I

The humans call the road boca del lobo after a wolf mouth because there is so much blood. The wolf mouth is man-made. The grief is wild, carnivore. People were left to perish in a semi-truck in la boca del lobo, Texas in 2022. Each loss has a human name. To have been named is to have been seen, held, loved.

Faraway, the wolves howl at the super blood wolf moon while U.S. citizens install miles of concertina wire along the Rio Grande. The elegant sound of the word “concertina” denotes a range of meanings: a squeezebox musical instrument that is part of the accordion family (even a musical instrument belongs to a family), whose bellows expand and contract so that the middle appears to collapse on itself; an action meaning, per the Cambridge Dictionary, “to fold, crush, or push together.”

The sharp-bladed concertina wire spirals along the riverbank while in the deep waters the floating barrier bobs and curves, a gigantic snake body with a long flexible spine. The neon orange buoys are connected, webbing anchored to the riverbed. The purpose of the floating barrier is to deter migrants, to dislodge humans. The security defense marketing copy for concertina wire says that its purpose is to “prevent entry of enemies or animals,” to complement immigration policies that crush and collapse the middle through displacement and separation of families.

The soaked and sacred footsteps of children, all flesh and fabric caught in the riverbank’s teeth. The river’s waters whisper: Children are sacred. Children are sacred. Children are sacred.

Even the inanimate concertina wire recognizes the cruelty and asks to be swallowed deep into the belly of the earth. The earth hears the prayer of the concertina wire: I’ll come for you. I’ll put an end to this. You were meant to do something greater than hurt children seeking safety at a border.

One of the men heard the cacophony of the river song, the concertina wire’s prayer, the earth’s promise, the children’s cries. He couldn’t get the song out of his head. At some point in his workday, he sent an extraordinary email from an ordinary computer to shine a flashlight into the river’s razor-sharp man-made mouth. I imagine the water flooded, soft and fresh to cool his ankles. His shoes squeaked as he walked water-logged down the hall. The news broke. The water broke. The hearts broke. Everyone and everything implicated in the brokenness. Man-made; man-destroyed. Whistle blown.

***

In 2019, I often crossed paths with the same person on my daily bus commute to downtown Portland. One morning I mouthed, “Thank you” when I saw them on the street holding a sign: Children Do Not Belong In Cages. I saw them on my lunch breaks alone in the middle of the plaza as people wolfed down food from nearby carts. This person held their sign, rain or shine: Children Do Not Belong In Cages. Their strong arms reminded me amidst all the noise and self-focused hurry that children were detained in cages, separated from their parents. Sunshine pulsed over my skin as I imagined the fear of children. Children are sacred. 

Two decades ago, in the early aughts, I had seen children heavy with fear while working as a bilingual case manager supporting families in domestic violence shelters, in both San Francisco and Los Angeles. Many had fled violence in their home countries only to find it in the United States. Magda lived in the shelter where I worked. When Magda crossed the border she hid in a body of water overnight. The water was up to her neck. The water was cold. The water kept her safe. She shivered then, in the body of water, and again, in the remembering. Her eyes watered. Mine did too.

People who don’t understand the complexity of domestic violence ask, about those who remain, “Why do they stay? Why don’t they leave?” And those who don’t understand the necessity of migration ask, about those who flee, “Why don’t they stay? Why do they leave?” I’m not sure those who ask even want answers or are prepared to listen. They’d rather the river drown out the sounds.

I could point to the pervasiveness of femicide and gender-based violence, or to domestic violence lethality indicators and statistics that confirm how leaving is the most dangerous time. I could run through the Power and Control Wheel, a domestic violence pie chart with factors related to intimidation, isolation, economic and emotional abuse, and the use of children as pawns by parents. For undocumented families, the absence of citizenship and residency privileges increases danger. At the border, families who flee violence on foot are met with military tactics and those who make it to safety are met with policies and people who scream, “Go back to where you came from!”

By the late 2010s, I was volunteering as a creative writing teacher with unaccompanied minors who were detained crossing the border and incarcerated in Portland. I printed lyrics of requested favorite songs in Spanish and we read them out loud together. In some cases my Spanish wasn’t useful as the young men spoke Indigenous languages. Others weren’t able to read or write much, so instead we drew. One boy, who was maybe fifteen years old, told me he had crossed the border eight times already. His eyes were glazed over, sunken and far-away.

II

I stare at a photograph of my Uruguayan father in his mid-fifties, holding my baby sister in his lap. It was 1986. We lived in Peru as a family during a time of civil unrest and political violence. My white American mother, in her late thirties, would leave him soon—but not yet. He looks like he just got off work. It’s late at night. His hands cradle my baby sister gently, the way she will cradle her firstborn daughter in a pandemic after his death.

Sometimes the places we break bread are also where we break spirits. Some men in my lineage—across timelines, bloodlines and continents—have smacked, punched, wielded knives, carried loaded guns, pounded fists on tables, or threatened lives, in the kitchen or at the dining table, often when they themselves were still boys. The most domestic of places, the most domestic of violences. As a young person, I noticed how their addiction manifested at social gatherings and celebrations, in the exhaustion of overwork, in the sharp melancholy of being a little drunk, a little high. And I know now how trauma, mental health, and addiction are tributaries that flow through generations and borders. Violence to the self is often the most convenient coping mechanism—the alteration and emptying out of reality to dull the pain of invisible wounds, or to time-slip to the past or future, anywhere but here.

The first time I saw the Power and Control Wheel, I was in elementary school. My mother held the xeroxed piece of paper in her hand as we stood on the cold kitchen tiles under the steady sunshine of California. This was after the divorce and restraining order secured against my father. One day, after nearly two decades together, he had lost his temper, become physically violent with her, and threatened her life.

We had left him—along with our home, friends and belongings—in Peru. My sisters and I had no idea we were leaving our home and our father for good until we arrived in California. My mother had a U.S. passport and a teacher certification to buffer the rupture of returning to Los Angeles County as a single mother with three daughters—and even so, she feared for her life when she left.

She was a high school Spanish teacher who stopped speaking Spanish in the home, as a way of forgetting my father. Eventually she fell in love with a white American man. They dated for several years. They both loved rock and roll and the mountains. When I was in junior high, she married the man and we moved in together for the first time by relocating to rural Colorado.

The man had a beard like a werewolf and once we moved in, he transformed. Out came a cycle of cruel behavior he’d endured as a child and now, replicated as an adult. He bared his teeth at me and my sisters in strange, sudden ways. My mom took us to a domestic violence shelter for several weeks. We left the werewolf alone with his mountains and returned to Los Angeles County.

My maternal grandmother, too, had married more than one werewolf. She never had to hide with water up to her throat, but one of the werewolves did hold a knife to her throat in the kitchen. She left him and the others. She lived alone as an elder, as my mother does now.

***

When I text my mother and sisters:

OMG it’s the super blood wolf moon tonight. [wolf emoji] [moon emoji] [blood drop emoji]

What I mean is:

We are more than the hurt we have caused or endured. Our inheritance is vaster than violence.  I want to cradle the frightened light of the super blood wolf moon.

***

I went from being a child in a domestic violence shelter to an adult working with children, youth and families impacted by violence. For years I focused my attention on the ways that bodies, and systems governed by bodies, harm each other, and how to prevent and recover from that harm. If I could hang out in the mouth of violence, I thought, then maybe I could understand how it played out in my own lineage.

I took training in crisis intervention, violence prevention and childhood trauma. Eventually, I was invited to speak on panels and contribute to policies. I was called a subject matter expert. But I didn’t want to be one. What I wanted was for the pain I had gone through to be useful to another person. What I needed was to reckon with grief which, as it turns out, is a consequence of love.

I saw patterns in how violence fed off itself. I studied the individual, interpersonal and collective wreckage of the sophisticated art of violence: man-made and moneyed, a borderless black hole that ripped through the universe shredding bodies. Proximity as a point of no return: a kitchen window spaghettified, shards of glass stuck to a fist; a street pancaked, bullet casings hot on the sidewalk; a sharp-toothed river laden with concertina wire. I saw that the black hole’s heartbeat was well-fed, tidal-forced, time-stretched, light-swallowed.

I used to do lethality assessments while working on high-priority domestic violence cases. If I had to do a mock lethality assessment for the black hole of violence perpetrated by the United States, I’d run out of ink: access to weapons, escalation of violence, threats or attempts to harm or kill.

Papers, certifications, and dreams are obliterated across borders, and within them. Safety, status, and the body are permeable like water.

***

My grandmother’s dream was to be a dancer, but her mother—the same one who didn’t protect her from an abusive father—told her she wasn’t good enough. Instead, she taught piano lessons and ran a preschool from home before becoming a public school kindergarten teacher. When my grandmother was in her eighties and could no longer walk, she swayed her arms to classical music on the radio. Her gentle blue eyes were lost in the music. She surrounded herself with art and beauty, house plants everywhere, objects and clothing found second-hand at thrift stores.

She encouraged me to immerse myself in beauty too. So when I longed for Spanish and longed for my father, I listened to cassette tapes in Spanish in my room on Friday evenings. I cycled through the sad boleros of Roberto Carlos and Julio Iglesias, the rumba flamenca fusion “cantes de ida y vuelta” by the Gipsy Kings, the ranchera music of Linda Ronstadt’s Canciones de Mi Padre. I listened to music that my father and I shared a love for, to close the continental distance between us. I wasn’t the only one in my family who played songs on repeat. My father’s post-divorce theme song was Michael Bolton’s “When I’m Back on My Feet Again,” while my mother’s resurrection song was Stevie Nicks’ “Stand Back.”

To echo Bjork’s song “Headphones,” music saved my life, along with those of so many people I love. Maybe yours too. The swaying of hips, the throat humming, the collective balm washing over us. I reached for music and poetry in elementary school. I choreographed dances in the closet mirrors at home to Janet Jackson, Paula Abdul, Gloria Estefan, C+C Music Factory, Salt-N-Pepa. In junior high, I found classic rock, hip hop, house music, Art Laboes’ Dedicated To You compilations of funk, soul, and blues.

In high school, I continued to seek out the ballads of melancholy men in Morrissey, The Cure, and Elliott Smith. I was drawn to alternative rock music: indie rock, punk rock, art rock, psychedelic rock, emo, folk. I sought out experimental underground music scenes where I could join a sea of rhythmic bodies, sweat, and sound. There was so much to lose myself to, but above all else, my hands reached for mixtapes, pen and paper, and eventually my own guitar. I joined a constellation of solo femmes with loop pedals and made walls of discordant sound.

My father told me how as a teenager, he ghost-wrote love letters as favors to his male friends in military boarding school. After his death, I held some of his lyric auto-fiction in my hands: paper as a soft-field landing for vulnerability, armor dropped away for lyrics. Like those before me, I continue to surrender to music and words in a freefall. Like with water, the more you brace yourself for a wave—the more you fight against the current—the more you lose.

III

In early January 2025, Bad Bunny releases DtMF (DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS), an album flowing with Puerto Rican sounds from past to present, lush hybrid rhythms to move body and soul. I play the album on repeat alongside the rest of the world. Our neurotransmitters light up with euphoric waves of pleasure. I wish my father could be alive to hear this album; instead he must listen and dance through me. I text a loved one, “This album might be the best thing about 2025.”

But then I brace myself. When things feel good, I’ve often leaned on high pattern recognition and hyper-vigilance as I look for danger and catastrophe around the bend. My shoulders tense as I watch the Los Angeles County fires close in around the people and places I love. At night, I strum my guitar and write a love song for the city that I left fifteen years ago, but that remains mine—places lodge their ways into our hearts, the way people and songs do.

Before the month’s end while the fires are still burning, the White House issues an Executive Order titled “Protecting The American People Against Invasion,” which includes the Alien Registration Requirement. In a hyper-compressed timeline, the country starts doubling-down on exclusionary practices, de-documentation and broken agreements. People risk deportation to “third countries” that they have no ancestral ties to and where they sometimes don’t share the language. Trans, intersex and nonbinary people are denied safety, healthcare access, and freedom of movement. U.S. citizens are detained for the color of their skin and their political views.

Language slips into grim dissonance: “big, beautiful bill” stands in for small and cold-blooded. Names signal brute force: “Alligator Alcatraz,” an animalistic alliteration so blunt and boastful. The literalism is relentless; words lift off the page and become multi-dimensional.

Public space becomes like outer space, like sci-fi. Locations become sites of dislocation; places that were once safe become sites of violent vanishings. Daywalkers with transparent skin cosplay as ICE agents as if it were Halloween. The agents cover their faces and their last names; they travel in unmarked vehicles with tinted windows. No one is certain who is a real agent or not.

The agents abduct street vendors selling fruit, ice cream, flowers, tamales. Inanimate objects are left on street corners: giant pots go cold on a portable grill, ice cream melts in a cart. People with dark skin are kidnapped, regardless of their citizenship status. I read about the curfew zone, a one-mile area in downtown Los Angeles, and I listen to the protest drums, chants and songs that offer people a space to dance together at the sites of these vanishings. I watch mariachi groups traveling on foot, and bandas composed of musicians who use truck beds as mobile stages—to serenade federal buildings, and the hotels where the daywalkers attempt dreamless sleep.

Driven by detention quotas, these daywalkers extend their terror past Los Angeles to the farms of Ventura County where agricultural workers harvest strawberries, cannabis, and vegetables. There, they round up men with brown eyes and furrowed brows like the ones I inherited from my father. These men are someone’s father, husband, brother, uncle. A father soothes his child in a calm voice while a daywalker smashes the car window. Another runs for his life during a raid and loses it, leaving a child fatherless.

I close my eyes and imagine a psychedelic timeline where the Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever” plays while Mother Earth awakens, hungry and fed-up, rumbling, “You don’t bite the hand that feeds you.” Instead of composting the ripe fruit smashed under the agents’ combat boots, the land opens up to swallow the agents themselves. With the passage of time and the help of worms, their corporeal matter will decompose to bear fruit for a future harvest.

I open my eyes. Then I watch a video of a woman who is clinging to the waist of a jacaranda tree. The witnesses film and shout while the agents rip her from the tree. They shove her into a vehicle while another woman screams, “¿Cómo te llamas?”

I zoom in on the tree’s blue-purple flowers shaped like trumpets. The jacarandas, a name from the Guaraní Indigenous language meaning “fragrant,” are sub-tropical trees from South America. They aren’t from Los Angeles and that’s exactly why they belong here. The jacarandas are part of an infinite body of dreams reinvented a thousand times, in hundreds of languages, in one of the most diverse cities in the world. The trees make the city more beautiful–just as they do in Mexico City thanks to the vision of Tatsugoro Matsumoto, an imperial gardener who migrated from Japan.

I imagine the jacaranda tree’s twisted branches full of flower-trumpets whispering, I recognize your shape in mine. Does the jacaranda feel the tree-hugging woman’s fear, as her heart beats against the trunk? How long will the jacaranda mourn not being able to give her refuge, the way its branches offer shelter to winged creatures?

I don’t know all the names of the plants, animals and humans that surround me, but I never had to know their names to know what is sacred. I never had to speak the same language to want to protect another being. My light skin, my English without an accent, my citizenship and racially ambiguous appearance may protect me today, but not tomorrow.

***

As the United States invokes the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, I consider the nation’s historic use of the term “illegal aliens” to describe humans who migrate. The iconic sci-fi movie Alien is an example of the visceral terror that a collective imagination can conjure for the monstrosity of the Other. What allows humans to treat the Other with such a sustained escalation of violence, enacted cool-headed and sober by the light of day? You’d have to first see another person as animal, monster, or alien–and decide that non-human life is not worth as much as yours is.

I scroll through my photo library until I find the picture: my hand holding my father’s naturalization certificate. I zoom in to the document’s date, June of 1977. I stare at his alien registration number: the letter “A” for alien, followed by eight numbers.

His exile from Montevideo to Los Angeles was aerial, not fluvial. He did not wade through rivers. He was a lucky alien to be registered, to be counted. But migration, diaspora and frequent relocation made belonging slippery. He lost his home and faced assimilation, code-switching, and shape-shifting more than once. His grief was an imaginarium that kept fragments of him underwater in the Atlantic Ocean of Uruguay’s coastline—the way my grief slammed down on me and my surfboard in the Pacific Ocean along the California coastline, after his sudden death in the early aughts.

I do research about the year 1968, the year my father migrated to the United States—and I notice how it mirrors the present-day. A global escalation of violence and protests. Poets, folksingers, and musicians—such as La Nueva Canción movement of the 1960’s and 1970’s—in danger for tapping into the collective power of music. A fascination with extraterrestrial life during the Cold War’s “flying saucer era,” when the U.S. Air Force studied U.F.O.’s through the Project Blue Book Program—just like the Pentagon spent millions on its Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program between 2007-2012.

If my father was an alien, that makes me part-alien too. I look skyward for flying objects. Winged bodies remind me of my father, who as a young boy pointed to the sky and named his dream to be a pilot. As a young man, he became a pilot of the Fuerza Aérea Uruguaya, and as a middle-aged immigrant to Los Angeles, he left behind his wings to become an airplane mechanic. I wonder whether aliens have a name for us. Is “Anthropocene” their word for grief? Do they listen to love songs when they go cruising in their U.F.O.’s? Would they understand homesickness and why humans dedicate songs to each other across distances as vast as prison bars, as far as death?

In the mid-aughts, I saw this power of song at work when I taught creative writing in Central Juvenile Hall in Los Angeles. The youths there faced long sentences, including some that were for life. I never asked how they got there. Their cases were open, so I always had to remind them not to put anything in writing that could be read as incriminating evidence. But I learned through their poems and stories how violence in their homes and communities had impacted their lives.

Our space was a small room with a closed door and large glass windows, so the guards could always watch us from the outside. We sat elbow to elbow at a table with paper and pens. The pens had to be counted and returned to me before anyone could leave the room. Whenever someone needed a music beat to accompany their writing, their peers would thump their fists and open palms on the table. Bodies became instruments. Chests became drums. Fists became songs. Words and rhythm became an excavation of hope where none should have been.

Aliens and people alike will always find a way to hear music in the silence, to bend light around black holes. Music tethers us to each other and to our dreaming for a future. In a fight-flight stress response, drumming, chants, rhythms and melodies soothe us and bring us together, activating the “wandering” vagus nerve that runs riverine through our bodies. I’ve felt as a singer-songwriter how grief and pain have transformed in my body through song.

I read about increased personal safety measures that immigrants have to take while driving, which includes not listening to music in Spanish. And I remember how my father and I, both half-aliens by then, danced and sang in Montevideo in the living room, during his last year on Earth–how all our worries washed away for the length of a song, gave us respite, like the ocean shore’s inhale and exhale.

***

You can’t take music out of a person, any more than you can take the water out. Water, like music, is essential to life on earth; even as it can swallow us whole or flood us, it can protect us. My body, more than half water, carries grief whether I name it or not. My grief sloshes around, occasionally tidal-waved, an ocean beckoned by the moon. Perhaps the water inside of my body wants to be drained dry, to let me start anew. Perhaps the water also wants to be cleansed.

Perhaps it is too much to bear alone, and so we must come together, offering our bodies as musical instruments. I imagine us at an estuary, a natural riverbank—no man-made razor teeth, just a soft muddied gummy mouth. I dip my hands into the shallow pool. I bring the clouded water, thick with sediment, to my lips, and I close my eyes in grief. Overnight more of us were swallowed by the water. Now there are fewer of us. But no one can take the river’s song. We hum in water tongues.

If you haven’t made it to the shore yet, I’ll wait for you. At our feet there is a blanket of purple petals from the jacaranda trees—a fertile ground, a place to rest. You hold my wet hand and I feel the weight of it, our dignity. Our clumsy, trembling, tired hands—tethered to the sun, the blood moon, our songs and each other. We orbit violence—the gravity of it, your extraterrestrial hand in mine.