemployed individuals and extending eligibility to undocumented families can help ensure the economic sustainability of our commintities during the economic recession.

In the meanwhile, Eduardo and his brothers and sisters in arms at NMDT have created a Go Fund Me – COVID Relief for Undocumented Families in NM. In the last two days, already $1,609 has been raised towards the $50,000 goal. There have been 31 donors who have contributed to the cause and over 325 shares. Please help to raise awareness regarding this very important call to action! Below is the personalized message from Eduardo Esquivel and link to the Go Fund Me, as well as NMDT’s website. 

My name is Eduardo. I grew up in a mixed-status family in Albuquerque, New Mexico and I am the Programs Manager for New Mexico Dream Team, a state-wide, youth-led immigrant rights organization.  As an organization made up of directly affected young people, we are seeing firsthand the impacts that the COVID Pandemic is having on our communities.

I and on behalf of the New Mexico Dream Team, am asking for your help. We will be collecting monetary assistance and delivering funds directly to undocumented families in New Mexico as they need it during this crisis. Anything you can donate helps. If you cannot donate please share with your friends and family that are in a position to be able to help out.  We need funds as soon as possible.

For many of us, our parents are still going out to work everyday as they have now been deemed “essential workers.” They are exposing themselves at a higher risk to Covid-19 in order to make ends meet, though they are unsure for how much longer this is even possible.

My friends’ parents are still going to clean houses and others have been laid off. Everyone is just trying to figure it out the best they can.

With the supposed relief that is coming to Americans, undocumented people are ineligible but are one of the groups that will be hit the hardest. So many of our people are on the front lines of this crisis and have the most financial risk on top of that.

Yet, we keep fighting. We are undocumented, unafraid, unapologetic and we know we will overcome this pandemic together; taking care of each other with love and compassion.

During times of crisis such as the one we are in the midst of right now, structures of power tend to assess how far they can push, how much they can extract from the people and our earth. They are figuring out how much they can get away with. During these times more people are able to see the violent structure of our society and how every sense of protection and stability crumbles for the masses to protect and further enrich the greedy billionaires and politicians. This is an opportunity for us to practice a better way of living. What does it look like for us to care for each other as people, to care for each other when the governments that are supposedly there for our benefit and to represent us fail to do anything that doesnt doesnt serve their interests?

100% of these funds (Go Fund Me Link) will be going to undocumented families. Please visit NM Dream Team for more information and to support the movement as well as the largest immigrant youth-led organization in the country, United We Dream.

Keep reading for a poem written by Xicana poet and educator Jessica Helen Lopez. In honor of National Poetry Month, we want to highlight and uplift poetic verse that attempts to assuage the collaboration of art and activism for the purposes of social justice.

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Man Made Materials
Jessica Helen Lopez, Xicana Poeta y Maestra

for our interned relatives along the border

The chainlink knows nothing of beating hearts, of lax
flesh or parting fingers. Knows nothing of separation. 
How it splits a mother’s chest open like manzana
beneath a sutured knife. Juice of the blood. How 
a father becomes impotent because politicians
are in bed with the business men. And brown bodies
turn a profit when they are behind fences.

How babies are interned. How brown babies are interned.

The chainlink and the aluminum blankets can’t hear.
They have neither ears nor eyes. No sight. Only 
malleable chemistry to be fashioned, shaped as
accoutrements for the incarcerated child-bodies,
round up and laid out upon the slabs of pavement.

The pavement never remembers.

The paper doesn’t know if it is a green card or not.
Doesn’t know the difference between a passport
and a deportation warrant. It certainly doesn’t care
if it is a page in the bible or a constitution.

The desert is just a desert. In all its glittering,
thirsty glory. It was merely born that way. It never
knew and will never know about man made borders.

A prison is only a collection of angles and hooked wire.
It doesn’t understand it was meant to be a cell.
A cell is unknowing of itself. It cannot recognize grief.

All of the keys and all of the locks in this world 
will never suffer. But metal can be a dangerous
thing. This we know.

We know that men, in the name of power 
and devotion to the coin, will eat the poor 
for dinner. Will place us on plates of gold. Tuck
the linen into the starch of the collar. Wet
their lips with the blood of the guiltless and call
us a delicacy.

Their wives will exclaim over the recipe,
the exotic snuff of it. Pick their pearly whites
with our bones.

We know. I know, they gobble the spirit of their 
brothers and sisters never to
acknowledge us as  kin.

This is how animal becomes less than human.
How a human is less than the blood it was born in.
Less than machine and metal and tool.

This is how their teeth are akin to chainlink.
Their tongues, a paper ballot, the ink that runs
from the sides of their mouths as they chew.
Masticate their jaws. Pay their dinner bill with plastic.

The ones who own everything. Who own
the mineral, the land, the stainless-steel toilets
in all of the prisons. Who think they own you.

Who don’t understand that the heart is a 
manzana. An apple that grew from the tree
but was never enslaved by it. The branch is
a benevolent passenger.

This is how an apple is different from chain link.
How, in this knowledge, the meek, the righteous,
will one day inherit the earth.