Dispatch from SW Detroit:Seven Generations Seeking Good Home, Good Faith, Strong Will, Hard Working A.K.A. Get Your Own Damn Holiday and Stop Dressing Up Like a Fucking Mexican

Michelle Martinez

On the dawn of Cinco de Mayo, I brace for another rowdy celebration, droves of drunk settlers descending on my backyard, leaving urine, vomit, and trash in their wake. Cinco de Mayo, a holiday Mexicans and Mexican Americans rarely celebrate. But a holiday, nevertheless, to which this Latinx is forced to bear witness every year. Every year, I cringe at the sombreros and ponchos, the fake mustaches. I want to write an open letter to those who don them, about why this is akin to blackface, or Native American Halloween costumes. Perhaps we can work through the intellectualism of the violence of colonization, othering, and erasure, enter into dialogue about our bodies, and right to sovereignty. But this year, I reflect on this trauma over five generations in a four-block radius, collectively through time and space, and then through the witnessing of the changing in the land — this phase of colonization called gentrification. My family and this land are two clauses within the footnote of some history book, unseen or unwritten. This is a dispatch from Detroit's small Latinx diaspora, SW Detroit, Mexicantown, the US-Canadian border, frontera norteña, from my back window.

First, I want to talk what's what since the 1994 signing of NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement. The land speculation in SW Detroit started then — for the bridge, for trade — but it was also the subsequent migration. Many people left Mexico because NAFTA hollowed out not only U.S. factories but also Mexican farms, thanks to huge U.S. agricultural subsidies. Farmers had to flee because they couldn't compete with Kraft cheese. I start there.

Dispatch, NAFTA: I'll tell you of the gang war between the Latin Counts and the Sur 13 which included tagging, shootouts, the burning of three houses, the home raid of an elder, and the portrait of two Red Berets standing in front of her house who couldn't prevent its eventual burning. I'll tell you about the eviction of a family because of a slumlord who didn't pay the taxes, and his tenant who had unpaid workdays but no recourse because his employers knew he didn't have papers. The eviction of this family resulted in the collapse of a budding friendship between two six-year old girls. I'll tell you about witnessing a woman watch a house be bulldozed by the forces of a millionaire magnate, the sole owner of the international bridge to Canada. She held a picture frame and cried in the alley as the house was smashed into the ground, leaving a vacant lot. And I'll tell you that was not the only house, and not the only woman.

I want to always remember the names of Maria and her children, I want to see their faces, now after returning to Mexico to be with their deported father, picked up on his way to work by ICE. Their two-year-old helped me plant the garden in the lot where the house was bulldozed. Where is the family now that was fixing their minivan to transport their four kids when the bank foreclosed on their home? I know where the hipsters who currently occupy it are, drinking $5 espresso that takes twenty minutes to slow brew. This is all just on my block. NAFTA made Detroit the busiest northern border crossing, broke apart so many homes, forced migration for labor — and with this came more policing, more security services, more trucks, more pollution.

In SW Detroit, you see many police: mounted police, rail police, Detroit Public Schools police, the Ambassador Bridge Security, the flashing lights of SWSOL, private security guards, border patrol, Homeland Security, Wayne County Police and State Police, and the Detroit Police Department.

Some residents participate in citizens' patrol, and cooperate openly with police. Yet crime and safety are almost like a caste system, separating those protected and those committed to prison. Unregistered landlords fined, garbage cans left on the curb, too. Unpaid taxes? Evicted. No money for water? Shut off. Police are chasing poor black and brown teenagers down the street, a drug bust to account for half-grams of medical marijuana, handing out a nine-count felony for graffiti while rape kits collect dust, while murder remains nightly news. This is the message: if you climb out of poverty, get out or go to jail.

Yes, some are happy with more police, happy that higher property values will get them more for their property. Maybe they can stop fearing home invasion, maybe they can finally move to the suburbs, retire somewhere warm, with dignity. Some can now finally afford their subprime mortgages on the rents of wealthy Brooklynites, a small stopgap in eviction. I wish all the assistance could've arrived sooner — fixed the roof under your tarp before you gave up, given out small grants to replace the melted siding from the fire, served you some help before giving up the business, battling depression, drug abuse, and abandonment, imprisonment. If only we could've defeated Clinton's NAFTA, would it have prevented the loss of your son to gang war, or the selling of the tortilla shop? Maybe then our schools wouldn't have closed, our language wouldn't have been stripped from the classroom.

Twenty-two years later, we see...