Today marks the third anniversary of the El Paso Massacre, called “the deadliest anti-Latino attack in modern American history.” A shooter motivated by what he called a “Hispanic invasion” and the racist concept of “replacement” killed 23 people and wounded 23 more.
My dear friend Camilo Pérez-Bustillo is a human rights lawyer and former advocacy director of the Hope Border Institute in El Paso. He lived in El Paso. He used to shop with his family at the Walmart in El Paso where the massacre occurred. (He’s Colombian, but his children are Mexican.) I wrote a poem dedicated to Camilo and El Paso. It’s about the El Paso Massacre and more–an advocate for migrants in El Paso, his Mexican children, the haunted feeling that “it could have been us.”
The Faces We Envision in the Scrapbook of the Dead
For Camilo Pérez-Bustillo and the city of El Paso
A freak fall, you said. A bad landing, you said, a Colombian from Queens
always wandering a map of unknown places. The tumble down the stairs
of the brownstone in Brooklyn ripped your knees from their moorings,
ruptured both quadriceps, and in the whirlwind of an instant you could see
the flash between walking and not walking, breathing and not breathing,
like a fighter wheeled away from the ring on a stretcher as everybody prays.
The surgeons resplendent in white, priests hearing the god of ripped bodies
speak only to them, screwed your knees back on, sat you in a wheelchair
the way a ventriloquist props up the dummy, and then sent you home.
In El Paso, with braces on both legs, blood seeping through the bandages,
the bathroom a soccer field away, you waited for the boy you named Centli
to lift you up, his arms suddenly thick, your head suddenly on his shoulder.
You called all your compañeros the night he was born, jolting them from sleep,
translating the Nahuatl name, tender grain, deity of maíz in the Valley of México
Now, on weekends, he drove for Lyft, steering inebriated soldiers from Fort Bliss
to the strip clubs and back, as they balled up dollar bills by the fistful for him,
then the garters of the girls. Your girl, Lucecita, crossed the bridge from Juárez
to join you, a waitress swerving from table to table at the diner, her mother’s
name on the badge of her uniform. For you, she scrambled eggs with green chiles.
The wheelchair gone, the braces ready to go, came the day you saw in your sleep,
the day of muscle gripping bone like vines curling around the wrinkled trunks
of trees, the day you could walk with a cane in each hand. At the Walmart by
Cielo Vista, around the corner from the movie house where you would see
Centli’s Marvel heroes and their ropes of muscle, you picked out your canes
with ceremony, your boy and girl as witnesses, scrutinizing the aluminum
bones, the gray rubber handles, the suction cups anchored to the floor, those
diminutive spaceships. You paid for the tools of liberation and a roast chicken
at the checkout counter. No one could envision the faces in the scrapbook of the dead.
You would stand with the solitary man, all the way from Brooklyn, and his sign that
said Free Them at the migrant adolescent internment camp in the desert of El Paso,
and found your lawyer’s tongue as a carpenter finds the hammer, words nailed
in the air, then evaporating in the heat for reporters who could never write as fast
as you could talk, who said Could you repeat that, and so you did, till the delegations
from Congress swept into the desert with calls to investigate. You would stand again
at the microphone, thin as the mike stand, to tell the rally of the militia patrolling
the desert in camouflage, to name the men who hallucinated code names like Viper,
who raged of invasion to the migrants shivering in the sand at gunpoint, so you
kept talking, as if at gunpoint yourself, till the vigilantes evaporated in the heat.
August 3rd, 2019: at the table with Centli and Lucecita in the Ciudad de México,
you saw again the flash between walking and not walking, breathing and not
breathing in the headlines from El Paso. The shooter left his job selling
popcorn at a movie house to navigate six hundred fifty miles across the map
of Texas, stopping only to scald his throat with coffee or stare in the mirrors
of gas station bathrooms, the manifesto he nailed to the message board
shimmering in the mineshaft of his head: the Hispanic invasion of Texas,
open borders, free health care for illegals, cultural and ethnic replacement.
He meandered through the aisles of your Walmart by Cielo Vista, another
boy who would drizzle extra butter on the popcorn, then came back
wearing headphones and safety glasses, like a mantis with eyes swiveling
in search of prey, the AK-47 at his shoulder, the Mexicans in his sights.
Later, as the scrapbook of the dead flipped across screens and newspapers,
you saw a face you knew, a man oblivious to the headlines and captions
creeping at the edges of his snapshot like a wreath. He was a bus driver
for the city of El Paso, marched for the Army and the Chicano Movement,
sat a few times at the back of your class called Human Rights on the Border
and would raise his hand. How you long for a beer in a bar with him now.
How you wonder if your lawyer’s fireworks show of words burst in the sky
of the boy with the rifle, why he drew a circle on the map around El Paso.
In the vision you cannot swat from your eyes, you lean on your canes
at the Walmart, close to the checkout counter where the bus driver bags
the last of his groceries, as the crowd stampedes to the back of the store
with the gunshots popping in the parking lot, and your knees tell you
what your thudding heart already knows, that you cannot flee to dive
and roll under a table or a storage bin. Centli and Lucecita stand with you,
refusing to run with the others, leaving their father wobbly on his canes
in the medical supply aisle to face the bullets alone. Your boy’s arms
are suddenly thick around you. Your head is suddenly on his shoulder.