WE HAD OUR REASONS

A bilingual collaboration between several Mexican and Mexican American authors.

Ruiz describes this collection as a “poetry pulley” that “reel[s] in the poems made by rural poets with their friends, neighbors, co-workers and family,” including several Mexican immigrants and his own brother, who works for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The poems are presented in both English and Spanish, with shared bylines between Ruiz and his collaborators and some of Ruiz’s solo work mixed in. Many of the 13 contributors—most of whom are identified by their first names only—work agricultural jobs; some lack documents, and a few survived human trafficking. The book’s various sections address the stress of migration, the anxiety of deportation, and the difficult reality of pursuing the American dream. One of the uses of poetry is to provide catharsis that journalism and even memoir can’t facilitate. Centavo, one poet, recounts selling cannabis as a child with a local gang to help his parents: “They would come and get me— / my backpack full and / it wasn’t just weed any more. I moved other shit: / Ten thousand pesos for one trip.” In another poem, David Ruiz (the author’s brother) grapples with his role as an ICE officer: “Imagine that you’re established here. You got / your kids to pick up from school. / You own two cars and / you got a job— / and I’m supposed to pick you up and send you back.” The starkness of the language makes the speakers’ surveys of past wounds feel even more acute. Some longer works braid several perspectives together, such as one that puts David Ruiz and multiple other contributors in conversation as two sides of an interaction at the Mexico–United States border. Ruiz’s solo works provide a sort of bridge, offering accounts of an experience between two worlds. The power in all these poems is not in their desire to convince, to cause guilt, or to inspire but in plainly laying out the many costs that one pays to live in America.

An affecting set of poems about family, resilience, and moving forward.