Scary Poetry - fit for Halloween

Date: Friday, October 31, 2003 2:36 PM

JOB DESTRUCTION NEWSLETTER

www.ZaZona.com

The poem below was sent to me by a high school teacher in the
California Bay area. It is being used in high school and college
English classes throughout the nation. The following links are for its
use in college curriculums.

http://www.cl.uh.edu/itc/course/LITR/4332/po1ch.htm
LITR 4332: American Minority Literature
Student Poetry Presentation, fall 2001

http://www.flsouthern.edu/eng/bquetch/ENG208_1.html
ENG 208.1 Office: H-201
Survey of Contemporary Literature

http://oak.cats.ohiou.edu/~hartleyg/200/200sched.html
ENGLISH 200: Introduction to Literature
with Professor Hartley

http://www.rethinkingschools.org/publication/rg/rg-web-toc.pdf
Rethinking Globalization
Teaching for Justice in an Unjust World

So Mexicans Are Taking Jobs from Americans

by: Jimmy Santiago Baca

O Yes? Do they come on horses

with rifles, and say,

Ese, gringo, gimmee your job?

And do you, gringo, take off your ring,

drop your wallet into a blanket

spread over the ground, and walk away?

I hear Mexicans are taking your jobs away.

Do they sneak into town at night,

and as you're walking home with a whore,

do they mug you, a knife at your throat,

saying, I want your job?

Even on TV, an asthmatic leader

crawls turtle heavy, leaning on an assistant,

and from a nest of wrinkles on his face,

a tongue paddles through flashing waves

of lightbulbs, of cameramen, rasping,

"They're taking our jobs away."

Well, I've gone about trying to find them,

asking just where the hell are these fighters.

The rifles I hear sound in the night

are white farmers shooting blacks and browns

whose ribs I see jutting out

and starving children,

I see the poor marching for a little work,

I see small white farmers selling out

to clean-suited farmers living in New York,

who've never been on a farm,

don't know the look of a hoof or the smell

of a woman's body bending all day long in fields.

I see this, and I hear only a few people

got all the money in this world, the rest

count their pennies to buy bread and butter.

Below that cool green sea of money,

millions and millions of people fight to live,

search for pearls in the darkest depths

of their dreams, hold their breath for years

trying to cross poverty to just having something.

The children are dead already. We are killing them,

that is what American should be saying;

on TV, in the streets, in offices, should be saying,

"We aren't giving the children a chance to live."

Mexicans are taking our jobs, they say instead.

What they really say is, let them die,

and the children too.

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