El Altar, The Altar
Looking back from 2022, on all that was lost — and claimed again.
A night sky, bright with stars gets brighter from the middle where a milky way pattern appears. A watershed breaks through the center of the frame from left to right, the picture taken by Vanessa from a waterfall in unceded lands of the Abenaki Nation, Vermont. Top right corner has a quarter circle arc of yellow sunflowers grown in Vanessa’s Cambridge garden, unceded land of Wampanoag Nation. In the middle of the flowers is a Buenaventura, Colombia green and yellow lit candle, an offering made by Milady Garcés Arboleda, IRD Local Coordinator. The bottom right corner has a quarter circle arc pattern with radiating cacao seeds and river pebbles, from the Colombian Pacific Ethnic Territory, a pattern from the altar of Milady’s mom and social leader, Doña Gloria Arboleda. The bottom left corner has a quarter circle arc of white roses, found in the Cambridge neighborhood. In the middle of the arc is a Senegalese doll representation of a Black woman, she has pink eyes made from beads, two braids, and a dress of white, pink, blue, and green beads, an offering made by Natalia Mosquera, IRD National Coordinator. The top left corner shows tree branches full of leaves from the Charles River, Cambridge and glimpses of light breaking through into the waterfall.
No fireworks went off today, July 4th, 2022. Even still, I had looked outside to find the moon, maybe she had something to share tonight. I couldn’t find her. The night sky though was charged, electric, captivating. In the middle of the city, every single star in the galaxy showed up tonight. Blinking at you from the future, holding on to what you don’t yet know.
You didn’t hear the repeated thunderous booms off in the distance tonight, those that reminded you of times in your childhood in the suburbs of Houston, when people came out to the neighborhood streets to light roman candles rather riskily from their own hands to celebrate independence day. They never sparked your pride anyway. They reminded you of the time in Colombia, before you’d moved to Houston when you celebrated dia de las velitas, little globes with real candles floating up into the sky, and that little girl’s dress caught on fire.
In the beginning, it was clear who was being hit the hardest- Black and Brown communities. The virus ripped apart hospitals, hospital workers, grocery clerks, vendedores ambulantes, migrants and inmigrantes, essential but sacrificial workers. It was clear this level of exploitation couldn’t sustain us forever.
The stock markets rose again, a “V-neck recovery” they said, in the first couple of months
We “recovered” in ways that left us hollow from the inside out.
We “recovered” in ways that left us hollow from the inside out.
No. Today the streets in Houston were quiet, people mourning their loved ones, making time for insurmountable, unimaginable grief. The silence I felt echoed for miles. We had all lost someone we loved.
A year before, COVID-19 cases struck 100 million in the united states, 600 million around the Globe while capitalism ripped us open. “Moderna begins mass production of a vaccine”- my phone would notify me. “Stock markets soar”. But for me and you, that too became a commodity.
Today cases struck 1 billion worldwide and with immunity in the hands of a few Death roared to 100 million. 100 million — no one remembers when our Indigenous ancestors lost most of their loved ones to smallpox in a matter of a few generations.
45 wore a mask for the first time, ironically, right before his re-election. Now, we never see our faces walking into the streets covered by grief, our eyes barely visible. People say he’s still alive, people also say he died a few months after then. Either way, the empire is what we see outside.
It’s hard to predict when we will feel that “enough is enough”.
For months now, we’ve been putting up our altars.
No one is celebrating now – we are repenting.
We sit by each altar, praying for redemption
We are hoping it’s not too late for forgiveness
Tonight, if you listened hard enough you could hear a heartbeat, from the distance. Pulsating to the beat of rushing water and falling droplets of rain stirring the smell of earth
Tonight, we all kneel to the altar
Esta noche, nos arrodillamos al altar
Cada uno dándose cuenta de lo ciegos, mudos, e insensibles que nos volvimos hacia nosotros mismos
Each of us has realized we’ve become deaf, mute, senseless to ourselves
Yellow flowers for abundance, White flowers for our grief
flores amarillas para la abundancia, flores blancas por nuestro duelo
cada intencion sostenida por una ofrenda
cada ofrenda recobrando sentido a nuestra existencia
every intention sustained by an offering
every offering reviving meaning to being
What does it mean to be human?
Cuál es el significado de ser humano?
Yellow flowers for abundance, White flowers for our grief
flores amarillas para la abundancia, flores blancas por nuestro duelo
As we all kneeled in prayer, each altar bringing us to our core, the earth started to shake underneath us and white noise flooded every screen with a persistent dissonance.
Roots started rupturing through the cracks.
The prayers became songs across balconies, stoops, windows, altars that kept growing and growing. We felt storms of lightning from the stars, shocks of electricity coming into our homes, into our internet, flickering lights. Pulsating to the beat of rushing water, restless, falling droplets of rain stirring the smell of earth, grasping for air. Our ancestors emerging-
do you know where you come from?
Saudade, saudade for where you come from
Silence, the altars growing, an offering for a loved one taken by the viruses — COVID, police violence, greed, capitalism. Our bodies holding onto our traumas while we kept multiplying viruses, viruses- are they even alive? Viruses latch onto our own DNA and utilize it for their own replication.
flowers blooming from gusts of wind
Is it alive?
Pulsating the beat of rushing water, the arctic melting, the sun’s explosive hydrogen drawing earth closer and closer, rotating faster through the seasons.
Our ancestors are here.
Is it alive?
Do you know where you come from?
You, the sum of all who came before you
Saudade, the oceans and their sorrow across the middle passage
Saudade, do you know where you come from?
One hundred million. 600 hundred million. 1 billion droplets of rain hitting the ground in unison and you feel each of their hands grabbing you.
Thunder
I open up my eyes. I look outside to see the brightness of the sun peering over east.
My cell phone suddenly buzzing repeatedly.
Brooklyn and Buenaventura port workers shut down the port
L.A. BLM protesters shut down the airports and highways
Amazon workers shut down plants all over Asia
Indigenous nations closed highways across their reservations
I call my sister. I grab my backpack, in it a weeks worth of essentials. I know I’m headed to the port.
Vanessa holds a Master in City Planning from MIT, where supported leadership capacity building in the Colombian Pacific region, and worked with the Healthy Neighborhood Study team to support participatory action research in Boston. Her research prior to MIT explored the equity implications of global carbon market policies in Costa Rica. Her work as a labor organizer with SEIU-UHW and as a community organizer in South Sacramento taught her to always build leadership capacity and community-led governance into all planning. As a LatinX woman from Bogotá, Colombia, raised in Houston, Texas, her immigrant upbringing inspires her work in social justice. Find her portfolio at vtb.cargo.site