Poems emerge from our own inner geography, which is itself often shaped by real geography. We may find our entire emotional life embodied in a particular river, mountain, or tree. History, too, belongs to our inner selves and is essential to who we are.

Faced with the Trump administration’s authoritarian, arbitrary, and cruel immigration crackdown, the people of our region, the people of the desert, see reflections of a long and tragic history of imaginary borders being used to divide people.

Here on our imaginary border, we have a natural affinity for migrants, as the immigrant experience has shaped our communities. What governments call a border is nothing more than a narrow river flowing through the desert.

Deserts are harsh environments, and the desert where I live is no different. In a land of sparse rainfall, the plants, animals, and people have learned to adapt to hardship. Giving and receiving hospitality is one of the ways that desert dwellers have learned to survive. In our community, people take pride in providing hospitality to immigrants, who have almost certainly had their own harsh experience of the desert on their journeys. 

But our land is more than just desert. It is also a place with a troubled history. The land where we live is land that was stolen from Mexico in the Mexican-American War. When this happened, hundreds of thousands of people who were living in our region became immigrants in their own land. Without crossing a border, they found themselves second-class citizens of a foreign country, forced to struggle to maintain their culture, language, and beliefs. This led to a long struggle by peoples of Mexican (and Indigenous) heritage for full recognition of their civil and economic rights, a struggle that achieved much but is now being undermined by the racist policies of the Trump administration.

We know, however, the lessons of history. For tens of thousands of years, our region was not a place of division but of interaction between peoples. Evidence of those interactions is found today in the trade goods from Mesoamerica that have been discovered at prehistoric sites across the American Southwest (in my poem, I use the Mexica word “pochteca” to describe the traders), in Mesoamerican religious and cultural influences such as the depictions of the water god Tláloc in ancient rock art throughout our region, especially near permanent sources of water, and in the stories of great migrations from the American Southwest to Mesoamerica.

The desert reminds us that we all live a precarious existence and that scarce resources should be shared by everyone. The Trump administration may call immigrants criminals, freeloaders, and enemies, but for all whose families are rooted in the immigrant experience—regardless of their backgrounds—the immigrant is, in fact, a sister, a cousin, an uncle, or a friend, and is welcome in our hearts and on our common land.