Poetic visions rooted to mis raíces [my roots], by Manuel Barajas, Professor, Department of Sociology, Sacramento State

The poem by Jorge Quintana elevates awareness, empathies, and motivations to build a world outside the colonial order of today’s modernity, which uproots, exploits, distorts and erases the original peoples of this land, now called Sacramento, California.  This coloniality, in the most powerful and richest state in the nation, treats the indigenous people of the land as gone with the past or as foreigners.  Contributing to this alienation, nation-state borders divide people and keep them unequal; and these colonial boundaries have grown more inhumane over time and have perpetuated false stories of who belongs and who does not, inverting reality: the brown people of indigenous ancestry are seen as foreign and illegal, and the more recent colonial settlers as native.  Furthermore, the label “Latin American”, a word that makes no sense to the poet, erases his indigenous roots to the land, places Europe as his cultural center, and relegates the colonizer, the colonized, and those in-between in the same classification.  

In the efforts to overcome the cruelty and pain of this colonial oppression in the Americas, the Jorge Quintana poem dives with mind and heart deep into a poetic vision of “where my people never suffer.” Quintana tells an origins history of his people: how the heavens were created and how the land came alive. He communicates his love for the land, rivers, and stars, and his heartfelt desires to exist with dignity and equity outside the coloniality that erases his humanity.  He envisions a world without money or greed, only abundance where people share and relate harmoniously to the benefit all relations.  This vision of a just world is not one born out of nothing.  His vision is rooted to “[a] history that can never be erased.”  Quintana’s vision is a vaccine for the viral coloniality of a never-ending monopoly of power, wealth, and destruction in today’s world.  This poem celebrates a history and culture that values healthy relationships with all life forms and offers hope for a more just future, “where my people never suffer.”