Political Activists

"yo soy toda soledad/en un corazon rebelde"

"bailaremos la danza de la vida/al ritmo de un incendio de luz/que brotará del sol."

"Es en ti (los pueblos hispanos de America) donde canta mi canción, donde grita/libre grito mi voz iniciada en montañas."

"Iba fiel la tormenta sobre mi alma cansada/cuando te apareciste con ternura de estrella."

"Le diste corazón al universo/que se ocultaba en mí"

"la palabra amor/se alzará de la tierra/en volcán inocente/que renueva universos"

"Humanamente, y libre,/y distante, y materia/que allá abajo muy hondo/rimaré una canción."

"Ya no es canción./Es grito./Grito de fuerza viva,/de hombres que luchan,/de mentes que se libertan,/de brazos sueltos/prestos a no caer./Las masas rugen./Piensan./Son."

"tus dos manos ya no vuelvan a alzarme/a recoger del cielo su cosecha de estrellas"

"Fui estrella en tus brazos derramada"

"Los Hitler, los Mussolini.../¡Balas! ¡Balas! ¡Balas! ¡Balas!/Las dos víboras de Europa/que con la muerte se pactan."

"A cada paso adelantado en mi ruta hacia el frente/rasgaba mis espaldas el aleteo desesperado/de los troncos viejos."

"Debe ser la caricia de lo inútil,/la tristeza sin fin de ser poeta,/de cantar y cantar, sin que se rompa/la tragedia sin par de la existencia."

"¡Obreros! Picad el miedo./Vuestra es la tierra desnuda./Saltad el hambre y la muerte/por sobre la honda laguna,/y uníos a los campesinos,/y a los que en caña se anudan./¡Rómpanse un millón de puños/contra moral tan injusta!/¡Alzad, alzad vuestros brazos!"

"Cantemos desde ahora, que la vida se va"

"Hacia el alma es muy largo el camino que andar"

"La que juzga mi alma por la piel que me arropa/ni siquiera se extiende lo que alcanza su voz."

"Yo, fatalista,/mirando la vida llegándose y alejándose/de mis semejantes...Yo, dentro de mí misma,/siempre en espera de algo/que no acierta mi mente."

"Yo fui la más callada./La voz casi sin eco./La conciencia tendida en sílaba de angustia,/desparramada y tierna, por todos los silencios...Yo fui la más callada./La que saltó/saltó la tierra sin más arma que un verso./¡Y aquí me veís, estrellas,/desparramada y tierna, con su amor en mi pecho!"

"Sólo dejarme, como estoy, soñando/a ser lucero enamorando al sol"

"Carry yourself seriously but speak with a sweet voice. Humiliate no one, since, as you know, adolescence is characterized by unbridled self-love, and when a teacher shines light on the good qualities of a child, it does much more than focusing on their vices."

"To save something beautiful you must destroy it, so it does not fall, limp and degraded, from our miserable human hands."

"¡Qué inmenso es ser al creerse muerto!"

"All the flowers… are open, awaiting my arrival, and they clothe beaches of the most beautiful blue, to receive my life, whole and healthy like before. I want to spend days by the sea, burning myself in the sun like we did in our juvenile days, and to be able to return and see my river, with the same tranquil and yearning eyes as I did when I was its bride."

"¡Y aún me piden canciones por palabras,/no conciben mi pulso sin poemas"

"La sombra del mañana me vigila la vida"

"The power of art is that it can help us heal our relationship to nature and help us as human beings understand that we can move away from an extractive relationship toward a regenerative one. Culture can do that, but we have to do it by replacing the old fairy tales. Greta Thunberg called them “fairy tales of endless extraction” because, in reality, they are fairy tales. They are stories. They are a form of culture that has gotten us here—and largely a culture of colonialism that deemed some life could be exploited for the benefit of other life."

"I really long for a time when I can look at art and listen to music and watch films that remind me of my relationship to nature, that help connect me to all of the beautiful animals that we share this planet with, the ocean, the forest. That relationship has been broken. It has been altered and severed. That is the effects of white supremacy and colonialism. This is why in so many movements, there is a demand to return land to Indigenous communities and to center Indigenous voices because Indigenous people continue to be the ones who are most protecting our world’s biodiversity. And if you look at culture from an Indigenous perspective, they are very different kinds of stories. They are stories about being stewards of the Earth, stories about protecting the salmon."

"The narrative we need is to respect all life, including all human beings. How do we build our reconnection to each other as human beings? Because that’s what’s going to transition us away from an extractive economy and solve the climate crisis."

"the contradiction of encountering male-supremacist practices within a movement supposedly fighting for social justice spurred many Chicanas to new consciousness."

"Favianna Rodriguez is one of the first people I met who brought up sex in a public context with no attempt at mass seduction. She was incredibly matter-of-fact about her truth that, as an artist, as an organizer, her pleasure and her freedom are part of her larger radical creative path."

"The power of art and culture is that it speaks to our heart. It speaks to our emotions, but it also opens up our imagination to show us what’s possible. It takes us to another world, and we can experience that world. What we urgently need in our climate movement is to be able to imagine solutions and see ourselves in a different kind of relationship to nature. In order for us to halt the climate crisis, we have to reimagine our relationship to energy. We have to think about our consumption, especially as Americans. We could tell very different kinds of stories around how we achieve happiness and success. How we do that is by reconnecting to each other and to the natural world."

"He sabido la inmensidad del cielo alto sobre las rosas"

"¡Oh amor entretenido en astros y palomas,/cómo en rocío feliz cruzas mi alma!"

"The voices of the grassroots, of people like Fannie Lou Hamer, must always be heard if we are to understand the past and move effectively toward the future"

"When I worked for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee SNCC from 1961 to 1968, first as a volunteer and then as full-time staff, it seemed perfectly natural. If a person wanted to spend her life tearing down the prison called White Supremacy, what better place to go than the Black movement? And proudly, too. It took a few years to wonder, how does a person who isn't white-but not Black either-fit into the color scheme of this color-obsessed society? After a while, some unexplored Mexican spirit inside, and the changing times outside, drew me to the Southwest, where I had never been. It had its own prison of White Supremacy. But the two prisons were really one, and the fight was really one, and a perfectly natural voice said: Let us tear down all prisons together. Amen."

"Another sign of positive change: one young African-American woman, daughter of two SNCC veterans, announced without hesitation: "I'm a lesbian. That doesn't mean I'm not a Black woman." Rejecting the frequent demand for a single identity, she explained, "I want to deal with sexism and homophobia, not just racism." Perhaps a quarter or a third of the room clapped for her comments, but it is impossible to imagine any such openness 30 years ago. We can also be cheered by the fact that Rep. John Lewis, from Georgia, former SNCC chair, spoke against homophobia strongly and unasked."

"One of the most serious obstacles to genuine diversification is that on most campuses the faculty remains lily-white and male"

"But the ferocious attempt to block any non-Eurocentric, non-traditional educational effort has shown the need to expose the attack on multiculturalism, while insisting that it be defined as anti-racism. Interpreted that way, and not simply as additive, it is truly subversive, for it defies the centrality of a Euro-dominated nationhood. Let us define multiculturalism, then, as a united front against White Supremacy. Anglo teachers, students and activists should recognize that today's reactionary opposition to a genuine multiculturalism signifies a chilling repression of independent thinking in general. It signifies a readiness to curb any systemic critique of U.S. society. Yet even those apparently concerned about social justice seem indifferent to such threats as compared to the perceived threat of diminished race-power. One wants to holler: "Yo, gringitos-wake up! They'll be coming for you in the morning, if you don't stand with the rest of us tonight.""

"The Civil Rights Movement was not an event; it is a process and it goes on. Process says one should learn the language of youth, respect them without glorifying them, take a long look at what we could have done better and pass the lessons along."

"The most striking change during the past 20 years can be seen in attitudes toward homophobia. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, an almost total silence hung over gay and lesbian advocacy. No openly gay person could be a movement leader. Today homophobia persists; most progressive, straight Chicanos as well as Chicanas still fail to see gay and lesbian rights as another struggle of other oppressed people. Too many still fail to see homophobia as a sometimes murderous force of discrimination. But the situation has improved, especially in some major cities, in academia and among youth."

"¿Cómo podrán callarme/cuando todos los ecos del universo sean/sinfonías en mi frente?"

"We need to be able to have writers in television rooms write about the Black children who are getting asthma, the Latinx farmworkers who are working in extreme heat. All of these stories exist. They’re happening, but we need to find the bridge so that these stories can be transformed into cultural content that will move audiences."

"The real concern of anti-diversity warriors is not with the introduction of politics but with the wrong kind of politics. They want literature to serve a very political function indeed: to sustain, not criticize, the status quo."

"The war on multiculturalism can also confuse liberals because, unlike conservatives, they usually do not perceive or accept the connection between racism and domination. They fail to see that racism has never been just a matter of negative attitudes but rather an institutionalized set of power relations."

"The anti-diversity war rages not only in academia but in the whole society. Like the anti-affirmative action campaign, it is profoundly racist and sexist. Both represent much more than a backlash: they are tactics for solidifying a rightist ideology to sustain the Right's political hegemony, to guarantee that a racist, sexist and capitalist agenda holds the center of U.S. political culture. This in turn calls for demonizing progressive ideas and people that might impede right-wing domination over ideological space. It calls for blocking the study of U.S. history as a history of racism, sexism and imperialism at work. The U.S. political culture must be kept ahistorical, even anti-historical. The war on multiculturalism parallels the way in which reactionaries sought to use the Gulf War to regenerate patriotism and thereby annul the Vietnam War syndrome with its national self-doubt."

"A term originally created by leftists in humorous self-mockery, "PC" is now used to evoke Stalinist demands for conformity. Thus PC-baiting has become a post-Cold War substitute for anti-communism, and a dangerously reactionary political expression."

"being denied the right to speak Spanish is an old form of racism that has plagued Latinos for decades. To speak Spanish represents defense of one's culture in a Eurocentric, racist nation that doesn't want to remember that Spanish-not English-was the common language in much of the Southwest for 250 years."

"We must do still more. We need to be constantly moving beyond a short-range definition of needs, and not be deceived by scapegoating campaigns or driven into new fights over crumbs. Instead of pursuing a nationalist agenda, people of color must build a transnational movement for civil and human rights, a movement that will empower working-class people everywhere. Such a movement requires all of us to educate ourselves about our histories and commonalities, including our experiences of working together, so as to break the mythology of inevitable division and domination."

"When we consider how the anti-terrorism act and other laws passed in 1994-97 have imposed fear and suffering, we have to ask: who are the real terrorists? If terrorism means the systematic use of intense fear as a means of coercion, we can look at Latino immigrants (not to mention others) and find appalling examples of such victimization."