“Many Fires” was born from an intentional creative and cultural process. Through poetic, theatrical, and narrative techniques, community members grounded themselves in their commonalities and differences and their complex relationship to eight different topics. (Topics and resources for each are listed below.) After participants “identified” themselves, they explored data and policies that helped explain and reflect their experiences collectively and also enabled them to envision the world they wanted to create.

The creative exercises — Windows & Mirrors, Theatre of the Oppressed, Story Circles — have been utilized by social justice artists and warriors, nationally and internationally, and were adapted by A Scribe Called Quess?. The exercises coupled with poetry performances, dance choreography, and an original score, constitute the docudrama, “Many Fires This Time: We the 100 Million.”

 

“¿Qué es una Frontera? What is a Border”

Diana Cervera, poem for Many Fires This Time

Along la linea international between San Diego and Tijuana

Over 6,000 individuals line up at the San Ysidro US port of entry awaiting their turn to knock at

the empire’s gate hoping that with luck, their number is the one that is called today.

Mexican protesters line the port wearing red caps that read make Tijuana great again their ode

to American racism and a revelation of their own.

They shout “go home, go back to your country there is nothing here for you” at the Central

American families who wait in line the same rhetoric white nationalists on the other side spew

towards Mexican migrants…the hypocrisy is so thick it fills the air.

Refujiado-Refugee

One who has been forced to flee, to depart on exodus carrying tenacity, desperation and a

story..A name so desired yet so disdained. A title which can only be anointed after a trial by

jury, in which an individual must present a story so compelling that it would prove they have a

well-founded fear of persecution.

As if the perils of their journey alone are not reason enough.

As if crossing multiple borders and walking thousands of miles on foot does not suffice.

They wait at ports in El Paso and Arizona,Tijuana Mexicali.

Some float between ocean waves in the mediterrainin between Italy and Sudan, Greece and

Spain. If only they could reach land they might have the opportunity to share their story.

Should they make it, the journey will have been well worth the risk.

¿Qué es una frontera? What is a border?

It is the liminal space between two nations, where the distinction between freedom and

oppression is unclear. For there is a fine line between criminal and citizen.

Humanity forsaken for those caught between the push and pull of nation states.

It is a place where human currency is commodified and discarded at the whim of global tirants.

Where children lie awake in cages wondering when they will see their family again.

¿Qué es una frontera?

Es una herida abierta, an open wound where U.S intervention grates against the humanity of

millions.

It is la bestia

It is surviving off of sheer luck and the kindness of those along your path.

It is Haiti, Cameroon, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala in Tijuana.

It is asylum seekers awaiting trial in detention centers across the United States in cities like

Oakland San Francisco, San Diego, New York. It is people carrying nothing and everything.

¿Qué es una frontera? What is a border?

It is more than those who cross and those who wait.

More than I-589 forms, barbed wire, MPP, it is overwhelmed shelters along border towns

It is International street in Oakland California cutting through fruitvale and zooming past Oscar

Grant station.

It is Dulce, Sandra, Diana,

Refusing to let their joy be trampled by the oppression of exclusion.

It is families interlacing their hands through the gate in friendship park.

It is deported veterans awaiting their American Dream.

Sunsets over an ocean divided by a border fence.

It is falling in love on the road to freedom

It is changing the pronunciation of your name from Spanish to English from French to Spanish.

It is hiding your accent, bleaching your skin

It is resisting the heat of the melting pot

Black Migrants in Mexico shouting Justice for George Floyd, Breyona Taylor.

It is demanding justice for the life of a fallen Haitian compañero at the hands of Mexican police

“Justicia, No podemos respirar”

¿Qué es una Frontera? What is a Border:

It is where the stories of our collective resistance converge

Realizing the connections and intersection between our struggle for liberation

It is only a wall that will inevitably crumble brick by brick from Palestine to Tijuana to Morocco

For we are building un mundo sin fronteras

A world without borders

Where we will meet at the crossroads of our joy and celebrate the victory of our revolution