Who Owns US?
- Aug 8, 2025
- 8 min read
Updated: Aug 11, 2025
All good books are bound... to what exactly?
It is a certain privilege to walk into a room full of books. Some of those same books would be piled onto the street, torn, and set in flames. Evidently, a set of bonded pages holds some kind of magic. Voices of our elders, harnessed in scripture, exist as long as the memory of their scripture exists. I do not hold a written record of any one person I descended from. Orphan of scripture. I cannot quote here. The tradition of oral descendancy is strong, however. Anecdotes that hold warnings, nurture, and God. In my mother tongue. When I translate these anecdotes, I find I recite incantations of what once was, followed with a justification for every single turn. My mother always sang to baby Jesus on Christmas. Well, it was like a posada. A posada is like Christmas, but we celebrate los Reyes Magos, not Santa Claus. We would still some years receive gifts on the 25th. The Reyes Magos? Oh, the three wisemen. From the bible... I think. Christmas was fun as a child. Posadas, sorry, I forgot I told you.
I can't believe I told you.
Keep this between us. Promise? I do not wish to see another one of my memories be codified into law. To be Mexican. To be Mexican American. If you call yourself blank, you must have lived blank. I do not ascribe to the code of identity, to ascribe is to inject value. Those who haven't lived that part must now subscribe, to subscribe is to pay in. I am not the only magician here. Joining us now is one of the most important humans to live through the page.
James Arthur Baldwin
Baldwin is a hot commodity when it comes the code of identity. A religious, black, bisexual man. Grab onto what you want. Baldwin is an elusive figure whom he himself searched for seemingly his entire writing career. It is also true that he knew who he was. Baldwin, to put it mildly, is a conjunction of truths who make a higher truth that dissolves the Truth. Baldwin was ostracized by other black intellectuals. He continued to write. Baldwin contested his own existence in this world. He continued to write. Baldwin's contemporaries were assassinated on American soil. He continued to write.
"Medgar, Malcolm, Martin—murdered. I really cannot talk. And yet I must. Pray to those Gods who are not christian, for our lives, for your brother’s life." James Baldwin in a letter to his close friend in the midst of the deaths of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr.
Cited as 1,884 pages long, the FBI collected extensive information on James. Reading his foreword for Lorraine Hansberry, author of A Raisin in the Sun and Chicago native, I am compelled by his heart that bleeds through the page. Writing from memory, he brings forth his friend in such a light I begin to reminisce in his memory as well. Beyond rhetoric, James's words put me, the reader, back in time. Back to a nebulous space in time where my timely worries dissuade. When I first read thoroughly, I awakened from this reading, a comatose state, and found myself fully engrossed body and mind.
I would often stagger down her stairs as the sun came up, usually in the middle of a paragraph and always in the middle of a laugh. That marvelous laugh. That marvelous face. I loved her, she was my sister and my comrade. Her going did not so much make me lonely as make me realize how lonely we were. We had that respect for each other which perhaps is only felt by people on the same side of the barricades, listening to the accumulating thunder of the hooves of horses and the treads of tanks.
A passage from To Be Young, Gifted and Black, a selection of Lorraine Hansberry's work. The foreword, titled Sweet Lorraine, was written by James Baldwin.
Does love inside those letters need over a thousand pages from a federal agency? Do his words justify an exclusion from the civil rights movement? Does that exclusion tell us more of what we sacrifice for what we wish to achieve? What is there to achieve anyway? The deaths of those who thought of others would be enough to desensitize us today. Why does James Arthur Baldwin still write?
Before you codify and mythicize this man, reader, I will present to you another thinker. Dangerous?
Amiri Baraka
When you pull the veil off the all-reaching, omnipresent cogs that reverberate under us, you will always face controversy for the effort you exerted when you were trying to find your grip. Musically inclined was poet, playwright, human Amiri Baraka. Amiri Baraka is not his birth name, yet Amiri adopted it as a way to consciously reject what has transpired before him. A literal wedge between what was and what could be. Along with Baldwin, Amiri lived through the string of assassinations. In the literary world, if Baldwin is the hot commodity in the code of identity, then Amiri Baraka is a working, running car engine. The closer you look the more complex he becomes, and you will get oil on your hands when you try to parse his works. Bring along a shop rag to engage without thinking that the pain was his to bear innately. He chose to write. A writer then does not get to choose how readers react, but it is the hope of what the reaction might lead into that keeps the writer entangled in nouns, verbs, and well-placed commas.
Amiri Baraka had his own place in the eyes of the FBI.
"Art speaks to people that's why they use it against you." Baraka speaks to the present time. "They make you sing songs that tell you, you don't have no sense, you crazy, you don't have no future. You think you just singing a song. You actually teaching yourself the propaganda of the opposed."
Myself
As far as I know there is no organization surveilling me or any of my writing for that matter. I’m a small fish in the universe, writing about the sunrays piercing through the ocean’s surface. Who then do I write for?
The Other and Others
When I recite my poem, el metodo del artista, to an elderly woman from Oaxaca who finds her way of life selling coconuts and flavored ice shavings, everything makes sense. I am not worried about anything. The words take a life of their own, and my Id takes a backseat for the mind, body, and soul to become the vessel it knows it is. The words take my life. It took my life to gather the words. When my life is gone, the words will live. The words often get overshadowed by my beating heart. Not sonically. Socially? Maybe. I dote upon what would transpire if I were to fall off the edge of the universe. The sea of people that would upload pictures of me with them, I love pictures. An amalgamation of Where’s Waldo? tied to a writing exercise prompted by ”Who was he, anyway?” This next part will get cynical, be warned. My words would gentrify my mistakes and shortcomings. While I am all that I am, it’s hard to accept that the same man who wrote about love tied to constellations and a benevolent God also has a history of being unfaithful. My words would step into the place of me. Ideations that surface in late night calls to my closest friends would become obsolete in my history; replaced by optimistic prose based in absolute truths. My words will overwrite me. Leading to this uncomfortable confrontation, am I because of my words or are the words my words in spite of me?
If I’m lucky… hypothetically. If I’m lucky, I will feed on my words, nourishing on the fruits that hang off the branch. Whether I will own the fruits of my labor then becomes its own deviation, causing fractured, perpendicular universes. In one universe, I hold physical prints of my poetry collection, tucking one away for the special woman in my life. In another universe, I’m engaged in my work, fulfilling a press run from rural small towns to big, eclectic cities. In another universe, I am set dressing for a city that’s all too familiar with artists overshadowed with their own potential then submerged by their own pervasive subconscious. These universes are perpendicular because they could all be, yet I have not lived them therefore they intersect. Where? I do not know. I must then live.
The Others.
America’s hyperindividualism lives as an undercurrent below all happenings here. The simple solution to keeping on as detractors and critics latch on to your output as an artist has been said to be: ignore them. In the age of virality and the prevailing virtual dimension that often carries more weight than actual life now, an economy that has always existed, now supersedes the one of the doer. Money, exposure, social clout, identity, subculture, community, etc. If there is a higher incentive to comment over creating in this abstract world of art, it then becomes pointless to care. It goes deeper than that. To intellectualize it would be to give it too much credit, as better writers have done it better. Better is subjective, and I will leave that comment to the critics.
Here, I will now intellectualize it for the woman who sells coconuts that hails from Oaxaca: mientras que suspire, no dejere a quien soy. No puedo. Un regalo de Dios tan pesado que ni yo lo entenderé. Un momento de mi infancia… en días cuando estaba solo, me ponia a buscar el lugar donde menos me podrían encontrar. Esta rutina empezó en jugar Escondidas con vecinos y niños que conocía en la calle. Evolucionó a un plan ejecutable por si cayera el día que inmigración quiebre el candado de la puerta y secuestren a mi familia. La imaginación de un niño, ¿no? La verdad fue que en un solo momento mi papá fue cuestionado por su identidad, empezando la devolución de un hogar sin forma de escapar. Deportaron a mi padre.
Who Owns Me?
It changes. One day I am contemplative of my career choices and become doubtful I made the right choice. Another, I worry myself to death on how I will make rent for the next month; while I sacrifice another meal in the day, satiating my hunger with peanuts and protein powder. Somedays, music takes over, and I live out a soundtrack over the course of a couple days. Recently, my days are overflowing with self-loathing and regret. Symptoms of an unemployed period that has run its course, along with rising costs across the board. The growing feeling of a boundless possibility that emerged in 2016 was wounded but swimming in 2019. It is 2025 now. There are no more ripples in the water. The magical, mosaic fish are extinct. Swimmers pop their heads out of the water to hear what the gulls have to say about the lack of fish. Fish, still alive in this climate, flop out of the ocean, condemned for asphyxiating too loud for the beachgoers.
Afterlife
I walk along with Baldwin and Baraka looping in the background as I stroll through the neighborhood. Balancing the beauty and architecture of nature in my thoughts with other thoughts of liberation, sovereignty, and life. I don’t presume to inherit their spirit nor do I envy their plight. I acknowledge my own and find that their words speak to my personal plight, closer than a lot of other literary work. Is it personal or do I take it personal? Why did Baldwin continue to write? How did Baraka come and live through his metamorphosis? Baldwin acknowledges his life was saved when he went to a quiet village in Switzerland, finishing his first novel. I confess I’ve gotten too good at Escondidas. When they found my dad, the games ended. Kids I grew up with still waver between work and no work.
Why Do I Keep Writing?
Consider these breadcrumbs. A call to all fish. Swim by and splash around. The lifeguard towers stand vacant as the beach consolidates its workforce to sell drinks and burgers, offering fries separately. Even if the water’s temperature rises as do the tides, the fish need a home. Welcome home, even if it’s temporary.
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