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He spent his formative years as a worker in Tijuana’s maquiladoras, light-industry sweatshops that bloomed like poisonous mushrooms in the Mexican borderlands after the passage of NAFTA. This is perhaps why so much of Yépez’s critique of the Mexico City literary establishment focuses on money: who gets it, who doesn’t, and who decides who belongs in each category.
And in the moment of me and my father, I see myself, I see my face in a tiny square in the corner of my phone and I’m flushed, I’m this red angry thumbprint listening and trying to think things through and waiting for it to all be over, and he’s in his bed holding the tablet or whatever they gave him at this terrible angle where I just get the underside of his chin and his hair splayed out on either side, it’s like the underside of his chin is a tiny featureless face jutting up out of the hospital gown, some weird eyeless monster, and all I’m hearing is wheeze wheeze crackle crackle....
It felt insane leaving our comrades in the ditch like that. In the hands of the police. In the dry and desecrated earth, under the anger and irritation of the police and the workers and hecklers. Treating us like we’re crazy, and useless, and dangerous, too.
Those who wish to ban legal abortion are not “pro-life”; they are pro-criminalization. Those who wish to protect the right to abortion are not “pro-choice”; they are anti-criminalization. Reframing the conflict in these terms clarifies the stakes. At issue here is not a principled attachment to “life” or to “choice” but the practical question of whether terminating a pregnancy should be considered a crime.
The scars of war don’t go away. They stay in our souls and our memory. They remain alive in the memory of all those who have experienced war and suffered its destruction, those who have lost their loved ones. You cannot forget the horror of this war or our tragedy simply because the world wants to pull the curtain down over it, to hide the victims and reward the executioners.