Above: Isreal’s art: La Llorona
Borderless Haiku: (IFHL)
We have forgotten the names of each other underneath the shedding skin those names written in our blood that have danced to tonantzin tonatiuh before they knew they were lovers.
Last week I was fortunate to have attended a poetic reading and performance by a remarkably gifted young Mexican man named Israel Francisco Haros Lopez who was born to immigrant parents in Los Angelos. He is both a visual and performance artist, and his work transcends borderlands of all kinds. Israel believes that it is critical to honor and remember the ancestors so that we may once again become one with the winged ones, all those who crawl or walk on this earth, the Four Directions, Earth Air Fire and Water, Tonanztin and Tonatiuh – the Aztec Earth Goddess and the Sun God – Israel’s expression of unity in divinity, and the universe as a whole. His visual motifs are drawn from Pre – Columbian America and his work is an attempt to search for personal truths within the context of today’s world incorporating Mexican/Indigenous stories into the whole.
Israel believes written work or visual work cannot occur without sound or vibration, because all things on this earth embody and express themselves through vibrations. As such his written and oral work is constantly shifting as it is performed or recorded.
Israel’s current body of work explores Mexican, Indigenous and Urban Street Art Identity. He is inviting the viewer to consider their own ancient script and ancestral memory in order to mend racial, geographical divides. The work is also a healing practice, which through his art workshops he invites participants to become contemporary ancient scribes exploring their own writing practices both literal and figurative.
He brings his firsthand knowledge of the realities of migration, U.S. border policies, and life as a Mexican American to his work with families and youth as a mentor, educator, art instructor, ally, workshop facilitator and activist. Even with a 1.59 High school G.P.A., Israel managed to go back to the community college and raise his grades to get accepted into U.C. Berkeley and receive a degree in English Literature and Chicano Studies followed by an M.F.A in Creative Writing. At formal and informal visual art spaces, Israel creates and collaborates with others in an interdisciplinary way that includes poetry, performance, music, visual art, and video making and curriculum creation. His work addresses a multitude of historical and spiritual layered realities of border politics, identity politics, and the re-interpretation of histories.
What follows are two of my favorite pieces:
- mexican jazz part 50
build that wall we come from the stars
we are the echo of grandmothers
migrating this America when it was just
and always a turtle
on mothers backs
more mothers backs
more mothers backs
this wall cannot stop the wave
of time immemorial
our grandmothers bones are scattered
across this rock
all rocks
along the feathered serpent
dancing with your minimal
notions
of what you think
you can stop with a wall
build that wall
you cannot stop our d.n.a.
- white liberal antics part 44
White supremacy gets tricky when you add white hispanic and spaniard
and spaniard blood is white European blood
where do you think hitler learned genoicide
through the skilled native holocaust
orchestrated by cortez and the sword
and the bible that drives the blood
underneath the asphault
runs through the veins of a city
wanting to continue its legacy
of spanish conquistador
and la virgin de la conquista
running through the rivers
of la llorona
mourning for all her children
red black yellow white brown green blue purple pink
how do you interrupt this white supremacy
running through the city
running through the rivers
of la llorona mourning
screaming for the memories
of the whiteness of the moon
screaming for the memories
of the whiteness running through
her raped indigenous body
praying for the memory
of her children that were birthed
from this
red black yellow white
brown green blue purple pink
begging for the songs
stuck in our throats
Over The Edge and Beyond: Journal of a Naturalist 