What an honor it has been to be named poet laureate of Laredo for a two-year term. Poetry has always been an important part of my life. I still have my poetry books from grammar school, and I always promoted poetry during my 49 years as a Spanish teacher in our vibrant bilingual, bicultural border community. One of the directives I was given when I was named, was to take poetry to the community and demonstrate the diversity, uniqueness, and rich cultural heritage of our city.
As poet laureate in 2021, my first year, I held seven poetry workshops and participated in three community events. The workshops featured English, Spanish, and bilingual poetry. After various poems were read and discussed, the participants were encouraged to write. The first five workshops were virtual via WebEx, and the last two were hybrid. We’ve had great participation, and our virtual participants have included people from all over the country and even from outside it.
Because our September workshop, “Reflections of Life on the Borderlands,” had the most success, I am proposing to base the community-engagement part of my project on this theme. In the Borderlands workshop, we read Gloria Anzaldúa’s poem “To Live in the Borderlands Means You.” Several poets in the group shared their border poem, as did I, reading “Fronteriza / Border Woman” (which was featured on NPR back in 2003). These poems served as a prompt for the evening’s writing on Sept. 13. I will be reprising this workshop as my project: offering to schools, colleges, and the Laredo community.
I use Anzaldúa’s “To Live in the Borderlands Means You” as the cornerstone for the project not only because it is a poignant poem that addresses many of the conflicts that exist in the borderlands, but because—as I found out in the workshop—people respond to it and are inspired by it to write poetry about their own border experiences.
In Laredo, we are indeed a vibrant community that takes the best from two cultures to form our own unique way of life. And as Anzaldúa advised, we don’t give up. She urged that we “do work that matters,” and to me poetry is what matters. This project would be heaven sent, as it would deepen our understanding of what it is to be a borderlander, while also making it possible for us to share our border experience with the rest of the country—through poetry. It may not heal the wounds inflicted by the many border problems or the immigration policies, but it has the potential to heal our hearts.
(Attend and participate online at https://www.laredolibrary.org/write-poetry-laredo/)
