INTRODUCTION

We have been ignored for decades by a juggernaut culture. Flown over by planes. Driven over by freeways.

We feed your children in the supermarket. Our fingers are worn by the white man’s appetite.

But now we have been called upon by the Gods of Acculturation to remember all that has been plowed under in the furrows.

You say there are skyscrapers in Oxnard, but there are only two.

Our town is misnamed after an Englishman. It should be Hispania. It should be Mexicoland. Azteca!

Feel our desire of willingness in your feet and hands; the gnaw of hunger that makes our children cry.

See the man in the very eucalyptus shadows.

We are the people who work the hardest for the least.

Our verse is staccato, like the act our people endure of picking the berries.

From these baskets of fruit we enter your consciousness – your bloodstream!

You can smell it in the fertilizer. In the fog that rolls in from the Channel Islands. In the berry fields as you pass them on the freeway. The heavenly scent of God’s fruit on the auto route.

This cornucopia of plenty is yours America, yes – but it is ours too!

The problem with Oxnard is that YOU are missing. Come as Cabrillo did, as Vizcaíno, as de Anza....

There is no time like now. There is no place like Oxnard.


(c) 2012 by Alden Marin and Enrique Gonzales
oxnardpoets@gmail.com