My name is Podrigotuma and one of the things that was really powerful in my education was

learning poems about Irish resistance to empire. And often those poems were full of sadness

and even accusation. But what I was left with in learning these poems off by heart in Irish

and English as a youngster was the fact that there is something powerful to be celebrated,

but that is never an aim of vengeance on powers but really a way of keeping something alive

that needs to be kept alive.

Battlegrounds by Sotil Hulisa Bermejo, Gettysburg National Military Park.

Motorcycles and white tour vans speed between behemoth granite shafts.

Shove my body by their force. Leave me roadside and wandering fields.

Little is funny when your chicanna and walking a civil war site not meant for walking.

Regardless, I ask park rangers and guides for stories on Mexican soldiers,

receive shrugs. No evidence in statues or statistics.

In the cemetery, not one Spanish name. I'm alone in the wine shop. It's the same in the post office,

the market, the antique shop with KKK books on display. In the peach orchard, I prepare a

sails, sit cross-legged in grass and hold a smoky quartz to the setting sun. I invite the unseen to

speak. So many dead, it said Confederates were left to rot. In war, not all bodies are returned home,

nor graves marked. I Google Mexicans in the civil war and uncover layers to the treaty of

Guadalupe, Idalgo and Syncode, a mile. This is how I meet ancestors for the first time.

Heroes, this country decorates in clownish sombreros and fake moustaches.

Dishonours for fighting European empire on shared American land, power and money dictate can't be

shared. Years before this, carrying water gallons up in Arizona mountain ridge to replenish supplies

in a pass known as Deadman's, I wrote messages on bottles to the living, scammed Sonoran canyons

...