I’m just a human being trying to make it in a world that is rapidly losing its understanding of being human.—John Trudell From Our Land to Our Land by Luis J. Rodriguez A week after the national elections in November 2016, a muscle-bound tattooed white man stood outside a large room at San Bernardino Valley College in California , berating the mostly brown-skinned students trying to get inside. He lashed out about how they don’t belong, they’re criminals and job stealers, you know, the corrosive anti-Mexican rants that have increased in number since President Trump’s 2016 campaign. The college invited Xicanx spoken-word artist Matt Sedillo and me to speak and read poems. A few people wanted to chase off the dude. Security had already been called. I said I’d prefer for him to come in and listen. If he still wanted to rant, we’d handle it. Sure enough, he found a seat among the standing-room-only in attendance, about four hundred people. I told the group that even though I’m of Mexican descent I’m no immigrant. My mother had roots with the Tarahumara people from the state of Chihuahua , Mexico, also known as the Rarámuri. This tribe is associated linguistically, and in other ways, to the Hopi, Shoshone, Paiute, Tohono O’odham, and Pueblo, all the way down to the Mexica of central Mexico, the Pipil of El Salvador, and Nahuatl-speaking tribes in Nicaragua. In fact, they have ties in many ways with tribes throughout the hemisphere. The Rarámuri are also linked to the so-called Mogollon peoples of prehistoric times. Just before I was born, my mother crossed an international bridge from Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico, to El Paso, Texas. The year was 1954. I’m an “anchor baby”—and so what. Migrants from Europe included many pregnant women lining up at Ellis Island, some ready to burst—350 babies born there in its fifty-year history. They knew, because of law, that a US-born child helped their residency claims and later citizenship. Criminalizing or demeaning anyone for this is ridiculous and inhumane. More notably, the Chihuahua desert cuts a large swath through the US Southwest and northern Mexico. The Rarámuri have WORLDLIT.ORG 81 COLLAGE MURAL BY MELANIE CERVANTES, JESUS BARRAZA, AND LIANNE CHARLIE. PHOTO BY MAXIME FAURE resided in the Chihuahua desert for at least eight thousand years of the desert’s existence —way before the Spanish, Portuguese, English, or French, before borders, before “legal” documents. El Paso is within the confines of this desert, which intersects two nations and several states. When my mother gave birth to me across the border, we went from our land to our land. During our reading and talk, the white dude who had been heckling students on the way in didn’t say a word. Slowly, and quietly, he left the room. I’M WRITING AS a Native person. I’m writing as a poet. I’m writing as a revolutionary working-class organizer and thinker who has traversed life journeys from which incredible experiences, missteps, plights, and victories have marked the way. My trajectories have been primarily in the United States but also across countries , beyond seas, through many languages . In spirit, I’m borderless. Nonetheless, I acknowledge the fabricated reality of passports , borders, race, and social classes. I’ve lived in particular areas of this earth, including where my immediate ancestors have long strode, abiding by natural law but also man-made law, some of which align with nature, most of which don’t. I also know this—I belong anywhere. Wherever the earth accepts my footsteps , welcoming my blood, my tears, my presence, as it does anyone regardless of skin color, sexual orientation, gender, or personal and societal traumas. This is Mother Earth after all. While we may each have our own particular mothers, she’s mother to everyone . I’m not talking about the fatherland, the patria, where the word “patriot” comes from, of nationhood that men created to bring together those with shared history, language, economy, and culture for home markets, governance, and identity. Nations exist...