Dan Vera

I live with the small shame of not knowing the multiple names for blue to describe the nightsky over New Mexico to describe the light in my lover’s eyes. It is a small shame that grows. I live with the small shame which resides in the absences of my speech as I pause to search for the word in Spanish to translate a poem to my Father who sits there waiting who scans my eyes to see what I cannot fully describe who waits for the word from me the word that escapes me in the moment the word I fear has never resided within me. It is a small shame that grows when indigo and cerulean are merely azul and not añil and cerúleo.

Let us praise the immigrant who leaves the tropics and arrives in Chicago in the dead of winter. Let us praise the immigrant who has never worn coats who must bundle up against an unimaginable cold. For they will write letters home that speak of it like Norse sagas with claims that if a frigid hell exists the entrance is hidden somewhere in this city. Let us praise the immigrant who fears the depths of the subway the disappearance of landmarks to guide them through the labyrinth. Let us praise the immigrant who dreams of the pleasures of sunstroke who wakes each morning to the alien sight of their breath suspended in the cold city air.

In that very first episode the transmission is received on the starship Enterprise that Space Commander Dominguez urgently needs his supplies. Kirk tells Uhura to assure him that the peppers are “prime Mexican reds but he won’t die if he goes a few more days without ’em.” Calm down Mexican. You can wait a few more days to get your chile peppers. In the corner of my eye I see Uhura’s back hand twitch and though I never see him on the screen I image José giving Kirk a soplamoco to the face. But this is the year 2266 and there are Latinos in Outer Space! We never see them, but they’ve survived with their surnames and their desire, deep in the farthest interplanetary reaches, for a little heat to warm the bland food on the starbase at Corinth 4. As it is on earth so it shall be in heaven. Ricardo Montalbán will show up 21 episodes later to play a crazy mutant Indio, superhuman and supersmart who survived two centuries to slap Kirk around and take over his ship.

Hatred as an element of the struggle; a relentless hatred of the enemy, impelling us over and beyond the natural limitations that man is heir to and transforming him into an effective, violent, selective and cold killing machine. Our soldiers must be thus; a people without hatred cannot vanquish a brutal enemy. —Che Guevara Tengo una remera del Che y no sé por qué, I have a Che t-shirt and I don’t know why. —Contemporary Argentine saying I see the red shirt at the peace rally and think of my parents who left everyone and every thing they knew and loved save for the coin forgotten in my brother’s baby jacket. Men like me in Cuba failed the test of this symbol’s manhood, were called “Western perversions” were imprisoned and made to labor. Thousands, like these assembled, were rounded up in the middle of the night driven to the far countryside to cut sugarcane for a revolution’s economic quotas. Tio Alberto’s eyes go blank when he speaks of the price he paid: three years of forced hard labor to work like a dog in the sun for the privilege of leaving his own country. I think of the chain of caudillos that promised one thing and delivered another.