Land of the Cranes

by Aida Salazar

hands

  sorrow

  dreams

  struggle

  healing

  heart

  skin

  You have been in my wings.

  Through pages of love

  I read to learn I’ve always

  known how to fly free.

  near silent Tía Raquel

  in the cage for

  my silver blanket

  and my new mat

  inside the same cold

  the same piojos

  the same toilet

  the same fear

  of all us cranes

  with tearstained cheeks

  and faraway faces

  left

  waiting.

  I give them paper.

  I give them what I know.

  I tell them

  right here is a

  way to take to the

  sky or to make

  it bend into

  your heart

  so it

  flies.

  At least the heart.

  At least that.

  When I get called to the

  office again, they tell me

  to bring my things.

  Alas I and II, my crayons,

  Papi’s letter, and crane poems.

  They give me a plastic bag

  with the things they took

  from Mami and me.

  Her handbag plus

  fifty cents for chocolate milk

  a shiny concrete rock that glimmers in the sun

  and a folded crane poem for Papi

  I made at school so long ago.

  The dried dead bee I collected in the yarda

  is now dust, just dust.

  You’re being processed for deportation.

  Deportation? Where?

  To Guadalajara, Mexico. Your relative Roberto Quintero

  will be there to receive you.

  But what about Mami? What about the baby?

  I pound my closed fist on the table.

  I will not leave here without them!

  I am empty of tears. Nothing but anger fills up my voice.

  Settle down! They’re in the holding cell across the hall.

  You’ll be traveling with them.

  What?

  What he said

  wrecks my head

  like a cyclone

  making landfall.

  At first

  I don’t have breath, or sight.

  I don’t have a sentence, or a picture.

  I reach to find

  a silence beyond my body.

  It doesn’t recognize the woman

  hugging me, it doesn’t

  know her voice, her choking cry,

  Mi niña, mi niña. Betita, I’m here.

  It doesn’t recognize

  the sweet pattern of her face

  but somehow, somehow

  I find a glimmer that

  encourages me to smile.

  I find an opening where

  memories float

  back into me

  to the longing for

  the Mami I wanted

  so much I called for

  her in my sleep

  the Mami I imagined in

  a grave of flowers

  I would never see.

  That Mami is

  now sweeping large

  golden-brown wings

  around my own

  so tightly I

  want to fold

  into them

  and let my

  disbelief go and

  allow all of her love

  to hold me.

  Mami opens a lumpy cloth

  wrapped across her chest.

  I don’t believe what

  I see

  a baby crane

  with little feathery ears

  rounded lips

  like a puckered beak

  sleeping.

  This is your baby sister, mi’ja.

  Her name is Alba.

  Alba?

  It means the first light of day.

  I give her the lightest

  kiss on her little head

  but don’t get too close

  so she doesn’t

  catch my piojos

  or my cough.

  Her name is a drizzle

  in my mind where I imagine

  a crane poem for her

  a horizon with only the top of a sun with eyes, peeking.

  Alba, a crane who moves

  from the night

  and enters the light.

  Mami, why are they sending us to Mexico

  where the men might find us?

  Where they might find Papi?

  I am so afraid of the mountain, Mami.

  They are sending us because I asked them to.

  It is called “voluntary departure.”

  Why would you? What about Fernanda

  and our case for asylum—to be safe?

  My heart and body are broken, amor,

  she says, and cups her hand over my face.

  We have all suffered so much. Now that I have you

  I can’t bear for us to continue to live like this.

  We need to be together again. We need to be juntos

  even though I am afraid of Mexico too.

  But I don’t remember Mexico.

  I remember East LA.

  My school.

  Our yarda.

  Will we ever come back?

  We are cranes meant to migrate, right?

  It is possible we might

  one day, we might.

  Higher above the land

  than I have ever flown

  closer to the sun

  all below fades

  from buildings and brush

  to deserts

  into an ocean of clouds.

  I feel Papi’s words

  curl their way

  into my arms.

  Dulzura, struggle, beauty

  and they are mine too.

  Mami and baby Alba

  beside me.

  Cranes in flight.

  Soon, Papi’s

  waiting eyes

  will meet ours

  in the warmest hugs again

  he will see Alba fly

  for the first time

  and all those days

  without one another

  will swirl into a mist

  that forgives

  a wind that is love

  to help us face

  the thunder of danger, together.

                                          Soon, we will

  bring in our wings

  and touch the earth

  of another home.

  Dear Reader,

  Thank you for your courage to bear witness to Betita’s difficult story. While this is a work of fiction, much of what is shared is based on the experiences of real migrant children and their families. Her story is one that can be folded into a larger tragic and true story of the criminalization of migration that spans hundreds of years in the United States.

  The history of humanity across the globe is one of migration. The Americas were populated just this way. We know of Aztlán, one of the homelands of the Mexica people (the place Betita’s father, Beto, references in the myth), because it was a migration story told through the Codex Boturini (one of the few remaining books of precolonial Mesoamerica). On the surface, the reasons why we migrate are too vastly different to see any commonality. However, when we look closely, the need to migrate is very similar in both the human and animal worlds. If we look at migration patterns—not only of people, but of cranes and other species—we will notice what all migrants have in common: They migrate to survive changes to their environment and for their well-being. It is humans who have drawn the lines in the sand, erected walls and borders around their territories, and deemed people “illegal” when they cross those walls and
borders.

  The Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy saw thousands of migrant children, mostly Central American, separated from their parents, kept in cages, and treated inhumanely. This policy also brought about an increase in the number of migrants who died trying to cross the border or while in custody. Despite worldwide protest over the clear violations of human rights, this administration continues to hurt asylum-seeking children and families as its laws change for the worse each day to our continued horror. There is no compassion when migrants arrive, nor is there understanding for the reasons people are forced to flee their homelands with their children. I am heartbroken and appalled, not only by the Trump administration or previous administrations, but also by everyday citizens who support the message of hate toward migrants. The views of these people and their entitled claims to land and territory disregard the First Nations of the United States, hundreds of years of migration, and really, the human suffering that is at the very root of why people migrate.

  I wrote Land of the Cranes with an understanding of the long and devastating history of raids, separations, deportations, incarcerations, and deaths my community has suffered. But also, I wrote from an intimate place. I, like Betita, was an undocumented child. I was born in Mexico and brought to the United States as a baby. My childhood fear of “La Migra” (immigration enforcement) and how they could easily rip our family apart hung over me until we received our green cards, though this was not necessarily a guarantee of safety. The immigrant community in which Betita was raised in East LA, and the fears, stigmas, and prejudices her community faced are mine, too. Though I was never detained or deported for being a migrant, some in my family and many in my community have been. This is a story I had to tell for us. But this is not the only story. This book is part of a wider literary tradition by numerous authors who’ve been speaking to the wound of migration for many generations.

  I chose to name some of the characters in the book after children who died while in detention or while migrating. I did so with the utmost respect and love and also in order to honor their memory and add resonance to their lives—even if only within the pages of this book. I am hopeful more #ownvoices stories from the Central American perspective will rise to speak to the deep tragedies and sufferings these people have endured. These stories need to be told, especially because these communities—many of which are indigenous—make up the largest groups of migrants coming to the border today.

  While these injustices may seem impossible to challenge, this crisis requires we break open our own humanity to try to find positive solutions. Our solutions must be steeped in respect for migrants and for their heartbreaking circumstances, and those solutions cannot be achieved by building more walls nor by acting with cruelty. I believe in our collective loving spirit, and this book, this long picture poem, is my offering de esperanza.

  Thank you for taking the journey with Betita. May you, like her, search to find light in your darkest hour, or as her Papi says, “find sweetness in your struggle.” May you see that as a child, like Betita, you have the power to write, to draw, to speak up against and shut down the forces that seek to make migrants criminals. May your wings, your voice, help us, members of the human family, rise above the hate and carry the much-needed compassion and justice for migrants into a vast migration of change across the globe. All of us with love, flying, together.

  Turn the page for a sneak peek at Aida Salazar's award-winning The Moon Within!

  There is a locket in my heart

  that holds all of the questions

  that do cartwheels in my mind

  and gurgle up to the top of my brain

  like root beer fizz.

  Questions that my journal

  doesn’t keep so my little brother, Juju,

  or other snoops don’t read them.

  Questions that Mima

  knows how to answer

  but I’m too embarrassed to ask her

  because they might

  seem stupid    or gross            or wrong.

  Like, why have my armpits begun to smell?

  Or how big will my breasts grow?

  Or when exactly will my period come?

  I flush bright red

  right through my amber skin

  just thinking about it.

  It was so long ago that Mima was

  eleven, maybe she wouldn’t

  remember what it is like

  maybe she’ll make me talk about it, a lot

  maybe wind herself into a lecture

  about the beauty of women’s bodies

  that I don’t want to hear from her

  sometimes cactus lips.

  Maybe she’ll just think I’m

  delirious and say,

  Celi, are you running a fever?

  while she kisses my forehead.

  My locket also keeps secrets.

  Secrets tangle in the shyness of my tongue

  even when I try to tell them

  to my best friend

  Magda.

  Instead, my locket holds quiet my crush

  on Iván who is one year older

  than me and who can do a backflip

  better than the other boys in his capoeira class.

  Or the wish that Aurora, my “friend”

  would just go away and

  not have a crush on him too.

  Or how often I sneak the tablet

  from my parents when

  I’m supposed to be practicing

  music or dancing.

  Though I’ve never seen it

  I know my locket is there.

  It keeps my questions

  my secrets

  warm

  unanswered

  and safe.

  A beam of moonlight

  squeezes through

  my window’s curtain.

  Luna is out tonight.

  My eyes wide open like doors.

  I’ll be twelve in a few months, I should

  be allowed to go to sleep later

  than seven-year-old Juju, who shares a room with me

  but I’m not.

  No matter that it is Saturday.

  Round-cheeked Juju passes

  out the moment his head hits the pillow.

  And I stare at the May moonlight.

  I watch her light up a sliver of dust

  in my room.

  Like a performance

  small specks dance

  twirl,

                  bounce,

                                                      float,

                  glide,

  somersault.

  They dance like I do.

  I try to memorize their choreography

  to use during bomba dance class

  when Magda drums for me

  and I am free to improvise

  bring my own moves.

  I smile to think that specks of dust

  dance around me

  though I don’t hear music.

  Maybe they dance to the clicks and creaks

  of our little house in Oakland

  and the city crickets

  and Mima’s and Papi’s footsteps

                                          outside my door

                                                      Juju’s steady breathing.

  And when Luna is gone

  and I can’t see their floating

  I know they continue to dance

  in a dream

  with Luna and me.

  Mima says judging by my body

  that soon my moon will come

  and with itr />
  my moon ceremony.

  It’s a period, Mima, I tell her, not a moon.

  She whips back,

  It will come every twenty-nine days

  just like the moon.

  So it’s a moon cycle.

  She doesn’t know that the moon

  is a dancer to me, not a period.

  I dread the ceremony where she will gather

  all six of my aunts

  some of my dance teachers

  a constellation of grown-up women

  to talk to me

  about what it means to bleed monthly

  and worse, I’ll have to openly share

  my body’s secret

  my locket’s secret

  as if on display

  like a ripe mango on a fruit stand.

  I just about lose my lunch and I can’t

  roll my eyes back into my head anymore.

  Mima tosses her long night-black hair

  to the side to explain for the twentieth time

  while I turn my back and imitate her words:

  Our ancestors honored

  our flowering in this way.

  It is a ritual taken away from us

  during so many conquests.

  The thought of having to talk

  to anyone

  especially adults

  about secrets only meant for my

  locket makes my insides crumble,

  I won’t do it!

  Please, Mima, please don’t make me do it.

  Embarrassment will eat me up whole!

  I shout from my heart.

  Don’t worry, Celi, she calms,

  your body will tell us when it is time.

  Long and thick and

  painted bright red

  is how I dream

  they could be.

  But they are

  little nubs at my fingertips

  small, gnarled, and crusty.

  I bite them and don’t

  think about it like when you

  eat popcorn during a movie.

  I do it mostly when I listen

  to Magda tell me a story

  or when Iván is around

  and I pretend not to stare.

  Mostly it’s a nervous habit

  like anxious ants crawling inside my fingertips.

  My parents and my dance teacher, Ms. Susana, all say,

  Celi, stop biting your nails!

  But soon, up they zoom, right to my mouth

  when I’m learning new choreography

  or waiting for my turn to dance.

  Mima says I can’t paint them

  red until after I’m thirteen