Ayling Zulema Dominguez

In a 1987 Texas federal district court case set to determine whether or not Ricardo Rodríguez, a Mexican man who had lived in TX for over a decade, could naturalize under existing racial restrictions on citizenship, Judge Thomas Maxey stated that Rodríguez could be

Classed with

the copper-colored or red men. … dark eyes,

straight black hair, and high cheek bones.

If we are copper, it is because of our earthen 

desire. The copper in my ears that allows me to still hear 

the voice of my abuela—voy envejeciendo y me acerco 

cada vez más a la tierra. From dirt we came and to dirt we will 

return, she reminds me. How good of our copper stories to 

be anti-corrosive, to be stored in our livers and kidneys, 

where excess can become poison, so we seek descendants vowed

to preserve a naturally occurring treasure threatened 

by unnatural possession, even if by means of mutation,

a skin electric. If we are copper, it is 

because of the way we must be mined for, extracted 

from the ore of our lands. Our copper blood 

that knows no nationhood. 

Aguatero y Limpiatumba 

En el Barrio Obrero my father fought until the cemetery soil refused

his blood. He stashed black eyes and bloody noses and ran

home after the ground got tired of catching him. He locked 

horns with the other schoolboys where no one would pull

them apart. Daring graveyard boys with an anger 

they could not yet place, an anger they could not yet stop. 

We are only as holy as our surroundings. I asked if he ever thought

the ghosts would haunt him. Nunca. Los fantasmas de la isla entienden 

la ira. What is a fight amid tombstones for a boy handed

the same killing device as massacring army and told to restore

the burial grounds. A boy whose father was administered 

a language test on his way home from work, just to prove 

he was Dominican enough to evade the machete. 

Island ghosts do not roll in their graves, they reach across 

a river named slaughter in more histories than one 

and clear the table for what comes after: descendants of 

descendants rejecting regurgitations of dictatorly desire.