Michel Foucault wrote that an essential element of authoritarian racism is “the administrative prose of a State that defends itself in the name of a social heritage that has to be kept pure.” If administrative prose is vital to the mechanisms of persecution and oppression from a predatory state, then it should be possible for artistic and activist poetry to serve as the means of rebellion, the substance of defiance, and the inspiration for a reactivation of a humane impulse in our politics.
Martín Espada lives by this principle. The winner of a National Book Award and Ruth Lilly Prize, Espada is a lifelong activist. He began as a tenant lawyer representing Latino immigrants, and released his first collection of poetry in 1982. His recently published collection, Jailbreak of Sparrows, provokes deep thought about the nature of justice while deftly eschewing didacticism. Espada’s narrative poems masterfully manipulate language to interrogate a society that, as he puts it, has “systematically drained the blood” from the way we communicate about each other and ourselves.
Inspired by his late father Frank Espada’s own activism and artistry, he now confronts a country that threatens the values to which he has dedicated his work. While Espada is careful to note that Trump’s authoritarian, white nationalist threat is not unprecedented, its severity certainly gives painful urgency to his poems of struggle on behalf of Latinos, the poor, and anyone who believes in social justice and democracy.
I recently spoke with Espada over the phone about his new poems, the vicious assault on immigrants, book bans, and more.
Your father, Frank Espada, was a Puerto Rican community organizer in New York, and a documentary photographer of the Puerto Rican diaspora. You spent years as a tenant lawyer representing Latino immigrants, and through poetry and activism have continued to advocate for Latinos, the poor, and the oppressed. Both you and your father dedicated your lives to fighting and preventing what is currently transpiring on American streets – mass deportations, brazen violations of due process, an all-around assault on the humanity of Latinos. Given your multi-generational history with this struggle, how do you assess the current crisis of nativism, racism, and ultimately, fascism?
I’ll begin with the premise of your question, my work as an artist and an activist, my father’s work as an artist and an activist, and the despairing thought that crosses my mind at least once a day: My life’s work might be undone by what we are witnessing; worse, his life’s work might be undone. I watch the world go up in flames, a terrifying conflagration to witness, and then I think of my father, but also the Puerto Rican community of artists and activists over many generations, all that work, all that progress, all that blood.
Hopelessness has some basis in reason. It is not purely an emotional response – but it is a luxury I cannot afford, and certainly millions of others currently under the heel of the Trump regime cannot afford it either. How can we look at the roots of this disaster?
I’ll start with some numbers. The 2024 census figures show there are 68 million Latinos in the United States. Of those 68 million, roughly 20 percent of the population, more than 80 percent are citizens. What we’re seeing is the living embodiment of what the right-wing calls the “Great Replacement Theory,” the absurd notion that “they” want to replace “us.” Yet, the overwhelming majority of Latinos are citizens, so the right-wing political solution is to terrorize the most vulnerable part of the Latino population. That has enormous symbolic value for the Republican base. The Republican leadership can’t get rid of 68 million people, but they can demonize 68 million people. They can terrorize the undocumented, those with Temporary Protected Status undone, and they can revoke visas. They can create a special force called ICE to round up those people. They can incarcerate, deport, or disappear those people without due process. It’s the theater of sadistic glee, the theater of white nationalism.
When I say, “theater,” I’m not minimizing the real damage to real human beings, lives torn apart because of a wave of hysteria. We hear Trump saying that migrants “poison the blood of the country.” We look at Fox News creating the delusion of a so-called, “migrant crime wave.” But those buttons wouldn’t be there if they weren’t wired many years ago. But this is nothing new.
I grew up with the perception of Latino males as dangerous. This “dangerousness” divided itself into two categories: Criminal dangerousness or revolutionary dangerousness; Nixon’s crime in the streets or Ché Guevara. My father, who went to jail various times, fell into the second category. He was that most dangerous of creatures, a working-class Latino radical. He was in the Ché Guevara category. Most of the time the perception of dangerousness falls into the criminal category. See the grossly disproportionate rate of Latino males in prison, or the police brutality brought to bear against them.
The perception of dangerousness is dangerous. It puts you in harm’s way, leading to what we see on the streets with ICE rounding up migrants who, we’re told over and over, represent a crime wave. We see it in the violent acts of arrest, incarceration, and deportation. This goes back to my father’s generation, post-World War II. My father, at age nineteen and in Air Force uniform, was arrested on a Trailways bus passing through Biloxi, Mississippi because he refused to move to the back of the bus. He spent a week in jail. He said it was the best week of his life, because he figured out what to do with the rest of it.
To be a Latino male in this country often means that you grapple with the perception of dangerousness, be it criminal or revolutionary.
Part of your analysis is how language creates the perception of dangerousness. As someone who worked as an attorney, a field in which precision of language is important, and now as a poet, could you elaborate on the importance of language in this crisis, and what is the poet’s role in fighting it?
What we face is an existential battle, a tension in the language between humanity and dehumanization. We’re breathing in the language of dehumanization because it is the officially sanctioned language of our government. Such language serves as a prerequisite for acts of dehumanization. The people being rounded up and incarcerated, it follows, are not deserving of civil liberties and human rights.
The poet’s response should be to humanize the dehumanized, to restore the details of faces and voices to those whose faces and voices have been erased.
For me, that means narrative, the telling of stories that push back against the narrative of the dominant society. I ground the narrative in the image, in the senses. Combining the language of the senses with the impulse to tell the stories of the damned, despised, and dehumanized engages the poem in that struggle.
I had a professor at the University of Wisconsin, Herbert Hill, who would say, “Ideas have consequences.” Some poems have consequences. I can’t always see those consequences — sometimes, but more often not. Writing a political poem, paradoxically, is an act of faith.
You once told me that you consider one of your duties to be “rescuing the dead from oblivion.” In your new collection, you rescue many of the dead from oblivion, from Latino activists to victims of hate crimes to radical bookstore proprietors to, again, your own father. Is there a politics of memory that can help combat the politics of dehumanization?
Absolutely. What is happening in the present depends on historical amnesia. Some of that has to do with the perception of Latinos and other immigrant communities, but also the reality that people have forgotten how they’ve been swindled in the past by demagogues like Trump. Trump is the descendant of Roy Cohn most directly, but also Joseph McCarthy, Richard Nixon, George Wallace and countless other demagogues we’ve known.
There is absolutely a politics of memory. Invoking the names of the dead is necessary but not sufficient. When I write a poem for the dead I strive for what Robert Pinsky called “an elegy with an uppercut,” a phrase he coined talking about my elegies, miming a punch as he said it. The elegy with an uppercut remembers the one gone in some moment in their battle for justice, dignity, humanity.
In Floaters, there’s a poem called “Morir Sonando,” for Luis Garden Acosta. He was the best community organizer I ever saw, the cofounder of a multiservice community center called El Puente, “The Bridge,” in Brooklyn. He was a spellbinding speaker, a natural teacher. I followed him around in my twenties, learning everything I could. The poem is about what he teaches me, illustrating his principles and his vision by building a community center from the shell of an abandoned church in an abandoned community. I recall him rolling up his sleeves and fighting the good fight. That’s an elegy with an uppercut.
In a poem in the new collection, “The Puerto Rican with a Bolshevik Name,” you give an uppercut to the bigotry and parochialism of our society, but also to yourself.
I’ve reached the age, 68, where I’m addressing my regrets. Sometimes, I wish I could have a friend back so I could do what I should have done, what that friend did for me. Such a friend was Vladimir Morales, the Puerto Rican with the Bolshevik name.
He was a Puerto Rican activist in Amherst, Massachusetts when I lived there. I was in demand at the time. I spent more time in the air than on the ground. My poetry took me places I would have never seen, and I’m grateful, but I missed important things happening at home. That included what Vladimir was doing. He was on the school committee and a leader at the classic New England town meeting. He wanted to involve me, but I was resistant, because, theoretically, I had more important places to be. Once, he asked me if I voted for him in the local election. I hadn’t because I wasn’t there. I gave him the brushoff, but he kept coming back. In addition to his other work, he would raise the Puerto Rican flag over the Amherst Town Common once a year. It was an odd thing to see Puerto Rico colonize Amherst once a year. He dragged me into helping him raise the flag every year. I never knew the human being behind the politics as I should have. I never knew his true depth. Then I had a medical emergency. I would have died. Vladimir put me in his car and drove me to the hospital. If not for him, I wouldn’t have had the surgery that saved my life.
I left Amherst and we drifted apart. Eventually he died. I felt tremendous guilt. He was there for me, but I wasn’t there for him.
I wrote the elegy. I wanted his widow, Victoria Silva, to have it. Then Vladimir and Victoria got a joint award from a community organization in Amherst. In his case, of course, it was posthumous. I read the poem at the awards ceremony. It was useful.
That’s powerful, because so often, in our increasingly anti-intellectual and mercurial society, people tell us that poetry, and the arts and humanities more broadly, are not “useful.”
Above all, the poem should be useful. It doesn’t have to be an elegy. It can be a poem that turns someone’s life around.
The last reading I did was in Ridgefield, Connecticut. Afterwards, a young couple approached me with a baby. The couple introduced themselves as Ryan Irlanda Cruz and Caroline Ferguson. The baby’s name, it turns out, is Martín Albizu Irlanda Ferguson. I didn’t get it at first. I said, “What a coincidence. That’s my name.” I had never met a person named after me. I once met a dog named after me. The punchline is that Martín was born on the 7th of August. That’s my birthday. We were born on the same day, 67 years apart. There’s a cosmic connection.
I got an explanation that had to do with Ryan’s journey. He is a Puerto Rican from Houston. He served with the Marines in Afghanistan. He left the military and went in a new direction; he credits my book, Imagine the Angels of Bread, as essential. He is a student at Yale Law School in their environmental law clinic, interning with the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund in New York.
No one else has been named after me, as far as I know, but I have met people battling depression, recovering from substance abuse, or in prison, who tell me that the poetry did something for them. It helped them. It was useful.
Poets should not minimize themselves. I’m not going to say that poetry can change the world by itself, but it can change the people who can change the world.
That’s a natural segue way into the subject of book bans. If poetry can change people, is that why writers such as yourself, and not only poets, but novelists, journalists, and historians, are increasingly targeted by the Republican-led book bans in states across the country?
Yes. A regime like this depends on ignorance to wreak havoc upon the world — the ignorance of the Trump voter, the ignorance of the people who stayed home and didn’t vote, the ignorance of people who may have voted Democratic, but have stopped caring, because, for them, politics is something that happens in a voting booth once every four years. Ignorance is a prerequisite for the tremendous damage that the Trump regime is inflicting upon millions of people.
It’s easy to draw that line between ignorance and the suppression of books with a dissenting viewpoint. This is a regime not only interested in political control, but also control of the culture. That sets it apart from other right-wing governments that were strictly interested in political and economic control. This regime wants it all. That manifests itself in Trump taking over the Kennedy Center. The elimination of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is about suppression of dissent. I’ve had my issues with the corporate influence over their programming, but they gave us Sesame Street. PBS has been one of the few avenues where poets can get on television. That’s how I did it — through Bill Moyers, a great journalist who interviewed me twice.
Of course, they are going to do anything they can to engage in the suppression of books. The brush will get broader and broader. It begins with suppression of books about or from transgender people. It’s DEI, and DEI can mean anything.
There is a poem in Jailbreak of Sparrows called, “Big Bird Died for Your Sins.” The Sesame Street reference aside, there is a tie-in with censorship. In 2023, a children’s book called Roberto Clemente: Pride of the Pittsburgh Pirates by Jonah Winter, illustrated by Raúl Colón, was banned in Duval County, Florida, then unbanned after a national outcry. I’m friends with the gallery owner who represents the illustrator. I gave a reading in that gallery surrounded by Colón’s prints and started with “Big Bird.” Both the book and the poem focus on Clemente’s humanitarian sacrifice above and beyond what he did on the field. Both the book and my poem confront racism. That will get you classified as DEI and banned.
I know about book banning. Though we think of Trump as a beast that we’ve never seen before, there were always manifestations of his ugliness. In 2011, I had a book called Zapata’s Disciple, a collection of essays and poems, banned as part of the Mexican American Studies curriculum in Tucson outlawed by the state of Arizona. I was in good company: Howard Zinn, Jonathan Kozol, James Baldwin, Henry David Thoreau, and many important Latino and Latina writers, including Sandra Cisneros, Julia Alvarez, Gloria Anzaldúa, Rudolfo Anaya, Luis Alberto Urrea and Luis Rodríguez. Shakespeare’s The Tempest was on the list briefly, but his presence was too embarrassing even for Republicans.
This is a constant dynamic. The books may be banned, but the writers and the readers aren’t going anywhere. They can ban the book, but they can’t erase the mind and heart of a writer or a reader.
I hate to give this monstrous crew any ideas, but one of the poems that they would like to ban is “The Snake” from Jailbreak of Sparrows. It is a poem that juxtaposes the specificity of bigotry, and the overt support of fascism and persecution, and the specificity of victimhood. What use would you hope that poem would have?
At his “Save America” rallies, Donald Trump would read what he’d call “a poem.” It wasn’t a poem, but rather the lyrics to a song written by a jazz singer and composer, Oscar Brown, Jr. in 1963. In turn, he took the idea for “The Snake” from one of Aesop’s Fables, “The Farmer and the Viper.” Trump appropriated the lyrics without permission and used them despite the family urging him to stop, turning “The Snake” into an anti-immigrant parable. I forced myself to watch Trump do this multiple times so I could write about it.
He would tease the crowd. He’d say, “You wanna hear a poem?” or words to that effect. They would start screaming; they knew what was coming. He would pull it out of his jacket. The “poem” tells the story of a woman who finds a snake dying by the road, and nurses it back to health with milk and honey by the fire. The snake bites her, and she asks why, and the snake says, “You damn well knew I was a snake before you took me in.” This would provoke the biggest howls from the crowd. Trump would make explicit the connection: this was about immigration.
There were a few editorials at the time making the point that the snake in question was actually Trump. I thought, “That’s too easy. Work harder.”
My poem pivots from Trump reading “The Snake.” It so happens that while all of this was going on, there was a Department of Labor investigation into the use of underage immigrant labor on the cleaning crews of slaughterhouses. In my version of “The Snake,” the snake isn’t Trump; it’s a hose that an adolescent from Guatemala uses to wash down the killing floor in a Nebraska slaughterhouse. The fangs of the snake appear in images of skull splitters and bone saws in the slaughterhouses these kids had to clean in the middle of the night. I reference Grand Island, Nebraska because it was there that teachers noticed their students falling asleep in class with acid burns on their hands. One particular company, JBS, was notorious for using child labor in this dangerous setting.
Juxtaposition is everything. It’s not just that Trump calls immigrants “snakes.” Again, how do we humanize the dehumanized? We point to the labor they do late at night while the rest of us sleep.
Humanizing the dehumanized returns us to language. We’re living in a country where words no longer mean what they mean. We’re living in a country that has systematically drained the blood from words. The job of the poet is to put the blood back in the words.
Two poems by Martín Espada
Look at This
My father spoke: Look at this, he said to me. We were walking through
an alley from somewhere to somewhere else in Brooklyn. In front of us,
a man with white hair and white beard reached into a dumpster, plucked out a bag of potato chips, stuffed his arm up to the elbow
in the bag, let it flutter to the pavement at his feet, and shuffled ahead.
Look at this, my father said again. Sometimes, he would repeat himself.
He walked up behind the white-haired man, called Good morning, sir!
so the other man wheeled around to see us, shook his hand and left
a twenty-dollar bill in the handshake, all without slowing down.
We never spoke of it again. The day we left Brooklyn, he drove away
away so fast he left a stack of his 78s in the closet of the apartment
in the projects. Look at this was all he said, and all he had to say. Look.
The Snake
At the Save America rallies, after the damnation of the criminal aliens breaking
across our borders and 1,900 percent more murders, he would ask the crowds
if he could read a poem. This has to do with immigration, he’d say. The crowds would whoop and yip. He would read The Snake, words stolen from a song, from the hand of a dead Black singer who could not snatch it back, a jazz fable
spun on vinyl, a tale from the fabulist of Greece centuries before Christ.
The crowds would listen to the poem: Bikers for Trump, Cops for Trump, Uncle Sam in his beard, the Statue of Liberty in her crown, the millionaire who sells pillows on TV. They would testify in T-shirts that said, Jesus is My Savior, Trump is My President. They would hoist the Stars and Bars or signs that rhymed,
Trump 24 or Before. They would see the movie of the poem in their heads:
The snake frozen on the road, the woman scooping him up tight to nurse
him with milk and honey by the fire, the incandescence of his skin brought
back to life, the woman’s kiss and the viper’s venomous bite, her question
Why, then the words oozing from his tongue: You knew damn well I was a snake
before you took me in. The crowds would howl at the moral, at the punch line,
at the tender woman who would die of tenderness. Like a preacher spelling
out the lesson of a parable, their president would repeat: Immigration.
As they slept—the bikers and the cops, Uncle Sam and the Statue of Liberty,
the millionaire on his magic pillow—adolescents from Guatemala scalded
the killing floors at the slaughterhouse in Grand Island, Nebraska, their hoses like snakes spewing rivers that bubbled in the steam. Around them, the blades
of skull splitters and bone saws waited for their fingers to slip, fangs lurking
in the murk of early morning, in the daze behind the goggles on the faces
of adolescents from Guatemala, sleeping the next day at Walnut Middle School, shaken awake by teachers who spotted the acid burns on their hands.