Sin Fronteras: Dispatches from Mexico City

[Pictured: A mural by Jose Antonio Aguirre]

All photos of the event, included in this article, were captured by Carmen Harumi V. Leos.

By David A. Romero

“Caminante, no hay puentes, se hace puentes al andar. (Voyager, there are no bridges, one builds them as one walks.)”

—Gloria E. Anzaldúa

Nov 15-19, 2022 — A delegation of Chicano poets, artists, and intellectuals flew to Mexico City for five events over the course of four days across the city. 

It all began with a series of emails and social media messages flying across the Mexico–United States border. 

One poet, Matt Sedillo, Literary Director of the Mexican Cultural Institute of Los Angeles, and one academic, Alfonso Vázquez, founder of the Chicanxs Sin Fronteras project in Mexico City, first made their acquaintance virtually, and eventually, made plans together to bring a delegation from the U.S. to Mexico.

“In my first conversation with Alfonso, I told him I had spoken all over the world, that I had even spoken at Cambridge. While that was a huge honor, my real dream was UNAM,” said Sedillo of those early exchanges.

A professor at FES Acatlán (UNAM), and the author of a history of Chicano cinema and media representation in Spanish, Chicano (University of Guanajuato, 2018), Vázquez knew he could make Sedillo’s dream a reality.

“There is a great reception and interest in Chicano culture in Mexico.” Said Vázquez in an interview with Nancy Cázares, of La Izquierda Diario.

Alongside his partner Abril Zaragoza, Vázquez has created Chicanxs Sin Fronteras to “disseminate and bring young people and the general public closer to Chicano culture beyond the stereotypes that have been imposed on the Mexican who lives in the United States.”

Sedillo and Vázquez developed a four-day literary and arts series of events across Mexico City – with the coordination of the Mexican Cultural Institute of Los Angeles and Chicanxs Sin Fronteras, along with the latter organization’s frequent collaborators: Tianguis Literario CDMX (a collective led by young poet Yasmín Alfaro) and Gorrión Editorial (a publishing house run by poet and professor Abraham Peralta Vélez) – collectively entitled: Desfronterizxs. Homenaje a la escritora Gloria Anzaldúa. Encuentro de poesía chicana.

Sedillo’s delegation flying in from the U.S., a mix of those born in the U.S. and in Mexico, was a “dream team” that included the Director of the Mexican Cultural Institute of Los Angeles, the muralist Jose Antonio Aguirre, poets and professors Norma Elia Cantú and Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs (both of whom knew the series’ figure of homage, Gloria E. Anzaldúa, personally), community activist and author of Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A. (Atria, 2005), Luis J. Rodriguez, the sociologist and organizer of delegations to Cuba, Jose Prado, the art curator and organizer of events at El Camino College in Los Angeles, Dulce Stein, and myself, David A. Romero, the author of My Name Is Romero (FlowerSong Press, 2020) (and writer of this article).

Norma Elia Cantú, along with the sharing of her poetry, carried the special honor of giving a multimedia presentation on Anzaldúa’s life, work, and philosophy. Cantú’s own reputation, as the recipient of over a dozen awards and the author of dozens of books, including Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera (University of New Mexico Press, 1997) preceded her in CDMX and many of the professors and students in attendance were excited to meet her in person.

The delegation from the U.S. presented from November 15-19, 2022 at locations as varied as the universities FES Acatlán (UNAM) and La Casa de la Universidad de California en México (UC system), the high school CCH Naucalpan (UNAM), the activist café La Resistencia, and arts center Gimnasio de arte y cultura in Roma (formerly the home of the Partido Popular Socialista (PPS)).

At FES Acatlán, La Casa de la Universidad de California en México and CCH Naucalpan, the delegation from the U.S. presented with introductions from Vázquez, and organizers at their respective campuses: María del Consuelo Santamaría Aguirre, Jeohvan Jedidian Silva Sánchez, Keshava R. Quintanar Cano, Eva Daniela Sandoval Espejo, and Efraín Refugio Lugo.

At La Resistencia and Gimnasio de arte y cultura, the delegation was joined by the Mexican poets, writers, and performers: Pita Ochoa, Cynthia Franco, Sara Raca, Abraham Peralta Vélez, Yasmin Alfaro, Bajo Palabra, Rubikon, Omar Jasso, Lumen Eros Vita, Imperio Soul, and DJ Paolo Guerrero, all of which were excited to share their work alongside the delegation and to represent their country.

The delegation from the U.S. was embraced in all places by their Mexican hosts, who welcomed them into their institutions, presented them with certificates of thanks, took photos with them and purchased their books, escorted them on trips throughout the city to visit historic places of interest and for many members, even welcomed them into their own homes and the homes of their extended families.

Outside of the events, the trip held special meaning for members of the delegation. For Jose Antonio Aguirre, who holds dual citizenship and makes frequent trips to his homeland, the trip to Mexico City was nevertheless an opportunity to meet up with his daughter and to reconnect with an old friend. For Luis J. Rodriguez and Dulce Stein, it was an opportunity to connect with family members they had never met. In the case of Rodriguez, those family members were the children of his aunt Chucha, the namesake of his cultural center in Sylmar, Tia Chucha's, which has served its community for over twenty years. 

For Sedillo, the author of Mowing Leaves of Grass (FlowerSong Press, 2019) the trip to Mexico City had a less direct, but still profound cultural and spiritual meaning, “It's every Chicano's dream to be welcomed back home—to Tenochtitlan.”

The historical significance of the Chicano delegation to Mexico City

Gloria Anzaldúa traveled to Mexico City to teach a graduate seminar “La Identidad Estadounidense” at UNAM’s main campus in 2013, and a handful of other noted writers of Mexican descent born in the U.S., including Sandra Cisneros and Roberto Tejada, have both lived in the metropolis on and off for decades and have given readings in the city, sometimes inviting their contemporaries from the U.S. to join them.

However, there is no bridge that has been regularly maintained, neither by universities nor cultural centers in Mexico City that has been built to bring in Chicano writers and poets to share their work and build a connection between the communities in earnest.

For over a century, the populations have been separated: by border, by language, by history, by culture. It may have seemed unlikely, if not impossible, for the Chicano and Chilango to come together and to build together.

In the U.S., Chicanos, whether those with longstanding ties to the borderlands, or the children of immigrants, are often treated as second-class citizens, lumped into a category known as “minority,” or more generously, as “people of color,” thereby still subject to microaggressions, labor exploitation, criminalization, and violence. Ours is a history of struggle and poverty. Of the antagonism between assimilation and resistance. Of constantly being uncertain of our futures and of who we are. Of being, "ni aqui, ni alla." We are a people often defined by what we are not.

The Mexicans of Mexico City, the Chilangos, can seem to be the opposite, as people who are certain, who are defined, who are. They are the majority population. The normal. The normative. The unquestioned. They live in their capital, a world city, cosmopolitan and international in their tastes. Everywhere, they pull from the character of their nation, producing a synthesis, one that may vary from neighborhood, but that is proud. That is Mexican. They are fluent in Spanish, because prima facie, that is their language. Everywhere in CDMX, there is a tie to both the recent and ancient past. They live in Tenochtitlan; the ruins of Templo Mayor within arm's reach and mere feet away from the Zócalo and the National Palace. Monuments to their heroes abound in bust and sculpture—and their heroes all look like them.

For a time, it could seem that we, the Chicano and the Chilango, could not be more different. What sense would the tales of uncertainty and second-class citizenship make to a Chilango? How could the Chicano, who directly, or indirectly, benefits from U.S. imperialism, respond to accusations that they are implicit in the modern-day gentrification and subjugation of their motherland?

And yet—culture connects us: music, art, film, literature. As in Japan and Thailand, Chicano culture has saturated Mexico City. The cholo is cool. Chicano is cool. Chicano es chido. But, unlike in Japan and Thailand where the connection is deeply felt, but somewhat cosmetic, the Chilangos know that, although divided, although different, the Chicano and Chilango share the same blood. We are the same people.

“The borders aren’t real. They’re not like the rivers or mountains. They weren’t made by God. They were made by man. This land is one. All of the Americas are our community.” Luis J. Rodriguez, the former poet laureate of Los Angeles, said, passionately, to the students at FES Acatlán.

During a short presentation at CCH Naucalpan, Jose Antonio Aguirre described himself, humorously, “I am from Ciudad de Mexico. I am a Chilango. But I have also lived in the United States for a long time, and am influenced by the Chicanos. So, I call myself a Chicalango.”

In one of the most powerful moments of the event series, Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs, the author of Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia (Utah State University Press, 2012) , asked the over one hundred in attendance at CCH Naucalpan for a show of hands. “How many of you have family in the United States?” Almost everyone in the audience raised their hands. She added, speaking of Chicanos in Mexico, "This is our country, too."

Alfonso Vázquez, a Chilango with family in California, knows this isn't an isolated phenomenon, “Many of our families, many states of the Republic have a great tradition around to migration, they are migrant states: Michoacán, Jalisco, Guanajuato, Zacatecas, are states with a great tradition. There are also many migrants in Mexico City, it is a place from where many people leave for other states, and to the United States of course.”

Vázquez partnered with CCH Naucalpan and Gorrión Editorial to collect work from the writers of the delegation from the U.S., with translations of works in English into Spanish, and art by Jose Antonio Aguirre, into a special collection entitled, Ellos son nosotros (They are us).

The message from the Chilangos to the Chicanos could not be clearer.

A bridge that goes both ways

“We thank you. For creating a bridge into Mexico.” Matt Sedillo said, at Gimnasio de arte y cultura to close out his set, wiping sweat off his brow, addressing the crowd of Mexican organizers and artists present. “I recognize, a bridge goes both ways. It’s not just for us to come here. But for us [Chicanos], to host you [in the United States].”

The words of Anzaldúa ring, “Caminante, no hay puentes, se hace puentes al andar.”

For Sedillo, who has sailed to the island of Elba, taken trains to Paris, flown to Ravenna to receive the Dante’s Laurel, and likewise, traveled to Cuba, England, Mexico, and Canada, the task of continuing to work with Vázquez to build such a bridge between Mexico and Los Angeles, is not merely a challenge, as the Literary Director of the Mexican Cultural Institute of Los Angeles it’s in his job description, and is the greatest opportunity he can imagine.

David A. Romero is a Mexican-American spoken word artist from Diamond Bar, CA. Romero is the author of My Name Is Romero (FlowerSong Press), a book reviewed by Gustavo Arellano (¡Ask a Mexican!), Curtis Marez (University Babylon), and founding member of Ozomatli, Ulises Bella. Romero has received honorariums from over seventy-five colleges and universities in thirty-four different states in the USA and has performed live in Mexico, Italy, and France. Romero's work has been published in literary magazines in the United States, Mexico, England, Scotland, and Canada. Romero has opened for Latin Grammy winning bands Ozomatli and La Santa Cecilia. Romero's work has been published in anthologies alongside poets laureate Joy Harjo, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Luis J. Rodriguez, Jack Hirschman, and Tongo Eisen-Martin. Romero has won the Uptown Slam at the historic Green Mill in Chicago; the birthplace of slam poetry. Romero's poetry deals with family, identity, social justice issues, and Latinx culture.

Proletarian Poetry Returns: A Review of Matt Sedillo's 'City On The Second Floor'

By Jon Jeter

Reading Matt Sedillo’s second book of poetry, City on the Second Floor, reminded me of the late, hip hop icon, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, who chose that colorful pseudonym, according to his bandmates in the Wu Tang Clan, “because there was no father to his style.”

That is not entirely true of Sedillo. As I myself wrote in my review of his first book, Mowing Leaves of Grass –a postcolonial takedown of Walt Whitman’s fabled 1855 book of poetry, Leaves of Grass – Sedillo’s verses shares much in common with the late, African American griot, Amiri Baraka. I wrote at the time:

"Present in the work of both poets –the late icon and the relative ingenue respectively –is the rhythmic mixture, una mezcla, of the street, and minds sharpened, like swords, by struggle, and self-enlightenment.

This is not to suggest that Sedillo’s poetry is all fire and brimstone. Like Baraka before him, Sedillo infuses his poetry with a certain knowing, or playfulness, befitting an outsider who is in on the joke, and has seen through the illogic of a handful of Europeans “discovering” 90 million indigenous people. The white settler’s arrogance produces both amusement and blinding, righteous, anger.”

Hints of Baraka are also present in City on the Second Floor, but reflecting a relatively-young poet who continues to find his voice, Sedillo’s verses are evolving, making it difficult to pinpoint one single, or dominant, influence. Or, to return to the example of Ol’ Dirty Bastard, it is not that his style is fatherless, but rather it seems the product of many fathers.

Aside from Baraka’s work, City on the Second Floor’s most glaring resemblance is perhaps to the work of another son of Los Angeles, Charles Bukowski, although the similarities between the two poets are superficial, and I suspect, purely coincidental. Like Sedillo, Bukowski’s poetry was often a paean to his hometown, the City of Angels, and its seedy underbelly but Bukowski ‘s gritty portraiture veers towards cynicism, and even solipsism, mindful, perhaps,`` of film noir. Sedillo uses Los Angeles’ grit much differently, casting the city’s Chicano community and dispossessed populations in sharp relief, and his poetry is reminiscent not of any sterile Hollywood oeuvre, but of Mexico’s iconic Marxist muralist, Diego Rivera, and his classic fresco depicting the Ford River Rouge plant in interwar Detroit.

In a poem entitled The Pope of Broadway, Sedillo writes:

Heard a story that

When Anthony Quinn married in to the DeMille family

It was on the condition that his very Mexican family would not be attending the wedding

And that's the ticket, the price of admission, what they are buying and you had best be selling

And let me tell you one thing

When Dallas, Minneapolis, Ann Arbor, Orlando, Toledo, Scranton Ohio sends their people

They don’t send their best

They're vain

They're shallow

They're narcissists

And some of them I imagine are good waiters

Flight of the sociopaths

Transplants turned cynics chasing down plans, hopes and ambitions

On roads paved in ways I would never even begin to dream to imagine

Talking only to themselves, defining a place by all they claim it is not but it’s them

Fake, fakes, fake as fuck, fuck them

They don’t know this town, this region the history

Hell they don’t even know the valley

A certain class consciousness imbues the work of both Bukowski and Sedillo, but while Bukowski maintains a comfortable distance from the unwashed, bearing witness to the struggle but not really getting his hands dirty, Sedillo picks a side, and dives in head first, grounding — to borrow a term introduced by the late Marxist, Jamaican economist Walter Rodney — with the masses. His poetry is equal parts art, advocacy, and anthropology. Consider his poem from which the book draws its title:

There is a city on the second floor

An international destination

Whose entrance is prohibited

To all those appearing

Too poor for travel

Where commerce crosses

Bridges of wire and concrete

Just above the street light

Rises an economy of scale

Where buildings and offices

Connect to disconnect from the world below

Here

In the space between

Worker and destination

Conversation spins profit

And no one moves without reason

And no one speaks without purpose

Here

The word is stillborn

A commodity

And the world dies anew

While working stiff spend wages

In cheap imitation

Of their exploitation

Arrogant

Delusional

Walking dead

Laughingly dreaming

Of a penthouse suite

They will never reach

While staring down from terraces

Towards the street below

In this and other poems, I detect echoes of two, towering Midwestern poets whose work is often associated with proletarian themes: Detroit’s Philip Levine, and Chicago’s socialist scribe, Carl Sandburg, whose poem, Chicago, remains one of my all-time favorites. City on the Second Floor is indescribably good, as rich and textured as the best bottle of wine you’ve ever consumed, , in part because of this almost sociological lens that Sedillo applies to his verses. But reading it for me was a bit of a chore, akin to a high-stakes wine-tasting contest, as I struggled mightily to identify the differing bouquets: was that vanilla or almond, nutmeg or currants?

After identifying hints of Baraka and Bukowski, Sandburg and Levine and even a subtle aroma of Rivera, I still felt I was missing someone. Finally, after my second reading of Sedillo’s poem entitled simply, The Rich, it hit me: the Spanish poet, , Federico Garcia Lorca, who was assassinated by Spanish fascists in 1936. It reads:

You see the rich

And the poor

Well, they're just like you and me

Two hands

Two feet

The sky

The sea

And everything between

One heart that beats

And the time

To make the most of it

So, you'll find no sympathy

Reaching into these deep pockets

All we ever asked was our fair share

And God damn it, that's all of it

So, while you're out in the streets screaming for peace and justice

We’re sleeping in satin sheets dreaming free and guiltless over oceans and tariffs liquidating pensions then off to bid on porcelain and portraits at billion dollar auctions

You know you need us

You know we're selling your secrets

It is not that Sedillo is a surrealist as Garcia Lorca was but his poetry represents Chicanos in the same unapologetic way that Garcia Lorca represented his tribe of Andalusian Roma people, who suffered under the thumb of Franco’s regime just as Sedillo’s tribe suffers under the white settler regime in LA. Reading Sedillo’s use of the words “us” and “we” is subversive, particularly in such dire times, and emotionally triggering, but in a good way, harkening back to a day when the best artists were not feted with awards and university chairs, but were instead held in contempt by the pharaohs, for helping the people fight their oppressors.

Jon Jeter is a former Washington Post correspondent and the author of Flat Broke in the Free Market: How Globalization Fleeced Working People and the co-author of A Day Late and a Dollar Short: Bright Nights and Dark Days in Obama’s Postracial America.

Decolonizing the American Mind: A Review of Matt Sedillo's "Mowing Leaves of Grass"

By Jon Jeter

Had Amiri Baraka been born 50 years later to a Chicano family in Southern California rather than a black family in Newark, he would’ve been Matt Sedillo. 

Present in the work of both poets –the late icon and the relative ingenue respectively –is the rhythmic mixture, una mezcla, of the street, and minds sharpened, like swords, by struggle, and self-enlightenment.

This is not to suggest that Sedillo’s poetry is all fire and brimstone. Like Baraka before him, Sedillo infuses his poetry with a certain knowing, or playfulness, befitting an outsider who is in on the joke, and has seen through the illogic of a handful of Europeans “discovering” 90 million indigenous people. The white settler’s arrogance produces both amusement and blinding, righteous, anger. 

And so it is that Sedillo’s second book of poetry, Mowing Leaves of Grass, reads like a criminal indictment handed up by, well, a poet. In the book’s first poem, entitled Pilgrim, he writes:

See, I come from struggle

And if my story offends you

That is only ‘cause you made the mistake of seeking your

reflection

In my self-portrai

In one of the book’s shorter poems, Pedagogy of the Oppressor, it is made abundantly clear that Sedillo’s poetry is, at its core, an attempt to decolonize the American mind:

And when they read  

They read in conquest 

And when they thought 

They thought of process 

And when they wrote  

Again and again  

It was the word progress 

And when they spoke  

A festival of bayonets 

Impaled the audience  

Line the children  

It’s getting late November  

Teach them Pilgrim  

Teach them Indian  

Speak of gratitude  

Speak of friendship 

Of all the usual suspects perp-walked by Mowing Leaves of Grass, however, the kingpin is Walt Whitman, whose storied 1855 book of poems, Leaves of Grass, is the inspiration of Sedillo’s book title. Widely regarded by ivory-towered elites as the greatest book of poetry in the history of the Republic –or the genre’s Huck Finn – Leaves of Grass is considered a siren song, calling for a young and yearning nation of castoffs and cut-ups to unite in the democratic experiment that is America. 

Sedillo, however, makes no claim to the mantle of poet-laureate but rather dissident laureate, and he finds Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, like the nation itself,  wanting, and in need of a reappraisal. Why, he seems to ask in Mowing Leaves of Grass, is Whitman so fawned over and feted when he fails to account for the suffering, the despair, or the rivers of blood spilled by Native Americans, and blacks, in the making of the nation?

In his poem titled “Oh Say,” Sedillo remixes stanzas from Whitman’s Leaves of Grass,  lyrics to the anthems Star-Spangled Banner and America the Beautiful, and the dirge popularized by Billie Holliday, Strange Fruit.

So we were bound 

To keep singing 

Oh captain 

My captain 

Drunk on blood anthems Blind patriots 

Raised flags 

And fallen veterans 

The myths 

The hymns 

The bitterness 

Of fairy tales 

Best woven into song 

From the dawn’s 

Early light 

To twilight’s last gleaming From Plymouth Rock 

To Dred Scott 

From smallpox 

To church bomb 

From black bodies 

Swinging in the summer breeze To the endless blood 

Of countless wounded knees Old glory 

We are born 

Witness 

To the sins of your soil 

Oh pioneer

I’ve never heard Sedillo recite his poetry live but I am told by those who have that he is electric, inhabiting the words, owning the room,  spitting fire and truth much as Baraka did in his day, but to a rapid-fire, staccato, hip-hop beat rather than Baraka’s jazzy cadence. The writer Greg Palast calls him the best political poet in America, and while I’m not in any position to agree or disagree, I can say that his poems leave me feeling ennobled, and less alone in the world.

Sedillo’s voice is defiant, irreverent, even wrathful, but his metier is championing the cause of the unwashed, and the unloved, be they Chicanos, African Americans, Indonesian sweatshop workers, or Palestinians. And the irony is that what shines through in Mowing the Leaves, more than anything is not of a poet seething at the injustice of it all, but besotted with the people. From his poem, Once:

I have this dream

Every so often

Of people

Beyond borders and prisons

Gathered in the distance

Telling tales of a time

When women feared the evening

When communities were punished by color

And grown men hunted children

Hardly able to believe

People once lived this way

Jon Jeter is a former Washington Post correspondent and the author of Flat Broke in the Free Market: How Globalization Fleeced Working People and the co-author of A Day Late and a Dollar Short: Bright Nights and Dark Days in Obama’s Postracial America.