Underground Library Celebration



Photography Credit:  Moon Maiden

 Last night, Renee and I attended the inauguration of San Antonio's Underground Library.  It is one of four that has now been established by the Librotraficante movement in which they have vowed to bring banned books back into Arizona.

Arizona shamelessly eradicated Mexican American Studies at the Tucson Unified Schools overlooking the program's 98% graduation rate.  The highest graduation rate of any Latino/Native American/Hispanic community.  Politicians also proceeded to take books that were "unpatriotic" out of the hands of students.  Those books were many including: Shakespeare, Leslie Marmon Silko, Luis Alberto Urrea, Junot Diaz, Pulitzer Prize recipients and or Natives, people born and raised on that land.

Last night the wind was cool and so was the guy handing out free copies of his short films, the lady who unloaded crates of banned books, and the 6 year old little girl who kept telling her mom, "Look!  Look!"
There were belly dancers, prose writers, musicians, artists, and poets sharing a common goal:  to bring literature back into the state that had abolished it.  I, along with my friend Viktoria, read our responses to this banning, this set back in the continuing struggle for civil rights. 

People chanted as Viktoria raised her fists in the air declaring we fight back!  She introduced me to come to the mic and I was a little terrified.  My blood pressure started to rise, my heart began to beat faster, my palms were begining to sweat, and my face felt as warm as the temperature earlier that day.  I couldn't find the right angle for the microphone, but I just went with it.  I stuck my gum in a nearby planter and began to read "The List".  Choking up always takes over my voice when I'm reading something that is so important to me.  Soon, I finished reading the words that had, two weeks prior, sent my body into toxic shock.

I placed the mic back into its stand and took my place on the cement with the others.  Other poets made their way to the mic, spitting and rhyming and pointing and declaring.  It was time to go and as I began to make my way out a woman stopped me to express her very intimate feelings about my poem.  It was then that I was overtaken by emotion.  I knew in my heart and in my soul that I could never again write about things that do not matter. 

As artists and as humans we have an obligation to each other and to our communities.