WE HAD OUR REASONS, Ricardo Ruiz

Business as usual seems beyond me right now, and I’m daily amazed by the advertisements that make their way into my email-inbox—including from writers merrily chirping about new classes and life changing strategies for writing “your next best-seller!”

But here’s me. Dropping some of my 2024 goals, downsizing from the usual blog reviews, but still reading poetry and still wanting to share amazing poets with you, particularly the ones who are sustaining me just now.

We Had Our Reasons, a Washington State Book Award winner from 2022, is one of the books I keep picking up.

This community effort was created by poet and translator Ricardo Ruiz. On the cover, we find not only Ruiz’s name, but also: “and other hard-working Mexicans from Eastern Washington.” It was published by Pulley Press, an imprint of Clyde Hill Publishing (Seattle, WA).

Each poem appears in the language of the writer (or collaborator), and in English translation. Thus, “Un saco de dormir y un semi,” by Centavo and Ricardo, on one page, and on the facing page:

A Sleeping Bag and a Semi

I came from Mexicali across the border.
There was work for me in Arizona.
I crawled into the gray sleeping bag,
hearing the zipper, feeling the tape
tighten around my legs and body.
I became a gray balloon floating into
the storage compartment
where the trucker kept the chains.
My mind, clouded by the smoke.
I meet the sky again
in Nogales.
I was born in California,
so I could have walked but I didn’t know.
I was bound up in not knowing.

—Centavo and Ricardo

The voices of the poems vary. Many are young, sounding a bit like any suburban kid dealing with divorcing parents, Game Boys, attempts to buy beer. Some, like Centavo, work alongside their parents in the fields. Many of the voices sound to me older, worn out with work and trying to keep families together. Ruiz’s own poems often address his service in the U. S. Military. The profiles of the collaborators are in prose, in the back of the book. We Had Our Reasons has a cumulative power that moved and educated me.

These are the people who will be threatened with deportation in the coming years.

After Ten Years They Came Back Again

My Social Security is good.
When I was detained
on the bus outside of Indio,
we filled out the paperwork.
So, I have been legal to work.

The call came in
while I was at lunch.
Don’t clock in.
Head straight to HR.

The officer told me
I had two choices
– walk out with them
– or be taken out in handcuffs

The shame shot into me
that I was wrong
as ICE paraded me out of my workplace.
I’d worked there seven years.

They took me to my house.
Let me change out of my scrubs
and we waited for my mom.

—Patty and Ricardo

You can learn more about the book at https://www.poetruiz.com/reasons.

To learn more about justice for migrant farm workers, visit this site: https://www.wslc.org/immigrant-toolkit/.