Former President Donald J. Trump said undocumented immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country” in a recent interview, language with echoes of white supremacy and the racial hatreds of Adolf Hitler.–New York Times, Oct. 5, 2023
In writing this letter I feel no pleasure. In not an ounce of my body nor a drop of my blood, crimson and impure with its dark tone and splattered on your streets, will you find the spite you assume I must be driven by. Though I know words will reach no heart that understands, I will nevertheless write.
I write to have a voice. You will not find me behind bars nor with my hands against the wall nor behind my back.
Back where I belong as if it had been my choice. As if I had been old enough to pick and choose the struggle of navigating through the extensive document lists and the frustrating bureaucratic immigration processes with heavy-lidded exhaustion. And through it all I heard your name, President Trump, as did my mother before me, and as will my children after me. I heard it at every corner and every turn. I heard my name, and my mother’s name, and my children’s names, and my neighbor’s name, and the names of any and all I had come to call my friends—of any and all I had come to call my family. In the mouths and the tongues and the ears and the laws of the people of the country they came from.
They who love so lawlessly your laws cannot contain them. They who sacrifice so willingly you are willing to sacrifice them. Those who know no better than to faithfully listen to the honeypot promises that lured them to your soil, just as they did in 2019 and in 1924 and in 1882 and in 1798 and in 1620. Who risk their voices and their lives and their children for the chance, for an Opportunity.
You, President Trump, who cares not for the wilting figure of the mother who is seventy-five barefoot miles too old, carrying children struggling to understand it all, children still too young to do so.
Too young to be Dreamers but too old to not dream, who will find themselves dreaming of endless fields of solitude in a language you will never understand nor will care to have interpreted. The children who pray to grow normally, with normal childhoods and normal lives, but who will never rid themselves of using normal to mean All-American. Instead of the kind that emerges from the abnormality of being an imagined, ethnic concept rather than a real, present person—instead of an adjective; though they will teach your children, President Trump, what a noun and an adjective are until your children cannot separate my children’s names from the nouns and the adjectives that describe them, no matter how much they bleach their skin and straighten and slick their hair and practice their American accents over and over and over and still.
And still you will confine them, though they claw and tear and scream—at night in their beds and in their college dorm rooms and in their corporate offices and in the cells you keep them in; because they are nothing more to you than the filthy, demeaning words your people come up with day after day after day; descriptions so detached from me that I cannot understand them.
¿Usted lo entendería, Presidente Trump? ¿Si lo único que usted entendiera fuera su nombre? ¿El saber que su nombre, Presidente Trump, es lo único que le queda para entender de mis insultos y mis apodos y mis ofensas de las cuales no se puede defender?*
Defending their souls and your soil, and still, they will receive the same unjust fate; because in your eyes, they all look the same and sound the same and talk the same and feel the same in the so-called diversified nation of the United States of America—the melting pot at the center of the world, where skin colors mix so much but will never turn into the pure, sacred, and untouchable white.
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*Would you understand, President Trump? If the only thing you could understand was your name? Knowing that your name, President Trump, is the only thing that remains for you to defend yourself from my insults and my nicknames and my offenses from which you cannot defend yourself?
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Ivanna Viloria Enciso is a new writer living in Arizona. Originally born in Mexico, she enjoys giving a voice to her community through her nonfiction political creative writing as she studies Political Science at Northern Arizona University.
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A native of Wisconsin, Jeri Griffith is both writer and artist who grew up in the Midwest. She regularly publishes essays and short stories in literary
quarterlies. Many of these can be accessed through her website and read
online. Jeri lives and works in Brattleboro, Vermont with her longtime collaborator and husband Jonathan, her best friend Nancy, and their two beagles, Molly and Ruby.
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Another Chicago Magazine 