By Emily Nuñez

A rebel crouches low in the mountain’s misty vegetation, broad-leafed palms and dense brush the only means of occlusion from the enemy in distant sight. The standoff calls for utter stillness and silence, on which the waning promise of life depends. The barrel of the rifle peeks between slender blades of grass, pointed at those who renounced the island for the mainland’s tyranny. The rebel inhales a steady, profound breath of fertile soil and warm dew, wishing to slow time and linger just a moment longer upon the earth. Survival is uncertain. The sheer necessity of the sacrifice is not. With a trembling exhale, he sinks into perfect precision and tugs the trigger, the culmination of commitment to the cause. To die for a history in the making is the closest to eternity one can pray for.

Rebel ancestors,
mares of the indigenous Earth,
beaten by man over the ages,
someday broken into blinders and horse tack
till the descendant herd found themselves trained and abiding,
only a fragment of the promise of glory.
We interact with their historic archives to little avail,
perhaps moved toward a fascination with those degraded voices,
not yet urged to take up their defense.

Iron hands construct offshore from the rubble of massacred nations,
trying to emulate their former greatness,
forever falling short,
yet winning over the illusioned along the way:
exodized godchildren of revolution

who accept elite machinations
and proceed as sterile utensils to the oppressive order:
purchasing material contentment,
consuming the spoils of distant labor,
paying fabricated debts,
idolizing feigned righteousness,
worshipping the mystic and disdaining the creator
because it is pleasant to imagine things come to exist from thin air.

We’ve been tricked into believing we have too much to lose.
Meanwhile, our backs are already to the wall,
all our lives but a favor on borrowed time,
mere invasive species to their eugenic landscape.

Witnessing rampant atrocities in passing has turned us ill.
Aghast at the violence and
desensitized to it at once,
we feel defenseless against those parasites that writhe through our
ears and eyes.
These worms feed
off the state’s infanticide,
mutilation of its children made casual,
treasons against humanity the
stories read just before sleep,
breeding grounds for our disabling infirmity.

The communal stasis that follows each tragedy sends us further into disarray.
Duty drifts beyond us
as we watch our sovereignty wither,
and let the parasites gnaw tenaciously away
at our coherence,
in constant bargain with all the reasons not to resist.
The horrors fog every path,
any way out somehow spiraling back to the center.

As state-sanctioned abuses follow the exodus overseas, hunting the racialized wherever they run, seeds of doubt sprout again in the injured Latin American psyche.

The resistance is generations behind the rebel’s kin, surviving as an inherited memory nearing religiosity in its powerful effect. A young descendant, long removed from the island, treks down an urban road lined by dozens of shops. It is a quiet, brisk afternoon; a few idle subjects and many buzzing signs at war for their attention. For years she has grown restless with her still life of relative comfort, her impression of peace rapidly distorting into truth with each global tragedy exposed. Saddened by this routine—now constant—contemplation, she pauses in her unhurried footsteps and looks up from the colorless pavement for the first time in several blocks. She hesitates beside a storefront—any storefront, the distinctions between the countless soon dissolving into nothing—and might have wandered inside were she not so self-aware of the irony of petty shopping in a world as cruel as this. She had been frozen, asleep, all this time ¡while the state martyred her own blood at any attempt to resuscitate the fight! How she winces now at the tremendous loss, and gazes around the consumerist purgatory in spite.

The parasites paralyze their host, and thus
inaction
is the state of equilibrium.
Yet deep in our anima,
tejido a nuestra alma,
is a tendency to revolt.
If we could only take from our own disease,
let the momentous rage erupt
and consume our encompassing system.
Devour the rich and their habitat,
and at last remake it our own.

The ancestors fought vigorously at every occupation.
Our history commands us to react.
As civilization arrives again at the crucial moment,
so does the countdown on our stagnation begin. ■