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Migration
- University of Arizona Press
- Chapter
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4 Migration The white blue of daylight shrinks to a rip, and the geese seem to slip through but don’t. They crush on through the stitched darkness, past the New Mexican/Mexican border, year after year. It is the movement I want to remember, illiterate and surviving like my great-grandmother mending the pants of soldiers bunking down in the scrub grass, her needles made of cactus spine embedded in a sack of goods strapped to her back. One peso for washing, two for sewing. The unwritten story goes: she sold more than salvaged clothes, marching with a traveling brothel. I don’t think words can explain it, the indiscriminate passing and desire to persist. I’ve seen one picture of her in front of a clapboard church in Earlimart, California, hands together, plump face belying the white feathers barely visible under a veil. If I can say anything, I’ll say I descended from a migrant bird. Even in the fading picture, she seems to be telling whoever held the camera to hurry up by standing perfectly still. ...